![]() It’s pretty easy to spot when the late-night earthquake struck in the Bay Area this week. It’s Boston - probably because it’s a huge college town, with a huge population of young people. Gleichauf dove into American geography to see if there were differences in bedtime consistency - and there is.Ĭan you guess which city has the most widely varying bedtimes over the week? “For the first time ever, we were actually able to show the link between consistency and how long you sleep.” Social jet lag, by city “I’m super excited about this data,” Heneghan says. Till Roenneberg, professor at the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Munich, calculates that every hour of social jetlag increases your risk of being overweight or obese by about 33%.) Gleichauf calls it social jet lag: On Monday, when you have to go back to work (and drag your bedtime backward), you feel crummy and you’re more likely to get sick. When your bedtime varies over the week, then, you’re creating self-induced jet lag. “You’re not on the right part of that curve to make you fall asleep.” So, at night in your new city, you lie there for hours, unable to fall asleep - and then in the middle of the next day, you’re overcome by exhaustion. You know how jet lag works, right? “When you have jet lag, it’s the mismatch between the actual time, in the zone you’re in, and your circadian rhythm,” Gleichauf told me. If your bedtime varies by two hours over the week, you’ll average half hour of sleep a night less than someone whose bedtime varies by only 30 minutes.īy the time your weekly bedtime variation is 2 hours, it’s costing you half an hour of sleep a night. The Fitbit data shows that your sleep suffers as a result. on weeknights, but stay up after midnight on the weekends. That, Gleichauf explains, “is this idea that your bedtime varies.”Īnd in America, it really does vary - by an average of 64 minutes. The biggest finding in Fitbit’s data may be the link between sleep quality and bedtime consistency. Here’s a data point that no amount of sleep-lab studies could have unearthed: The average American goes to bed at 11:21 p.m. There’s a great quote from Yogi Berra: ‘It gets late real early around here.’” The national bedtime here in California, and the restaurant staff are kind of looking at you funny. “I personally find this consistent with my experience of American culture,” Heneghan says. WestĮast Coasters, according to the data, stay up seven minutes later than West Coasters (and wake up five minutes later, too). In other words, there may just be more big cities in the North. “I think North/South may be an artificial divide urban/rural is probably a more meaningful divide,” he notes. On the other hand, Heneghan points out that statistics can be tricky. That may seem like a very small difference, but on the scale of billions of data points, it’s significant. Yes, it’s true: Northerners go to bed five minutes earlier than Southerners. We get less and less of the good sleep as we age. (It’s always disheartening to see how much of the night you waste in little one- or two-minute wake-ups that you don’t even remember.) Each morning, the Fitbit app shows which parts of the night you spent in REM sleep (the vivid-dreams stage, good for mood regulation and memory processing), in deep sleep (good for memory, learning, the immune system, and feeling rested), in light sleep, and awake. The measurements include not just how long you sleep, but what stages of sleep you experience. “It’s probably the largest biometric data set in the world.” “It’s a really, really exciting and really rare data set,” Fitbit data scientist Karla Gleichauf says. (This data is anonymous and averaged it’s not associated with individual customers’ names.) This is a gold mine - by far the largest set of sleep data ever assembled. Since Fitbit began tracking sleep stages in March 2017, it has collected data from 6 billion nights of its customers’ sleep. These bands track your sleep automatically, in your own bed, on your normal schedule, under normal conditions. Most of Fitibit’s bands, for example, have built-in heart-rate monitors, which produce much more accurate sleep-measurement results than earlier bands. Now, though, there’s a new way to study our sleep: Fitness bands, worn by millions of people. Other sleep studies use self-reporting, where you write down each morning how you slept, but that data is famously unreliable. Sure, one person at a time can stay overnight at a sleep lab, hooked up to scalp electrodes - but try sleeping normally that way, away from home and wired to strange equipment. ![]() (No pressure.)īut it’s amazingly hard to measure our sleep, as a population. Getting too little sleep not only makes you feel lousy and cranky, but it’s also linked to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even early death.
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