The Gist: Millennials and Gen X are getting more sleep.
Sleep. We all do it, some more than others. We recently read that Americans are getting more sleep. We wondered what story our data told on this topic. The thing is, we have been tracking how much sleep people are getting each night for over 5 years.
Turns out, not everyone is getting more sleep.
Let’s start with an overview.
The little more than half of the U.S. adult population get between 6-8 hours of sleep each night. The national recommendation is at least 7, so that’s hopeful.
What could be seen as unsurprising but still alarming, is that 32% who only get 4-6 hours, and the small but likely tired group who say they get under 4 hours of sleep nightly.  And that 8-10 hour group who make up 10% of the adult population, let’s just say we’re a bit jealous of them.
When you look at an all-time view of this questions, there’s no overall shifting trend in the amount of sleep people are getting over the years.
But, when we broke it down by age group, we can see the groups that have started getting more sleep in the past year.
Sigh. It’s the Millennials, for starters:
There was a significant shift over the last year in Millennials getting 6-8 hours to 8-10 hours. The 8-10 hour group went from making up 12% of Millennial respondents to 19%. This could be due to a shift from college life to job life, or maybe the trends in wellness that we see online.
But Millennials aren’t the only group getting more sleep. In the past year, Gen Xers went from 52% saying they got 6-8 hours to 59%. They may not be getting as much sleep as the generation after them, but it’s a similar, almost identical, jump in more sleep.
When we looked a Baby Boomers, we saw no significant change in the hours of shut-eye.
So, what’s causing the extra sleep? A lot has happened in the last year, politics aside. Could it be the ability to stay at home more? We can’t say that for sure but we’re all for the trend of more sleep.
