I can’t sleep because my bed’s on fire
I can’t cope for another hour, oh no
I’m tired of being tired …
These lyrics of a Johnossi song come to my mind when describing the last few weeks. It felt quite hard trying to fall asleep, or waking up in the middle of the night and staying awake for hours. I have no idea why and wanted to know, is this something that only happened to me or what about other people? So, I looked at what people all over Europe shared on Twitter over the last 4 weeks and this is what I found out.
What is the reason, people can’t sleep?
Illness (24%) and noise (19%) are the most common reasons for people tweeting about no sleep. I could read of drunk people shouting in the street, neighbours playing music too loud, barking dogs, snoring husbands, babies, grandmas and pets.
A heartwarming amount of people (18%) couldn’t sleep because they were too excited. A closer look into the hashtags and tweets shows, what the excitement was about. Ticket sale started for BTS in London and many users couldn’t sleep because of that.
I feel sympathy for the 16% of tweeters that are kept awake by children, spouses, siblings and sleep-talking parents.
You might wonder about the 5% mentioning ‘hot’ with ’no sleep‘. These people couldn’t sleep because they were freezing and needed hot drinks and blankets.
When is it that people complain about no sleep?
In Europe, most people complain about having trouble sleeping between 1am and 2am.
Which countries are the most sleepless?
With 70% the UK has the most restless sleepers followed by Germany, Ireland, France and Spain.
UK got 70%? Why is that? That is not surprising and shows a weakness of my analysis in one aspect: not everyone in Europe tweets in English – certainly more users tweet in their mother tongue.
Leaving out the UK data, we get the following distribution:
Who can’t sleep?
Breaking these mentions down by gender shows an unfortunate trend for tired women. If you are female, it seems you are almost twice as likely to be complaining about not being able to get to sleep.
Hey wait, what about the moon?
I couldn’t find many tweets about sleeplessness and the moon. Hm, that is strange. Will have a closer look into that. 😉
Methodology: Analysis by collecting Twitter mentions from 1 Feb to 1 Mar, 2019 and extracting 890 mentions related to topics with Boolean based categorization.
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