Sleep – Losing your job makes you more likely to sleep too little or far too much

Losing your job makes you more likely to sleep too little or far too much. Either is bad for your health

ONE OF THE unexpected benefits of lockdown has been some precious extra moments of shut-eye. According to Fitbit, a fitness-tracking firm, American users of its wearable devices got an additional 20 minutes of sleep in April, compared with the previous year; Fitbitters elsewhere also enjoyed more time under the covers. But not everyone has been sleeping well of late. The pandemic has put millions out of work. According to a new working paper, these newly unemployed workers are much more likely to suffer from poor sleep.

To see how employment status affects sleeping habits, researchers at University College London and Dartmouth College analysed data on 2.5m Americans, collected by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2006 and 2019. Participants were asked how many hours they slept on average, and how often their sleep was disturbed. The researchers found that, although unemployed people got a little more sleep overall (about six minutes per day), this average masks wide variations. More of the jobless suffer from either too little or too much sleep (which have similar consequences).

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ Daily chart – Unemployed people sleep worse than workers | Graphic detail | The Economist