Getting Too Little Sleep Makes You Easier to Scam

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When Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins each March and the clocks spring forward, people lose an hour of sleep. This sleep deprivation has been linked to a higher rate of fatal car…

When Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins each March and the clocks spring forward, people lose an hour of sleep. This sleep deprivation has been linked to a higher rate of fatal car accidents the week after—but that’s not the only lingering effect of lost sleep.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where phishing emails were sent to more than 10,000 people, found that the Monday after DST began, people were 13% more likely to click on the links within a suspicious message.

The idea for the study was inspired by a routine cybersecurity test, says study author Eitan Schechtman, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at University of California, Irvine. “My university runs this program in which they send phishing emails every few months,” he says, in order to educate employees about how to spot them. Phishing emails resemble legitimate messages and are designed to spoof recipients into giving up personal data. “I was wondering, as a sleep researcher, what sleep would do to that,” he says.

He arranged with the university’s IT team to have spoof emails sent to half of recipients the Monday before the transition to DST in 2026 and half the Monday after, to compare how people responded. The DST shift is a well-established source of mild sleep deprivation, making it a simple way to test the idea.

The time change made no difference in terms of how likely people were to open the fishy emails, nor did it change how likely they were to report them as spam. But it was linked to a greater likelihood of clicking on links in the emails—which, if the emails had been real scams, would have taken recipients to fake websites or otherwise compromised their security.

“Our interpretation of this is that sleep loss rendered people more impulsive and less likely to carefully think about their decisions, so they open the email and they're like, ‘OK, here's this link. I'll just click it.’” Schechtman says.

A number of factors can play into whether people fall…

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