Sleep is essential and its quality has a dramatic effect on health. how are you Maybe right now. However, do you contribute to a comfortable old age with your lifestyle and especially your sleep?
How does lack of sleep affect our body?
Are you so tight that you would sleep like Rosehip Rose for a hundred years? Maybe not for that long. Quality daily or rather nightly sleep should last 7 to 9 hours, even if our demands are individual and dependent, for example, on movement or mental exhaustion. This time is long enough for the organism to rest, regenerate and be able to function well again the following day.
Of course, it never pays off to sleep little or badly, and the consequences are predictable. Sufficient sleep is necessary and essential, as its lack directly affects physical and mental performance the following day.
After a sleepless night or prolonged sleep deprivation, it is not easy to return the body and mind to their original good state. It may take several days. Therefore, don’t count on the fact that a sleepless night is all you need to sleep the next day. Even a nap during the day, or so-called power-sleep, cannot replace an insufficient night’s rest.
What happens to the body when you don’t sleep enough? The following post from the TrochuLepší YouTube channel will also answer that.
Source: Youtube
Researchers looked at sleep duration and aging in a large study
However, lack of sleep affects much more than just how you feel the next day. Your lifelong habits play a major role in how you age.
Authors from China’s Wenzhou Medical University associate the length of sleep with comfortable or successful aging. It was a paper titled “Association between trajectories of sleep duration and successful aging: a population-based cohort study,” which was published in issue 24 of the journal BMC Public Health in November of this year. By this, the authors mean that aging is successful if sleep does not interfere with people’s physical or mental skills even in later life. In this large Chinese study, 3,306 people with different sleeping habits were monitored, or specifically, it was mainly about different sleeping times. The participants were then divided into 5 categories accordingly.
In the first are people who did not change their habits during the four monitored years and slept about 7 hours a day.
The study participants who initially slept little, but increased the length of their sleep every year, were then included in the other four categories. The other group had it the other way around, i.e. they slept long and shortened the length of their sleep. In the fourth category were people who slept for a relatively long time, i.e. almost 9 hours, in the middle of the sequence time, there was a slight dip, and then a return to almost nine hours of sleep again. In the last category were those who slept only a little more than five hours, slightly more in the middle of the observed period, and then returned to the original length of sleep.
How much sleep is best?
In these five groups, the researchers then monitored the length of sleep and any changes and were interested in how they reflected on the quality or, if desired, well-being in older age. It turned out that the group that slept a steady 7 hours did significantly better than the other four groups. In the background, however, was a group in which the participants indulged in an even longer sleep of almost nine hours.
I’m sure you can figure out what that means. According to Chinese scientists, 7 hours of sleep is ideal, without large permanent fluctuations. Even longer sleep won’t hurt, but it doesn’t seem to add particularly good health and physical and mental well-being either.
It probably won’t surprise you that the last mentioned group had the worst results. If the sleep lasts only 5 to 6 hours, it is definitely not enough. While it is certain that our needs are somewhat individual, this short amount of sleep is not conducive to comfortable and healthy aging.
Sources: sciencealert.com, bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com
