A new sleep wellness study by Miracle Leaf has revealed the most sleep-deprived places in Britain, with the top three results surprisingly far cries from the bustling cities usually associated with sleeplessness. 

Following findings that 1 in 3 Britons suffer from insomnia, the study uses local search data to find where the most frequent Google searches for terms like ‘why can’t I sleep’, ‘how to get to sleep’ and ‘have I got insomnia’ are made around the UK.  

The Top 20 Sleep-Deprived Places in Britain (Most-Least):

Position

Place

Monthly Searches

Population

1

Harrogate

89.43

14,500

2

Bangor

89.43

18,322

3

Kilmarnock

178.85

46,132

4

Inverness

268.28

70,000

5

Glasgow

1,429.10

633,120

6

Castleford

89.43

43,625

7

Wokingham

87.71

46,745

8

Yeovil

89.43

48,615

9

Woking

177.13

105,367

10

Aberdeen

357.71

228,670

11

Basingstoke

177.13

113,776

12

Perth

178.85

151,950

13

Scunthorpe

89.43

82,334

14

Birkenhead

89.43

88,818

15

Northwich

89.43

100,700

16

Edinburgh

426.5

524,930

17

Carlisle

87.71

108,678

18

Northampton

178.85

224,610

19

Oldham

178.85

237,110

20

Coventry

266.56

371,521

Those conducting the report were surprised by its findings.

“It was much more of a mixed bag than we envisaged”, they said. “We expected bigger cities like London or Birmingham to come out on top and, in Wales, we thought Cardiff or Swansea might show as being more sleep deprived, too. The narrative tends to be that these places have more of a reputation for being restless, with people living in louder, livelier areas, and/or with high-pressure city-centre jobs often thought to have more issues with insomnia and broken sleep.”

“But actually it seems to be a lot more nuanced than that. The results were a real mixed bag; the top three locations, Harrogate, Bangor and Kilmarnock are typically a lot slower, and generally thought of as more relaxed.”

“What the results of the study showed, then, is that places (and people) aren’t always what they appear to be on the surface, and that sleep issues can impact anyone and everyone, for a myriad of reasons.”

The research ranked cities and towns based on the number of people searching for key phrases related to sleeplessness, insomnia and not being able to sleep per month. It used Google’s Keyword Planner tool to find and collate local search volumes for each phrase and then added up the total number of impressions. 

It used the most recent ONS data for each place to work out the percentage of the population this accounted for, and used this to work out the rate for each place. It then ranked them accordingly, and filtered the results to any location with more than 13,000 residents.