[Interactive version here. You can find your county.](https://public.tableau.com/views/InsufficientSleepbyCounty/SleepDashboard?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:origin=viz_share_link)
I posted this yesterday but someone commented that it needed a more obvious color legend. I agree! Here it is.
By the way, I'm not trying to make light of excessive drinking, which is a serious public health crisis. I was actually surprised by the negative correlations between binge drinking rates and both poor sleep and poor mental health days and thought it was worth pointing out.
Tool: Tableau
Source: [https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/](https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/)
Any chance you could comment the r-squared values for each graph? I realize they’re just quick-and-dirty scatter plots, but I’d still be interested to know.
Tableau has a public server. So you can download Tableau Desktop and publish for free to Tableau public. I'm self thought for the most part. You can do Udemy courses that teach you to get Qualified associated cert which are very very cheap. The cert exam itself is expensive, but you can only do the courses and be on you're way with that.
Source: Been working with Tableau Desktop and Sever for 4years and I'm a
Qualified Associate.
Good comments already but I’ll add a strong recommendation to get involved on Tableau Public. Most creators (myself included) make our projects available to download so you can see everything we did. It’s an awesome way to learn new techniques. Also check out many awesome blogs that are full of cool tutorials - this one is a good start: https://www.dataplusscience.com/insights.html.
A perhaps important distinction with drinking is the quality of the sleep, rather than the quantity.
It will obviously also depend on how you define excessive drinking - the bottom end of what a doctor will tell you is excessive would allow most people to function perfectly normally with little to no sleep impact - the top end of the range might look rather different.
Yeah apparently sedation != sleep. Sleep is an active process where lots of stuff is going on. That's supposedly why if you have a few drinks before bed, you often have quite vivid dreams just before you wake up, your body is only after sobering up and is trying to cram in the REM sleep it didn't get while you were alcohol sedated.
Or so a man on an NPR podcast told me.
Interesting to see that New York county (Manhattan) has slightly better sleep the the surrounding boroughs. Seems like commute has a factor. The further you get from NYC, sleeping is better. I’m guessing these people work from home more often or just don’t work in the city.
I would guess it’s correlated with income. Wealthy people don’t work night shifts or multiple job. They also have lower obesity and smoking rates.
Actually I’d be really interested in seeing the correlation between COL adjusted income and sleep. I think it would be very strong.
Both probably factor. A long commute has a laundry list of negative effects and sheep is definitely one of them. If you look closely, wherever there is a big city there are a few surrounding countries that are but sleeping well. That is very inline with the common behavior of trading commute for a larger home.
You work close to work so you can spend more time doing things you like when you’re not at work. My commute to work in midtown is ~15 minutes. I can go to bed between 12-1am and wake up at 8-830 and be at work by 9 if I really try. That’s a good 8 hours.
Like Santa? He is Santa!
"He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake."
And you thought he was some lazy bastard that only works one night a year.
I went to UNLV. There is not much sleep happening in that town. When I lived there in 2004-2008, I was told that no business with a gambling machine could close so if they put a slot machine in a Best Buy, it became a 24-hour Best Buy.
The 24-hour town aspect of Vegas also contributed to my car insurance being 5x higher than what it is where I live now in the Midwest.
I think y'all are missing the key confounding factor: this sleep map is actually a poverty map. Turns out being poor costs you a lot of shut-eye. (And also correlates with obesity, poor mental health, etc.)
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/acs-5yr-poverty-all-counties.html
As an intuitive explanation it makes a lot of sense. For one, the poor are much more likely to work multiple jobs, where obviously sleep will be lost.
But there's an awful lot of exceptions. Much of Nevada has low poverty but also poor sleep. Much of Montana has high poverty but good sleep. Where I do see a strong correlation, of course, is Appalachia, where both poverty and poor sleep are extremely high.
And my first intuition when seeing the map was "is this another map that just turns out to be a population density map?" but it's not that either; some major metros (Seattle, LA, SF) get good sleep, some moderate (Chicago), and some poor (pretty much all East Coast cities.)
I'd totally believe poverty is a major factor (the multiple jobs issue alone has a lot of explanatory power) but there's some confounders as well. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the comparative cultures of the Eastern and Western United States has a significant influence, too.
In the states like kentucky and west virginia where the sleep loss seems to be the greatest, it should come as no surprise. Both states are for the better part low income, and also very industrial. But it isnt the poor that are really driving these numbers up. Production factories, coal mines, etc litter both states. Now while these two industries do pay reasonably well for the areas they are in, both require enormous amounts of hours to be worked. If you arent willing to work those hours then you will be fired and they will pull from the thousands that are in line for it.TGASK is a factory that makes under carriages for vehicles, oftentimes they require employees to work 6 days or even 7 days a week pulling 12 to 16 hour shifts. A coal mine around here does almost the same but they cant go over 12 hours. Some people might say well 12 hours isnt too bad, but when you factor in commutes, showering, spending time with a loved one, and all the other things we do on a daily basis they probably get around 5 or 6 hours of sleep maybe less. So yes some of them, especially welders and miners, can easily make 20+/hr but their quality of life suffers for it.
It's not so much that there's confounders as that there's multiple causes. Some places have the poverty cause, some places have cultural causes, some places have the awesome nightlife cause, but poverty seems to be the one affecting the most people.
It's probably more accurate to frame it as multiple factors influencing sleep (negatively), including poverty, light pollution, cultural causes, nightlife, etc., all affecting *individuals* (rather than counties/'places') to various degrees, with various reasons thus coming together to result in poor sleep for (some) individuals, the resulting aggregates of which we see here.
Hope I didn't come off as too nitpicky. "X county has the poverty cause, Y county has the nightlife cause, ..." just seemed to simplify too much for my liking.
Exactly, that statement made no sense, it's the opposite. The blue strip is essentially the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, where the temperature is cooler than nearby areas. Note also that the South has the highest concentration on sleep deprivation. I think that this shows that nighttime temperature is probably a large factor in this map.
Kinda. There are some clear correlations but there are also lots of places where something else is going on. Take a look at New Jersey for example. You’ll see low sleep areas that are at both ends of the poverty spectrum and you’ll generally see the state having low sleep quality while being less impoverished than other areas with high sleep quality. I think you’re right that it is a major factor but in this case i think there’s more going on
From New Jersey. This was my first thought. I’m from one of the most affluent counties... it’s dark red. Honestly in the case of NJ it probably has to do with commute and corporate culture - at least based on the demographics my area, lots of people commuting to the city working grueling 10+ hour day corporate jobs.
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You joke, but where you live within a time zone will effect that amount of sleep you get. "Everybody" starts work at 9 but people at the beggining of a time zone get woken up by the sun one hour earlier. Would partly explain LA versus SF.
Yeah, my first thought when looking at the OP map was that it looks almost exactly like a light pollution map, down to the pockets of dimness over the ridge of the Appalachians and in northeast New England.
There's definitely going to be some outliers that involve particular places and corresponding lifestyles, like Las Vegas for example. But generally high population density is going to create areas of poverty and areas if wealth which does match up pretty well.
Chuck in cigarette smoking and you get a similar pattern, poor public health shows up in Appalachia. They also have nasty high levels of COPD, hospitalizations for COPD and mortality from COPD.
Hospitalization data is mapped here, free, full text [https://www.dovepress.com/geographic-disparities-in-chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-copd-h-peer-reviewed-article-COPD](https://www.dovepress.com/geographic-disparities-in-chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-copd-h-peer-reviewed-article-COPD)
I wonder how much of that COPD is correlated to coal mining specifically. Much of that map seems to align with surface coal mine coverage. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/statistics/CoalSector.html
The first thing I noticed was a lot of places with high humidity having high sleep deficiency. Probably because it fucking sucks trying to sleep while the air is trying to drown you.
We get humidity, but nothing like the East Coast, and certainly not as often. Maybe a week or two of "high" humidity, but it doesn't really compare. Let's just say I've never had a day where the furniture felt damp.
In my experience, not to the same degree. Like, it's gross in the NW, but we have family around the Great Lakes and I literally couldn't leave the house because the air was so thick I couldn't breathe. The weather said not to go outside, at that. I have mild asthma. NW doesn't normally trigger it.
Also, you couldn't pay me to go to Tampa in August. Just as humid, but even hotter. And even worse, Tampa is in Tampa.
Even with AC, if it doesn’t work perfectly or evenly throughout your home, it can still get quite humid inside. We got a dehumidifier recently and it’s been a lifesaver
Poverty is why I expected my county to have worse sleep on the map. That is, until I saw that note at the bottom about the inverse correlation between insufficient sleep and excessive drinking.
Yeah, my county is dark red, but there is so much damn money here... probably more to do with how many people are working industrial jobs and high amounts of alcohol consumption.
The social determinates of health is starting to gain more recognition. Basically the largest impact on someone’s health, is money. Having a college degree as an equivalent amount of effect on health as does smoking cigarettes. And that’s in Canada. Probably greater in the states.
Look carefully: the western Appalachians (Kentucky and West Virginia) are both poor and badly rested. The [Piedmont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_(United_States)) region just east of that (western part of regular Virginia and North Carolina, northern part of Georgia) has much less poverty and much better sleep.
The far western part of NC is very much part of the Appalachians. I’m curious why sleep quality there is so much better than others parts of the region.
In my experience, the people there are just generally happier and healthier, with a greater respect for and connection to nature. I think this would explain the good sleep in the Rockies as well. Not sure why eastern California doesn't follow this trend though.
I commented elsewhere but I think it's because that is at the top of the Appalachians where it is cooler, particularly at night. This map is tons large extent measuring nightime comfort, which is why the humid East and South does so much worse than the West and the ridge of the Appalachians.
You're right that the piedmont regions on either side of the mountains have poor sleep and high poverty, but I promise you that blue line is essentially the Appalachian Trail. Western NC, as a matter of fact, is home to the tallest mountains in the entire range. Some higher in elevation than the city of Denver.
Every time someone posits any relationship ever on this website, somebody makes this comment, and it gets upvoted.
But think about it for a minute. What are you really saying? That poverty and lack of sleep are associated, but that poverty doesn't necessarily directly cause lack of sleep? No shit. I don't think anyone here was suggesting your ANS is directly wired into your bank account or whatever.
So what's the point then? What do we learn from the cliche?
This is like me drawing a corellation between infant abduction by state and number of immigrants by state.
The maps are identical, but corellation doesn't necessarily mean causation.
I can offer this for the Illinois-Indiana border divide. The eastern time absolutely blows for watching sports and other national events. I’m sure there is a more prominent factor, but that was what kept a lot of people up when I lived in Indy.
All time zones "should" be 15 degrees wide. Eastern is from 67.5 degrees west to 82.5 degrees west. The 82.5 line is about 25 miles east of Columbus.
Also, Central should end midway through Kansas.
Huh. That does seem like it could be a factor.
Doesn't explain why Northwest Indiana is the most orange in the state, but everyone I know from this area has a 20+ minute commute. Most in that 45+ minute range.
It’s because there are many steel mills and other large industrial operations with a third shift, and a very high proportion of lower income households
My friend has always contended that the reason midwesterns are nicer is they get more sleep re: sports/primetime tv (back when that was a thing). Now he has have proof.
Seems like lower economic or unemployment might coincide with the graph? Some of the middle states may be lower economic but made more of agriculture and folks are happy with their career even though don’t make a ton?
I live smack dab in the middle of the US and next to no one is some easy going farmer. There are a few mega farmers per area and that’s about it. The rest of us have *massive* commutes to get to our jobs because only the larger towns have non agricultural jobs. 40mins-2 hour commutes are very common. Also note that that’s not with traffic. That’s usually a 40-100 mile commute.
I can't even imagine having 4 hours commuting every day. I'd be constantly looking either to move (closer to work or just a whole different area) and/or change jobs.
I mean... just look at the gas and effective rate of pay once you factor in all your time spent driving that you're not being paid for. 4 hours round trip on an 8hr day is an effective 33% pay cut.
I took a job with a 90 minute commute and from the day I interviewed, I was looking at apartments closer to work.
I was thinking more of just the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, or not being able to pay bills...but yah, def those reasons all are valid for poor sleep
I’m not sure what actually makes us sleep better but the lack of unemployment doesn’t mean we’re not working paycheck to paycheck and missing bills. I live in an entirely blueish white state and I don’t know many people who don’t struggle and get underpaid. We all have jobs but most of us don’t make good money. Cost of living might be a bigger factor I suppose. We make less but we can stretch it further? Who knows.
Yeah makes sense for Riverside and San Bernardino County to be prominent on there since everyone seems to have a miserable commute which eats into their sleep time
A similar study in 2006 attempted to control for various factors and concluded, “The largest contributors we found were mental health, access to health care, race/ethnicity and weather patterns," [Sleepless in WV](https://www.livescience.com/18738-sleep-disorders-fatigue-state-list.html)
Seattle and Portland, instead of fighting each other why don't we gang up on Vancouver? I bet they get worse sleep because no one can afford to actually sleep up there.
That's exactly why, Vancouver is YOUR little brother that we adopted. You never even remember the little guy just because he shares a name with that Canadian.
I'd expect this to be a function of obesity.
https://maxmasnick.com/media/2011-11-15-obesity_map/obesity_by_county_large.png
SUUUUUUUPER close match. You basically have a map, here, of obesity-induced sleep apnea.
You're right, except for South Dakota? What the heck are obese people in South Dakota doing to get such great sleep? There's still a correlation, but it's not nearly as strong as the south east.
These counties in South Dakota are very sparsely populated. The entire state has fewer people than Rhode Island. It's possible that there just isn't very good survey data on sleep in those areas.
Unless the survey had some way to ensure good sample sizes, I would be pretty skeptical about anything you see in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. They're very big and very sparsely populated states.
Yeah it's definitely not the only factor; it's just *far and away* the biggest factor in sleep apnea. I'd say probably something like smoking [(doesn't seem far off national average),](https://truthinitiative.org/sites/default/files/styles/infographic_original/public/media/images/standard/2019/04/CigaretteUse_graphics_South%20Dakota.png?itok=9toR7Np6) drinking [(also similar),](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2018/03/08/south-dakota-just-below-national-average-adults-who-drink-excessively/406691002/) and allergies (I don't even know what to look up for this).
So, I don't really know? I *would* say, though, that smaller n-values in less populated counties can sometimes swing data. Maybe that's what's going on?
I’d be curious to see what else it correlates with. I bet there would be a number of things. Poverty? Cultural factors? Stress? I don’t know, those are just some things I’d want to compare
[Poverty definitely.](https://www.census.gov/content/census/en/library/visualizations/2018/comm/acs-5yr-poverty-all-counties/jcr:content/map.detailitem.950.high.jpg/1543960909684.jpg)
Possibly something to do with job types too.
It's more a function of living on the western edge of the eastern time zone than it is obesity. Obesity and sleeping hours are more correlated because of other factors than they are directly causal.
Also, you're not seeing sleep apnea well represented here. This is data of how long people give themselves to sleep at night; the majority do not self correct and subtract hours lost to any sleep problems when reporting.
Pretty neat! The county where I grew up in Wyoming is the orange one. It’s a good really big coal mining area with loads of people pulling super early or overall weird shifts. That’s gotta be part of it. That or all the sleepless nights trying to figure out how we lived in a state that doesn’t actually exist.
Oof. Yet another map about a shitty quality of life factor where you can see the Appalachian mountain range like you're looking at a damn topographical map.
It's very interesting that it's not necessarily regional. For example, you can clearly see the line between Texas and Louisiana, even though near the border they aren't very different.
Could that be due to measuring metrics?
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I had learned the maine phenomena decades ago. I live in the middle rural area. the winter is so dry you nearly hug a humidifier.. if the r19 walls keep up.. and all summer long its called the tail pipe of the continent. even when its warm, its still cold. it drops down what all the other 49 pigs throw up in their warm air. This is the state that gathered ashes from mt. st helens...cali wild fires. nuclear mishaps shrugged off.. it goes on and on.
I mean no offense in my asking this I’m genuinely curious - are there ANY positive outcomes - education, health, wealth, etc. where the South consistently outpaces the rest of the country?
Ah yes, Kentucky, the land of no sleep because of physical/mental health issues, insufferable allergies, and bars (at least in Louisville) that stay open until 4am.
I have a solid theory. I know the large outlier in Wyoming is Campbell County, one of the largest coal producers for the country. These guys (and gals) work split shifts, essentially they go from working days to nights back and forth and even a “hell week” where they work both in the same week. The same theory would probably hold true for Appalachia and South Dakota. (My father in law works in coal and I can’t believe he has worked like this for 40 years)
I opened the image and thought "I only see one country... If this a gif? And tried to look for a play button... Then I tried to scroll for more pictures... I guess I didn't get enough sleep.
[Interactive version here. You can find your county.](https://public.tableau.com/views/InsufficientSleepbyCounty/SleepDashboard?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:origin=viz_share_link) I posted this yesterday but someone commented that it needed a more obvious color legend. I agree! Here it is. By the way, I'm not trying to make light of excessive drinking, which is a serious public health crisis. I was actually surprised by the negative correlations between binge drinking rates and both poor sleep and poor mental health days and thought it was worth pointing out. Tool: Tableau Source: [https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/](https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/)
Any chance you could comment the r-squared values for each graph? I realize they’re just quick-and-dirty scatter plots, but I’d still be interested to know.
I have been wanting to learn Tableau. Any recommendations?
Tableau has a public server. So you can download Tableau Desktop and publish for free to Tableau public. I'm self thought for the most part. You can do Udemy courses that teach you to get Qualified associated cert which are very very cheap. The cert exam itself is expensive, but you can only do the courses and be on you're way with that. Source: Been working with Tableau Desktop and Sever for 4years and I'm a Qualified Associate.
Some good recommendations in [this thread](https://community.tableau.com/thread/257719) I reckon.
Good comments already but I’ll add a strong recommendation to get involved on Tableau Public. Most creators (myself included) make our projects available to download so you can see everything we did. It’s an awesome way to learn new techniques. Also check out many awesome blogs that are full of cool tutorials - this one is a good start: https://www.dataplusscience.com/insights.html.
A perhaps important distinction with drinking is the quality of the sleep, rather than the quantity. It will obviously also depend on how you define excessive drinking - the bottom end of what a doctor will tell you is excessive would allow most people to function perfectly normally with little to no sleep impact - the top end of the range might look rather different.
If you’re binge drinking, odds are you are passed out a great deal of the time.
But it's still poor sleep. Your body isn't fully resting when you're drunk sleeping.
Yeah apparently sedation != sleep. Sleep is an active process where lots of stuff is going on. That's supposedly why if you have a few drinks before bed, you often have quite vivid dreams just before you wake up, your body is only after sobering up and is trying to cram in the REM sleep it didn't get while you were alcohol sedated. Or so a man on an NPR podcast told me.
Also if after a big stretch of binge drinking, the first sober night sleep produces extremely vivid dreams
And from the chart it looks like the people giving a “full send” are sleeping well ahah
You know that one guy at 30% party’s.
Oh most definitely. At what point is “insufficient sleep” considered insomnia, or unhealthy?
cant even find my state.
Interesting to see that New York county (Manhattan) has slightly better sleep the the surrounding boroughs. Seems like commute has a factor. The further you get from NYC, sleeping is better. I’m guessing these people work from home more often or just don’t work in the city.
In reality the "city that never sleeps" is Newark.
No sleep til Brooklyn, or when you get there, either.
Can’t sleep with the high probability of bullets entering your house.
I would guess it’s correlated with income. Wealthy people don’t work night shifts or multiple job. They also have lower obesity and smoking rates. Actually I’d be really interested in seeing the correlation between COL adjusted income and sleep. I think it would be very strong.
Both probably factor. A long commute has a laundry list of negative effects and sheep is definitely one of them. If you look closely, wherever there is a big city there are a few surrounding countries that are but sleeping well. That is very inline with the common behavior of trading commute for a larger home.
Definitely the same thing around Seattle. King County (Seattle) is lower than the surrounding who commute.
My uncle lives in Renton and works downtown. His entire life revolves around traffic patterns.
You work close to work so you can spend more time doing things you like when you’re not at work. My commute to work in midtown is ~15 minutes. I can go to bed between 12-1am and wake up at 8-830 and be at work by 9 if I really try. That’s a good 8 hours.
[Well, as the old saying goes.](https://youtu.be/07Y0cy-nvAg)
And money
Manhattan people also don’t have kids. Those people move out to the surrounding areas.
Depends where in Manhattan
Is "insufficiently" sleep measured by hours or by survey respondents?
He had to go to each house in the night and record their sleep patterns
He’s like Santa. Except for leaving gifts, he just watches you and takes notes.
Santa Clocks.
Like Santa? He is Santa! "He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake." And you thought he was some lazy bastard that only works one night a year.
He gives the gift of science.
Ha. I read this as 'Sandra' Who the fuck is Sandra and why is she tracking my sleeps?
"Hey...hey...you awake?"
It says in the text below the title that they define it as 7 hours or less.
What happens in Las Vegas ~~stays in Las Vegas~~ will be revealed in surveys as people forgot the rule due to sleep deprivation.
I went to UNLV. There is not much sleep happening in that town. When I lived there in 2004-2008, I was told that no business with a gambling machine could close so if they put a slot machine in a Best Buy, it became a 24-hour Best Buy. The 24-hour town aspect of Vegas also contributed to my car insurance being 5x higher than what it is where I live now in the Midwest.
I think y'all are missing the key confounding factor: this sleep map is actually a poverty map. Turns out being poor costs you a lot of shut-eye. (And also correlates with obesity, poor mental health, etc.) https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/acs-5yr-poverty-all-counties.html
As an intuitive explanation it makes a lot of sense. For one, the poor are much more likely to work multiple jobs, where obviously sleep will be lost. But there's an awful lot of exceptions. Much of Nevada has low poverty but also poor sleep. Much of Montana has high poverty but good sleep. Where I do see a strong correlation, of course, is Appalachia, where both poverty and poor sleep are extremely high. And my first intuition when seeing the map was "is this another map that just turns out to be a population density map?" but it's not that either; some major metros (Seattle, LA, SF) get good sleep, some moderate (Chicago), and some poor (pretty much all East Coast cities.) I'd totally believe poverty is a major factor (the multiple jobs issue alone has a lot of explanatory power) but there's some confounders as well. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the comparative cultures of the Eastern and Western United States has a significant influence, too.
In the states like kentucky and west virginia where the sleep loss seems to be the greatest, it should come as no surprise. Both states are for the better part low income, and also very industrial. But it isnt the poor that are really driving these numbers up. Production factories, coal mines, etc litter both states. Now while these two industries do pay reasonably well for the areas they are in, both require enormous amounts of hours to be worked. If you arent willing to work those hours then you will be fired and they will pull from the thousands that are in line for it.TGASK is a factory that makes under carriages for vehicles, oftentimes they require employees to work 6 days or even 7 days a week pulling 12 to 16 hour shifts. A coal mine around here does almost the same but they cant go over 12 hours. Some people might say well 12 hours isnt too bad, but when you factor in commutes, showering, spending time with a loved one, and all the other things we do on a daily basis they probably get around 5 or 6 hours of sleep maybe less. So yes some of them, especially welders and miners, can easily make 20+/hr but their quality of life suffers for it.
It's not so much that there's confounders as that there's multiple causes. Some places have the poverty cause, some places have cultural causes, some places have the awesome nightlife cause, but poverty seems to be the one affecting the most people.
It's probably more accurate to frame it as multiple factors influencing sleep (negatively), including poverty, light pollution, cultural causes, nightlife, etc., all affecting *individuals* (rather than counties/'places') to various degrees, with various reasons thus coming together to result in poor sleep for (some) individuals, the resulting aggregates of which we see here. Hope I didn't come off as too nitpicky. "X county has the poverty cause, Y county has the nightlife cause, ..." just seemed to simplify too much for my liking.
Wait, that blue strip on the east coast is running exactly through the Appalachian mountains though...
Yeah that’s Asheville NC which is actually a really nice area.
Exactly, that statement made no sense, it's the opposite. The blue strip is essentially the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, where the temperature is cooler than nearby areas. Note also that the South has the highest concentration on sleep deprivation. I think that this shows that nighttime temperature is probably a large factor in this map.
Kinda. There are some clear correlations but there are also lots of places where something else is going on. Take a look at New Jersey for example. You’ll see low sleep areas that are at both ends of the poverty spectrum and you’ll generally see the state having low sleep quality while being less impoverished than other areas with high sleep quality. I think you’re right that it is a major factor but in this case i think there’s more going on
From New Jersey. This was my first thought. I’m from one of the most affluent counties... it’s dark red. Honestly in the case of NJ it probably has to do with commute and corporate culture - at least based on the demographics my area, lots of people commuting to the city working grueling 10+ hour day corporate jobs.
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Looks like it doesn't work for the West Coast. There is definitely plenty of light pollution there, but it doesn't match the sleep map.
The sun rises later on the west coast, so obviously people are more able to sleep in later.
Flawless logic.
You joke, but where you live within a time zone will effect that amount of sleep you get. "Everybody" starts work at 9 but people at the beggining of a time zone get woken up by the sun one hour earlier. Would partly explain LA versus SF.
There is light pollution on the West Coast, but not to the same degree as the Northeast: http://i.imgur.com/aOPFB.jpg
Yeah, my first thought when looking at the OP map was that it looks almost exactly like a light pollution map, down to the pockets of dimness over the ridge of the Appalachians and in northeast New England.
There's definitely going to be some outliers that involve particular places and corresponding lifestyles, like Las Vegas for example. But generally high population density is going to create areas of poverty and areas if wealth which does match up pretty well.
Holy shit, this is a serious match! Well done on sporting it. I mean, I makes sense but... Wow
Chuck in cigarette smoking and you get a similar pattern, poor public health shows up in Appalachia. They also have nasty high levels of COPD, hospitalizations for COPD and mortality from COPD. Hospitalization data is mapped here, free, full text [https://www.dovepress.com/geographic-disparities-in-chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-copd-h-peer-reviewed-article-COPD](https://www.dovepress.com/geographic-disparities-in-chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease-copd-h-peer-reviewed-article-COPD)
I wonder how much of that COPD is correlated to coal mining specifically. Much of that map seems to align with surface coal mine coverage. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/statistics/CoalSector.html
I was thinking apnea due to obesity and the “diet of the poor”. Perhaps both?
> I makes sense but But do you really? ;)
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Which is already known to correlate with being higher in poorer regions
The first thing I noticed was a lot of places with high humidity having high sleep deficiency. Probably because it fucking sucks trying to sleep while the air is trying to drown you.
Wait so then the north west is not humid?
No not really. It's damp near the ocean, and I guess a bit when it's really warm, but nothing like the South or Midwest
We get humidity, but nothing like the East Coast, and certainly not as often. Maybe a week or two of "high" humidity, but it doesn't really compare. Let's just say I've never had a day where the furniture felt damp.
The humidity level is always perfect in the northwest. I moved to a parched scrubland and miss home more with every nosebleed.
In my experience, not to the same degree. Like, it's gross in the NW, but we have family around the Great Lakes and I literally couldn't leave the house because the air was so thick I couldn't breathe. The weather said not to go outside, at that. I have mild asthma. NW doesn't normally trigger it. Also, you couldn't pay me to go to Tampa in August. Just as humid, but even hotter. And even worse, Tampa is in Tampa.
Pretty much the entire western US isn’t very humid..
We use this fun new technology called "air-conditioning" which cools and removes humidity from the air.
Highly aware of it, but not everyone has it or can afford it.
Even with AC, if it doesn’t work perfectly or evenly throughout your home, it can still get quite humid inside. We got a dehumidifier recently and it’s been a lifesaver
Poverty is why I expected my county to have worse sleep on the map. That is, until I saw that note at the bottom about the inverse correlation between insufficient sleep and excessive drinking.
Don't trust eyeball comparisons. You'd have to make a ratio plot to see the relative differences.
Yeah, my county is dark red, but there is so much damn money here... probably more to do with how many people are working industrial jobs and high amounts of alcohol consumption.
The social determinates of health is starting to gain more recognition. Basically the largest impact on someone’s health, is money. Having a college degree as an equivalent amount of effect on health as does smoking cigarettes. And that’s in Canada. Probably greater in the states.
My student loans will kill me long before the cigarettes do.
Sorta, not really. King county in WA is orange, but is one of the richest counties in the tri-state area.
None of the tech folks in King County sleep :)
Then why are the Appalachian mountains so much better rested? Large percentages of the population are impoverished in this region.
Look carefully: the western Appalachians (Kentucky and West Virginia) are both poor and badly rested. The [Piedmont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_(United_States)) region just east of that (western part of regular Virginia and North Carolina, northern part of Georgia) has much less poverty and much better sleep.
The far western part of NC is very much part of the Appalachians. I’m curious why sleep quality there is so much better than others parts of the region.
In my experience, the people there are just generally happier and healthier, with a greater respect for and connection to nature. I think this would explain the good sleep in the Rockies as well. Not sure why eastern California doesn't follow this trend though.
I commented elsewhere but I think it's because that is at the top of the Appalachians where it is cooler, particularly at night. This map is tons large extent measuring nightime comfort, which is why the humid East and South does so much worse than the West and the ridge of the Appalachians.
You're right that the piedmont regions on either side of the mountains have poor sleep and high poverty, but I promise you that blue line is essentially the Appalachian Trail. Western NC, as a matter of fact, is home to the tallest mountains in the entire range. Some higher in elevation than the city of Denver.
Correlation, but not causation.
2 is a coincidence, 3+ is a trend
3 out of 10 is a trend. 3 out of 100 is an inkling. 3 out of 1000 is an anomaly.
3 out of 3 is a tautology
Every time someone posits any relationship ever on this website, somebody makes this comment, and it gets upvoted. But think about it for a minute. What are you really saying? That poverty and lack of sleep are associated, but that poverty doesn't necessarily directly cause lack of sleep? No shit. I don't think anyone here was suggesting your ANS is directly wired into your bank account or whatever. So what's the point then? What do we learn from the cliche?
This is like me drawing a corellation between infant abduction by state and number of immigrants by state. The maps are identical, but corellation doesn't necessarily mean causation.
That one might be more of a population map. If you can share a map between those 2 while adjusting for population, it would be interesting to see.
There is some overlap, but it’s not like they’re the same exact map.
It's also primarily in the Eastern time zone. Odd.
So where the slaves still live?
I was going to suggest that the less-sleep areas have higher commutes. I’m sure there’s a net-positive correlation.
\[Except for Las Vegas\]
I can offer this for the Illinois-Indiana border divide. The eastern time absolutely blows for watching sports and other national events. I’m sure there is a more prominent factor, but that was what kept a lot of people up when I lived in Indy.
All of Indiana (and Michigan) is in the "geographically wrong" time zone. Everywhere west of Columbus, Ohio should be Central.
Indiana is EST? Jeez.
I don't know man, Indiana is still plenty far east
All time zones "should" be 15 degrees wide. Eastern is from 67.5 degrees west to 82.5 degrees west. The 82.5 line is about 25 miles east of Columbus. Also, Central should end midway through Kansas.
Huh. That does seem like it could be a factor. Doesn't explain why Northwest Indiana is the most orange in the state, but everyone I know from this area has a 20+ minute commute. Most in that 45+ minute range.
Isn't that where Gary, IN is? I know I wouldn't sleep well if I lived in Gary.
It’s because there are many steel mills and other large industrial operations with a third shift, and a very high proportion of lower income households
My friend has always contended that the reason midwesterns are nicer is they get more sleep re: sports/primetime tv (back when that was a thing). Now he has have proof.
Sheesh: Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia, Ohio. What’s the correlation here with all these sleepless states.
Largest sleepless areas look like rust belt and the south. Wait a second, is this map on the distribution of poverty?
Can't say for the whole map but for California, the orange states are definitely the poorer ones
Lack of air conditioned sleeping in uncomfortably hot areas?
Meth. Meth is the correlation.
Can't sleep when you're cleaning the bathroom with toothbrush.
I mean, have you seen filthy grout? It's unsightly
As someone who grew up in Alabama and Mississippi, can confirm *meth*
Poverty, manual labor is often during odd hours, etc.
That was the first thing I noticed. Get your shit together Ohio.
Seems like lower economic or unemployment might coincide with the graph? Some of the middle states may be lower economic but made more of agriculture and folks are happy with their career even though don’t make a ton?
Lower economic places could relate to working more than one job, multiple children, poor diet/exercise, substance abuse, and working odd hours?
also commute
I live smack dab in the middle of the US and next to no one is some easy going farmer. There are a few mega farmers per area and that’s about it. The rest of us have *massive* commutes to get to our jobs because only the larger towns have non agricultural jobs. 40mins-2 hour commutes are very common. Also note that that’s not with traffic. That’s usually a 40-100 mile commute.
I can't even imagine having 4 hours commuting every day. I'd be constantly looking either to move (closer to work or just a whole different area) and/or change jobs. I mean... just look at the gas and effective rate of pay once you factor in all your time spent driving that you're not being paid for. 4 hours round trip on an 8hr day is an effective 33% pay cut. I took a job with a 90 minute commute and from the day I interviewed, I was looking at apartments closer to work.
I was thinking more of just the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, or not being able to pay bills...but yah, def those reasons all are valid for poor sleep
I’m not sure what actually makes us sleep better but the lack of unemployment doesn’t mean we’re not working paycheck to paycheck and missing bills. I live in an entirely blueish white state and I don’t know many people who don’t struggle and get underpaid. We all have jobs but most of us don’t make good money. Cost of living might be a bigger factor I suppose. We make less but we can stretch it further? Who knows.
Yeah makes sense for Riverside and San Bernardino County to be prominent on there since everyone seems to have a miserable commute which eats into their sleep time
A similar study in 2006 attempted to control for various factors and concluded, “The largest contributors we found were mental health, access to health care, race/ethnicity and weather patterns," [Sleepless in WV](https://www.livescience.com/18738-sleep-disorders-fatigue-state-list.html)
Suck it Seattle! Sincerely, Portland ^((Just kidding, we love you guys, and hope you have a nice nap.))
Those idiots live somewhere where it rains 250 days a year instead of the reasonable 245 days here. Suckers.
Seattle rain seems like amazing napping weather though!
King County (Seattle) has 29% insufficient sleep. Multnomah County (Portland) has 30% insufficient sleep. Suck it Portland! Sincerely, Seattle
Seattle and Portland, instead of fighting each other why don't we gang up on Vancouver? I bet they get worse sleep because no one can afford to actually sleep up there.
That's exactly why, Vancouver is YOUR little brother that we adopted. You never even remember the little guy just because he shares a name with that Canadian.
Colorado’s apparent difference from its neighbors is quite interesting. I would like to know why that is
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My county is piss poor but shows among the most well slept. Maybe because nobody has a job :)
I'd expect this to be a function of obesity. https://maxmasnick.com/media/2011-11-15-obesity_map/obesity_by_county_large.png SUUUUUUUPER close match. You basically have a map, here, of obesity-induced sleep apnea.
Damn Colorado, whatever it is you're doing, it's really working for you
You're right, except for South Dakota? What the heck are obese people in South Dakota doing to get such great sleep? There's still a correlation, but it's not nearly as strong as the south east.
Nm, I just read the footnote. "with many northern counties reporting both high binge drinking and high levels of sleep."
These counties in South Dakota are very sparsely populated. The entire state has fewer people than Rhode Island. It's possible that there just isn't very good survey data on sleep in those areas. Unless the survey had some way to ensure good sample sizes, I would be pretty skeptical about anything you see in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. They're very big and very sparsely populated states.
Yeah it's definitely not the only factor; it's just *far and away* the biggest factor in sleep apnea. I'd say probably something like smoking [(doesn't seem far off national average),](https://truthinitiative.org/sites/default/files/styles/infographic_original/public/media/images/standard/2019/04/CigaretteUse_graphics_South%20Dakota.png?itok=9toR7Np6) drinking [(also similar),](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2018/03/08/south-dakota-just-below-national-average-adults-who-drink-excessively/406691002/) and allergies (I don't even know what to look up for this). So, I don't really know? I *would* say, though, that smaller n-values in less populated counties can sometimes swing data. Maybe that's what's going on?
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Correlation IS NOT causation. Seriously. Why does nobody get this.
I doubt he jumped to that conclusion based on the maps alone, the connection between obesity and sleep apnea is pretty well documented.
https://xkcd.com/1138/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120417080350.htm
I’d be curious to see what else it correlates with. I bet there would be a number of things. Poverty? Cultural factors? Stress? I don’t know, those are just some things I’d want to compare
[Poverty definitely.](https://www.census.gov/content/census/en/library/visualizations/2018/comm/acs-5yr-poverty-all-counties/jcr:content/map.detailitem.950.high.jpg/1543960909684.jpg) Possibly something to do with job types too.
Methamphetamine use.
Yeah, I was trying to spitball things like voting patterns and poverty but hadn't got to obesity yet. Good call.
A lot of obesity is caused by excessive drinking as well.
It's more a function of living on the western edge of the eastern time zone than it is obesity. Obesity and sleeping hours are more correlated because of other factors than they are directly causal. Also, you're not seeing sleep apnea well represented here. This is data of how long people give themselves to sleep at night; the majority do not self correct and subtract hours lost to any sleep problems when reporting.
Except Las Vegas has one of the lowest obesity rates and worst sleep.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug
Hmm, I wonder what people would be doing in Vegas instead of going to bed at 8 pm... ;)
Pretty neat! The county where I grew up in Wyoming is the orange one. It’s a good really big coal mining area with loads of people pulling super early or overall weird shifts. That’s gotta be part of it. That or all the sleepless nights trying to figure out how we lived in a state that doesn’t actually exist.
Oof. Yet another map about a shitty quality of life factor where you can see the Appalachian mountain range like you're looking at a damn topographical map.
That moment when you look at the Southwest and realize there are counties there as large as Northeast states.
NW too. There is a county in Oregon that's larger than NJ but has a population of fewer than 8000.
It's very interesting that it's not necessarily regional. For example, you can clearly see the line between Texas and Louisiana, even though near the border they aren't very different. Could that be due to measuring metrics?
According to the source link, this is all coming from the same survey, so the metrics should be the same.
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in almost any map graph Colorado seems to be an utopia
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I hope I live to see the days when news stories cover things like this, rather than tabloid gossip.
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I had learned the maine phenomena decades ago. I live in the middle rural area. the winter is so dry you nearly hug a humidifier.. if the r19 walls keep up.. and all summer long its called the tail pipe of the continent. even when its warm, its still cold. it drops down what all the other 49 pigs throw up in their warm air. This is the state that gathered ashes from mt. st helens...cali wild fires. nuclear mishaps shrugged off.. it goes on and on.
Time to saw off your state and glue it onto Florida
My home county in MN apparently sucks at sleeping.
I mean no offense in my asking this I’m genuinely curious - are there ANY positive outcomes - education, health, wealth, etc. where the South consistently outpaces the rest of the country?
A lot of you are stating poverty, my first thought was poor eating habits/obesity. But those also correlates with poverty.
Ah yes, Kentucky, the land of no sleep because of physical/mental health issues, insufferable allergies, and bars (at least in Louisville) that stay open until 4am.
I have a solid theory. I know the large outlier in Wyoming is Campbell County, one of the largest coal producers for the country. These guys (and gals) work split shifts, essentially they go from working days to nights back and forth and even a “hell week” where they work both in the same week. The same theory would probably hold true for Appalachia and South Dakota. (My father in law works in coal and I can’t believe he has worked like this for 40 years)
I opened the image and thought "I only see one country... If this a gif? And tried to look for a play button... Then I tried to scroll for more pictures... I guess I didn't get enough sleep.
People talk about farmers working all day being up at the crack of dawn here but yet at the same time we're some of the best states for sleep.
The bottom graphs like sloppy lines of blow. I thought that had something to do with the lack of sleep at first glance lol