How do the one per cent sleep at night? Not as well as you'd think

Bad news for the one per cent – the more you earn the less you sleep.

That's according to the American Time Use Survey (ATS), which shows that people who are on the highest salaries are sleeping, on average, 40 minutes less than those in the lowest income families.

As the Upshot note, lack of sleep appears to be directly linked to the amount that people are in the office - with work hours eating into the time that people should be sleeping.

Their post was prompted by data from the American Centre for Disease Control & Prevention, who this week published data which appeared to show that rich people slept better than those on lower incomes. However, as the Upshot reports this survey is not as reliable as the ATS because the data was collected by asking people to estimate an average of how much they slept rather than accounting for every minute of a day in the ATS.

Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London has an economic theory about the relationship between the highest earners and those that sleep the least. He believes that the more that one earns, the more one is willing to sacrifice sleep for work.

Professor Mathias Basner, of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school said: “The major determinant of short sleep is actually work.”

He continued: “People who work a lot of hours, they are much more prone to be short sleepers.”

More: The nights when we lose the most sleep