A Ball State study finds the number of working Americans sleeping less than seven hours a night has increased by around 5 percent during the last nine years.
A team led by Ball State health scientist Jagdish Khubchandani looked at statistics for the National Health Interview Survey.
Khubchandani says one of the most alarming things the study found was that the people getting the least amount of sleep are health care workers, law enforcement officers and people who work in transportation.
According to the study, around 50 percent of law enforcement and 45 percent of healthcare workers sleep less than seven hours a night.
Khubchandani says he thinks stress is a major factor in what’s keeping American adults up at night.
The analysis uses self-reports of 150,000 adults.
Bente Bouthier: What made you want to look into sleep and workers?
Khubchandani: There’s a lot of studies that exist on sleep problems. But we wanted to see the adults, the working population. There are a lot of studies that use sample populations of people from hospitals that may have a disease that causes sleep issues. But once we saw people were sleeping less, we wanted to break it down by area and occupation.
Bouthier: What makes this study different from previous sleep studies?
Khubchandani: The sample is actually a sample of the general population in America that has a job, adults who are in the community, not institutionalized. Also, we looked at 10 years of time and broke it down by race, age, gender, occupations.
Bouthier: What was the most concerning thing you found in this study?
Khubchandani: A lot of our healthcare, law enforcement, and people responsible for transportation in our society do not get enough sleep. These are the people getting the least sleep, when they’re supposed to be taking care of our health and safety. If they don’t sleep enough, it could cause troubles in judgement and how they function.
Bouthier: Do you think the fact that it’s people is these professions getting the least sleep that shows one of the causes is stress?
Khubchandani: For sure. When we finished our analysis, we thought maybe the population has changed, the composition of people has changed, and the jobs have changed. So, we controlled and adjusted for all the factors possible, yet we find that Americans continue to sleep less. There are studies out there that indicate stress in the workplace has grown. The use of technology in the workplace has grown. Because people live longer, they have chronic diseases that may keep them awake at night.
Bouthier: How do you plan to use the research moving forward?
Khubchandani: I think I’m looking at if people if people sleep less, even if they appear to be fine, there have to be some indications of their failing health. So, I’m looking at healthcare utilization of those who sleep less. Somehow in some groups there’s an idea that you can survive on less sleep, but we need to correlate that with some evidence, signs of unhealth bodies that get less sleep. So, that’s my next step right now.
