It is believed that all over the world people sleep about the same – on average, seven hours a day. However, there are factors that affect the duration of sleep, including, such as age stages in a person’s life.
A team of French scientists from the University of Lyon conducted a study and found that the duration of sleep depends on three human life cycles – its early, middle and late maturity. The members of the scientific group presented their arguments and facts on this matter in an article published in the journal nature communication.
The researchers collected and analyzed information about the dreams of 730,000 volunteers from 63 countries. It contained their personal information – demographic and cognitive. The data was collected thanks to the Sea Hero Quest project, a mobile video game that evaluates the navigational abilities of the world’s population.
As a result, scientists came to the unequivocal conclusion that the duration of sleep depends on the three age stages of human life. Each of them has its own term: early maturity lasts from 19 to 33, middle – from 34 to 53 and late – from 54 years. These life cycles are stable in relation to all people, regardless of their cultural, gender, demographic and other affiliations.
It turned out that the average sleep duration in the world is 7 hours. At the same time, women sleep 7.5 minutes longer than men. In the early stage of maturity, a person sleeps an average of 7.4 hours, in the middle phase sleep lasts 6.8-7 hours, and after 54 years, its duration gradually increases to 7.4 hours a day.
Curiously, the duration of dreams did not affect the cognitive abilities of people in the first two stages of life. At the same time, at the third stage (from 54 years of age and older), 7-hour sleep contributed to a person’s greater ability to work, and a lack of sleep, on the contrary, reduced his social and business activity.
