Better Sleep Can Add Years to Your Life
Five factors rate good, quality sleep and predict health and longevity. See how you rank. Because you only have one life.
How well do you sleep? My bet is you’d struggle to answer the question beyond something vague like great, good, bad or terrible. Scientists like to gauge sleep success a little more, you know, scientifically. So one research group came up with five factors to rate sleep quality and efficiency that resulted in the absolutely unsurprising finding that people who sleep better live longer.
The more interesting news tidbit here is that you can rate your own sleep on these same five factors, get a little insight into how wonderful or awful your nights really are, then take action to improve your sleep, which promises to improve your entire life. As I write in my book Make Sleep Your Superpower:
Improving sleep duration and quality — think of it as overall sleep efficiency and effectiveness — will literally clear your brain of built-up garbage and rebuild your body on a nightly basis. It will lower your stress level and settle your emotions, and prepare you to conquer that anxiety-producing to-do list and take on new challenges and joyous pursuits. Good sleep battles chronic pain, weight gain, depression and dementia. It can even improve your sex life.
Sound worth working on? OK, then…
The new study analyzed data on 173,321 U.S. adults, average age 50, who self-reported their sleep habits and whose health outcomes were then tracked for 4.3 years on average, during which time 8,681 of them died. Participants were scored zero or 1 on each of five factors:
- Getting ideal sleep duration (put at seven to eight hours a night)
- Difficulty falling asleep no more than twice a week
- Trouble staying asleep no more than twice a week
- Feeling well-rested after waking up at least five days a week
- Not using sleep medication
Compared to people who got a zero, those who scored 5 — representing the highest quality sleep — were…
- 30% less likely to die for any reason
- 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease
- 19% less likely to die from cancer
- 40% less likely to die of causes other than heart disease or cancer
Life expectancy for the best sleepers was estimated to be 2.4 years longer for women and 4.7 years longer for men, compared to the worst sleepers. Because good sleep helps us avoid chronic diseases, we can presume these longer lives would also be less miserable.
If your score is middling or awful, don’t despair. There are many ways to improve sleep (more on that below). And any incremental improvement matters, the study showed.
“We saw a clear dose-response relationship, so the more beneficial factors someone has in terms of having higher quality of sleep, they also have a stepwise lowering of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality,” said study co-author Frank Qian, MD, a resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School.
The health and longevity benefits of quality sleep begin to accrue “from a young age,” Qian said in a statement, and on the flip side, the negative effects of insufficient or low-quality sleep also add up over time, so it’s never too early in life to improve sleep habits.
The research, to be presented March 6 at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, does not prove cause and effect, but the scientists did account for other potentially confounding factors, such as smoking, drinking, medical conditions and socioeconomic status. Also, it’s important to note that self-reporting of sleep habits is known to be less than perfect. And of course, not every individual will see results in line with the averages presented above.
Specific numbers aside, however, the findings are in line with oodles of other studies detailing the outsized importance of good sleep for health and longevity.
It’s vital that we not only sleep long enough, but that we spend ample time each night in deep, restorative sleep that rejuvenates the mind and body and gives us the energy to conquer the coming day. The stages of deep sleep and REM sleep (rapid-eye movement) are far and away the most important, and easy to disrupt by what I call sleep kryptonite: things like alcohol, stress, a sedentary lifestyle and erratic sleep schedules.
Good sleep comes naturally to some people. But for many, it requires putting effort into some proven tactics. Here are some the most important ones among 20 explained in my book:
- Set a specific bedtime and wake time
- Carve out time for physical activity
- Cut back on booze
- Avoid late-afternoon caffeine
- Spend more time outside to allow natural daylight to properly set the body’s internal clock so it knows when to get sleepy.
If you scored poorly on the scientists’ five-factor test, or if you don’t feel refreshed most mornings or are often tired in the afternoons, then check out my full list of sleep articles on Medium, especially this one:
Your support makes my health and wellness writing possible. You can sign up for emails when I publish on Medium, or join Medium to directly support me and gain full access to all Medium stories, get my health news briefs on Mastodon, or check out my book: Make Sleep Your Superpower: A Guide to Greater Health, Happiness & Productivity (paperback or Kindle version). — Rob