A trio of American and Danish researchers found that, in some cases, people who didn’t get enough sleep at home stayed in Morpheus’ arms longer when traveling.
- In France, 45% of 25-45 year olds consider that they sleep less than they need.
- A good night’s sleep corresponds to at least 3 to 5 cycles of 90 minutes on average.
“Travel is expected to have a deleterious effect on sleep, but understanding of travel-associated sleep changes has been limited by the lack of large-scale data,” said scientists from the Technical University of Denmark, the University of Vermont (USA) and the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science. To determine what the impact of travel is on sleep, they carried out a study whose the results were published in the journal Nature Human Behavior February 24.
In order to carry out their work, the researchers analyzed data on the sleep of around 20,000 people obtained using a device worn on the wrist. The information collected comes from 121 countries and represents approximately 3.17 million nights of sleep, including 218,000 nights away from home. The authors focused on short trips, during which time zones did not change.
Travel balances sleep hours
They found that traveling had a balancing effect on sleep. “People who don’t sleep enough at home tend to sleep more while traveling than at home, while people who sleep more than 7.5 hours on average at home tend to sleep less when traveling,” can we read in the results of the study.
According to scientists, the amount of sleep during a trip is linearly dependent on the amount of sleep at home. They also found that adults who tended to sleep less than average over their lifetime were more likely to sleep more when they went on vacation on weeknights but not on weekends.
.
