You know that saying about the early bird catching the worm? Well, it turns out that actually, the early bird dies. Kind of. A new study from the Journal of Sleep has found that those who get more sleep on the weekends, that’s over eight hours, have lower mortality rates. In fact, they concluded that adults under 65 years old, who averaged five hours or less of sleep every night, had a 65% higher chance of an earlier death than those who got an hour or two more on weekdays.
Though it is commonly understood that good sleep regularity is the key to good health, (i.e. six to eight hours every single night) this study has exposed that if you are only sleeping around five hours a night on the weekdays, you can somewhat catch up with a few hours on the weekend.
In other words, you have a medically sound reason to have a glorious lie-in.
Though, don’t get ahead of yourself, since the study does also warn against over-sleeping.
The study, which was conducted over 13 years with 38,000 participants, also found that those who slept over eight hours a night regularly had a 25% greater chance of passing away early. Which isn’t ideal.
Stuart Peirson, an expert on the human ‘body clock’ told the Guardian that ‘sleep debt’ needed to be ‘paid off’. So if you don’t sleep in the week for whatever reason, you should try and make up for it when you can. He said, “You can’t keep burning the candle at both ends. Well, you can, but you won’t live as long.”
Off to bed we go then.
From: ELLE UK
