Recent research has cast doubt on the commonly held view that modern, industrialized living leads to chronic sleep deprivation. While issues like excessive screen time and daily stress are often blamed for poor sleep quality, studies suggest that individuals in industrialized societies actually sleep longer than those in less industrialized environments. Despite concerns about modern life’s impact on sleep, data from multiple studies indicate that the average sleep duration in industrialized societies is longer than in their non-industrialized counterparts, challenging assumptions about sleep loss in modern times. However, although people in industrialized nations may get more sleep, their circadian rhythms—our natural sleep-wake cycles—are often more disrupted.
One of the key studies examining these patterns was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by anthropologists David Ryan Samson and Leela McKinnon from the University of Toronto Mississauga. Their meta-analysis reviewed 54 global studies on sleep, including data from 866 healthy adults. The findings reveal that, on average, people living in hunter-gatherer societies sleep significantly fewer hours compared to those in industrialized societies. In fact, some hunter-gatherer groups reported sleeping only about 5.5 hours per night, with the general average sleep duration in non-industrialized societies being around 6.4 hours. In contrast, individuals in industrialized countries sleep for more than seven hours per night on average, suggesting that modern life provides more opportunities for sleep, despite other factors at play.
Moreover, the research also points out that sleep efficiency, defined as the proportion of time spent in bed actually sleeping, is higher in industrialized settings. According to the study, 88 percent of the time spent in bed in industrialized societies is used for sleep, compared to just 74 percent in non-industrialized settings. This suggests that, although people in industrialized societies may sleep more, their sleep is generally more efficient. Yet, this improvement in sleep efficiency doesn’t extend to circadian rhythms. The study found that the regularity of sleep-wake cycles, measured by the circadian function index, was less consistent in industrialized environments. Non-industrialized societies had a higher circadian rhythm regularity, with an index score of 0.7, while industrialized societies had a lower score of 0.63, indicating more disruption in sleep patterns.
In conclusion, while modern industrialized societies may offer more sleep opportunities, they also come with disruptions that affect the quality of sleep, particularly in terms of circadian rhythm regularity. This new perspective challenges the longstanding narrative that modern life leads to widespread sleep deprivation, providing a more nuanced understanding of how our sleep patterns are shaped by the environment we live in.
