The data was self-reported through Entrain, a smartphone app originally developed to help with jet lag, which allows people to self-report their sleeping habits as well as tracks outside light patterns. 'I think some people assume that it's just by an alarm clock, we have blackout shades, but we actually do see that people are really changing their bedtime.' 'We're not saying that the molecular clock doesn't affect bedtime or that societal pressures don't affect wake time,' Forger said. But it is clear that sunrise and sunset affect when people wake up.Īccording to the study, later sunsets seemed to correlate with longer sleep durations. It's still unclear if the differences in sleep times have a stronger correlation with culture influences, like what activities or societal pressures lead people to sleep later or wake up earlier, or with differences in light exposure. Now the researchers are determined to figure out why this is, Daniel Forger, the study's co-author, said. How late people went to sleep showed to be a stronger indicator of how much time people slept overall rather than what time they woke up: The later people go to bed, the less sleep they get on average. B) Bedtime and sleep duration for the same 20 countries. A) Wake time and sleep duration for the 20 countries in the data set with the most respondents.

Americans were among the earliest morning risers alongside Australians, while those in Australia tended to go to bed earlier. Of the 20 countries with the highest number of respondents, people in the Netherlands on average reported sleeping nearly an hour more than those reporting from Singapore and Japan. On average, Americans don't sleep as much as the Dutch.Ī new study from researchers at the University of Michigan published in the journal Science Advances has captured the 'normal' sleeping habits of people around the world, using data from a smartphone app.

The late bird sleeping in