Understandably, foreigners are interested in how we sleep in Spain

A week after my visit to Spain Melissa Perry He couldn't get over his astonishment. The people around him had dinner at 10:00 pm and went to work before 9:00 am. But what's more, he spent the weekend partying until three in the morning. hallucination, I opened Twitter and wrote “A serious question for the people of Spain: When do you sleep? […] Are you vampires? How do you do it? what is the secrete?”.

I didn't know what I was doing: 11,000 likes, over 1,000 replies, and the same number of quote tweets. Come on, the question is interesting… so we started investigating.

Nap, nap! This is it The most common answer Among those who responded to Melissa. Oddly enough, it is also the most common among those who are not Spanish. because? Well because, despite the stereotype, Data is stubborn: 60% of Spaniards never take a nap, and only 16 do so daily. This leaves 3% who do it on weekends and about 20% who do it from time to time.

It's true that There are regional differences (Societies like Aragon or Murcia more a nap from average; While Euskadi and Galicia practice it less frequently), much of it is due to the climate. That is to say: the Sun of Justice that rules the central hours of the day in most parts of the country and flattens even those least inclined to take a nap.

It's not that easy. However, what the data tells us is that siesta in Spain is stagnating. If it is true that sleep habits are a combination of biological cycles of sleep and wakefulness, environmental conditions, and cultural practices: European of the country (light lunches, air conditioning and the “discrediting” of napping) makes it an endangered species. Just when we discovered that it's great to be 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 quantify “Natural sleep patterns” in many countries of the world. Circadian rhythms of death were studied in the laboratory, but they realized that we had no real data on how people slept at home.

To achieve this, the researchers used the smartphone usage time of participants around the world. to focus It has its limitsBut it turns out to be a surprisingly useful metric for estimating the average time it takes citizens to fall asleep and wake up in each country.

Spain, the great night owl. Reviewing the data, the first impression is that Melissa Perry's sentiment is confirmed: Spanish We went to bed very late. Of all the countries studied, we stayed up the most. However (and this is important), if we look at the number of hours that Spaniards sleep… we arrive at an exact average: just under eight hours.

.…but also the least early risers. That is, countries such as Brazil, Germany, Japan and Singapore sleep much less than the Spaniards even though they sleep earlier. because? Because according to this data, we Spaniards are also among the nations Who wakes up later. Only the UAE outperforms us (and not by much).

solve the puzzle? It is true that in Spain we do not sleep properly. Countries around us like France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK sleep (on average) more hours than us. And this, as we've explained on several occasions, is the watermelon we need to open – if only because of its sheer size. Hidden costs Who is born

However, we shouldn't be fooled by the crazy and irrational nature of Spanish timetables either. As with debates about time zone and time change, there are often deep geographical and production reasons behind the apparent Spanish “madness.” Reasons that are not easy to solve and which if we ignore can eventually lead to a problem.

In Chataka | Countries that sleep the most and least in the world, on a map: The eight hours, a mythical animal

In Chataka | I've left my smartphone outside the bedroom for a month now. It's a successful idea

Image | Xataka with MidJourney

*An earlier version of this article was published in June 2023