On March 12, the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic. In the days that followed, the amount of people talking about sleep troubles rose sharply. In the first half of the month, an average 2.7k people mentioned being unable to sleep per day. In the second half, that number was 3.9k.

This eventually reached a peak of 4.9k people on March 30. Although we’ve seen the number of people reporting being unable to sleep fall since then, it’s still higher than usual levels. In May 114k accounts mentioned the problem compared to 69k the same month a year before.

This suggests that Covid-19 is having a sustained negative impact on people’s sleeping habits. This in turn has a negative effect on people’s health, giving us an example of how the virus can harm us even if we don’t catch it.

Worryingly, there are early signs of the problem getting worse. The last few days have seen the highest numbers we’ve witnessed for a couple of weeks. Looking to Google Trends, we found data that tallies with this.

Google searches for insomnia follow nearly the exact same trend as people posting about being unable to sleep. That includes a recent uptick, similar to what we saw in our social data.

Looks like there could be a lot more wide-eyed nights ahead.

Plastic and wood

In previous bulletins we’ve reported how people are taking up new hobbies and interests since the pandemic, such as baking, gardening and learning languages.

Today we’re looking at two more from either ends of history: woodworking and 3D printing.

First we turned to Google Trends to see what search interest in the two topics has been like.

Up until March they follow a similar upwards trend until they see a slow fall as the new year begins. This fall continues until the pandemic is declared and again they follow each other, shooting straight up.

It’s from mid-April where they diverge. Searches around 3D printing quickly falls back to pre-pandemic levels, while woodworking searches do the opposite and continue to rise.

To find out more, we turned to our Brandwatch Consumer Research platform. We decided to look at the activity in two subreddits, one dedicated to each hobby. Here’s the data we pulled out.

We see the same trends as we did in searches. Both jump at the start of the pandemic before 3D printing drops off as woodworking continues to rise. But why is this happening?

Our data didn’t reveal any clear cut issues for this. Both require time, materials, and machinery, one hobby is just sticker than the other. Perhaps woodworking’s harking back to an earlier, pre-Covid age has a certain appeal.

What the data does show though is that people aren’t just picking up new hobbies that are quick and easy to start. They’re learning entirely new skill sets that involve investing time and money just to get started, let alone produce something of decent quality.

Whatever the world holds for us, we’re going to have a lot of people with some interesting new skills down the line.

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Thanks for reading

And that’s another week down. We’ll see you again on Monday.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team