Sleepless in Kolhapur

Janabai Sonawane had never argued or bickered with her closest friends.

But this year has been different. “I would get annoyed quickly and start fighting with my friends over even minor differences,” says the 62-year-old, sitting outside her modest two-room house in Bhadole village, Maharashtra.

The summer of 2025 saw night temperatures increase significantly in the state’s Kolhapur district. And Janabai found she was struggling to fall asleep. At first, she thought her discomfort would pass in a day or two. However, there were days when she could barely manage three hours of disturbed sleep. The days became weeks and stretched into months. She found herself constantly irritated and exhausted.

A landless farmer, Janabai spends eight hours a day doing backbreaking work in the fields of others. She clears weeds, lifts heavy fodder, and harvests crops. By evening, she is fatigued – her shoulders aching, her legs heavy with the weight of the day. At the end of such a day, she usually settles down by 10 p.m. near the entrance to her home. In minutes, she would drift off to sleep.

But those nights of a deep and restful sleep, are now a distant dream. The recent months of soaring temperatures and humidity in the region make her sweat through the night. Tossing and turning, she stays restless, waking up often as the heat radiates off her tin-roofed house.

Once awake, it takes her at least an hour to fall asleep again.

She reckons that this May (2025), only by 3 a.m. did the temperature drop marginally to become bearable. And by five she had to be up to start her household chores, followed by another day of hard work.

Janabai wakes up before sunrise to fetch water, sweep, and cook for the family. In her sixties, the long day in the field and the searing heat exhausts her. The household chores still wait – washing utensils, preparing dinner, and collecting firewood for the next day. “There’s always something left to do,” she says wearily.

Sleep is not restful, and she often snaps at her family, and then regrets it. “They think I’ve changed. Earlier, even after a long day at work, I would laugh,” she adds. Thinking back to her younger days when she was full of energy, singing while working in the fields, she is aware of how much she has changed.

“Now,” she adds, “people think I’m angry all the time. But I just don’t have the strength [to be genial] anymore.”

Some nights, she says, “doka duktay [my head throbs]. Dole laal laal hotat [my eyes turn red from exhaustion]. It feels like “majha doka kaam det nahi [I can’t think straight],” she adds. Restlessness and worry have crept into her life and vocabulary.

Janabai is not alone. Rising ambient temperatures, especially during hot nights and heatwaves, are making it hard for people to fall asleep. A 2025 paper on how climate change is impacting sleep says, “…climate warming exacerbates sleep deprivation and degrades sleep quality, especially for the elderly, women...”

“When the room’s ambient temperature is high, it becomes difficult for the body’s internal thermoregulation system to lower the core body temperature enough to start and sustain sleep.” explains Dr. Uvais N.A., a psychiatrist. But across India, people are experiencing upto 80 ‘hot’ nights with temperatures over 25 degrees Celsius, says this 2024 study by Climate Central.

That’s a lot of warm nights to get through in the year. For those working outdoors during the day, there is no respite.

“Biologically, our bodies are designed to cool down as we prepare for sleep and also when we enter the deeper stages of sleep,” adds Uvais, who consults IQRAA International Hospital and Research Centre in Calicut, Kerala. “This struggle can lead to tossing and turning, frequent awakenings, and a feeling of restlessness.” This is evident in individuals from lower-income countries, older adults, women, and those residing in hot regions, he adds.

In Janabai’s village home, the ceiling fan offers little comfort – it just circulates the hot air over the four people trying to sleep in the two-room house.

When Janabai finds it impossible to cope, “I chew tobacco because it calms me enough to fall asleep for a while,” she told PARI, adding that she is becoming habituated to it. Relief is only temporary, though, as nicotine is known to disturb sleep over time.

Janabai’s reliance on tobacco to sleep reflects a larger pattern. Across communities, many people turn to alcohol or other substances to cope with poor sleep. But its frequent use ends in broken sleep, snoring, and even sleep apnea.

The exhaustion and lack of sleep take a toll on her body, too. She says that during summer, her blood pressure often spikes, and her heart races, leaving her restless and stressed. “By morning, the headache hits hard because I haven’t slept properly.” Every week during the summer, she visits a private clinic where the doctor prescribes sleeping pills that finally give her some relief.

Bhadole is a quiet village, lined with narrow mud paths and tall coconut palms, mango, peepal, and neem trees. Most people spend their days as farm workers in faraway sugarcane fields. Convivial evenings, once lively with neighbours chatting to each other outside their homes, have fallen sharply as temperatures have steadily risen.

Day temperatures in Kolhapur regularly exceed 38 degrees Celsius during summer, and this year was no different. “Every summer feels hotter than the last,” one of her friends said, while fanning herself with an old school textbook.

When Janabai and her neighbours return from work, conversations often drift to how unbearable the nights have become, how the wind feels warm, and sleep no longer comes easily. “It’s already so hot, and poor sleep makes it worse,” she says, describing her daily stress and anxiety.

Janabai says the lack of good sleep leaves her vulnerable at work. She says she often feels like she might collapse while working. To prevent that, “without fail, I carry sugar with me.” Whenever she feels drowsy, Janabai eats it and drinks lemon juice, which she says brings quick relief.

Time with her friends, laughing and chatting, listening and helping each other, sharing stories, is now a thing of the past. Months of poor sleep, irritability, and fatigue, make her avoid social interactions for days; she prefers to keep to herself, foregoing the friendship she once happily enjoyed.

There’s a saying often heard in the village, “Jhop nahi tar sharir dam det nahi, ani man shant hot nahi [Without sleep, the body won’t rest, and the mind won’t calm down].”

This saying plays in the back of Janabai’s mind; she feels tired, but sleep doesn’t come.

In Jambhali village, just over 30 kilometres from Janabai’s home, Lalubai Kamble is also feeling the heat.

“It was extremely hot this year, and I barely slept for an hour each day during the three months,” she said. The one table fan in her house of nine adults, is used by her son. “Without proper sleep, I feel exhausted and weak the next day,” says this 72-year-old who has quit working in the sugarcane fields. Delayed sleep on warmer nights induces physical fatigue and increases the risk of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

For adults, it’s recommended to get at least seven hours of sleep daily. However, this feels like a distant dream for Lalubai, who struggles on some days to even fall asleep. It’s a combination of her body aging -- the physical toll of decades of hard labour in sugarcane fields, now worsened by sleep deprivation caused by extremely hot nights.

“Until four years ago, I could fall asleep within five minutes,” Lalubai tells PARI. “But not anymore.”

Her 45-year-old son, Pramod, worries that she barely sleeps. “She looks tired all the time,” he says. “Even when she sits quietly, it feels like her mind is restless.”

Not getting the requisite quality sleep can worsen mental health issues like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Uvais. Poor sleep can disturb brain chemicals, over-activate stress and emotion centers in the brain, keep the body stuck in a “stress mode,” cause ongoing low-grade inflammation, and interfere with the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle.

“I thought the pain would ease with the season, but it didn’t,” Lalubai adds worriedly.

Now, she believes she will have to quit farm work permanently. She remains stressed all the time; according to her neighbours, it is evident on her face.

Finally, after five months of sleepless nights, Lalubai saw a doctor who prescribed sleeping pills. “I thought it would get better…when I found it difficult to do even the basic tasks, I realised something was serious,” she says.

Nanda Sonawane from Bhadole village has dreaded the summers. Whenever summer begins, she starts a 90-day countdown. “Every day I pray for summer to end,” says this 50-year-old. This is because her sleep cycle improves as soon as the season changes.

She gets less than three hours of sleep during warmer nights. “In case nothing helps, I start watching television, hoping to fall asleep,” she says. The consequences of poor sleep are severe. She feels irritated the next day and experiences dizziness, and severe body pain that doesn’t go away until she takes a painkiller.

Like Janabai and Lalubai, Nanda too was prescribed sleep medication, which she says has become an addiction for many women. She suffers from hypotension, and extreme heat worsens it, making it difficult for her to fall asleep. Whenever heat wakes her up, she grabs some sugar to calm herself.

Across the district, rising heat is robbing people of their sleep.

“Earlier, I never faced any issues with sleep,” says Janabai. She says she wasn’t stressed earlier, but now she hasn’t had a day without stress.

PARI's nationwide series on climate change and mental health is supported by the Mariwala Health Initiative. The series will investigate the impact of the climate crisis on the mental and overall health, and livelihoods of people in rural India and rural migrants in urban India.