"The Black-White Sleep Gap"

"it wasn’t just slow-wave sleep in general that in­ter­ested the re­search­ers; they spe­cific­ally hoped to com­pare how blacks and whites ex­per­i­enced slow-wave sleep. And what they found was dis­turb­ing. Gen­er­ally, people are thought to spend 20 per­cent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white par­ti­cipants hit this mark. Black par­ti­cipants, however, spent only about 15 per­cent of the night in slow-wave sleep.

The study was just one data point in a mount­ing pile of evid­ence that black Amer­ic­ans aren’t sleep­ing as well as whites...

Blacks were also more likely to re­port feel­ing sleepy in the day­time, and they woke up more of­ten in the middle of the night. “Not­ably,” the study reads, “these as­so­ci­ations re­mained evid­ent after ad­just­ment for sex, age, study site, and [body mass in­dex].”...

“The race gap is de­creased if you take in­to ac­count some in­dic­at­or of eco­nom­ics,” says Laud­er­dale, “but it’s not elim­in­ated in the data that I have looked at.”...

Sci­ent­ists have dis­covered “clock genes,” tiny bits of DNA that act like a bio­lo­gic­al met­ro­nome: By reg­u­larly flip­ping on and off, they help the body main­tain its sense of time. And not only are these clocks in every tis­sue in every hu­man, or in every tis­sue in every mam­mal, but they can be found in “vir­tu­ally every or­gan­ism on the sur­face of the plan­et,” says Mi­chael Twery, dir­ect­or of the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health’s Na­tion­al Cen­ter on Sleep Dis­orders Re­search. Cycles in activ­ity and rest are fun­da­ment­al in the ar­chi­tec­ture of life.

Mess­ing with these cycles—es­sen­tially throw­ing the body’s met­ro­nome off beat—throws the whole body off beat...

ON THE QUES­TION of how to ex­plain the black-white sleep gap it­self, re­search­ers have a num­ber of re­lated the­or­ies. (There is a con­sensus that in­nate bio­lo­gic­al dif­fer­ences between blacks and whites are not a factor.) The stress caused by dis­crim­in­a­tion is one strong pos­sib­il­ity...

She ar­gues that sleep is a re­flec­tion of a per­son’s agency. The more con­trol you have over your life—the more free­dom you have fin­an­cially, the more free­dom you have to live where you choose, the more con­trol you have over what you eat and when you eat it, the more you have the lux­ury of pos­sess­ing the time and equip­ment to ex­er­cise—the more likely you are able to cre­ate an en­vir­on­ment that fosters good sleep. “[S]kep­tics can­not ar­gue that people with poor sleep habits simply ‘choose’ to sleep poorly,” Hale and a co-au­thor wrote in 2010. “Sleep should be viewed as a con­sequence of something oth­er than choice.”...

at every level of gov­ern­ment, there are policy de­cisions—wheth­er on neigh­bor­hood noise levels or pub­lic safety or the place­ment of pub­lic hous­ing—that provide good op­por­tun­it­ies to con­sider, and per­haps im­prove, how people sleep."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/91261/black-white-sleep-gap

I want to post this is in several of my publications, but it's most relevant here. (If you follow my science or mental health posts, you already know about circadian rhythm and health)

I am involved in research about the biology of circadian rhtyhm and sleep, and I appreciate this other perspective too - there is something very cognitive about sleep, about designing and scheduling you day and moving towards sleep and being capable of turning off and trusting your environment. 

Related: Chronotype, others...