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Sleep duration and life satisfaction

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Sleep is for wimps!

Reputedly said by Margaret Thatcher, who apparently existed on 4 h of sleep a day.

It’s not an indulgence, it’s not a luxury and actually a good night’s sleep can have a huge impact on your ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems.

Russell Foster CBE, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience.

All I wanted was to sleep… A ruined night throws a dark shadow for many days ahead and makes me irritable and feel out of place.

Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson.

Abstract

Sleep is an important part of life. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and, furthermore, that maximal life satisfaction is associated with about 8 h of sleep on a typical weekday. This figure represents, on average, one hour more than people currently sleep for: a result that is robust to different subsamples, and found via two common estimation techniques, one of which controls for individual heterogeneity including different sleep needs.

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Notes

  1. There is no collinearity problem with sleep and health in all of the regressions presented below.

  2. In the New York Times article, the journalist explicitly uses the word happiness when talking about the hypocretin findings but the study referred to discuss positive emotions rather than happiness.

  3. This could be achieved by decreasing the amount of sleep one has.

  4. A negative (and significant) coefficient for sleep duration would represent the former situation, and a positive (and significant) coefficient would represent the latter.

  5. This ceteris paribus statement is important: all results in the paper are ceteris paribus results, and any opportunity costs in terms of less leisure or less work (or less of both) and their subsequent impact on life satisfaction, if any, are not addressed here.

  6. Future research, with a different data set, can better control for shift work, and other unusual working hour patterns, and see if there is a modifying effect on the association between sleep duration and life satisfaction.

  7. The discussion of Woolley (2011) covers using the transformation for a dependent variable, rather than an independent variable, though the interpretation is equivalent. Regardless, here where income is just a control variable and not of especial interest, precise interpretation is not important and knowing the sign and significance is enough.

  8. This is one of the first investigations to use this transformation in life satisfaction work though arguably it should be more commonly used. Additionally, the wealth literature favours this transformation over the log transformation because it can handle negative values (not so important for income) as well as zero values, unlike the log transformation.

  9. In all cases, here and below, the sleep duration with respect to maximum life satisfaction has been calculated with the 7 decimal place results for hours of sleep and hours of sleep squared, rather than the two decimal places presented in the tables. This is not inconsequential: as an example, the 7 decimal point coefficients for the first column of table two are ‘hours sleep weekday’ 0.5472968 and ‘hours sleep squared weekday’ minus 0.0329243, which give the figure for sleep duration as 8.31. Relying on just the two decimal place coefficients in the table gives, for the same column, a sleep duration of 9.17, a substantial difference. The precision of the coefficients used for calculating these maximums is important.

  10. A recent investigation of the age–well-being relationship taking advantage of system GMM techniques to better account for these changes is Piper (2015a).

  11. Further discounting the long sleep duration results of Table 3 are the coefficient results obtained for (full sample) fixed effects estimations of weekend sleep duration and weekend sleep duration squared without the inclusion of the equivalent weekday variables. When used to calculate an optimal sleep duration, the value obtained is approximately 9 h and 20 min.

  12. This was checked by restricting the sample to include employed individuals only. The differences found between males and females are maintained, though now the differences are around half the size of those shown in Tables 6 and 7.

  13. The one occasion when the maximum is closest to the actual average is the least preferred model for reasons discussed above.

  14. These results are ceteris paribus results, found by substituting the different hours for weekday sleep duration and weekday sleep duration squared in the real income (i.e. first column) results of Table 2 (OLS) and Table 3 (FE). In the appendix, a short table shows differences in life satisfaction associated with sleeping a different duration than that of the duration calculated for maximum life satisfaction in the first column of the second table (the pooled OLS results). In all cases, the full seven decimal place results are used.

  15. A discussion regarding GMM estimation with respect to life satisfaction is found in Piper (2015b).

  16. And this link is not just made by the medical literature, but also within literature generally. As just one example, characters in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg call sleep a gift and a boon for life.

  17. For example, the column 1 Table 2 equivalent (pooled OLS), the maximal sleep duration is 5 min lower without the health controls; in the column 1, Table 3 (fixed effects) is 0.01 hours lower.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nick Adnett, Marta Barazzetta, and Gerd Grözinger as well as seminar audiences at the Europa-Universität Flensburg and the 2016 Economics, Health and Happiness conference (Lugano) for useful comments and suggestions. Similarly, I am also grateful to the article’s two anonymous referees who made pertinent comments which have helped to significantly improve the paper. The data used in this paper were made available by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. Further details about the SOEP, an excellent longitudinal dataset, are provided by Wagner et al. (2007). Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

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  1. Internationales Institut für Management und ökonomische Bildung, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Munketoft 3B, 24937, Flensburg, Germany

    Alan T. Piper

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Appendix

Appendix

Sleep duration and life satisfaction: values calculated from Table 2, column 1.

As column 1 of Table 2 shows, a sleep duration of approximately 8 h and 20 min is associated with maximum life satisfaction. This table shows how far life satisfaction falls from this maximum when an individual sleeps for a different duration (ceteris paribus).

Sleep duration (hours)

Life satisfaction drop (from maximum)

4

0.61

5

0.36

6

0.18

7

0.06

8

0.00

9

0.02

10

0.09

11

0.24

12

0.45

  1. Figures calculated using more precision than the two decimals presented in the table

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Piper, A.T. Sleep duration and life satisfaction. Int Rev Econ 63, 305–325 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1

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