Nearly a third of Americans are getting inadequate sleep — including police officers, healthcare workers and truck drivers — and it’s getting worse each year says a new study from Ball State University. “Short Sleep Duration in Working American Adults,” an analysis of more than 150,000 working adults from 2010 to 2018, found that prevalence of inadequate sleep — seven hours or less — increased from 30.9 percent of respondents in 2010 to 35.6 percent in 2018. “Inadequate sleep is associated with mild to severe physical and mental health problems, injury, loss of productivity, and premature mortality,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, lead author and a health science professor at Ball State. “This is a significant finding because the U.S. is currently witnessing high rates of chronic diseases across all ages and many of these diseases are related to sleep problems.” The study found that in 2018, professions with the highest levels of poor sleep included those in the police and military (50 percent), health care support occupations (45 percent), transport and material moving (41 percent) and production occupations (41 percent). The study also found that for men, about 30.5 percent reported getting seven or less hours of sleep in 2010 and by 2018, about 35.5 percent reported inadequate sleep. Among women, those reporting too little sleep grew from 31.2 percent in 2011 to 35.8 percent in 2018. “There is no definitive cause found for these trends in sleep duration in the working American population,” Khubchandani said. “We see the workplace is changing as Americans work longer hours, and there is greater access and use of technology and electronic devices, which tend to keep people up at night.”

Source: Ball State University