While everyone is conscious of the benefits a solid nights sleep has on the body, research published in a new book has proven that the shorter you sleep, the shorter your life.
Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California director Matthew Walker has opened up about the “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” the world is currently facing, telling The Guardian: “No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation. It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it.
“Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families. But when did you ever see an NHS poster urging sleep on people? When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised. Sleep loss costs the UK economy over £30bn a year in lost revenue, or 2 per cent of GDP. I could double the NHS budget if only they would institute policies to mandate or powerfully encourage sleep.”
Walker recently published his life’s work in the book Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, which explains just how dangerous lack of sleep is on the body. For example:
- After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70 per cent
- A lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast
- The World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen
- Adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200 per cent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night
- A lack of sleep also appears to hijack the body’s effective control of blood sugar to become less responsive to insulin, and thus to cause a prediabetic state of hyperglycaemia
- You are susceptible to weight gain as inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signalling hormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger-signalling hormone, ghrelin
- A lack of sleep will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease
While the facts are stacked against getting less than eight hours, Walker also provides tips for getting a better night’s sleep:
- Avoid sleeping pills
- Avoid pulling “all-nighters” — after being awake for 19 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is drunk.
- Start thinking about sleep as a kind of work, like going to the gym: “People use alarms to wake up, so why don’t we have a bedtime alarm to tell us we’ve got half an hour, that we should start cycling down? We should start thinking of midnight more in terms of its original meaning: as the middle of the night.”
