How much sleep is the right amount?
ON JULY 4th America will celebrate the 242nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The holiday might be an opportunity for weary citizens to catch up on sleep, too. America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s health watchdog, declared sleep deprivation a national epidemic in 2014. It deems seven hours of shut-eye a day necessary to function normally, and worries that few people get a sufficient amount.
New data released by the Bureau of Labour Statistics show that, as a whole, the country appears to be getting more rest. The agency asks a representative sample of some 25,000 Americans to log and time every activity during the course of their day. The data demonstrate that from 2003 to 2017 the amount of sleep increased by a minute each year, on average. The average American now rests for eight hours and 48 minutes per night.
Some of this increase is probably the result of an ageing population: the average American was two years older in 2017 than in 2003. When plotted against age, sleep patterns form a U-shape: the old and young sleep the most and the middle-aged sleep the least. The bend now is steeper for men. By their mid-30s, men get about about 15 minutes’ less sleep than women do, whereas in the 70s the averages for both sexes were identical.
Like many things in the United States, inequality in sleep is vast. But encouragingly, about half of Americans get what can be considered a good night’s sleep: between eight and ten hours. One-eighth of Americans get fewer than seven hours’ sleep per night; a similar proportion sleep for more than 11 hours every night.
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