Questions for you: Have we, as a species, always had difficulty sleeping, or is this a manifestation of the last couple of decades?
Just in the last 100, 120 years, we have been monitoring just through basic surveys.
In, like, 1900, the average worker would sleep about or be in bed at least about nine and a half hours because there was less access to light.
It’s very expensive to have electricity and candles are expensive and so much of that time they’re sleeping, right?
About 90% of the time that we are in bed, we typically want to be sleeping.
That’s a good sleeper.
When you hit 1950, still the hardest working generation, the golden generation, the hardest workers, the work ethic that we all know about as Americans, their average was about eight and a half hours, right?
It didn’t drop very much.
Then you move into the 70s it came down to seven and a half hours.
Now in the 90s and 2000s, and even now, the average person is sleeping six and a quarter hours.
We’ve shaved off a third of our sleep content.
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