Americans Are Sleeping Too Much, Ruining Their Lives

By Doug Barry | September 23, 2012 | 6:00pm

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Your body needs sleep, otherwise, you’ll turn into an obese monster with a penchant for Frito ham sandwiches at midnight and an outstanding balance on your special Shamwow credit card that Vince Offer sent you himself after you ordered so many Shanmwows that you helped him keep up with mortgage payments on his condo in Pensacola. But don’t get too much sleep! Jesus, are you fucking out of your mind? If you get too much sleep, your body gets too indolent, and the next thing you know, you wake up four hours late for work on Monday, lose your job, and have to move in with your Uncle Ralph, who demands that, in lieu of rent, you sing to his canary, Brutus, and also itemize his hockey card collection.

Americans, according to Business Insider, are getting far too many minutes of sleep over the acceptable quota for productive, well-balanced citizens of the republic, who all required eight whole hours of sleep, not one minute more or less. A survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that American women are sleeping the most, racking up marathon slumbers averaging eight hours and 48 minutes, while men sleep an average of eight hours and 37 minutes. That’s on the weekdays — on the weekend, the picture gets even bleaker, with Americans sleeping an average of nine hours and 21 minutes, which can disrupt their Circadian clocks and cause their insides to slowly wither away. It’s science.