“The Black-White Sleep Gap”
“Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep.
The study was just one data point in a mounting pile of evidence that black Americans aren’t sleeping as well as whites…
“The race gap is decreased if you take into account some indicator of economics,” says Lauderdale, “but it’s not eliminated in the data that I have looked at.”…
ON THE QUESTION of how to explain the black-white sleep gap itself, researchers have a number of related theories. (There is a consensus that innate biological differences between blacks and whites are not a factor.) The stress caused by discrimination is one strong possibility…
She argues that sleep is a reflection of a person’s agency. The more control you have over your life — the more freedom you have financially, the more freedom you have to live where you choose, the more control you have over what you eat and when you eat it, the more you have the luxury of possessing the time and equipment to exercise — the more likely you are able to create an environment that fosters good sleep. “[S]keptics cannot argue that people with poor sleep habits simply ‘choose’ to sleep poorly,” Hale and a co-author wrote in 2010. “Sleep should be viewed as a consequence of something other than choice.”…
at every level of government, there are policy decisions — whether on neighborhood noise levels or public safety or the placement of public housing — that provide good opportunities to consider, and perhaps improve, how people sleep.”
I want to post this is in several of my publications, but it’s most relevant here. (If you follow my science or mental health posts, you hopefully already know about circadian rhythm and health)
I am involved in research about the molecular biology of circadian rhtyhm and sleep, and I appreciate this other perspective too — there is something very cognitive about sleep, about designing and scheduling your day and moving towards sleep and being capable of turning off and trusting your environment.
This article was a really motivating thing for me to read. I hope that, soon, our society recognized the core health implications of sleep and circadian rhythm and that we start structuring around enabling healthier lives.
Related: A post I wrote about the importance of chronotype (i.e. being a morning person or an evening person), which links to several other relevant things.
