How will getting fewer than six hours of sleep every night for many consecutive years affect a person? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Ray Schilling, doctor, author of Healing Gone Wrong-Healing Done Right, on Quora:
Will getting less than six hours of sleep every night for many consecutive years affect a person? These studies say yes!
Sleep deprivation in nursing homes.
A publication has zeroed in on what happens in the frail elderly who live in nursing homes.
Here is what sleep researchers have found:
- Older people need 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night, not less as previously thought.
- Let people sleep at night, and give them undisturbed sleep. The practice of waking them up every 2 hours is unnecessary and undermines a restful sleep with normal amounts of REM sleep.
- The color of light matters: Blue/purple light coming from TVs, iPod’s, laptops or cell phones stimulates serotonin production that wakes you up. In contrast to this, orange/red light stimulates melatonin production that facilitates sleep. A nursing home owner, Guildermann said: “We have made it darker at night, and what light they do have is orange/amber/red light, and we are having phenomenal results.”
- Sleep, exercise and nutrition are the biggest components of health.
Night workers.
One of the news stories in 2016 was about health risks of night shifts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2000 that 15 million workers (16.8 % of the working population) were doing alternative shifts (night shift work mixed with daytime shifts). In 2016 they reported 14.8% were working alternate shifts. Among blacks, Asians and Latino Americans the percentage of working alternative shifts was higher, namely 20.8%, 15.7% and 16%, respectively.
Shift work is more common in certain industries, such as protective services like the police force, food services, health services and transportation.
Your body rewards you when you sleep 7 to 8 hours during the night, but it will penalize you severely, if you turn it upside down. The reason is because of the diurnal hormone rhythm that we all have built in. Sleep is regulated by melatonin during the night, which is released by the pineal gland (on the base of the skull). Daytime wakefulness is regulated by the stress hormone cortisol from the adrenal glands. These two hormones inhibit each other, cortisol inhibits melatonin and melatonin inhibits cortisol. All the other hormones are also regulated according to the diurnal rhythm: testosterone, for instance is highest in the morning, human growth hormone is highest between midnight and 3 AM.
There are examples of what happens when you do shift work for several years:
A) A Swedish study found that white-collar shift workers had a 260% higher mortality compared to a control group of daytime white collar workers: Shift work and mortality.
B) A study compared night workers in the age group of 45 to 54 with daytime workers and found a 147% higher mortality rate in the night shift workers: Shift Workers’ Mortality Scrutinized. Shift workers work at night and sleep during the day. This can be done, but it is against the physiology of your body, as I explained above. Remember that melatonin does not only regulate your sleep, it also is one of the main stimulant hormones of the immune system. If you manipulate your diurnal hormone rhythm by staying awake during the night and sleeping during the day, you pay the price by an increased risk of mortality (increased risk of death). This is not worth it!
Telomere length and sleep deficit.
It is true that you can suffer multiple health problems with insufficient sleep, as all of your hormones depend on the resetting during your deepest sleep between 2AM and 4AM triggered by the nighttime melatonin response. Even your telomeres, the caps of chromosomes in every cell get shortened from too much stress and too little sleep. Short Sleep Duration Is Associated with Shorter Telomere Length in Healthy Men: Findings from the Whitehall II Cohort Study.
Shortened telomeres mean a shortened life span. The reason for this is that people with shortened telomeres develop heart attacks, strokes and cancer. How do we avoid this risk? Develop healthy sleep habits. It is best to start going to sleep between 10 PM and 11 PM and sleep for 7 to 8 hours.
Conclusion
It appears that there are health consequences for only sleeping 6 hours every night instead of 7 to 8 hours.
More info here: results of insomnia studies.
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