After a week of visiting Spain, Melissa Perry he did not come out of his astonishment. People around him ate dinner at 10:00 p.m. and got to work before 9:00 a.m. But, in addition, it is that the weekend was spent partying until 3 in the morning. hallucinated, opened Twitter and typed “Serious question for the people of Spain… When do you sleep? […] Are you vampires? How do you do it? What is the secret?”.
I didn’t know what I was doing: 11,000 likes, more than 1,000 replies and just as many quoted tweets. Come on, the question is interesting… so we have started to investigate.
The nap, the nap! That’s himto most frequent answer among those who have responded to Melisa. Curiously, she is also the most frequent among those who are not Spanish. Because? Well, because, despite the stereotype, the data is stubborn: 60% of Spaniards never take a siesta and only 16 do so daily. That leaves 3% who do it on the weekend and around 20 who do it from time to time.
It is true that there are regional differences (communities such as Aragón or Murcia are more siesteros than average; while Euskadi and Galicia practice it less frequently), but many of them are due to the climate. That is to say: to the sun of Justice that governs the central hours of the day in a good part of the country and flattens even those least inclined to take a nap.
However, what the data tells us is that in Spain the siesta is in recession. If it is true that sleep habits are the combination of the biological cycles of sleep and wakefulness, environmental conditions and cultural practices: the ‘Europeanization’ of the country (lighter lunches, air conditioning and the ‘discredit’ of the siesta) it’s causing it to become an endangered species — just as we’re finding out it’s great for being more productive.
And then? It seems that to find an answer we have to look elsewhere. In 2016, a team from the University of Michigan quantified “normal sleep patterns” in many countries around the world. Circadian rhythms have been studied to exhaustion in the lab, but they realized we had no real data on how people sleep at home.
To do so, the researchers used smartphone usage time from participants around the world. The approach has its limitations, but it turned out to be a surprisingly useful measure for estimating the average time at which citizens in each country fell asleep and woke up.
Wash the colgs.
Spain, the great night owl. Reviewing the data, the first impression is that Melisa Perri’s feeling is confirmed: we Spaniards go to bed very late. Of all the countries studied, we were the most night owls. However (and this is important), if we look at the number of hours that Spaniards sleep… we are in the exact average: a little under eight hours.
...but also the least early riser. That is to say, countries like Brazil, Germany, Japan or Singapore sleep much less than the Spanish despite the fact that they go to bed earlier. Because? Because according to these data, the Spanish are also among the countries that rise up later. Only the United Arab Emirates surpass us (and not by much).
Mystery solved? It is true that in Spain we do not sleep as well as we should. Countries around us such as France, the Netherlands, Belgium or the United Kingdom sleep (on average) more hours than we do. And this, as we have explained on several occasions, is a melon that we would have to open — if only because of the enormous hidden costs it generates.
However, neither should we be misled about the crazy and irrational nature of Spanish timetables. As with the debates on the time zone and the time change, there are often deep geographical and productive reasons behind the apparent Spanish ‘follies’. Reasons that are not easy to solve and that if we ignore them, they can end up creating a problem for us.
In Xataka | The countries that sleep the most and the least in the world, on a map: eight hours, a mythological animal
Image | Xataka with MidJourney
