Sleepless In The City

By Author: David Wilding
Total Articles: 3764
Comment this article

Divorced male lawyers, aged 55, living in London are today pinpointed as the UK's worst sleepers, in a new report by bed experts Silentnight.

Getting a meagre four hours a night, they are kept awake by work stress and admit to becoming bad tempered, emotional and underperforming at work as a result.

Today, the findings of the new Sleep Report by GFK NOP of 2,000 adults to launch Silentnight's National Love Your Bed Week (August 4-10 2008), sheds light on what's keeping us awake and what affect this has on our lives.

Single female bar workers, aged 20, from the East Midlands, are officially Britain's best sleepers, snoozing an average of 10 hours a night.

And the Welsh top the poll as the most carefree in Britain - losing the least sleep over worries including the credit crunch and health problems.

The Silentnight results reveal only a quarter of Britons get the recommended eight hours a night, with the rest of us tossing and turning over family problems, work stress, health worries and discomfort. The current economic crisis doesn't seem to be affecting us as directly as reported, with money ...
... worries only keeping a fifth of us awake at night.

The nation's lack of sleep is having serious affects on our personal and professional lives: with one in five Brits suffering from depression, a lack of sex drive and underperforming at work; a third of us admitting to becoming oversensitive and snapping at friends and family; and a quarter noticing a significant difference in appearance.

And our sleeping habits vary across the regions:-

While London and Northern Ireland officially have most trouble snoozing, those in the East Midlands and the North get the most sleep with on average 10 hours a night.

When asked what keeps them awake, those in Anglia (51%) were most sleepless because of work, money worries keep up Londoners (27%) and those in the North West (26%) most, unlike those in Wales who were least likely to let personal finances stop them from sleeping (13%).

Our personal health is the biggest concern for those in East Midlands (40%) and the North (40%), but once again you won't find the Welsh (13%) losing much sleep over that.

And it seems lots of us just can't get comfortable, with a massive 43% of Anglians kept awake because of discomfort, followed by those in the South West (40%) and Scotland (38%). Those in the South West (34%) were the people most sleepless because of their partners but it seems we're a lot more tolerant of our other halves in the North West (12%).

Those in Anglia are the people to avoid after a bad night's sleep with a whopping 93% confessing to becoming bad tempered and likely to argue with friends and family. Those in Northern Ireland (27%) are most likely to suffer from depression due to lack of sleep and those in the East Midlands (31%) suffer from a lack of sex drive.

On the contrary it's the Scots who sleep easy, with the majority (36%) admitting to always getting enough sleep.

Behaviour psychologist Donna Dawson comments:

It is interesting to note that we all think that other people sleep better than we do - the truth is that we are all experiencing problems sleeping at night, whether it is a problem on our mind or a problem with the bed we are lying on!

Although money problems seem to score lower than other issues that render us sleepless, ‘money worries' could still be the real root of family problems, work stress and health issues. Whatever the reason, ‘not getting enough sleep' has far-reaching effects: on our personal and family lives, our working performance, our social contacts, and even on our appearance.

People judging us for the first time after a sleepless night would not realise that normally we were a well-adjusted, thoughtful person, instead of the snappy, unsociable wreck that they see before them. Consequently, we really owe it to ourselves to find a bed that we feel comfortable in, to give us at least a head start on a good night's sleep.

Steven Simpson at Silentnight comments:
The survey results show just how big a problem lack of sleep can be for some people and the havoc it can wreak on our personal lives. We were surprised to see that more people were kept awake because of discomfort than money worries, but it just goes to show how important it is to choose the right bed.