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1/4 of South Carolina workers 'survive' on less than 5 hours sleep each night, reveals survey.
- South Carolinians among the most sleepless in the nation.
- Over half of respondents said work stress affects sleep.
- 1 in 10 use alcohol to help them sleep.
- Interactive map shows where Americans are getting the least sleep (embed code included for hosting).
We’re told the ideal amount of sleep is a blissful seven or eight hours, but in today’s increasingly busy world, that’s not always possible to achieve. However, sleeping much less than that can have serious implications for our health and how we function during the day. Leading mattress review website, Mattress Clarity, polled 2,500 American workers and found that, on average, almost a quarter of people say they are ‘surviving’ on five hours, or less, sleep every night.It appears that getting this little sleep could be attributed to people’s employment and the wider economy. How? Well, for a start, 57% of people surveyed who sleep less than 5 hours say that work stress leads them to experience a bad night’s sleep. In fact, statistics show that Americans work more than anyone else in the industrialised world – more than the English, French and Germans, and even those notorious desk-bound office workers, the Japanese. We also take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.Additionally, an ABCNEWS poll found only 26% of Americans feel they work too hard, which is twice as many as 13% of respondents told a Harris Poll in 1960 that they felt overworked. This increased to about a third of people with kids, or workers between 35 and 54 years old.All these long hours are taking their toll on the quality, and the length, of our sleep. It can seem like we’re never <not> at work, as there has been a rise in Americans having more than one job, in order to make ends meet. The Labor Department recently reported that 7.6 million workers held multiple jobs, 2% from 7.4 million in July 2016.And even when we’ve left work, we don’t switch off from it; Mattress Clarity’s survey found that almost half of Americans check their work emails before going to bed at night (42%). And if something’s gone wrong, or if you’re worried about what’s going to happen the next day, it is likely keep you awake.Broken down by state, Mattress Clarity found that Nevada is where the highest number of people are surviving on five hours of sleep or less: 43.8% of them in fact – the 170K+ casino workers in Las Vegas may account for Nevada leading the sleep survival statistics nationwide. Workers in South Carolina are among the most sleepless people in America, with just under 1/4 (24.4%) surviving on little sleep during the work week. In comparison, the state doing better in the ‘sleepstakes’ is Arkansas, where the least amount of people – just 8.6% - say they sleep five hours or less.To find out how your state compares, check out our interactive infographic map:https://www.mattressclarity.com/blog/sleep-survival/