Baptists and Catholics sleep worse than atheists and agnostics

A team of researchers from Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty in Waco, Texas, con­clud­ed that the qual­i­ty of sleep may be relat­ed to a per­son­’s reli­gious affil­i­a­tion.

The study involved 1.5 thou­sand peo­ple. Dur­ing the sur­vey, they answered ques­tions about their reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, per­cep­tion of par­adise, and also assessed the qual­i­ty of their sleep and, in par­tic­u­lar, dif­fi­cul­ty falling asleep and its dura­tion.

It turned out that 73% of athe­ists and agnos­tics sleep 7 or more hours, as rec­om­mend­ed by experts from the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Sleep Med­i­cine. But only 63% of Catholics and 55% of Bap­tists could boast the same amount of sleep. Athe­ists and agnos­tics also found it eas­i­er to fall asleep.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the reli­gious par­tic­i­pants in the exper­i­ment, who reg­u­lar­ly got enough sleep, were more like­ly to believe that they would go to heav­en. But with the abil­i­ty to quick­ly and eas­i­ly fall asleep, faith in the exis­tence of the promised par­adise was in no way con­nect­ed. Accord­ing to the researchers, qual­i­ty sleep leads to a more opti­mistic out­look on life, which in this case man­i­fests itself in the form of a pos­i­tive out­look on the future, that is, get­ting into heav­en.

Accord­ing to researchers, poor sleep under­mines a per­son­’s abil­i­ty to live up to the core val­ues ​​of the church: being a pos­i­tive mem­ber of soci­ety, express­ing love and com­pas­sion (rather than anger and judg­ment), and being hon­est in thought and behav­ior. Per­haps, they sug­gest, improv­ing sleep will help peo­ple strength­en their own faith.