As our priorities shift to reflect the importance of sleep, more and more state-of-the-art wearable devices have been adding features to help us measure the quantity, quality and timing of our shut-eye.
Jawbone, the manufacturer of the popular fitness tracker UP, gathered sleep data from more than one million individual users across the globe to reveal just how well the world slept in 2014.
The results, shared in a new report on Jawbone's blog, may not account for every person's sleep habits, but the large sample, which spans 11 countries, sheds some interesting light on our collective sleep times, wake times and total hours slept on any given day of the past year. While some observations for the United States are what we would expect – does anyone sleep well when we "spring forward" at the start of Daylight Saving Time? – others were rather enlightening. Three-day weekends were just as much our friends as major holidays when it came to extra Zzs.
Labor Day took the win, giving us an average of .451 additional hours of sleep, followed by Christmas 2013, with an average of .415 additional hours. On a global scale, 10 of the 11 countries accounted for stayed up far past their bedtimes and woke far later the following day when it came time to ring in the new year; China's numbers only shifted slightly since Chinese New Year is celebrated several weeks later. Canadians hit their sleep maximum during their Thanksgiving. And both Italy and France logged time during the weekdays of August consistently catching up on sleep.
Jawbone's data scientist, Brian Wilt, also extrapolated data coordinating specifically with the 2014 World Cup (the sporting event of the year!) to show just how much global soccer fandom altered sleep habits.
Brits lost 23 minutes of sleep on June 14 to watch their team's match against Italy, making it their worst night's sleep of the year. Overall, the countries that experienced the most sleep deprivation due to late game times – and pure dedication – included Germany, Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands. Japan and Australia had the opposite problem of many European countries; instead of delaying bedtimes to watch the games, fans in these countries woke up far earlier, disturbing their typical sleep patterns all the same.
