Sleep is not for wimps? Britons think unfavourably of a leader who sleeps too little
Many politicians talk about how much they sleep. Naturally, journalists want to know more about the daily lives of the leaders who run the country, and careerists also want to benchmark themselves against the most powerful in society.
But politicians also use it as an opportunity to show how hard-working they are. Theresa May only slept 5 or 6 hours because “there’s a lot of work to do”; Angela Rayner said that she could power through her packed schedule because she only sleeps 3-4 hours as an insomniac (which she described as “good news”), and Margaret Thatcher famously only slept 4 hours per night. “Sleep is for wimps”, she also supposedly quipped.
Yet has anyone ever stopped to wonder how people actually feel about how much sleep our leaders are getting? Even in the country that ranks at the very bottom for sleep per capita, a national debate has been ignited over how many hours the Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (an ardent fan of Thatcher) is sleeping, who proudly shares that she’s only getting 0-3 hours per night. Things only worsened when it was reported that she recently had a health checkup lasting 6 and a half hours.
To examine this, we ran a survey experiment with 2,007 UK adults. We asked how favourably they would think of a new Prime Minister if they claimed to sleep 4, 6, 8, or 10 hours.
It is the year 2029. There is a new Prime Minister, who says they sleep X a night. How favourably or unfavourably do you think of the Prime Minister?
Neither favourably nor unfavourably
Figures may not sum to 100% due to rounding.
Our experiment shows, rather counterintuitively, that PMs are thought of less favourably if they sleep 4 hours. The proportion of Brits who think favourably of a PM that sleeps 8 hours is 44%, dropping to 37% for 6 hours, and then 35% and 32% at the extremes of 10 and 4 hours respectively. Perhaps more telling is the proportion of people who rate the PM unfavourably. The gap in unfavourability is 14 percentage points between 6 and 4 hours, and widens to 19 percentage points between 8 and 4 hours. To put another way, a PM that claims they sleep 4 hours (rather than 8 hours) is seen more unfavourably by an additional 18 percentage points among the public. Sleeping too much is a bad idea too, as sleeping 10 (rather than 8) hours also leads to an increase of 13 percentage points in unfavourability.
So as much as leaders talk about how little they sleep, it might be in their interest to sleep more (or at least tell people so). It could be that the public actually prefers their leaders well-rested; after all, images abound of British MPs falling asleep in Parliament (think Desmond Swayne, certainly a case of far too little sleep). But also don’t sleep too much, at risk of coming across as lazy or too carefree. Either way, a message to our political leaders: you’re not a wimp if you sleep enough.
Politicians and how much they sleep
| Politician | Hours slept |
|---|---|
| Average (Sleep Council 2005, as reported by the BBC) | 5.2 |
| Angela Rayner | 3-4 |
| Margaret Thatcher | 4 |
| Nick Clegg | 4-5 |
| Gordon Brown | 5 |
| Theresa May | 5-6 |
| Winston Churchill | 5 (+1 hour nap) |
| Harriet Harman | 7 |
| Donald Trump | 4-5 |
| Barack Obama | 5 |
| Sanae Takaichi | 0-3 |
