Working Americans Are Getting Less Sleep, Especially Those Who Save Our Lives
The number of workers getting less than seven hours of sleep a night is rising. Stress and our culture of constant connection may be to blame.
If you often hit that mid-afternoon slump and feel drowsy at your desk, you're not alone. The number of working Americans who get less than seven hours of sleep a night is on the rise.
And the people hardest hit when it comes to sleep deprivation are those we depend on the most for our health and safety: police and health care workers, along with those in the transportation field, like truck drivers.
In a recent study, researchers from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey. They looked at self-reports of sleep duration among 150,000 adults working in different the prevalence of inadequate sleep, defined as seven hours or less, increased from 30.9% in 2010 to 35.6% in 2018.
