A New Study Says You Should Only Sleep This Many Hours

Wake up. You might live longer.

A study of 116,632 people’s sleep habits, published recently in the European Heart Journal, made a strong correlation between people getting too much sleep and dying prematurely.

The report associated people’s daily sleep time and frequency of daytime naps with the outcome of deaths and major cardiovascular events.

The result? People who slept longer than eight hours per day had an increased risk of early death or experiencing a major cardiovascular event … while those who slept less than six hours had a “non-significant trend for increased risk.”

And the results get worse with the more non-waking hours: People who slept between 8 and 9 hours per night had a 5% greater risk of cardiovascular disease or dying early, which jumped to 41% (!) for those who slept 10 hours or more.

There are a lot of caveats here — most importantly, sleeping longer may not be the reason people were dying early (as the researchers note, “Excessive sleep duration may be a subclinical marker of those with undiagnosed diseases”). Still, aiming for 6 to 8 hours per day seems to correspond with better health — or even less than six hours but with (short) afternoon siestas.

Hey, at least you have a reason to ask your boss for a nap room.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash