Both Too Little Or Too Much Sleep Is Bad For Health

The I.T. industry maybe more than any other is just filled positions where its members go through long periods of extremely long stress filled hours and conversely others where workers have little to do. Because of this we should pay careful attention to a recent study of Briton government workers age between 35 and 55, reported in Reuters: Lack of sleep may be deadly, research shows. The article reports:

People who do not get enough sleep are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to a large British study released on Monday.

Although the reasons are unclear, researchers said lack of sleep appeared to be linked to increased blood pressure, which is known to raise the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

A 17-year analysis of 10,000 government workers showed those who cut their sleeping from seven hours a night to five or less faced a 1.7-fold increased risk in mortality from all causes and more than double the risk of cardiovascular death.

The findings highlight a danger in busy modern lifestyles, Francesco Cappuccio, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Warwick's medical school, told the annual conference of the British Sleep Society in Cambridge.

But the same study also found :

The correlation with cardiovascular risk in those who slept less in the 1990s than in the 1980s was clear but, curiously, there was also a higher mortality rate in people who increased their sleeping to more than nine hours.

So it appears that too little or too much sleep is decremental to our health, or in other words there does appear that there is a optimal amount of sleep for our health. Controls placed on the study would appear to be adequate in the results were adjusted to take account of other possible risk factors such as initial age, sex, smoking and alcohol consumption, body mass index, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Finding the optimal amount of sleep appears to be in the range of 7 to 8 hours per night as we have all been told since childhood. Unfortunately, getting any closer to finding the optimum length of sleep appears to be unique to the individual and the individuals situation. We sleep better some nights than others, so where 7 hours might be optimal one night, 7 hours might not be enough the next.

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