We all know it’s important to get a good night’s sleep if you want to feel healthy, sharp and refreshed the following day, but here’s a piece of research to really focus your attention on the importance of sleep; a team of English and Italian researchers has found that regular bad sleep has a very good chance of leading to an early death.
This study was a review of previous studies done into people’s sleeping habits, which was then combined with mortality data to look at the impacts of different sleep levels on survival chances. They defined the ‘ideal’ night’s sleep as 6 to 8 hours, and looked at what the associated mortality rates for people within and without these boundaries.
Those people had less than this loosely defined ‘average’ each night were found to be 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than someone equivalent to them getting the required amount.
That’s a hell of a lot. 12% may not sound like much, but that’s like being in a group of ten people and saying ‘one of you is definitely going to die younger than you should.’ If I was in that group, I’d want to do something about it, wouldn’t you?
Now, one should of course be a little sceptical, or at least a little critical. There’s a lot of chicken-and-egg going on here. The fact is that sleeping problems can often be a reflection of other health issues, both physical and mental. Therefore, it isn’t necessarily the lack of sleep per se that might be an issue. Interestingly, the study also found that if you have more than nine hours’ sleep a night, that’s also a bad sign. Clearly, there’s something more at work here.
Still, everyone knows that getting a good night’s sleep is important. If there’s something stopping that from happening, you should be doing something about it.
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