The 2016 UK Sleep Survey

Ever wondered whether your sleeping habits are normal? How the North sleeps compared to the South? Dreams have conducted a sleep survey of over 15,000 UK Adults to determine how the nation sleeps. We present the most interesting results from the survey.

Sleep Survey Respondents

First up, here’s a breakdown of respondents to the survey by geographical area:

2/3 of the respondents are female. The age split has a slight weighting to 55+, compensated by a lower-than-average group of 18-24s.

Sleep Survey Results

On average, UK residents spend 5 hours 5 minutes a week in bed either watching TV, watching a DVD/Film or working. This average is stretched by the anomaly of people from the capital who spend 7 hours 43 minutes a week on these activities, a whole 2 hours 57 minutes more than the rest of the UK average (4 hours 45 minutes).

Activities in bed

We asked everyone how long they spent on each of a range of activities, grouping the results into activities using blue light and activities which don’t. Blue light activities consist of using devices which emit blue light, for example a laptop, tablet, phone or TV. We can see that users spend on average 37 minutes 19 seconds more on blue light device activities a week than they do on non-blue light device in-bed activities.

1. Watching TV | 62 mins 14 secs
2. Reading a book | 54 mins 30 secs
3. Browsing the web | 42 mins 59 secs
4. Looking at social media | 38 mins 38 secs
5. Talking to your partner | 36 mins 2 secs

Reasons for struggling to sleep

1. Too hot | 46.57%
2. Stress | 38.23%
3. Struggle to get comfotrable | 27.04%
4. Money worries | 22.86%
5. Snoring partner | 22.86%

Number of days between cleaning sheets

On average, how often do people change their sheets? Once every 40 days.

• East of England | 41.59
• East Midlands | 38.58
• London | 42.42
• North East | 39.07
• North West | 40.89
• Northern Ireland | 39.34
• Scotland | 38.62
• South East | 38.10
• South West | 38.68
• Wales | 39.84
• West Midlands | 41.10
• Yorkshire & The Humber | 41.10

Quality of sleep

Average life of mattress and bedding