How COVID-19 affects our sleeping patterns

(jeffhuang.com)

Let's start with a simple comparison. On the first two Tuesdays in April 2019 (uneventful days a year ago), about half of the people woke up before 7:00am to start their day. It was most common to wake up between 6:30am and 7:30am. But one year later, on the first two Tuesdays in April 2020, many countries were in the initial stages of lockdown with most people waking up after 7:00am local time. There's a shift to a later wake up time. The data here controls for day of week, part of month, tries to remove naps, and only includes people who tracked on all four days.

If we want to dig further, we have to account for the day of week. Because sleep is shifted during normal times too, notably on weekends. Here's several months of sleep with bars marking the time in bed, using the median time across everyone (about 100,000 people). Weekends are colored orange while weekdays are colored blue, so you can see that on average people go to bed half an hour later, but wake up nearly 1.5 hours later on weekends.

Here's a nice post on how the pandemic is affecting our sleep, and it's interesting.