The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to warn Americans about the need for adequate sleep. If you don’t get at least seven hours of shut-eye, you increase the risk of health issues -- from obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure to stroke, heart disease, and even death. To find out how rested we all are, in 2016 the CDC asked people how much sleep they were getting, and discovered that nearly 35 percent of Americans were falling short. Hawaii turned out to be the most sleep-deprived US state, with only 56 percent of islanders reporting that they regularly sleep for seven hours or more at night.
Now I lay me down to sleep:
- The study found that the best-rested individuals tend to be married, employed, and college-educated. South Dakota fared best when rating states on their sleep: 72 percent of residents said that they snooze for seven hours or more each night.
- People in the Great Plains states had the highest rates of healthy sleep. Folks in the southeast and Appalachia had the lowest, coinciding with those areas’ higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and death from heart disease and stroke.
- The study relied on participants’ recollections of how long they slept, as opposed to measuring sleep patterns more scientifically. In addition, incarcerated people and armed service members were not included in the study.