If you have ever felt exhausted, drained of all energy, and like you cannot focus on your work or school after having a terrible night of sleep, well, that just goes to show how important sleep is for
your body. Being well rested and having a full night of sleep of around 8 to 9 hours can make a world of difference to your health, both mental and physical.
Now, a new study has found that how much of sleep you get can be an indicator for how long you live. The results from this research were published in the Nature journal.
It suggests that how long you sleep could be closely tied to how long you live and how quickly your body ages. Using data from about 500,000 people in the UK Biobank, researchers built 23 “ageing clocks” that estimate whether different organs look biologically older or younger than a person’s actual age.
They found that both too little and too much sleep were linked to “older biology” across the brain, heart, immune system, skin, and other organs, as well as a higher risk of future disease and all‑cause mortality.
Delving further into this, the study suggests that people who slept less than 6 hours or more than 8 hours a day had faster biological ageing, while those who slept roughly 6.4 to 7.8 hours had the smallest “biological age gap.”
Short sleep was tied more strongly to cardiovascular, metabolic, and psychiatric conditions, while long sleep was more strongly linked to psychiatric‑related outcomes.
“Previous studies have found that sleep is largely linked to aging and the pathological burden of the brain. Our study goes further and shows that too little and too much sleep are associated with faster aging in nearly every organ,” said study leader Junhao Wen of Columbia University.
Sleep expert Saema Tahir, MD, told Fox News that sleep is “when the body does its most critical repair work, including cellular restoration, immune regulation, hormonal balance, and even clearing out metabolic waste from the brain.”
She added that when sleep is consistently too short or too long, “those processes get disrupted” and contribute to “hallmarks of accelerated ageing.” Saema Tahir warns that “sleep duration is important, but … getting adequate sleep and REM sleep that allows our bodies to heal, clear, process and repair is much more important.”
