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Sleep Less, Live Longer
Linuxathome writes: "The Washington Post carried an article describing the results of a study linking the average amount of sleep one gets per night with his/her life span. It appears that those who sleep less than 8 hours a night, live longer (optimum is 7 hours). The study (link to the abstract) was aimed at looking at the mortality rate of those suffering from insomnia. But rather than associating insomnia with increased risk of death, it appears that sleeping more than 8 hours carries a much higher risk."
Personally, I'd rather sleep longer and live a shorter life.
...when I say that most of us are not often in danger of getting too much sleep ;-)
it seems from the report that the data are based on actual sleeping habits. this is to say that the time spent sleeping is, if anything, a symptom, not a cause. lots of rich people fly to Paris every day. this does not mean that flying to Paris every day will make you any richer.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
...but you'll feel like it ;-)
...correlation is not causation. Who sleeps more than average? Old people, sick people, and depressed people. I'm not surprised to find out they have a shorter life expectancy.
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... there goes one of the last objections to my intraveneous caffiene drip!
|>
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If I could tattoo one thing on everyone's head, it'd be: "Correlation does not equal causation!"
This study does not mean that if you sleep less, you will live longer. A correlation has been found, that's all. Maybe people who sleep less have better circulation, also linked with long life. Or maybe the space aliens who shorten life spend two hours a night doing it.
Point is, we don't know what's causing this effect, at least not from this article.
All this living longer is killing me.
This article from CNN reports the same thing. However, in this article The National Sleep Foundation suggests that the study may be flawed, and will do nothing but cause the public unnecessary confusion and concern.
Something to really keep in mind when looking at psychological/physiological studies is that correlation and causation are two different things. In order to show causation, you need to do more than just show that two things are correlated. Just becuase those that happened to sleep less tend to live longer, doesn't mean that if you sleep less you'll live longer.
One of the best examples of the difference between correlation and causation is that when ice cream sales go up murder rates also tend to go up. So if you start eating more ice cream will you be more violence prone? Nope, it's just that in the summer both ice cream sales and murder rates happen to go up. Must be the heat or something.
The report seems to come to the conclusion that just because people sleep less and live longer, the former causes the latter. It seems much more likely to me that the amount of sleep you get is indicative of what type of lifestyle you lead. Active people are less likely to oversleep and active people usually live longer. Also, depressed people usually sleep more than happier people, and depression can be linked to whole range of health problems that can affect your lifespan.
;)
Another possibility is that people who sleep less get more done, and are therefore more likely to be successful in what they do. This means that they would have a higher standard of living, leading to a longer lifespan. These are just ones I've come up with off the top of my head, so I'd say that less sleep does not lead to a longer life, but just is indicative of a lifestyle that would.
Oh, and when you're awake you can watch for bears and enemies attacking your cave. Natural selection probably favors those who sleep less
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Quoting the article:
"The amount of sleep you get impacts how alert you are, your risk for accidents, how you perform at work and school," said James Walsh, president of the National Sleep Foundation (...)"There's much more to life than how long you live."
Bullseye. Interestingly, the article does not specify exactly how more sleep would decrease your lifespan.
Hey, if I can sleep 9 hours a day, be rested the next day, and live to be 80 and die, I will do it! Is there really anyone who would want to sleep 6 hours a day, be constantly tired throughout their lifetime, and then die at an age of 100 where last 20 years where spent in a bed with bunch of tubes going from their body and the 'beep...beep' sound of the EKG machine at all machine?
Makes me wanna sleep in more. And take naps. Three times a day.
There are many potential confounds for this study that can provide these results, most notably their use of cancer patients as subjects. Most studies to date indicate an average need for approximately 8hrs of sleep per night are needed for an adult. However, those folks that have poor quality of sleep caused by factors such as sleep apnea or pain management issues among others where the architecture of sleep and quality of sleep are radically altered would need to spend longer amounts of time "sleeping" or more appropriately time in bed to acheive the required rest due to poor quality of sleep. These causes of longer "sleep" times are themselves responsible for higher morbidity and mortality.
Finally it should be noted that for a long time it has been known that there is a high degree of variation in the amount of sleep required by people and most of the variation is due to self reporting inconsistencies. (in other words people underreport the amount of time they actually sleep for a variety of reasons) Actual sleep recording or polysomnography narrows this variation considerably.
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I wake up, and the first thing I do is read slashdot where I learn that I've just decreased my life expectancy. That's a good way to start the week :)
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Though I admit it would be very nice if caffeine actually did lengthen life (as opposed ot just making it seem to be lived faster) ...
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"'None of this says sleep kills people,' said Daniel Buysse, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and the immediate past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. 'You should sleep as much as you need to feel awake, alert and attentive the next day...'"
"Sleeplessness produces health consequences that were not measured in the study,"
"The study relied on people's own reports of their sleeping habits,"
(very few reported that they had "CowboyNeal" hours of sleep)
"'You can choose to eat a Twinkie or a carrot, but I can't choose to sleep 12 hours or six -- I don't have that much voluntary control.'"
I dunno. It seems pretty obvious to me that, all else being equal, people tend to sleep longer when they are unhealthy because they are unhealthy. While I hesitate to use the term... Who am I kidding? I think people who are interpreting this as "Sleep less, live longer" are total Bozos, and I think the popular press is being irresponsible in their desire for a sensational story, as usual.
...Studies found that many people undergoing chemotherapy eventually die of cancer. The number was so high, in fact, that the only conclusion we can draw is that chemotheraphy causes cancer.
And tonight at 10: "Tylenol: headache in a bottle?"
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Babies sleep 12 hours or longer per day while old people sleep 6 hours or less per day.
If you do the study this way (asking people at different ages how long they sleep, then look at mortality) you get obvious result that long sleep = early death. People who died at age 2 slept probably more than 12 hours/day.
If you look at it the other way and ask for the rest life expectancy you would get exactly the opposite result: People sleeping longer have statistically a longer rest life expectancy (because they are younger, but this study ignores age, so we can ignore it, too)
I agree completely with roffe.
Think about it, who do you know that sleeps 8+ hours a day, other than the elderly and sick (both groups who at more likely to die than the average person)? And from my experience, the "average person" generally has more important things to do than spend 8+ hours a day sleeping. So as roffe said, sleeping 8+ hours a day is more likely a symptom of someone trying to maintain their health, because they are in danger of dying.
To put it another way, when I had mono I was sleeping 12 hours a day, and the hours I was awake, it felt like I was dying. And it wasn't like I had to force myself to sleep, my body was naturally making me sleep longer so I wouldn't end up dying. And gee, would you guess what? When I got better, I went back to my normal 6-7 hours of sleeping!
Does anyone want to fund my study? I'm going to see if age has anything to do with death.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Sure you will live longer, but you won't remeber it.
I took his class and it was very interesting. One of the most memorable things that I learned is that there is no single "right amount of sleep" for everyone. Some people need more, others need less. The range that he reports is 2 to 10 hours a night. If you need 6 hours a night then that is what you need and 8 is too much. If you need 9 then you had better get 9 and getting less is harmful. Here is what his website has to say on the subject.
One of the other very interesting things I learned in his class was the concept of sleep latency. He has developed tests that can actually measure how sleep deprived a person is. Once you accumulate sleep debt it doesn't go away until you make that sleep up. Thus if you are a person who needs 7 hours of sleep a night and one night you only get 4 hours of sleep you will be sleep deprived until you make up that 3 hours that you missed. You can do the next night by sleeping 10 hours or you could continue to sleep 7 hours a night and run around sleep deprived for months until you make up the sleep.
I would trust his opinion more than some researchers who do not specialize in sleep and merely noticed a correlation while conducting a study that wasn't related to sleep or sleep disorders. On the subject of life expectancy he actually mentioned in class that life expectancy is correlated with the amount on sleep that you need each night. Someone who needs only 4 hours of sleep each night, he used President Clinton as an example, will have a shorter life expectancy. This directly contradicts the study mentioned in this article.
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Couple of points.
First... this does not mean that "IF you sleep less you will live longer"
It just means that there is some relation between lifespan and sleep. It could also be that those who live longer tend to have lifestyles that involve getting up earlier.
Or that, for some reason, those predisposed to along life just plain sleep less.
Also... not getting your 8 hours? Think you can get by on 4 or 5 hours a night? I've heard people say that...
Studies show very conclusively that you basically need 8 hours of sleep a night. If you don't get it one night, you'll make up for it later. When you don't sleep enough, you accumulate a 'sleep-debt' that the body WILL pay off eventually, even over a span of months.
Stayed up on speed for 3 days? You might not sleep for 24 hours straight afterwards.. but you WILL catch up over the next few days.
Other studies have shown that different people need different amounts of sleep to function best. The "average" is between 5 and 10 hours of sleep.
If you really need 10 hours of sleep, and you believe in the old "8 hours per night for everyone", you will be tired all the time. You'll probably sleep in on weekends, which disrupts your sleep cycle, and makes you even more tired when you get up on Monday.
On the other hand, if you should really be sleeping 7 hours per night and you get 8 or 9, you will also feel tired. Many people have found that a gradual, planned cutback of the number of hours they sleep has led to increased energy. This has also been used as an effective treatment for depression.
The important thing is to figure out how much sleep you need, and keep up (as near as possible) a steady sleep schedule, even through the weekend. You should also avoid things like alchohol and caffeine up to several hours before bedtime, as these will decrease the quality of your sleep, though they might not keep you awake.
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Alot of the "layabout" types I have met seemed far more interested in spending 12+ hours in bed than actually doing anything with there life.
It isn't just a lack of joie de vivre; hypersomnia (sleeping a long time) can be a sign of serious chronic illness such as major depression.
The press is picking up on this as a "sleep is bad for you" story. In fact, another interpretation that fits the observation equally well is that health people require less sleep than people with chronic illness. In that case, it would be very unfortunate if people take this to mean they can improve their health by reducing the amount they sleep, because this would very likely injure it.
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If this correlation is true, what controllable factors cause a person to sleep longer each night?
Some of the answers are well known:
All interfere with your body's ability to reach the deepest levels of sleep, so it takes longer to have the same amount of rest. At least two of the three factors are also associated with shortened lifespan.
Is the study totally worthless? No. It proves that you don't need to subject yourself to a dozen separate tests to determine how well you are managing these long-term risks - keeping track of the number of hours you sleep is sufficient.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken