Most people love to sleep and love to complain about not getting enough of it. However, researchers say our periodic observations of what kind of sleep we get don’t show an accurate picture.
That’s why scientists at UC San Diego (UCSD) analyzed 5 million nights of sleep from 33,000 people. They identified five main types of sleep and 13 subtypes.
“So the idea that we could look at sleep across tens of thousands of people, living their normal lives was a really unique opportunity,” said Ben Smarr, UCSD data science professor.
Smarr was a researcher tied to the study and co-author of a paper published in NPJ Digital Medicine.
The voluminous data they gathered came from people who wore Oura Rings, which record body heat, activity and pulse and the many things that indicate how you slept at night.
So, what kinds of sleep did researchers see in the data?
“There were some people for whom every night of the week it’s just one big block of sleep and it looks great,” Smarr said. “There’s some people; for one or two nights there are a couple of shorter bouts but mostly there are mostly nice bouts. There are some people for whom every night is broken up a little bit.”
A very small part of the sample consisted of people with highly disrupted sleep, which is called “consistent short sleep,” who may have suffered from insomnia. Disrupted sleep is when a person is awake at night for at least an hour.
The great majority of the people in the study slept quite well. They slept through the night, waking up only for a few minutes, if that.
The study made some links between sleep patterns and health problems. Some came in people who had diabetes.
“If someone has disrupted sleep that gives us some level of information that they might be diabetic,” said Varun Viswanath, lead author of the paper and a PhD student at UCSD in computer engineering.
But Viswanath, like Smarr, said knowing what sleep island people lived on was less important than knowing how and when people moved from one type of sleep to another over time. The sleep study was longitudinal, meaning it followed participants over the course of a year, taking more than just a snapshot.
Viswanath said he hopes this study will help people be healthier.
“I think the next step is going to be using this landscape and this kind of information to give people more agency over their own decisions, day to day,” he said.
He added that the people who wore the Oura Rings and participated in the study did it to help advance science, and he’d like to thank them.