Everybody knows that you need enough sleep to function, as having your rest cut short can really throw you the next day, yet some aren't aware of quite how impactful reducing your sleeping hours can have on your overall life expectancy.
You often hear that eight hours is the recommended amount of sleep you get every night, but between general life and various distractions or interruptions it can't always be easy to reach that fabled benchmark.
If you have to get up early in the morning for work you can find yourself shaving off a few hours in order to enjoy your evenings more, and often staying up beyond your typical bedtime will eat into your sleep the next day.
It's shocking quite how much this can affect your health though – especially when it comes to your long term life expectancy – as one new study suggests that getting a certain amount of sleep every night could literally be shaving years off your life.
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As shared by Cambridgeshire Live, new findings published in the Sleep Advances journal have indicated that the quality of your sleep could be even more impactful than previously thought.
Sleep duration, for example, was revealed to have a greater impact on your life expectancy than your diet, the amount that you exercise, and social isolation — with only smoking proving to be a more influential factor in your long-term health.
Contrary to popular belief, getting less than seven hours of sleep every night is going to have a quantifiable effect on your life expectancy, especially if it's repeated over time, so make sure you're meeting that threshold if you want to remain in tip top shape.
"I didn't expect it to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy," explained lead researcher Andrew McHill, adding that "we've always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: people should really strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible."
This is specifically the case due to the link between your heart health, the function of your immune system, and general mental sharpness, and McHill insists that "this research shows that we need to prioritise sleep at least as much as we do to what we eat or how we exercise."
He adds that "sometimes we think of sleep as something we can set aside and maybe put off until later or on the weekend," but "getting a good night's sleep will improve how you feel but also how long you live."
Sleep unfortunately doesn't work like a bank that you can compensate for by increasing hours in subsequent nights, so ensuring that you reach that point whenever possible is vitally important and should prompt you to reconsider your routines if it's not a regularity in your current lifestyle.