Think you can power through on four or five hours of sleep per day? Think again:
A “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” is causing a host of potentially fatal diseases, a leading expert has said. In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Matthew Walker, director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, said that sleep deprivation affected “every aspect of our biology” and was widespread in modern society.
And yet the problem was not being taken seriously by politicians and employers, with a desire to get a decent night’s sleep often stigmatised as a sign of laziness, he said. Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation, which is defined as less than seven hours a night.
But this has been linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and poor mental health among other health problems. In short, a lack of sleep is killing us.
Amen. Lack of sleep is a major risk factor in just about every deadly disease. The body rests and repairs itself while you’re out cold; we have to give it time for the pit-crew elves to do their overnight work fixing up the old hulk and getting it ready to sail back into action the next morning.
“I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence,” said Professor Walker, whose book Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams is due out next month.
“Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70 per cent per cent, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else?”
Why take chances: put your brain back to bed and let your body do its thing. You’ll live longer.
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