Sleep Duration and Life Satisfaction

Abstract

Sleep is an important part of life. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and, furthermore, that maximal life satisfaction is associated with about 8 h of sleep on a typical weekday. This figure represents, on average, one hour more than people currently sleep for: a result that is robust to different subsamples, and found via two common estimation techniques, one of which controls for individual heterogeneity including different sleep needs.