Americans are sleeping more than ever

It wasn’t just you who rolled over and hit the snooze button this morning. Americans are now sleeping more than at any point in the past two decades, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, a Washington Post analysis found.

An individual in the United States gained 10 minutes of sleep per day, on average, between 2019 and 2022, according to data from the American Time Use Survey. That’s a meaningful increase, even at the individual level, sleep experts said. But those extra moments of counting sheep weren’t evenly shared. The biggest sleep gains were seen in younger adults between the ages of 25 and 34, men of all ages and people without children.

Time-use data is captured through an annual survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau asking a wide range of Americans a simple question: In the last 24 hours, how did you spend your day?

Each minute of the day is then coded for a specific activity, with “sleep” covering the rare nap, dozing off or falling asleep.

But the gold standard for measuring sleep is polysomnography, which captures brain activity, heart rate, breathing and blood oxygen levels. Time-use data doesn’t capture sleep with that level of precision, so time-use data appears to overestimate physiological sleep by about an hour. But it still provides a consistent and robust look at sleep trends across populations, and some long-standing trends are clear:

-Teenagers and young adults, between 15 and 24 years old, tend to get more sleep than older people, regardless of the day of the week.

-Women tend to sleep more than men.

-People generally sleep more on weekends or holidays than on weekdays.

-Men and women between the ages of 35 and 54 - prime parenting ages - tend to get the least sleep.

In recent years, the data has also started revealing more surprising trends:

-Young adults, ages 25 to 34, have started to get much more sleep, with the gap between them and those younger than them narrowing, especially among men. This group of men got almost as much sleep as 15- to 24-year-old men on weekends in 2022, compared with getting about 50 minutes less sleep than them in 2010.

-Between 2019 and 2022, men have gained about 16 minutes more sleep per night, compared with a nine-minute increase for women.

-In 2022, people without children spent roughly 25 minutes more time sleeping than they did in 2003, with that increase being especially pronounced for women without children. Between 2019 and 2022, women without children gained about 13 minutes of sleep per night compared with just five minutes for men without children.

-That jump has also created a new sleep gap between women with and without children. The two groups had gotten similar amounts of sleep since 2003. But in 2022, women with children under 6 got 13.2 fewer minutes of sleep compared with those with no children.

-Men with children have consistently gotten about a half-hour less sleep than men without children, based on data collected since 2003.

Remote work is driving gains in sleep time

The sleep time gains by Americans could be because of the increase in remote work post-pandemic, with over a third of workers now doing their jobs at home.

People with full-time jobs woke up about 35 minutes later on work-from-home days than on-site days in 2020 and 2021, according to a new paper, on which Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia, a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who studies time-use and productivity, was a co-author.

Before the pandemic, the difference in wake-up times between work-from-home and on-site days was much more pronounced for women than for men - 43 minutes compared with 19 minutes - but that gender difference equalized during 2020 and 2021 - 37 minutes compared with 34 minutes - Pabilonia said.

Work is the “No. 1 sleep killer,” followed by traveling, the vast majority of which is commuting to and from work, said Mathias Basner, a sleep researcher and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

That working and commuting time “has to come out of sleep, because people also aren’t willing to sacrifice leisure time and socializing and also just responsibilities outside of work,” Basner said. “People are just trading the sleep time for those other waking activities.”

The reduction in commuting time could also help people get to bed earlier. Bedtimes started to get earlier even before the pandemic, with that trend continuing through 2022, Pabilonia said.

Sleep quality is as important as quantity

Most of us are getting more sleep but it may not mean quality rest.

For sleep to be beneficial, it has to be both long enough - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least seven hours per night for adults - and of high quality.

Sleep quality is “determined by continuous bouts of uninterrupted sleep,” Basner said. He compared sleeping continuously through the different cycles of sleep to running a washing machine. If you don’t go through the full cycles of sleep you won’t be “fully recuperated,” much like how if you stop your washing machine in the middle of a cycle, your laundry won’t be clean.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that at least 50 million Americans - more than 1 in 7 - struggle with some kind of sleep disorder, including sleep apneas. Getting too little high-quality sleep is linked to serious health problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia.

The time-use data also indicates that many Americans still struggle with “sleeplessness,” or struggling to stay or fall asleep - for an average of 70 minutes per day over the past few years.

With sleep-tracking devices providing people with a lot of data about their sleep habits, they can also overly fixate on the feedback about their sleep, making them anxious and unable to rest, Basner said.

“People are more aware that sleep is important,” he said. “But some of these programs give you advice and say, ‘Hey you’re not getting enough sleep’ up to the point where we’re driving people into insomnia.”