Sleep pirates–are we really living through a sleep deprivation epidemic and what’s stealing our sleep?

There is a joke that is used to warn students about the dangers of ecological associations involving the (historical) 'causal link' between the declining numbers of pirates and increasing global warming. A key problem with this joke is that there are very few pirates left in the world: an assumption that is seldom questioned. Likewise in the field of sleep epidemiology, one of our key until recently untested assumptions is that a worldwide secular decline in sleep durations exists (the sleep deprivation epidemic). The problem is now that whilst the assumption is widely held numerous studies around the world using detailed time-use survey data have failed to confirm that adults in developed nations are sleeping less than they were a generation ago.¹ Indeed the very recent good news from the USA is that average sleep durations have continued to subtlety rise through the last decade.² Updated analyses of the time use survey data there indicate that between 2003 and 2016 average workday sleep durations have increased by about 1.4 min per year and weekend sleep by 0.8 min per year. Encouragingly for public health the authors suggest that people have been successfully convinced to go to sleep earlier.

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