Many people love to sleep and love to complain about not getting enough, but researchers say that even regular observations of how well we sleep don't tell us the exact situation.
So scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) analyzed 5 million nights of sleep from 33,000 people. They identified five main sleep types and 13 subtypes.
“This was a really unique opportunity to be able to look at the sleep of tens of thousands of people going about their normal lives,” says Ben Smaal, a data science professor at UCSD.
Smarl was a researcher involved in the study and is a co-author of the paper published in NPJ Digital Medicine.
The vast amount of data they collected came from people wearing Oura Rings, which track their temperature, activity, pulse rate, and a host of other things that indicate how well they slept at night.
So, what kind of sleep did the researchers observe in their data?
“Some people were able to get a block of sleep every night of the week and were fine with it,” Smaal says, “Some had a few short sleeps on one or two nights, but generally felt great. Others spaced their sleep out a little each night.”
A small portion of the sample consisted of people whose sleep was severely disrupted and who may have a type of insomnia called “persistent short sleep.” Disrupted sleep is when you're awake for at least an hour during the night.
The majority of study participants slept very well: they slept through the night and only woke up for a few minutes at most.
The study showed several links between sleep patterns and health problems, some of which were found in people with diabetes.
“This gives us some indication that people whose sleep is disturbed may have diabetes,” said lead author Varun Viswanath, a computer engineering doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
But Viswanath, like Sumar, said it's less important to know what kind of sleep islands people live on than to know when and how they transition from one type of sleep to another over time. The sleep study was longitudinal, meaning it followed participants over the course of a year, capturing more than just a snapshot.
Viswanath said he hopes the research will help improve people's health.
“I think the next step is to use this situation and this type of information to give people more power in their day-to-day decisions,” he said.
He added that he would like to thank those who wore the Oura Rings and took part in the study, as they did so to contribute to the advancement of science.
