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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. Believe it or not, survey data show that Americans are getting more sleep now than at any time in the past 20 years. Washington Post data reporter Caitlin Gilbert, who, by the way, has a PhD in neuroscience and genomics from Rockefeller, did a deep dive into the survey results, and she joins us now. Hi. Welcome to WNYC, Caitlin, and thanks for coming on.

Caitlin Gilbert: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we want to hear from you right away. We'll call this our end-of-the-show call-in segment for today. Tell us your story. Are you paying more attention to how much sleep you're getting? Are you tracking it on your phones or your smartwatches? Are you more mindful of your sleep habits, or are screens interfering, or is there just not enough time in the day with your busy life? If you're working from home more now, have you been able to trade commuting time for more time asleep, or whatever?

212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Tell us if you're getting more sleep than you were, say, five years ago, before the pandemic, or however you want to measure it, or are you getting less? Caitlin, I'm sure it differs by category, but broadly, how much more sleep are Americans getting?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, in comparing the data from 2019 to 2022, on an average night, Americans are getting roughly about 10 minutes more sleep. This seems like a small number, but this is actually pretty meaningful when you think about people who maybe don't get as much sleep on a regular basis, but accrued across the population, that's a sizable and meaningful amount.

Brian Lehrer: They can even measure that? 10 minutes? If we're talking the difference between 6 hours and 8 hours, 10 minutes is something they were even able to ascertain based on survey data, self-reported data about people's sleep behavior?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, this is the power. This is a really, actually, wonderful survey that the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics does every year, which looks at lots of different things that Americans are doing. It's essentially asking folks how did they spend a 24-hour period in their day, and they're asking this of 8,000, 9,000 Americans. They're asked to keep this time diary.

Then surveyors are putting every minute of what they're coding for these different activities that they're spending into these bins. Yes, for something like sleep, you can get down to the minute level, with comparing changes over time.

Brian Lehrer: While the survey-- What's called the American Time Use Survey, so I guess it asks about a lot of things. While it shows almost everyone getting over 8 hours of sleep, which surprises me, that's the biggest surprise to me, in this, it's not differentiating time spent trying to sleep versus time actually spent asleep. Can we talk about that, both ends of that? The average American really sleeps more than 8 hours a day?

Caitlin Gilbert: The sleep categorization for the Time Use Survey is including things like naps, dozing off, tossing and turning, struggling to fall asleep and wake up. The researchers I spoke to say that the time use data is a really robust way to compare trends over time, but it does overestimate physiological sleep, your brain, your heart rate, all the indications that you're actually sleeping by about an hour. That's a helpful barometer to understand what this data is saying, but yes, that's the bigger umbrella of what sleep it's including.

Brian Lehrer: The article in the post does include graphs that break down the data for adults by age groups, and roughly, it looks like what you might call a crooked smile, in that, on one end, young people get the most sleep, on the other end, senior citizens get the next most, with a dip in the middle for those in their forties, roughly, but every category was getting more sleep in 2022 than in 2003.

I guess it makes sense, right? Well, certainly, the senior citizens make sense, if we assume that a lot of them are retired, so they don't have to get up for work, then how do you explain the young adults getting the most sleep on average?

Caitlin Gilbert: The young adults bin includes teenagers. The survey starts at 15-year-olds. Younger adults do actually need more sleep than adults that are in their 20s and 30s. That's likely what's driving the 15 to 24 bin being a little bit higher. They tend to get more sleep in general, this is also aggregating not just during the week, but also on the weekend when people generally tend to sleep more than during the week.

Brian Lehrer: I saw where the Centers for Disease Control reported that one in three adults say they aren't getting enough sleep. Is there a disconnect with that and the survey data, that finds that Americans are getting, on average, more than 8 hours?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes. This is something that the data just can't capture. We're able to measure things like duration spent doing X activity, like sleep, but a very important factor of getting good quality sleep is that quality part, getting consistent, continuous sleep, and that's something a lot of Americans are struggling with. Actually, the NIH estimates that about 1 in 750 million Americans or so are struggling with some kind of sleep disorder, lots of which are chronic sleep apneas, that are disruptions to breathing during sleep.

This is still a very severe problem for many Americans.

Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WNYC for your stories, of if you're getting more sleep, less sleep, the same amount of sleep, as you were five years ago, or at any other time in your life. 212-433-9692, call or text. Rebecca, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I am now 100% remote, so I am taking advantage of not commuting to get more sleep. I have a dog, and about 8:30, I turn the TV off, I put the phone away, I take him for a walk, and there's no screens or anything in my bedroom. I now have a new alarm clock. I upgraded to one of those alarm clocks that starts about 10 minutes before the alarm goes off.

The light comes on, and then it plays really soft, light music, to quietly wake me up, and I am loving the extra about hour, I think, I'm getting now.

Brian Lehrer: That's nice to know about, that there are alarms like that. That sounds very pleasant, but it sounds like two factors for you. One is that you're working all remote, so you don't have to commute. The other is, it sounds like you've got a lot of screen discipline for the later part of your day.

Rebecca: True. Well, I have so many screens that I watch throughout the day. I have a huge screen for work. I have a laptop. I'm on my phone right now. I have a TV, so nothing is allowed in the bedroom anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca, thank you very much. Anything on the effect of the pandemic? This is another thing, like in our last segment on a whole other topic, that might separate out by class, professional class, more ability to work more frequently, remote, and maybe that group of people is getting more sleep than anybody else, at least compared to five years ago. Do you have data?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes. In talking to researchers who studied this pre-pandemic 2019 period to 2020, 2021, 2022, looking at the changes in sleep times, not only total sleep, but also wake-up times and bedtimes, remote work has this huge impact on how much sleep people are getting. One researcher I spoke to really measured this and found that folks who were working from home tended to wake up about 35 minutes later than they did when they were working on-site at their job.

This is something we see as being really almost semi-permanent since the pandemic. It was a big thing in 2021, but has really continued into 2022. Remote work is for sure a huge driver for this. That commute time is such a strong indicator for not getting as much sleep as you could be.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks in a text message, "Does the article on sleep break down statistics by gender?" Then gives, as an example, women going through menopause and post menopause, women do not sleep as well as they did before. I don't know if you accept that as a generalization, if there's science on that, but on that, and generally, does the article on sleep break down statistics by gender?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, we did look at gender, not, unfortunately, specifically about menopause, but in general, even across the 20 years in which the data has been collected, women do tend to get actually more sleep than men do, but that breaks down when you introduce childcare into this. Parents, in general, are sleeping far less than those who aren't parents. The age of the child also has an impact as well.

In recent years, we've seen, particularly, women without children gain much more sleep than their male counterparts, in particular. Yes, having trouble--

Brian Lehrer: You didn't need a survey to tell us that, right? Women without children get more sleep than women with children, especially at certain ages, as I think we're going to hear from a man. Nate, in Putnam Valley, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nate.

Nate: Hi Brian. Very nice to get to chat. I am 36 and I have a fantastic 2-year-old baby boy who excels in all aspects of life, including diminishing the sleep that his parents get.

Brian Lehrer: Very good at that.

Nate: Yes, oh my goodness. He's causing chaos at a fifth-grade level. We also have two cats and a dog. The cats get me up at 4:45. The dog gets me up at 6:00, and the baby gets me up about 6:45. To piggyback on some of the remote work conversation, my wife and I are lucky enough that we both work remotely. This isn't a matter of needing to get up and out at, for example, 7:30 in the morning to catch a train or commute on the highway, or anything.

There has been a dramatic loss of sleep in our household, which we are doing our best to share the burden of between the two of us.

Brian Lehrer: Nate, thank you very much. I see a lot of heads nodding out there, that I can't actually see, but I'm sure they are. Caitlin, Nate was pretty funny. His precocious 2-year-old is causing chaos at a fifth-grader's level already. [laughs] There's that, and we're getting other specific stories that I don't know would be baked into this national survey of general amounts of sleep.

Somebody is calling to say that they're getting more sleep since they lost their parents a couple of years ago, that maybe grief adds to sleep. Somebody else says they have long-COVID the last couple of years, and they're sleeping more. There are all kinds of individual reasons that would cause a change in sleep patterns. I don't know if survey data, national survey data can break out categories like those.

Caitlin Gilbert: The Time Use Survey unfortunately doesn't get into actual potential life events that could be influencing these calculations around how much sleep folks are getting. The researchers I spoke to, who've studied sleep patterns over time, for many, many years, have said that sleep in terms of its health effects has this u-shaped pattern, classically, where folks tend to recommend not too little, not too much sleep.

The interesting part with that long sleep portion is that, oftentimes, when you get more sleep than maybe is typically recommended, around seven to nine hours, the CDC typically says that could be a symptom of other things. Things like severe depression, struggling with grief, and stress that's often seen for folks who are struggling with those things.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have an impression of whether the place of sleep has changed, culturally? We certainly could talk about the medicinal-- Medicinal is the wrong word, but the health implications. Maybe you can touch on that before we run out of time, and what doctors and researchers say, you really, actually do need on average, before you actually put your longevity at risk.

Culturally, it wasn't that long ago, when business leaders like Martha Stewart bragged about how little sleep they needed, but then Steve Jobs, on the other hand, famously insisted on eight hours a night, more sleep became high status. Are there competing camps, or has this changed over time?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, I think the understanding is that people are generally prioritizing sleep more, because of these perceived health risks, that are not just perceived. They're very real. If you're getting less than seven hours, which is the recommended level, but generally, really sleep-deprived situations can lead to really severe chronic disorders. It's been linked to type II diabetes, stroke, heart disease, all sorts of very serious medical problems.

I think in the past decade or so, we've seen this general prioritization of health when it comes to sleep. This is another reason why we see, potentially, sleep ticking up slowly over this 20-year period.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Why do seniors struggle to sleep? Grr." That's from a senior, clearly, who is struggling to sleep, and sees it a lot among their peers.

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, that's a tough question. That depends on all kinds of different factors. Like I said, oftentimes, the sleep problems can stem from other health issues, and so that might be something that's just more likely to happen as you get older. Yes, generally, those who are older should actually be getting a little bit more sleep than those who are younger. That's what we expect as well.

Brian Lehrer: Just our last 20 seconds, is there sense that sleep tracking apps help with sleep, or are they irrelevant?

Caitlin Gilbert: Yes, this is something that actually came up when I was talking to a researcher who said he's now seen this new trend of orthosomnia, essentially people overly fixating on their sleep via things like health apps, or sleep trackers and whatnot, to the point where they actually don't sleep well because they're so concerned with getting enough sleep. This is a new thing that's come out of all these different devices and ways in which we can track our sleep. I think it's important to be aware, but not to overly obsess.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Washington Post data reporter, Caitlin Gilbert. Thank you very much. Really illuminating.

Caitlin Gilbert: Thank you too.

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