Feeling Rested with Age

How much you sleep each night matters, but more importantly, it’s about the quality and if you feel rested when you wake up. This seems to shift with age as responsibilities and sleep patterns change.

The following chart shows how rested people felt, based on answers to the American Time Use Survey.

Better Rest When Older

People were asked, “When you woke up yesterday, how well-rested did you feel?” By age 50 to 59, the very-well group passes the halfway mark.

So maybe there are some benefits to getting older, and the trend for those who answered “very well” looks a lot like the curves for life satisfaction. While I suspect there’s some survivorship bias, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that peak rest overlaps with the U.S. retirement age.

Estimates are based on data from the American Time Use Survey on the years people were asked about well-being (2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021). I downloaded data via IPUMS, analyzed in R, and visualized with D3.js.