Cutting Corners on Sleep May Shorten Your Life, New Research Finds

Sleep emerges as the second-strongest predictor of lifespan, after smoking.

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Skipping a few of our nightly seven to nine hours doesn’t just leave us groggy; it might cut years off our lives.

Recent research found that catching enough Z’s is more than just a way to feel rested—it’s a key factor in how long you’ll live—even more so than what you eat or how much you exercise.

The research, from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and published in SLEEP Advances, matched the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s county-level life expectancy data to residents’ self-reported sleep duration.

“I didn’t expect it to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy,” Andrew McHill, associate professor in the OHSU School of Nursing and senior author of the study, said in a statement. “We’ve always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible.”

Besides smoking, the amount of sleep a person got was the strongest predictor of life expectancy.

While scientists have long understood that getting enough sleep benefits health, the study reveals a surprisingly strong link between sleep and how long people live.

“It’s intuitive and makes a lot of sense, but it was still striking to see it materialize so strongly in all of these models,” McHill said, emphasizing that the strength of the connection between sufficient sleep and longer life was “remarkable,” even to a sleep physiologist such as himself.

How Does Sleep Affect Health?

Although previous studies have shown that inadequate sleep increases the risk of early death, this newer research is the first to demonstrate year-to-year correlations between sleep and life expectancy across all U.S. states.

While the research did not explore specific reasons why inadequate sleep shortens life expectancy, McHill noted that sleep influences vital aspects of health, including heart health, immune function, and brain activity.

Chronic sleep insufficiency is linked to a cascade of serious health conditions, according to Chelsie Rohrscheib, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Wesper, a home-testing sleep diagnostics company. The conditions include hypertension, cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, dementia, cancer, and immune system dysfunction.

Nearly 40 percent of adults fail to get the recommended seven hours of sleep each night, with 50 to 70 million Americans currently living with chronic sleep disorders.

There have been multiple studies over the years showing that either too little or too much sleep is a strong predictor of mortality, Dr. Thomas Kilkenny, director of the Northwell Health Institute of Sleep Medicine at Staten Island, who was not involved in the study, told The Epoch Times.

He pointed to a sweeping meta-analysis review from 2010 that included almost 1.4 million participants to show that all-cause mortality was increased in people who slept for shorter durations.

Another study, conducted at the Penn State College of Medicine in 2019, analyzed more than 1,600 middle-aged adults to examine the relationship between sleep, heart health, and mortality risk found that less than six hours of sleep a night doubled risk of death in participants with high blood pressure or diabetes, and more than tripled the risk of death in patients with heart disease or stroke.

“These and other studies confirm that there is a very strong association between poor sleep efficiency and subsequent early death,” Kilkenny said.

“Sleep deprivation has also been associated with mood dysregulation and is associated with increased risky personal behavior.”