A study by scientists and published in Science Advances analysed data collected from an app about world's sleeping patterns. It showed things like the Dutch sleep nearly one hour more than people in Singapoore or Japan which had an average of seven hours and 24 minutes sleep while the poeple in the Netherlands had eight hours and 12 minutes, and that women routinely get more sleep than men(middle-aged men the least of all). Researchers say the findings could be used to deal with the "global sleep crisis", and the team at the Michigan University used this app to help people overcome jetlag.
People in the UK averaged under eight hours, less than the French. Country's average bedtime had the biggest impact on the time: the later a country stays up into the night, the less sleep it gets. Time a country wakes up seems to have little effect on sleep duration.
Prof Daniel Forger, one of the researches, told: "Society is pushing us to stay up late, our (body) clocks are trying to get us up earlier and in the middle the amount of sleep is being sacrificed; that's what we think is going on in global sleep crisis. If you look at countries that are really getting less sleep then I'd spend less time worrying about alarm clocks and more about what people are doing at night."
The study shows also that people who spend the most time in natural sunlight tended to go to bed earlier, and that there is a effect of age on sleep: a wide range of sleep and wake-up times was found in young people.
"I think it's interesting, there's been a trend for these studies using data from twitter and apps and finding interesting correlations across the world we've never been able to do by putting people in sleep lab. It highlights that althought our body clocks are programming us to do certain things, we can't as we're ruled by social circumstances. We son't know the long term consequences of this for many years" says Dr Akhilesh Reddy, from the University of Cambridge.
Disrupted sleep in shift workers are linked to health problems like type 2 diabetes.
NEW WORDS:
*average
*amount
*disrupted
PERSONAL COMMENT:
I think it's a very interesting topic even if you're not an undierstanded perso in this area. Because of this we can see the negative and positive influences of the differents lifestyles of the countries and how this affects the sleep.
News item by BBC
