Sleep and Alcohol Use Patterns During Federal Holidays in the United States

We conducted a retrospective observational study using remote wearable and mobile application data to identify US public holidays associated with significant changes in sleep behaviors, including sleep duration, bedtime and waketime, and the consistency of sleep timing, as well as changes in the point prevalence of alcohol use. These metrics were collected and analyzed from objective, high resolution sleep-wake data and survey responses of 24,250 US subscribers to the wrist-worn biometric device platform, WHOOP (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), who were active users during May 1, 2020 through May 1, 2021. Compared to baseline, statistically significant differences in sleep and alcohol measures were found on the US public holidays and their eves. For example, New Years Eve corresponded with a sleep consistency decrease of 13.8% ({+/-} 0.3), a sleep onset of 88.9 minutes ({+/-} 3.2) later, a sleep offset of 78.1 minutes ({+/-} 3.1), and more than twice as many participants reported alcohol consumption (138.0% {+/-} 6.7) compared to baseline. The majority of US public holidays and holiday eves were associated with sample-level increases in sleep duration, decreases in sleep consistency, later sleep onset and offset, and increases in the prevalence of alcohol consumption. Significance StatementUS public holidays were associated with increased sleep duration, decreased sleep consistency, and later sleep timing among US adult users of an objective, validated commercial fitness tracker. Holidays were also associated with an increased prevalence of participants having reported alcohol use. Given the adverse health impacts of sleep timing variability on both weekends and during the transition to daylight savings time, and of increased alcohol use on weekends and public holidays, further investigation of the health impacts of these behavioral changes is warranted.