Matt Walker on why you should sleep more
David Rider stashed this in Sleep
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_sleep_your_way_top
"Simply put, the single most important thing you can do each and every day to reset your brain and body health is to sleep. Once you start to get anything less than about 7 hours of sleep, we can start to measure biological and behavioral changes quite clearly.
People will say, “I can get by on 4 or 5 hours of sleep.” But your subjective opinion of how you’re doing with insufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how you’re doing with insufficient sleep. Essentially it’s like the drunk driver at the bar picking up his keys after a couple of drinks and saying, “No, no. I think I’m fine; I’m perfectly fine to drive.”"
Stashed in: Sleep!, #health, Awesome, Health Studies
I wonder the main why 5 is bad and 7 is good.
I'm guessing it's the difference between deep sleep and not.
Even more interesting: 5 is bad. 7 is good. 9 is bad. It's bad to get too little and too much sleep.
From Discovery News:
Sleeping fewer than five hours a day, including naps, more than doubles the risk of being diagnosed with angina, coronary heart disease, heart attack or stroke, the study conducted by researchers at West Virginia University's (WVU) faculty of medicine and published in the journal Sleep says.
And sleeping more than seven hours also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, it says.
Study participants who said they slept nine hours or longer a day were one-and-a-half times more likely than seven-hour sleepers to develop cardiovascular disease, the study found.
The most at-risk group was adults under 60 years of age who slept five hours or fewer a night. They increased their risk of developing cardiovascular disease more than threefold compared to people who sleep seven hours.
Women who skimped on sleep, getting five hours or fewer a day, including naps, were more than two-and-a-half times as likely to develop cardiovascular disease.
Full article here: http://news.discovery.com/human/health/sleep-seven-hours.htm
7:28 AM Dec 18 2013