Hit the Sack! People Who Get a Good Night's Sleep Are Happier

Rachael Rettner

March 2, 2015 at 7:27 PM

Flickr / Pedro Ribeiro Simões Are you getting more sleep than the US president? Sleep is a subject of perpetual fascination. Especially when it comes to the sleeping habits of highly successful people. Madetomeasureblinds-uk.com, a company that sells blinds, used YouGov research to map the sleeping rituals of the general population against high-achieving folks like Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and US president Barack Obama. The results are fascinating. The National Sleep Foundation recommends around 7-9 hours of sleep a night for those between 16 and 64. But former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and talk show extraordinaire Jay Leno, say they require much less, on average, than others in their field. It’s also interesting to see how various industries compare. Marketing and PR types, for example, appear to need more sleep than politicians. Yet it’s the biggest names in marketing and PR that get the least overall. You’ll notice a common theme. Aside from a few anomalies — namely Bezos and Arianna Huffington (who really loves sleep) — the world’s top performers don’t snuggle down as much as everyone else. Take, for example, Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi’s. He claims he needs just 2-4 hours of sleep. Meanwhile, billionaire Donald Trump says he snoozes just 3-4 hours each day. The graph below shows a bunch of famous people and their sleep patterns against a survey of 1,401 working adults in the UK. The colours correspond to the number of hours of sleep survey participants within each field say they get. (In case you’re in the camp of people not getting enough sleep, the graphic lists alternative ways to getting some shut eye). NOW WATCH: ‘Bar Rescue’ host Jon Taffer reveals the invaluable advantage of getting less sleep Please enable Javascript to watch this video Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.

Happiness and a good night's sleep seem to go hand in hand, a new poll suggests.

The survey of more than 7,000 U.S. adults revealed that people who reported getting more sleep also had a higher overall well-being than those who said they got less sleep.

For example, the average well-being score for people who reported getting 8 hours of sleep a night was 65.7 out of 100, compared with 64.2 for those who got 7 hours of sleep and 59.4 for those who got 6 hours of sleep.

Because the poll was conducted at one point in time, rather than over a long study period, it cannot say whether getting more sleep boosts well-being or if people who have higher well-being tend to get more sleep.

The researchers, from Gallup and Healthways, calculated the well-being scores based on participants' answers to questions about their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial lives, community involvement and physical health. [7 Tips to Sleep Soundly Tonight]

The survey also found that 42 percent of Americans get less than 7 hours of sleep a night, which is the minimum amount recommended by the National Sleep Foundation for people ages 18 and older.

A number of factors may affect how much sleep people get, including their work hours, family obligations, conditions such as insomnia, or poor physical health.

Because a person's well-being is also known to be connected to their level of engagement at work, employers may want to consider allowing employees to work more flexible hours to help them balance their sleep with their work and family obligations, a statement about the poll from Gallup said.

The poll was based on a survey conducted in 2014 between Sept. 5 and 19, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.

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