Somewhere between 35% and 40% of U.S. adults say they usually sleep less than 7 hours a night.
Seven hours is the common cutoff for "short sleep." Why 7? Because many adults run best on 7 to 9 hours.
Picture ten adults on your street. Three or four of them are living on short sleep, night after night.
Two honest notes. People report their own sleep in these surveys — nobody wired them up in a lab — so it's an estimate. And one short night isn't a crisis. But short sleep that never lets up tends to go with higher health risk.
Sources
- https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep-deprivation
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23970-sleep-deprivation
- https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-conditions/s/sleep-deprivation.html
- https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-deprivation
- https://www.advocatehealth.com/health-services/sleep-medicine/sleep-deprivation
