Name: Bedtime.
Age: Bedtimes vary depending on how old you are, so if you’re a newborn …
A very clever, early-developing, Guardian-reading newborn. If you were a newborn, you wouldn’t really have a bedtime; you’d sleep in bursts of a couple of hours, night and day.
They do need a lot of rest. But this is about adults – and a new study.
I was waiting for that, the new study. Go on. A survey of 2,000 Americans, conducted for a mattress company, found that the average time people fall asleep is 11.18pm.
Seems quite late. For those who stayed up later than they planned, 29% said they were kept up by chores. But 21% said they stayed up because night was their favourite time of day. Anyway, the average American begins their going-to-bed routine at 10.15pm.
How long does that take? Twenty-one minutes. They’re tucked up by 10.36pm. Then it takes them 42 minutes to nod off, on average.
What are they doing? Reading? Scrolling? Tantric sex? The survey is about bedtimes, not what goes on in them.
And is there a prime time to go to bed? Good question.
Thank you. Research from 2021 suggests that going to sleep between 10pm and 11pm is linked to a lower risk of heart disease.
Better research than the mattress-company survey? More scientific, certainly, using data from more than 88,000 participants aged 43 to 74, published in the European Heart Journal. But even so, as the British Heart Foundation points out, it doesn’t prove cause and effect, just shows an association.
What else you got? A study from last year by researchers at Stanford University, published in Psychiatry Research, which analysed the sleep patterns of nearly 74,000 adults.
Sounds legit. It found that staying awake too late can be bad for your mental health.
What time? I need a time. They recommend lights out by 1am.
What! Too late? Then do what the twentysomethings are doing, apparently.
Which is? Going to bed at 9 o’clock.
What! How long are they staying there? Asleep? Nine hours and 28 minutes, on average. That was from analysis in 2022, up from eight hours and 47 minutes in 2010. It’s probably about 12 hours now.
No partying? A 19-year-old told the Wall Street Journal: “Nothing good happens after 9pm.”
Generation Zzzzzzz. Of course, that might all change when they get a job … on the night shift.
Do say: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a zoomer healthy, wealthy and wise.”
Don’t say: “Elon Musk tweets all night and he’s doing OK.”
