Path: Older people sleep less, women sleep more, runners wake up early and we all go to bed too late

When you’re using an app that is as personal as Path is, one of the most intimate things you can share with people is when you go to sleep and when you wake up. Some of my Path friends seemingly sleep for 4 hours a night, which boggles my mind. I’d be cranky with that little sleep, yet they keep on chugging along.

Path decided to take a look at the sleeping habits of all of its users and published a post about it with fancy infographics today. It’s quite interesting, actually.

Here’s what the company shared:

According to Hyun Hor and Mehdi Tafti at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland (2009), the amount of sleep that an individual needs ranges from 6 to 9 hours per night. But what is needed and what is achieved can be two very different things. Take a look at what we found:

So the Path average seems to be right on target with what researchers say is the average that individuals need to survive without being a complete jerk, 7 hours and 56 minutes. The really interesting part is that the average Path user goes to bed after midnight, and that women apparently sleep more than men.

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Here are some other interesting factoids about the sleeping patterns of Path users:

On the whole, Path users are night owls, typically going to bed sometime after midnight. But there can be big differences depending on where you check in the night before or the day after you log your sleep. Those who frequent the gym tend to go to sleep well over an hour before those who check in at bars and other nightlife spots. Similarly, those who check in at the office wake up 35 minutes earlier than those checking in at college.

Unsurprisingly, athletes, or those who share their running habits on Path, tend to wake up earlier in the day than the rest of us lazy folk:

The older you get, the less you sleep. I would have thought it would be the other way around, but perhaps this is because Path users have kids that keep them up at night or jobs that run around the clock:

I love data, and it’s fun to see what kind of inferences you can make about a group of people based on all of their data put together. I personally don’t use the sleep and awake feature on Path like I should, often forgetting to tell everyone I’m awake. To some, it looks like I sleep for 18 hours a day. If only that were the case.

How much sleep do you get a night? Let us know in the comments.