Traya.
More than half of Indian men report stress and 3 in 10 report sleep problems, finds one of India's largest men's hair and lifestyle datasets, mapped across 20 states and 50 cities
The Traya Hair Test Report, released this week, offers something India's wellness conversation has rarely had: hard numbers on how its men are actually living. Built from 4,89,721 hair test responses collected across 20 states and 50 cities, the report maps two lifestyle factors closely linked to hair health, stress and sleep, at a scale few Indian datasets can match.
The topline reading is of a country that is wired but tired. 54.6% of Indian men report experiencing stress, with 7.7% describing it as high and 46.9% as moderate. Sleep fares little better. 29.4% of Indian men report problems with their sleep, including 22.1% who describe it as disturbed outright and another 7.3% who report slight problems through the night. Barely seven in ten Indian men say they sleep peacefully.
Behind the national averages sits a striking geography, and it points firmly south.
Traya data: the South carries the heaviest load
Every one of the five cities where men report the worst sleep is southern. Chennai leads the country with 30.9% of its men reporting disturbed sleep, followed by Coimbatore at 30.4%, Vijayawada at 29.8%, Visakhapatnam at 29.3% and Hyderabad at 27.6%. Against a national average of 22.1%, the southern cluster stands clearly apart.
Stress follows the same map. Four of the five cities with the highest share of high stress are southern: Vijayawada at 10.6%, Salem at 10.5%, Coimbatore at 10.4% and Chennai at 9.9%, with Kolkata, at 9.6%, the only non southern entrant. At the state level, Tamil Nadu tops both tables at once, with 30.4% of its men reporting disturbed sleep and 10.2% reporting high stress. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana follow closely on sleep; West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh follow on stress.
India's best sleepers live in its smaller cities
The other end of the table belongs to the Hindi belt. Jodhpur reports the lowest share of disturbed sleep of any of the 50 cities, at 17.4%, with Patna, Jaipur and Varanasi close behind at roughly 17.8% each. Among states, Rajasthan and Bihar tie for the country's soundest sleep at 17.6%, and more than three quarters of the men in Bihar and Rajasthan describe their sleep as peaceful, among the highest shares in India.
Stress in these regions is correspondingly lower. Jammu and Kashmir reports the lowest high stress of any state at 6.0%, with Punjab and Haryana close behind. Among cities, Jammu is the most relaxed in the country at 5.8%, and in one of the report's quieter surprises, Gurugram, the high rise corporate capital of the National Capital Region, sits among the most relaxed cities in India at just 6.3% high stress.
Why Traya measures sleep and stress
The hair test that generates this data asks men about their lifestyle because hair does not exist in isolation. Rest and stress sit upstream of the body's repair and recovery cycles, which is why they belong in any serious conversation about hair health. In collecting those answers at population scale, the test has produced a portrait of Indian male life that extends well beyond the hairline: a young, urbanising country whose men are stretched thin, sleeping unevenly, and distributed across a stress map that looks very different from the one conventional wisdom would draw.
The full report, including complete state and city tables, is available on the Traya newsroom at traya.health/newsroom, along with the latest Traya news and updates.
Methodology: Findings are drawn from 4,89,721 hair test responses submitted by men across India, spanning 20 states and 50 cities. Sleep quality and stress levels are self reported by respondents as part of the Traya hair test questionnaire. Figures are population level statistics and do not represent medical diagnoses. Data extracted March and April 2026.
Disclaimer:- no part of this article makes a medical, diagnostic, or treatment claim. All figures are population level statistics from self reported responses on the Traya hair test.
