Abstract
It is often stated that sleep deprivation is on the rise, with work suggested as a main cause. However, the evidence for increasing sleep deprivation comes from surveys using habitual sleep questions. An alternative source of information regarding sleep behaviour is time‐use studies. This paper investigates changes in sleep time in the UK using the two British time‐use studies that allow measuring “time in bed not asleep” separately from “actual sleep time”. Based upon the studies presented here, people in the UK sleep today 43 min more than they did in the 1970s because they go to bed earlier (~30 min) and they wake up later (~15 min). The change in sleep duration is driven by night sleep and it is homogeneously distributed across the week. The former results apply to men and women alike, and to individuals of all ages and employment status, including employed individuals, the presumed major victims of the sleep deprivation epidemic and the 24/7 society. In fact, employed individuals have experienced a reduction in short sleeping of almost 4 percentage points, from 14.9% to 11.0%. There has also been a reduction of 15 percentage points in the amount of conflict between workers work time and their sleep time, as measured by the proportion of workers that do some work within their “ideal sleep window” (as defined by their own chronotype).
Highlights
The first part of the analysis describes the changes in sleep time and social jetlag, and the second part assesses the interactions between work and sleep, to investigate if jobs were putting increasing pressure on our sleep
The analysis shows that sleep has increased in the UK over the last four decades by 45 min on average, and a similar increase is found for individuals in employment
Social jetlag (Wittmann et al, 2006) has increased over this period, direct work–sleep conflict has declined by almost 15 percentage points
Summary
This paper used three nationally representative time studies for the UK from 1974/75, 2000/01 and 2014/15. The difference in the number of days covered by each survey was corrected with the use of weights (in the two most recent surveys, weekdays are given 2.5 times more weight than weekends, given the oversampling of weekends). Weekdays and weekends are used to estimate jetlag obtained for the entire population and not just for individuals in employment. In this paper we propose a direct measure of that conflict, defined as the amount of work within each individual's ideal sleep window. Each individual's sleep window is defined as the 10 hr surrounding midsleep on free days (chronotype). Work time information is obtained from the diaries. All estimates were obtained for the sample as a whole, as well as for different population subgroups, such as employment status, age (18–34, 35–64, 65+ years) and gender.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
