Full moon may disrupt sleep, according to a new study in the journal Cell Biology suggests that people tend to get lower quality sleep around the time of full moons.

This new study about the disruption said that people may tend to get 20 hours less of sleep during a full moon as compared to a new moon.

"If you ask people, at least in Switzerland, about 40 percent report feeling the moon during sleep, or they blame the full moon for bad sleep," lead study author Christian Cajochen of the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel in Switzerland said in the journal about the disrupt sleep that may happen.

Because of this, Cajochen and his colleagues decided to further study the full moon and its equivalence to sleep.

The study included 33 healthy volunteers, between ages 20 and 74. Participants slept under strictly controlled conditions in a laboratory with no windows, so they had no way of seeing the moon. They stayed in the laboratory for 3 1/2 days. Humidity and temperature were controlled, according to Sentinelsource.com.

"We have evidence that the distance to the nearest full-moon phase significantly influences human sleep and evening melatonin levels when measured under strictly controlled laboratory conditions, where factors such as light and personal moon perception can be excluded," the study authors wrote.

Nobody, including the experimenters knew at the time of the study that the moon was going to be a part of this study. It was 10 years ago when the 3 1/2 day period took place.

The full moon was associated with a 20-minute reduction of total sleep time, the study authors found.