One in Four Adults Has Told a Doctor They Can't Sleep. Here Is Who.
Updated: 1 day ago
Trouble sleeping is one of those problems that feels private and turns out to be common. To see how common, and when it starts, we went to the CDC's national health survey, which asks adults two blunt questions: have you ever told a doctor you have trouble sleeping, and how often in the past month did you feel overly sleepy during the day.
The data
The questions come from the sleep questionnaire in the CDC's NHANES survey, 2017 to March 2020 (P_SLQ). We matched it to the demographics file and kept adults 18 and over, 9,693 people. The sleepiness question is scored on a five-step scale from never to almost always; we count "often" (5 to 15 days a month) and "almost always" (16 or more days) as frequent daytime sleepiness. These are unweighted counts of respondents in the sample.
How many adults have trouble sleeping
Across the sample, 27.7% of adults have at some point told a doctor or other health professional that they have trouble sleeping. A similar share, 25.6%, say they felt overly sleepy during the day on at least five days in the past month.
Those two groups are not the same people. Trouble sleeping climbs with age; sleepiness is highest in the young:
Ages 18 to 29: 16.4% have reported trouble sleeping to a doctor, and 30.0% are frequently sleepy in the daytime.
Ages 30 to 39: 22.5% and 26.4%.
Ages 40 to 49: 28.5% and 24.6%.
Ages 50 to 64: 33.7% and 22.4%.
Ages 65 and over: 32.3% and 25.9%.
Reported trouble sleeping doubles between the twenties and the fifties. Daytime sleepiness runs the other way, peaking at 30% among the youngest adults, who also sleep the most on paper: 7.9 hours on a typical weekday against 7.3 to 7.5 hours for people in their thirties and forties. Sleeping enough hours and feeling rested are not the same thing, and the young are the clearest example.
Hours slept and the two complaints
We also grouped people by their usual weekday hours. The pattern is sharpest at the short end:
Under 6 hours (1,006 people): 38.4% have reported trouble sleeping and 39.4% are frequently sleepy.
6 to 7 hours (1,387 people): 25.9% and 27.8%.
7 to 8 hours (2,484 people): 25.7% and 22.7%.
8 to 9 hours (2,427 people): 24.8% and 22.4%.
9 hours or more (2,293 people): 28.7% and 24.5%.
Going from the under-six group to the seven-to-eight group cuts both complaints by roughly a third to a half. Beyond eight hours nothing improves, and the nine-plus group creeps back up a little on both measures, which fits what sleep researchers have long observed: very long sleep is often a sign of poor-quality sleep rather than a luxury.
The surprise is the 6-to-7 band. It looks almost identical to the 7-to-8 band on trouble sleeping (25.9% against 25.7%) but is noticeably sleepier in the daytime (27.8% against 22.7%). People in that band may not think of themselves as having a sleep problem. Their afternoons disagree.
What to do with this
Two things stand out. First, if you are under six hours on weekdays, you are in the group where both complaints are most common, and the biggest single improvement in the data comes from getting to seven. Second, feeling sleepy in the day while sleeping "enough" hours is common, especially under 30, and points at quality rather than quantity: late caffeine, an irregular schedule, alcohol, or a bedroom that is too warm or too bright.
None of that can be diagnosed from a national average. It can be seen in two weeks of your own mornings: a quick note of how you slept and for how long, and what the rough nights had in common. If trouble sleeping lasts for weeks, that record is also exactly what a doctor will ask you for.
Try it by text
Text Hi to (831) 999-2553 to start Sleep Textapp. Each morning it asks how you slept; you answer with a number from 1 to 10 and roughly how many hours, plus anything that got in the way. After two weeks, ask for your patterns and it tells you your average quality and hours and what your rough nights mention. No app, no wearable, any phone.
Your first 20 messages are free. After that, one $9.99 a month subscription covers every Textapp. Text STOP at any time to end it. If sleeplessness comes with thoughts of harming yourself, call or text 988.
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