Sign up for CNN’s Sleep, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide has helpful tips for getting better sleep..
CNN
—
Do you want to live longer? Then prioritize sleep in your life: Following five good sleep habits added almost five years to a man’s life expectancy and almost 2.5 years to a woman’s life. found a new study.
“If people have all of these ideal sleep behaviors, they’re more likely to live longer,” said study co-author Dr. Frank Qian, a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a resident physician in internal medicine. at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
“If we can improve sleep in general, and the identification of sleep disorders is especially important, we can prevent some of this premature mortality,” Qian said in a statement.
What do you do for a living? First, make sure you get a full seven to eight hours of sleep each night. That’s hard for many people: 1 in 3 Americans has a sleep deficit, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention..
But you need to do more than just stay in bed longer—you also need to get restful, uninterrupted sleep most of the time. That means you don’t wake up during the night or have trouble falling asleep more than twice a week. You should also feel well rested at least five days a week when you wake up, and ultimately you can’t be using sleep medications to achieve your sleep.
“We’re talking not just about quality and quantity of sleep, but also about regularity, about sleeping well night after night,” said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the School of Medicine. Keck of the University of Southern California. He was not involved in the study.
“Recent studies have shown that irregularity in sleep timing and duration have been linked to metabolic abnormalities and increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” he said. “Encouraging maintenance of regular sleep schedules with consistent sleep durations may be an important part of lifestyle recommendations for heart disease prevention.”
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. The annual survey is conducted by the CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics.
Each of the five healthy sleep habits—falling asleep easily, staying asleep, having seven to eight hours of zzz, waking up refreshed, and taking sleep medication beforehand—was assigned a number. People were rated based 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 premature death from certain diseases or from any cause.
The team then eliminated other potential causes of increased risk of death, such as alcohol use, lower socioeconomic status, and existing medical conditions.
“Compared with people who had favorable sleep factors of zero to one, those with all five were 30% less likely to die from any reason, 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, 19% less likely to die from less likely to die from cancer and 40% less likely to die from cancer. % less likely to die from causes other than heart disease or cancer,” according to a statement about the study.
The men who followed the five healthy sleep habits had a life expectancy that was 4.7 years older than people who had none or only one of the five low-risk sleep elements, the study found.
The impact of healthy sleep habits was much smaller for women: those who followed all five sleep habits gained 2.4 years compared to those who followed none or only one.
“That was an interesting part of the study for me, and I hope we can find that answer with more research,” Dasgupta said. One potential reason for that gender difference, she added, could be the difficulty of testing women for obstructive sleep apnea, a life-threatening condition in which breathing stops every few minutes. The more severe the apnea, the greater the risk of coronary artery disease, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.
“Women with obstructive sleep apnea are often underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed because they may not have the classic symptoms that we see when we evaluate men,” Dasgupta said. “Maybe we need to ask different questions or look at different parameters, or is there something missing here?”
Would your score be less than five? Don’t worry, the good news is that you can easily train your brain to sleep better by following what’s called good “sleep hygiene.” It’s important to go to bed at the same time most nights and get up at the same time most mornings, even on weekends and holidays.
Make sure your sleeping environment is optimal (colder and darker is better) and block out noise or try a sound machine. Avoid alcoholic beverages before bed: It may seem like you’re falling asleep more easily, but when your liver finishes metabolizing alcohol at 3 a.m., your body will wake up, experts say.
Establish a sleep routine with no blue lights or distractions at least an hour before bed. Try meditation, yoga, tai chi, warm baths; anything that relaxes you is excellent.
Parents and caregivers they can learn these habits and teach them to their children, thus giving them a better chance of a longer life, Qian said.
“Even from a young age, if people can develop these good sleep habits of getting enough sleep, making sure they sleep without too many distractions and having good sleep hygiene in general, it can greatly benefit their overall End-shutdown in the long run,” he said. . .
“Just like we like to say, ‘it’s never too late to exercise or quit smoking,’ it’s never too early either. And we should talk and assess sleep more often.”