Sleep Sacrifice: The Two Years of Free Time Brits are Losing Through ‘Sleep Debt’

70% of adults sleep below the recommended amount, losing an average of 41 minutes of sleep every week night, with the pressures of deadlines and early starts responsible for less snoozing in a jam-packed week. Multiply that by five, and we’re almost five hours behind what their bodies need to function by the time the weekend rolls around, causing most people to oversleep in an effort to ‘pay back’ their body for the missed time.

This payback schedule, however, has a huge impact on free time and productivity. In the time spent catching up on those precious hours of sleep, the average adult sacrifices the time it would take them to:

So, with so much already written about the impact of loneliness, thwarted dreams and less relaxation on wellbeing, why are we still doing it? The short answer is because we’re too tired to do anything else. If we didn’t catch up on that sleep, the accumulation of minutes and hours spent out of bed would eventually have physical and mental ramifications, leading to a nation of health problems, or even just a nation of office workers asleep on their desks come Monday morning. The secret lies in resetting our attitude to sleep in the week.

The quality of your sleep can have a huge impact on your day-to-day life, so don’t let anything get in-between you and forty winks. To calculate your own personal sleep debt, and get personalised recommendations for improving your sleeping life, check out Furniture Village’s sleep debt calculator here.