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How
much sleep to live a longer, more productive life?
 How
much sleep is enough, or how much sleep is too much has been a
controversial topic for many years? Regardless of the amount
needed, sleep has been well acknowledged to affect everything from our
athletic performance to our income according to a recent Time article
(June 10, 2008) Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the
Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, California recently looked at
this incredibly important question. In 2002, he studied death
rates of over 1 million adults in the U.S. as part of a cancer
prevention study, and reported their average nightly amount of sleep.
His results were very surprising, and more recently they’ve been
corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia. The following
is his explanation of the results.
Question: How much sleep is ideal?
Answer:
Recent studies have found that people who sleep between 6 ˝ hours to 7
˝ hours a night according to their report live the longest. People
who fall out of that range, sleeping more than 8 hours or less than 6
˝ hours do not live quite as long. According to recent research,
sleeping too long has just as much risk as sleeping too little. The
biggest surprise is that sleeping too much seems to be more than eight
hours. These studies have found in fact, that sleeping 8˝ hours might
be a little worse than sleeping only five.
Morbidity and sickness seem to form a U-shaped curve, with very short
sleep and very long sleep both being associated with many illnesses
such as obesity, depression and heart disease, as well as others. The
ideal amount of sleep however for different health measures isn’t
quite as conclusive. The data seems to indicate that for some health
conditions the ideal amount of sleep needed is 7 or 8 hours, while
other health conditions seem to indicate that 6 and some even 9 hours
would be ideal. According to this research, diabetes for example, was
lowest among 7-hour sleepers. The measures for the various conditions
weren’t as clear and definite as the mortality data.
“I think we can speculate [about why people who sleep 6.5 to 7.5 hours
live longer], but we have to admit that we don’t really understand the
reasons. We don’t really know yet what is cause and what is effect”
stated
Kripke . “So we don’t know if a short
sleeper can live longer by extending their sleep, and we don’t know if
a long sleeper can live longer by setting the alarm clock a bit
earlier. We’re hoping to organize tests of those questions.”
The reasons he wanted to publicize this information was that he wanted
to prevent a lot of insomnia and distress just by telling people that
“short sleep is OK”. “We’ve all been told you ought to sleep eight
hours, but there was never any evidence. A very common problem we see
at sleep clinics is people who spend too long in bed.” Kripke then
concluded by saying “They think they should sleep eight hours or nine
hours, so they spend eight or nine hours in bed, with the result that
they have trouble falling asleep and they wake up a lot during the
night.” Unfortunately, a lot of the problem with insomnia is that
people lie in bed and worry about it, according to many health
experts. There have been a large amount of controlled studies in
Great Britain and other parts of Europe as well as in the United
States, that show that insomnia treatment frequently begins with
getting out of bed when you are not sleepy, and restricting your time
in bed may actually help people to sleep better. They frequently get
over their fear of going to bed and become more confident that when
they get into bed that they will sleep. In conclusion, frequently
spending less time in bed may actually make your sleep better in many
cases. This is almost undoubtedly a much more powerful and effective
long-term treatment for insomnia than taking sleep medications.
Information adapted from Time article by Laura Blue (June 10, 2008)
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?
Additional Information and
webpage by Paul Susic MA Licensed
Psychologist Ph.D. Candidate
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