Sleep Duration and Waking Activities in Relation to the National Sleep Foundation’s Recommendations: An Analysis of US Population Sleep Patterns from 2015 to 2017

Michael Osei Mireku and Alina Rodriguez
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Michael Osei Mireku: School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK
Alina Rodriguez: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London W2 1PG, UK

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-15

Abstract: The objective was to investigate the association between time spent on waking activities and nonaligned sleep duration in a representative sample of the US population. We analysed time use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), 2015–2017 ( N = 31,621). National Sleep Foundation (NSF) age-specific sleep recommendations were used to define recommended (aligned) sleep duration. The balanced, repeated, replicate variance estimation method was applied to the ATUS data to calculate weighted estimates. Less than half of the US population had a sleep duration that mapped onto the NSF recommendations, and alignment was higher on weekdays (45%) than at weekends (33%). The proportion sleeping longer than the recommended duration was higher than those sleeping shorter on both weekdays and weekends ( p < 0.001). Time spent on work, personal care, socialising, travel, TV watching, education, and total screen time was associated with nonalignment to the sleep recommendations. In comparison to the appropriate recommended sleep group, those with a too-short sleep duration spent more time on work, travel, socialising, relaxing, and leisure. By contrast, those who slept too long spent relatively less time on each of these activities. The findings indicate that sleep duration among the US population does not map onto the NSF sleep recommendations, mostly because of a higher proportion of long sleepers compared to short sleepers. More time spent on work, travel, and socialising and relaxing activities is strongly associated with an increased risk of nonalignment to NSF sleep duration recommendations.

Keywords: sleep duration; waking activities; time use; suboptimal sleep; excessive sleep; recommendations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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