Which countries get the best night’s sleep?
quality of their sleep is better or worse. Surveys show that some countries are peopled by night owls, but others by early birds. But why this is so remains an open question.
A new paper attempts to fill some of the gaps. Using anonymised data collected from a popular wearable device between January 2021 and January 2022, researchers from the National University of Singapore and Oura Health, a Finnish sleep-tech startup, analysed the sleep habits of more than 220,000 people across 35 countries. Whereas sleep research has historically relied on survey data collected from a small number of people at a single point in time, sleep-tracker apps can track sleep objectively, from the movements, heart rates and body temperatures of large samples of users over long periods.
You can see how countries stacked up in the interactive Lie-in-dex. The researchers found that sleep patterns vary considerably across countries. As expected, the worst sleepers are mainly in Asian countries, where on a typical weeknight people snooze for less than six and a half hours—roughly 30 minutes less than those in the rest of the world.
The best sleepers are mainly in northern European countries (Estonia, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands) and in Australia and New Zealand, where users log a solid seven hours on average. Bedtimes and wake-up times tend to move together (see chart), though the authors note that Asian sleepers tend to fall asleep 35 minutes later than the average, and wake up around the same time as people elsewhere. Sleep quantity also tends to go hand-in-hand with sleep quality.
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