Where Do Sleepiest People Live?
Where do the sleepiest people in the nation reside? West Virginia, according to the first government study ever to look at state-by-state differences in sleeping patterns.
West Virginia's lack of sleep, about double the national rate, might be a side-effect of health problems like obesity, experts reported. One in five West Virginians reported they did not get a single good night's sleep during the previous month. On a national scale, the numbers are about one in 10.
Also high on the sleepy side were Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
The best sleep patterns: North Dakota where only one in 13 residents reported sleep woes and Hawaii where 36 percent of residents reported they were fully rested every day.
Reasons for the lack of sleep were not part of a telephone survey of 400,000 Americans (at least 3,900 in each state). Nor did the survey try to determine the hours per night people slept or reasons for any sleep disruptions.
"We didn't ask: ‘Why didn't you get enough rest or sleep?'" said Lela McKnight-Elly, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study.
Experts point to several problem areas that might contribute to loss of sleep: obesity, smoking, heart disease, and disabilities. "You would expect to see poorer sleep within a chronically diseased population," noted Darrel Drobnich, of the National Sleep Foundation.
Fiscal stressors and odd-hour work shifts might play a contributing role, added Ronald Chervin, MD, a University of Michigan sleep disorders expert.
That may partially explain why West Virginia residents are so stressed out: The state is an economically depressed area with tens of thousands of people working in coal mining, according to CDC officials.
This study also mirrored earlier research that found women are more likely to have sleeping problems than are men and blacks are more likely than whites or Hispanics to get less sleep, officials reported.
States you may expect to have high stressors to disrupt sleep patterns-California and New York with their large, stressed out cities-were actually better than average as was the state of Washington, the setting for "Sleepless in Seattle."
According to the survey creators, seven to nine hours of sleep each night is recommended. About a third of the participants reported they were fully rested every day. And in every state, the majority of the respondents reported a mix of nights when they got enough sleep and nights they did not.
This exceptionally large study adds to the growing body of knowledge that helps define and quantify healthy sleeping patterns in the nation.