At his Oakland home within earshot of the Coliseum sports arena and the BART tracks, Michale Jones said he usually sleeps just five hours each night. On top of the periodic rattle of the transit trains and roar of sports fans, there’s the intrusion of illicit activities that keep him awake.
“I always hear a lot of the gunshots, a lot of music playing, side shows and lots of other stuff like that at night and even midnight every day,” Jones said.
Jones might get a little relief Sunday when daylight-saving time ends at 2 a.m. across most U.S. states and clocks “fall back” an hour to standard time, granting an extra 60 minutes to sleep in.
But it may not prove much of a break for Jones and his neighbors, whose ZIP code stood out as having the highest percentage of “short sleep duration” in the Bay Area at 41.2%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest 2024 PLACES: Local Data for Better Health report.
More than one in three American adults say they do not get the recommended amount of sleep, which the CDC defines as at least seven hours a night. Anne Wheaton, deputy associate director for science at the CDC Division of Population Health, said the national average is 37%, while in California it’s 35%. Experts say reasons can range from long commutes to health issues and noisy neighborhoods.
“Environmental noise may play a role in short sleep duration,” said Clete Kushida, a neurologist and psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at Stanford University who is director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research.
Jennifer Martin, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and former president of the board of directors for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, said “California is pretty high” among the states “in terms of residents who don’t get enough sleep.”
“California is not the best-slept state in the United States, and there are a lot of people in California who don’t get enough sleep,” Martin said.
Jones’ ZIP code 94621 includes Oakland International Airport, the Coliseum and adjacent Arena and the Coliseum BART station. Other Bay Area ZIP codes with what Wheaton said were “statistically similar” levels of sleeplessness, the data show, were located in other parts of Oakland, San Francisco, Richmond, Pittsburg, Antioch and San Quentin.
Note: Short sleep duration is defined as sleeping fewer than seven hours each night. Data for some ZIP codes is unavailable.| Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention| Chart by Jovi Dai – Bay Area News Group
So where are Bay Area residents resting well? The data show the ZIP code for Portola Valley in San Mateo County, home to wealthy investors such as Vinod Khosla and late Sunset magazine publisher Bill Lane, has the lowest percentage of residents reporting short sleep duration, just 23.2%.
Fiona Barwick, a clinical associate professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at Stanford University, said wealthier communities like Portola Valley can be quieter and more restful.
“You don’t …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
