No Sleep Till Brooklyn: Night Owls In Kings County Have The Highest Insomnia Level In US
New York is the “city that never sleeps,” but there’s a borough giving Manhattan a run for its money across the Brooklyn Bridge — Brooklyn, N.Y. It is no surprise the borough with the unofficial anthem, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” by Brooklyn group The Beastie Boys, takes the top spot for the latest average bedtime of 12:06 a.m. in the U.S, according to Jawbone, fitness tracker maker and health platform company. Jawbone’s interactive map shows exactly when each county in the country typically falls asleep, illuminating how U.S. cities differ in their sleeping patterns.
In this map, we can see how our sleep is shaped by daylight. People in U.S. cities on the western extremes of time zones tend to go to bed later, while those on the eastern edges go to bed earlier. This can be seen just by looking at the Central Time Zone in Kentucky and Tennessee borders between Eastern Time and Central Time. Jawbone found the average difference in bedtime across the time zone border is 16 min, and in some places it’s as high as 30 minutes because some people are on opposite sides of the time zone border.
From coast to coast, counties along the East Coast have later average bedtimes around 11 p.m., while those on the West Coast have a bedtime between 10:45-11:15 p.m. Unlike Brooklyn, Maui and Kauai counties in Hawaii fall asleep the earliest in the U.S. at 10:31 p.m. and 10:33 p.m., respectively. Counties with the highest insomnia levels were unmistakably those with a great nightlife, like Miami-Dade County, and college towns in the middle of nowhere, such as Indiana University at 11:53 p.m. and Cornell and Ithaca Universities at 11:48 p.m. This could be explained by the effects of modern artificial everyday light-styles that lead to later entertainment with later sleep times and later melatonin production.
Jawbone also found out how many hours of sleep each county gets. Pocahontas, W.Va., and Sawyer, Wis., were among the few who get more than 7.5 hours of sleep per night, while New York City gets an average of 6.82 hours, and Washington, D.C. sleeps for an average of 6.89 hours. Healthy adults are recommended to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night.
Our circadian rhythms tune to sunlight hours, and can influence when we go to bed based on when the sun goes down and artificial lighting.