A lack of sleep and low-quality sleep affect many Americans and unfortunately it can have a negative impact on health. The team at NapLab decided to take a closer look at what affects our sleep quality. They used a variety of factors to create a sleep score and then assigned a score to each state, color-coding the sleep quality results on a map.
To create the sleep score, they considered these factors:
- Insufficient Sleep
- Depression Rates
- Physical Fitness Rate
- Illicit Drug Use
- Alcohol Consumption
- Physical Distress Rates
- Stress Score
- People Per Coffee Shop
This huge variety of factors like caffeine intake, stress levels, and substance abuse not only affect sleep, but their rates can be affected by location. That’s why this map is so fascinating. It makes sense that states with high levels of poverty would also experience greater sleep and worse sleep. Whereas states with physically fit people that have less economic concerns are also home to more people that have better sleep.
These were the states NapLab found to have the best quality sleep:
- South Dakota
- Nebraska
- Utah
- Idaho
- Minnesota
- Iowa
- New Jersey
- Hawaii
- California
- Maryland
These were the states with the worst quality sleep:
- West Virginia
- Nevada
- Louisiana
- Kentucky
- Arkansas
- Alabama
- Mississippi
- Tennessee
- Oklahoma
- Missouri
Is your state on either of these lists? Maybe you’ve noticed some things about the lifestyle in your home state that could impact sleep quality. For example, South Dakota had the highest sleep quality score. This is a state with large rural areas and less light pollution. It’s possible this has an impact on how soundly people sleep there. However, West Virginia ranked as the state with the worst sleep school and there are also a lot of rural homes there. There’s no doubt NapLab created a unique set of data that could potentially teach us a lot about sleep quality.
