Westerners are more likely to go to bed earlier and have longer lie-ins at the weekend than people in Asia, which could potentially have knock-on health effects.
at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues have analysed anonymised data collected from 220,000 people in 35 countries using sleep trackers between January 2021 and January 2022.
Most of the countries were either Western or Asian and there were, on average, about 242 nights of data for each wearer.
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Overall, across all countries, people slept between about 3 and 27 minutes longer on the weekend than during the week (see graph, below) and woke up 30 to 60 minutes later. But those in Asia tended to have shorter lie-ins than the typical Westerner.
People in India had the shortest lie-ins on the weekend, at some 3 minutes longer than their weekday sleep, whereas those in Finland had the longest lie-ins, at about 27 minutes longer than in the week.
Chee says that, in many Asian countries, weekend days aren鈥檛 culturally the same as weekend days in the West. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e not really a rest day,鈥� he says.
The researchers also found that people in Asia typically went to sleep later and slept less on average on weekdays than people in the US and Europe. On average, people in Asia slept about 45 minutes per day less than people in other parts of the world, which backs up . 鈥淲ork times are roughly the same across the world, so if you go to sleep later, you鈥檙e going to get less sleep,鈥� says Chee.
The team also found that weekday sleep was more variable for people in Asia than it was in the West. Chee suspects this is because people in Asia are trying to catch up on sleep during the week, while Westerners generally catch up at the weekend.
There is no evidence that people in Asia need less sleep than Westerners, says Chee, and instead the results reveal how culture affects sleep practices.
He does caution that users of sleep trackers are likely to be wealthier than the typical citizen, so these results may not be representative of each country鈥檚 wider population. 鈥淏ut if even the richer people in these Asian countries sleep less than people in the West, it could suggest that these effects are even stronger for people on lower incomes,鈥� says Chee.
He says that although the sleep data was collected during the covid-19 pandemic, the differences in sleep length between countries are likely to be similar today. 鈥淏ut overall sleep duration was likely longer during the pandemic.鈥�
鈥淎s disturbed sleep has a major impact on quality of life and long-term health, it will be crucial to further explore the unique country and regional differences in sleep patterns and their impact on downstream health outcomes,鈥� says at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sleep Medicine
