“About 33% of American adults report sleeping less than seven hours.”
None of the students attending Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge’s guest lecture seemed surprised at the statistic she opened with. After all, college is a time when sleep schedules chaotically shift with midterms and final projects. With so many responsibilities, students may struggle with time management. This can lead to bedtime procrastination, which is when a person delays sleep in favor of activities like watching television, gaming, or scrolling through social media. Researchers attribute this behavior with a desire to claim greater autonomy over one's free time or to avoid the next day’s responsibilities.
Restricted sleep raises your blood pressure, reduces insulin sensitivity, and increases oxidative stress.
Be that as it may, St-Onge asserts that sleep is not the part of your day to take liberties with. In her research with Columbia University Irving Medical Center, she found that restricted sleep, meaning to consistently sleep less than seven hours, raises your blood pressure, reduces insulin sensitivity, and increases oxidative stress. These factors contribute to a higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases like hypertension, coronary heart disease, and stroke.
Although insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing have already been identified as risk factors, St-Onge focused her research on insufficient sleep and poor sleep quality, which she says affects more Americans than diagnosable disorders. She shared that in one of her studies, research subjects struggled more with heavy physical activity and spent more energy on staying awake on six hours of sleep, requiring additional calories to support the body’s increased effort. For this reason, St-Onge suggests that sleeping less may increase risk of obesity and affect metabolism.
Without adequate rest, cell structures and communication start to break down, contributing to disease development.
Recovering from fragmented sleep takes time. St-Onge discovered that mice who underwent sixteen weeks of interrupted sleep did not recover quickly. Even after ten weeks of undisturbed sleep, the mice still had more white blood cells and impaired blood flow compared to the control group. Humans react to gaps in sleep similarly, causing the body to recover from oxidative stress less effectively without consistently sleeping more than seven hours. Without adequate rest, cell structures and communication start to break down, contributing to disease development.
St-Onge's research into these consequences led the American Heart Association to amend their “Life Simple 7” standards for a healthy life to “Life’s Essential 8,” which now includes sleep quality and duration as a significant contributor to heart health. Individuals who follow the association’s guidelines have a longer predicted life expectancy. St-Onge said the change “gives more legitimacy to sleep as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and gives us a lot more resources to study sleep as a risk factor.”
It is important to remember, St-Onge notes, that sleeping a minimum of seven hours each night could add five more years to your life. She compared this benefit to what regular physical activity does for your lifespan, and pointed out that investing in your sleep quality is second only to eliminating nicotine exposure in terms of adding years to your life. At the end of the lecture, St-Onge encouraged students to go to bed on time and get a full night’s rest. It’s an investment in your long-term health.