Dallas Is One of the World’s Sleepiest Cities

Using data drawn from what is admittedly a self-selected sample — users of their UP fitness tracker — Jawbone, a company famous for its Bluetooth headsets and speakers, has compiled some interesting findings about sleep habits and walking patterns from around the world.

You should check out and play around with the charts yourself, but the gist of the data is this: Dallasites go to bed early, sleep a lot when they do and don’t walk very much, even if they fancy their health enough to wear a fitness tracker.

Jawbone says there were “tens of thousands” of tracker users in every American city they looked at, and those in Dallas sleep on average 6 hours and 54 minutes per night and about 75 percent are asleep by midnight each weeknight. As you click through the data, you can see the sleep patterns change on weekends and holidays. On New Year’s Eve, for example, only a quarter of the sample was asleep by 12 a.m. Melbourne, Australia, the measured city that sleeps the most, gets a mere four minutes more than Dallas at 6 hours 58 minutes.

Whatever might be tiring us out so much, it sure isn’t walking. Dallasites in the study managed a mere 6,910 steps per day, over 22 percent less than Stockholm, the world’s walkingest city, according to Jawbone. It seems likely that number was a bit deflated due to the cancellation of the 2013 Dallas Marathon. There was a big jump in activity during the Turkey Trot, so it seems that last year’s early December ice storm cost the city a few steps.