The perfect length of time to sleep
Published 2 hours ago
It’s widely assumed that eight hours is the perfect amount of sleep but a new study found the “sweet spot” is a little less than that, said sleep specialist Dr Allie Hare in The Telegraph.
Getting it right matters because new research, published in Nature, found that “falling short, or exceeding” the “precise window” discovered by the research, is “linked with poorer brain, heart and immune health”.
People who got between six hours 24 minutes and seven hours 48 minutes of sleep a night were found to have better functioning immune systems, brains and hearts, according to researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
This ideal amount of sleep was associated with less ageing, as measured by organ-specific biological clocks. Duration alone doesn’t cause organs to age faster or slower, but the findings do suggest that insufficient or excessive sleep may be “markers of poorer overall health across the body”.
There is also a gender factor because women “seem to do better with a little longer”, Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. They need “15, 20 minutes” more sleep, which reflects the “slightly longer” sleep duration reported by the “general population”, which “tends to be slightly longer in women than men”.
https://theweek.com/health/the-perfect- ... e-to-sleep