If you want to live longer, your priorities in life must be sleep. A study of Harvard has collected five good habits to add almost five years to a man’s life expectancy and two and a half years to a woman’s. “If people have all these ideal sleep behaviors, they’re more likely to live longer,” said study co-author Frank Qian, a clinical research scientist at Harvard Medical School and a physician of internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess. Boston Medical Center.
How to sleep to lengthen life: advice
First of all you need to get a full seven to eight hours of sleep every night, a difficult mission for many people: 1 in 3 Americans, for example, has a sleep deficit. In addition, interrupted sleep must be avoided: this means, for example, not waking up continuously during the night. You need to feel refreshed at least five days a week when you wake up. And you don’t need to use drugs to be able to fall asleep.
Irregular sleep can be bad for your heart
“We’re talking not only about quality and quantity of sleep, but also about regularity, sleeping well night after night,” said sleep specialist Raj Dasguptaassociate professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of the University of Southern California.
“Recent studies have shown that irregular sleep times and durations have been linked to metabolic abnormalities and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease,” he said. “Encouraging the maintenance of regular sleep schedules with consistent sleep durations can be an important part of lifestyle recommendations for heart disease prevention.”
The difference between men and women
The preliminary study, presented Thursday at an annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, analyzed data from more than 172,000 people who answered sleep questionnaires between 2013 and 2018 as part of the National Health Interview Survey. Each of the five healthy sleep habits—falling asleep easily, staying asleep, getting seven to eight hours of sleep, waking up refreshed, and forgoing sleeping pills—was assigned a number. People were scored on how many of the five habits they had.
About four years later, the researchers compared those scores to records from the National Death Index to see if their sleep behaviors contributed to an early death from certain diseases or any cause.
The team then considered other potential causes of a higher risk of deathsuch as alcohol consumption, socioeconomic status, and existing medical conditions.
“Compared with individuals who had zero to one favorable sleep factors, those who had all five were 30% less likely to die of any reason, 21% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease, 19% less likely to die of cancer and 40% less likely to die of causes other than heart disease or cancer,” the study explains.
The men who followed all five healthy sleep habits had a life expectancy 4.7 years longer than people who had none or only one of the five low-risk elements of sleep. The impact of healthy sleep habits was much less for women: Those who followed all five sleep habits gained 2.4 years compared to those who did none or just one.