A new study released for World Sleep Day on Friday finds that, on average, people in Japan get the least amount of sleep among surveyed nations, but may have the most regular sleep cycles.
According to data released by Pokemon Sleep, a popular sleep-tracking app that was released in 2023, users in Japan on average get 7 hours, 1 minute of sleep on weekdays and 7 hours, 28 minutes on weekends.
This is the lowest average among the roughly 17 million users across seven countries included in the study ¡ª the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan ¡ª with the overall total average among the countries at 7 hours, 39 minutes on weekdays and 8 hours, 6 minutes on weekends. The data was collected between July 2023 to October 2024.
While their overall amount of sleep was lowest, people in Japan showed the smallest gap between weekday and weekend sleep duration, suggesting fewer cases of social jet lag ¡ª a phenomenon similar to jet lag caused by inconsistent sleep times throughout the week.
Sleep expert Masashi Yanagisawa says in the report that social jet lag can be observed when there is over an hour¡¯s delay in the mid-sleep time ¡ª the mid-point between sleep onset and waking up ¡ª which can cause tiredness during the day similar to actual jet lag.
The study found that more than 1 in 4 people worldwide experience social jet lag. However, data shows it is least common in Japan, with only 16.5% of users having a mid-sleep time delay of over an hour compared to the world average of 26.1%.
In Japan, mid-sleep time delay was seen most in the younger generation, especially people between the ages of 16 to 19.
Another study by global medical equipment company ResMed, also timed for World Sleep Day, also found that Japanese people had the lowest average sleep time at 6.56 hours. About 30,000 people across 13 countries participated in the December study, which ranked Japan last in average sleep time for the third year in a row.
Around a third of the respondents said they had trouble falling asleep on three or more days a week, with the most common factor being stress and anxiety. Japanese people, closely followed by people from China, were most likely to cite mental health conditions as reasons for sleep disruption.
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