Apropos of nothing, I’ve been feeling very tired lately. I know I haven’t been getting enough sleep. That’s partly because I’ve been working a bit more at night than I’d like, and partially just because I haven’t been sleeping well. Turns out I’m not alone:
Short sleep duration (average ≤6 hours per 24-hour period) was reported by 30.0% of employed U.S. adults (approximately 40.6 million workers) (Table 1). The majority of workers included in the survey (72.6%), reported that they usually worked a regular daytime shift; 3.7% worked a regular night shift, and 23.5% worked some other shift.† Workers who usually worked the night shift were significantly more likely to report short sleep duration (44.0%) than those who worked the day shift (28.8%) or some other shift (31.6%). However, this translates into approximately 2.2 million night shift workers with short sleep duration compared with approximately 28.3 million day shift workers with short sleep duration. Among workers in all shifts, workers in the middle age groups of 30–44 years (31.6%) and 45–64 years (31.8%) were significantly more likely than workers aged 18–29 years (26.5%) or ≥65 years (21.7%) to report short sleep duration (Table 1).
There’s lots of evidence that getting too little sleep is bad for you. I know I’m not feeling so hot at the moment. Almost one-third of working adults are getting six hours or less sleep a night. There’s nothing good about that.
