TV is Americans’ principal pacifier, sleep stealer

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Almost seven in 10 Americans spend some part of their final two waking hours each day in front of the television, and most let television programming -- not their level of sleepiness or their need for a full night’s sleep -- dictate when they go to sleep, a new study has found.

‘We were expecting people to watch a lot of TV,’ says Dr. Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry, one of the study’s authors. But, said Dr. Basner, ‘it was astonishing’ to learn that even when they had to get up early in the morning for work, Americans were unlikely to pare their habit of nighttime TV. On average, Americans spent almost half of their last two waking hours of each day watching the tube.

In spite of technologies that allow U.S. viewers to record and watch a show later or on handheld devices, ‘they just wait till the show ends’ to turn off the tube and go to sleep, said Dr. Basner. Interestingly, he noted, those who live in the United States’ Mountain and Central time zones, who generally can watch television shows an hour early, get more sleep than those who live in Eastern Standard or Pacific Standard Time zones.

The study findings were drawn from time logs kept by 23,193 Americans for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2003-06. The result was a paper presented this week at Sleep 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, in Seattle.

Roughly 40% of American adults sleep fewer than seven to eight hours, even though doing so raises their risk of daytime sleepiness, obesity, illness and even death. Basner and his colleagues have been exploring where in Americans’ day they could wedge in more shut-eye, and looked at the two hours before bedtime and the two hours after awaking as the best place to add some z’s to Americans’ schedules. But lengthening commutes and workdays have made a delay in workers’ start times pretty unlikely, Basner said. So if Americans are going to close their yawning sleep gap, they’ll need to do it by either leaving the TV off at day’s end or taking the bold step of turning it off in the middle of the show they’ve tuned in to.

-- Melissa Healy

Dr. Mathias Basner