Choosing to Sleep
Abstract
In this paper we claim that individual subjects do not have so much control over sleep that it is aptly characterized as a personal choice; and that normative implications related to public health and sleep hygiene do not necessarily follow from current findings. It should be true of any empirical study that normative implications do not necessarily follow, but we think that many public health sleep recommendations falsely infer these implications from a flawed explanatory account of the decision to sleep: the consumer choice view. This view, which we criticize here, proposes that sleep duration and sleep quality be understood as one choice among many.