Sleep and Physical Activity Over The Holiday Period

We’re well into 2025 and we hope you’ve had a good start to the year.

Every holiday season (Christmas, New Year, and Chinese New Year) marks a unique period which, with extra time off work and increased social activity, allows one to break away from their daily rhythm.

With the sleep tracking capabilities in NUS1000SE, we were able to observe these sleep-related holiday trends amongst our participants. In this blog post, we’ll show you some data on how NUS1000SE as a whole, experienced sleep and activity changes over the holiday period.

The figures below show sleep timing for the weeks of Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year, along with a regular week (the week before Christmas).  There were university holidays on the Wednesday of 25th Dec (Christmas), Wednesday Jan 1st (New Year), and Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th Jan (Chinese New Year).

On a regular week, you can see that people (on average) go to sleep around 12:30 on weekdays (dark blue).  People tend to go to bed later and wake up later on the weekend (light blue).

During the Christmas week, sleep on Christmas day (in red) looks much like weekend sleep, with people staying up later on Christmas Eve and waking up later on Christmas Day.

Sleep during the New Year week looks slightly different.  Sleep on Monday and Tuesday of that week is quite late and similar to weekend sleep. This is probably because many people took these days off in addition to the holiday on Wednesday. Sleep on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day is much later than weekend sleep; hopefully, because everyone was having fun with friends and family! After the New Year sleep returned to normal weekday sleep as people returned to work.

Over Chinese New Year, sleep on the two holiday days again resembles that on weekend days.

The figures below show people’s step count over the same weeks. In general, people walk a little more on weekend days (especially Saturdays) than they do on weekdays. 

Over the Christmas week (Christmas day, 25th Dec, Wednesday), we see that this difference disappears, and that people are walking more on Christmas Eve (24th Dec, Tuesday), perhaps taking care of last-minute errands before the holiday period starts. 

New Year’s Day (Jan 1st, Wednesday) also sees a drop in activity as people recover from the previous night’s festivities.

Chinese New Year (28th, Wednesday and 29th Jan, Thursday) shows a similar drop in activity that remains fairly low until Saturday.

We hope this has been an interesting look at how aggregated sleep data sheds light on how our sleep and activity patterns vary on working days and holidays!