After a week visiting Spain, Melissa Perry he did not come out of his shock. The people around him had dinner at 10 pm and started work before 9 am. But, other than that, weekends are spent partying until 3am. hallucinating, opened Twitter and typed “Serious question for the Spaniards… When do you sleep? […] Are you a vampire? How do you do it? What’s the secret?”.

I don’t know what I’m doing: 11,000 likes, over 1,000 replies, and that many quoted tweets. Come on, interesting question… so we’ve started investigating.

Nap, nap! There he isfor the most frequent answers among those who have responded to Melisa. Oddly enough, it also occurs most often among those who are not Spanish. Because? Well, because, despite the stereotype, the data is stubborn: 60% of Spaniards never take a nap and only 16 do it every day. That leaves 3% who do it on the weekends and about 20 who do it from time to time.

It is true there are regional differences (communities like Aragón or Murcia are more nap than average; while Euskadi and Galicians practiced it less frequently), but much of this was due to the weather. Meaning: to the sun of Justice that regulates the central hours of the day in most countries and evens out even those who are least inclined to nap.

However, the data tells us that in Spain siesta is in recession. If it is true that sleep habits are a combination of biological cycles of sleep and wakefulness, environmental conditions and cultural practices: the ‘Europeanization’ of countries (lighter lunches, air conditioning, and the ‘discredit’ of naps) is to blame. to become an endangered species — as we all know, being more productive is a good thing.

Then? It seems that to find answers we have to look elsewhere. In 2016, a team from the University of Michigan measurable “normal sleep pattern” in many countries around the world. Circadian rhythms had been studied to exhaustion in the lab, but they realized we had no real data on how people sleep at home.

To do so, the researchers used the smartphone usage times of participants around the world. Focus have limitationsbut it turns out to be a very useful measure for estimating the average time citizens in each country fall asleep and wake up.

Spain, the great night owl. Reviewing the data, the first impression is that the Melisa Perri sensation is confirmed: Spain we went to bed very late. Of all the countries studied, we are the most night owls. But (and this is important), if we look at the number of hours the Spaniards sleep… our average is spot on: just under eight hours.

...but also the least early riser. This means that countries like Brazil, Germany, Japan or Singapore sleep much less than Spain despite the fact that they go to bed earlier. Because? Because according to these data, Spain is also among those countries who wakes up later. Only the United Arab Emirates surpass us (and not many).

Mystery solved? It’s true that in Spain we don’t sleep as well as we should. Countries around us like France, Holland, Belgium or the UK sleep (on average) longer than we do. And this, as we’ve explained several times, is the melon we have to open — if only because of its enormous size hidden costs which produce

However, we also shouldn’t be misled about the crazy and irrational nature of Spain’s schedule. As with debates over time zones and time changes, there is often a deep geographical and productive reason behind Spanish ‘stupidity’. Reasons that are not easy to solve and if we ignore them, they can eventually lead to problems for us.

In Xataka | The countries that sleep the most and the least in the world, on the map: eight hours, mythological beasts

Image | Xataka with MidJourney