Hey first off shoutout to God for making sleep a thing. Where would we be without it?! What if we were just forced to be awake forever, that would be rough right? Well it seems that sleep is even more important to life than we thought before. I mean you don’t need to show me a special science study to tell me to sleep more!
It seems that research has found that if you are under the age of 65 and are getting five or fewer hours of sleep a day, then you are more at risk of dying sooner.
But if you are someone who loves to grind during the week like myself, that’s okay too! You don’t have to die sooner than you’re supposed to! Just make sure you are sleeping in on the weekends.
This study was published in the Wiley Online Library, and was co-authored by Torbjörn Åkerstedt and a few other researchers. They stated:
“Sleep duration is important for longevity. I suspected there might be some modification if you included also weekend sleep, or day-off sleep.
The assumption in this is that weekend sleep is a catch-up sleep.”
And then according to The Guardian, Stuart Peirson said this about the study:
“It fits with what we do know about sleep – that sleep is regulated by the body clock but also regulated by what is called a homeostatic process, which means the longer you are awake the more you need to sleep.”
Real great insight there, I agree and I’m not even an expert! The more you are awake the more you need sleep, I think that’s just normal person logic.
This isn’t the first study to say that we need more sleep!
Back in 2009, a Carnegie Mellon University study showed that if you slept less than six hours, you were more likely to get a cold. In fact if you sleep less than FIVE hours, you are even more likely and so on. They found that if you stay on this sleep schedule, you are at least 4 times more likely to catch a common cold.
Aric Prather who was the lead author of the study said this:
“Sleep goes beyond all the other factors that were measured. It didn’t matter how old people were, their stress levels, their race, education or income. It didn’t matter if they were a smoker. With all those things taken into account, statistically sleep still carried the day and was an overwhelmingly strong predictor for susceptibility to the cold virus.”
So with that, you have a couple takeaways. Sleep in on the weekends (no matter what it can’t hurt right?) and sleep for at least six hours a night. Now the real question is if you sleep in on weekends to catch up on sleep, will that reduce your risk of catching a cold?
I guess we will have to wait on the smart minds of the world to tell us in the next scientific study!