If you had one extra hour a day, how would you spend it?
If you were like a good share of the respondents in a recent nationwide poll, you would say sleeping. Of some 1,550 valid responses to the Tokyo Mutual Life Insurance survey, 19 percent said they would spend the extra time at rest in bed, 12 percent reading a book and 3.6 percent on hobbies.
Reasons included a lack of sleep due to overtime work for men and heavy housework loads and child-rearing responsibilities for women. Sleep ranked first among all age groups except for respondents in their 50s, who generally would prefer to spend the hour reading, according to the insurance firm.
Participants in the poll, which was conducted through newspapers and magazines from April to June, were not given a choice of answers but were free to provide any response.