On Somnolence

How Much Do We Sleep? 

   Perhaps too much. I know I waste a lot of time, a commodity I am running out of, but I never thought much about how many years I have slept. Yes, years! I am now thinking about it, because I have learned that Nikita Khrushchev thought we sleep too much and perhaps he is correct because I doubt that one can become the Leader of the Soviet Union by sleeping his way to the top.

   I am re-reading Charles Kuralt's, Life on the Road and he mentions that early in his career as a CBS News Correspondent he was in the Great Plains for a story about the death of family farms when 

the "Next thing I knew, I was chatting with Nikita Khrushchev in a silage pit on a farm outside of Coon Rapids, Iowa.

“You look a little tired,” I said to Nikita Khrushchev.

“No, no, he said. He put a beefy hand on my shoulder. “I do not sleep eight hours a night,” he said. “If you sleep eight hours and live for sixty years, that’s twenty years of sleep!” He waited for this remark to be translated. He shook a finger at me and repeated reprovingly, “Yes, twenty years of sleep!”

 
  Apparently old Khrushchev knew what he was talking about, but given that the arithmetic to determine such matters is somewhat beyond me, I gave the question to our guru Google and here are some of the answers they came up with:

"A good night’s sleep is vital for every human being to survive. Given that an average a person sleeps for 8 hours in a day, that means that an average person will sleep for 229,961 hours in their lifetime or basically one third of their life. That’s precious time which could have been spent watching Die Hard 105,325 times.

The average human spends just under 80 years on earth, so let's start with that number. Of those years, a mind blowing 26 years will be spent sleeping... but what's more surprising is that an additional seven years will be spent trying to get to sleep!

If the average night's sleep is eight hours (ie one third of a day), one sleeps for one third of one's life. If you live, say, 75 years, that's 25 years asleep, or 9,125 days."

Having confessed that I lack the arithmetic ability to calculate such things, I also admit to not being able to check those answers. I think they are likely correct, however, and I appreciate that one of them converted the sleeping hours to the hours one could have spent watching Die Hard, which I am sure has been listed on our TV guide well over 100,000 times. I don't know how, however, one can know how many years we spent just trying to go to sleep. But, surely we do spend a lot of time that way and if you add that number to the number of years we were dozing you get a substantial sum. Those of us who have not accomplished much can find some solace in recognizing that many of our years were spent sleeping.

How Much Time Do We Spend Alone?

   When I was not reading about the adventures of Charles Kuralt, I was often reading other things - and sleeping. From an article, I learned that many of us are now spending more time alone - not necessarily sleeping alone. At the beginning of this century Robert Putnam argued that there has been a decline in social engagement and that we are no longer participating as much in clubs or community organizations. The article just read does affirm that we are indeed, bowling alone, and that we are even spending less time with family and friends. Here are some of the numbers:

“The average American spent 15 hours per week with [friends] a decade ago, 12 hours per week in 2019, and only 10 hours a week in 2021. On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone.”

No single group is driving this shift: men and women, old and young, rich and poor of all races and professions have shown proportional declines in time spent with others.

“These new habits are startling,” Ward writes, “and a striking departure from the past. Just a decade ago, the average American spent roughly the same amount of time with friends as Americans in the 1960s or 1970s. But we have now begun to cast off our connections to each other.”

and

"Thanksgiving was not spared. Americans spent 38 percent less time with friends and extended family over the Thanksgiving weekend in the past two years than they had a decade prior."

While these numbers relate to Americans, Canadians may have withdrawn as well. Some of the solitude may be explained by the pandemic, but the tendency to spend more time alone was increasing and "Our social lives were withering dramatically before covid-19."

Sources:

  The article is here: "Americans Are Choosing to be Alone. Here's Why We Should Reverse That," Bryce Ward, Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2022. 

   The question you are asking is "How in the hell do we know how much time people are spending alone?" 

The source used in the article is the American Time Use Survey which measures, among other things, the time people spend working and sleeping. "According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the average American spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline."

The American Time Use Survey can be viewed here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/

The Bonus:

More statistics for you. I also recently learned that large numbers of people are sleeping in the rough and many are alone. 

"There are close to 42,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, a majority of them unsheltered, according to recent county data."

"A Snapshot of Homelessness Policies Around the U.S. and the World, New York Times, Nov. 30, 2022.