Sleep well and gain over 2.1 additional healthy years — Latest research and tips on our favorite inactivity 💤
Sleep is the single activity that we do 1/3 of our lives, and which then has a huge impact on happiness levels, concentration, and physical performance levels the following day, and again on the next night’s sleep. It can even alter the average healthy life expectancy by more than 2.1 years. But how does it affect our health, and how can you improve every aspect of your sleep?
Optimal sleep length
Very short sleep of less than 7 hours and long sleep of over 9 hours are correlated with all-cause mortality, reveals a recent meta-analysis that included over 1.3 million people in Europe, USA, and Asia.
Everyone’s sleep is individual, but in general the amount is at least 7 hours. If you think you can thrive with less, do a genomic sequencing, and find out if you have the short-sleep gene which would allow you to get enough sleep in about 5 hours. The other 99%, however, need to stick to at least 7 hours to avoid increased risk of diseases.
Immediate benefits
The benefits of good night sleep are immediately visible in your mood, but another almost immediate benefit is the improvement of immune functions. If you sleep six hours per night or less, you are 4 times more likely to catch a cold or seasonal flu than those who sleep seven hours or more.
Long-term dangers
Too short sleep reduces the anti-cancer fighting cells, natural killer cells of our immune system, by 70% leading to a higher prevalence of different cancers, e.g. prostate, breast, and bowel cancers. In fact, the link between sleep deprivation and cancer is so strong in humans and especially in animal models that the World Health Organisation classified shift work as a probable carcinogen. (Shift work conclusions start from page 764.)
If you are a night shift worker, or someone you know is, please take care that the body’s natural circadian rhythm is disturbed as little as possible, and you might be able to revert most of the damage.
This is why sleep duration cannot be discussed without mentioning sleep timing. Aim for respecting nature’s cycles. Better yet, you can sync your body’s circadian rhythms by timing your daily eating window between sunrise and sunset to regular times, also known as time-restricted eating. Most enthusiastic people can dwell into resources on the internet, but we will go deeper into this topic in our soon to be released Yolife App.
Brain health
Good sleep affects your body in many positive ways, but the organ that benefits the most is your brain. Brain aging is mostly caused by waste proteins that accumulate around your neurons and synapses to impair their functionality.
This gets counteracted by the mechanism of cerebrospinal fluid flushing out those waste proteins. When you sleep, the space between your brain cells expands, so that this mechanism works much better. You might say that a good night’s sleep is a cleaning shower for your brain, keeping it fresh into old age.
Heart health
Sweet pillow time is not only good for your immune system but also for your heart and the whole cardiovascular system. It is one of the most natural forms of reducing a high heart rate and blood pressure. A recent study from Sweden shows that men who slept 5 hours had a 200% increase in the risk of having a fatal heart attack or stroke in their lifetime compared to the people who slept 7 hours or more.
Your heart beats around 100,000 times during your waking hours. Give your heart its well deserved rest by sleeping enough. Maybe even thank it when you go to bed and feel the heart thanking you by its beat getting more and more calm.
Next step.
Take action.
If you sleep well, everything gets easier. If you don’t, everything gets harder — including sleeping well. It’s a vicious circle everyone gets trapped in at some point. As in almost all areas of your life, you can break it with some simple tricks and habits.
In our smartphone era, the most common reason for problems falling asleep is exposure to blue light from your screen before going to bed. Your body interprets this as daylight, releases certain hormones, and increases your blood sugar to make you ready to go — not to bed.
On the other hand, melatonin, the sleep hormone, gets ‘cleared away’ by blue light. This does not only impair your sleep, but also your immune system, increases your risk of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and speeds up your aging process. Not so nice. But easy to avoid.
Attention: this task is extremely easy! If you use Android and/or a PC, install the free app f.lux on both and set the night shift mode to one hour before you go to sleep. It filters the blue light. That’s it. For iOS and Macs it gets even simpler: go on Display in your settings and set Night Shift accordingly. Mac OS X still prioritizes the color quality over the health effects, so you can notch up the default settings a bit. If you don’t like the color change, hey, that’s one more natural reminder to stop working after sunset!
Share.
The act of giving back.
Ahoy, Sleep Masters and the people who struggle with sleep! Join our group and share your struggles. If you have already solved your individual sleep, share your solution, so it might help people who are missing their optimal sleep. Join now.
How long will you live in good health? Make the test now on Yolife.io
Also, check out Tassilo Weber’s book Life Extension Design.
