We’ve all been there. You’ve been lying in bed for what feels like an eternity, you’re trying to resist the temptation of checking (or rechecking) the time, which is edging ever-closer to your morning alarm, and your mind is conducting a mental Roll Call of every stressful,  embarrassing, or regrettable moment you’ve ever experienced. 

Being unable to get to sleep is, unfortunately, a common phenomenon. 

Very common in fact; a recent national study found as many as 16 million adults living in the UK suffered from sleepless nights. What’s more, a third of these adults also said they had insomnia, and nearly a quarter slept no more than five hours every night. 

But why is this? 

Studies have linked high-powered/pressured careers, relationship problems and financial difficulties to the issue, and most commonly a combination of stress-factors impact sleep wellness. 

One recent study  by Sleep Education correlated issues with falling (and staying) asleep to living in cities, claiming that those living in bigger, busier cities were more likely to be more regularly sleep deprived. 

With this mind, we wanted to find out where the most sleep deprived places in Britain actually were. Here’s what we found.

Key findings

• The results were much more of a mixed bag than initially envisaged. Not only were major cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester less sleep-deprived than expected, but smaller towns often associated with relaxation and a slower way of life were found to have residents that were much more prone to being unable to sleep. 
• The most sleep deprived place in the UK was Harrogate in Yorkshire, with the greatest number of searches for the phrase “why can’t I sleep?” in Google per capita. 
• The second and third most sleep deprived locations were Bangor (Wales) and Inverness (Scotland)
• Scotland occupied 3 of the 5 most sleep-deprived locations in Britain 
• Of all 45 locations, London had the lowest number of searches for the phrase “why can’t I sleep” per capita, making it the least sleep deprived place in the country. 

Results

Methodology

We used Google’s local Keyword Planner tool to find out how many times the question “why can’t I sleep” had been asked in cities and towns around the UK. 

Once we had this data, we found a monthly average for each place. 

We then used the most up-to-date ONS data to find out the populations of each place and used this to work out the total percentage of residents searching for this question. 

To streamline our findings, we filtered our results by all locations with a population of 120,000 or higher. This gave us our final list of the top 45 most sleep-deprived towns and cities, which we’ve ordered from most to least sleep-deprived.