How Lack Of Sleep Affects Your Heart

Mark Sisson had a post about sleep a few days ago and how important it is to overall health. According to the article about the study that he posted:

People who do not get enough sleep are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to a study released on Monday.
….
“A third of the population of the UK and over 40 percent in the U.S. regularly sleep less than five hours a night, so it is not a trivial problem,” he said in a telephone interview.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but sleep is very important in my life. I workout hard and sleep is an essential piece of recovery. I typically go to bed around 9:30pm during the week (asleep by 10) and am up around 6am for work. On the weekends, I may stay up a bit later, but if I’m at home on a Friday or Saturday night, I’m not opposed to hitting the sack before 11pm. It’s rare that I sleep past 8 or 9 on the weekends either. So I get between 7.5 and 9 hours pretty much every single night. My room isn’t as dark as I would like it, but it is pretty good. I’m lucky enough not to have a street light right outside my window. Two or three nights at 7 hours has an effect on me, although my otherwise solid lifestyle doesn’t quite put me to zombie status. Less than five hours would leave me absolutely worthless.

Going to bed early is easy for me now though. My body clock is set and TV doesn’t entice me to stay up since I don’t watch it. Sometimes I try to stretch it and stay up to read or surf the Internet, but around 9:45 the yawns start and my productivity drops, so off to sleep I go. I know plenty of people that wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor, as if depleting their health by burning the candle at both ends is a good thing. People seem to think that the longer they are awake, the more they get accomplished, but that’s not entirely true. I am awake about 16 hours per day and often have plenty of idle time to find ways to fill. I read books, get all of my Internet surfing done, cook good meals, write on here, and make progress on side projects all while working full-time and still getting a solid night of sleep. Putting in 15 hours a day at the office isn’t necessary to get everything done. If it is, you probably need to find a way to work more efficiently or hire someone to take some of the workload.

I have done the less than 6 hours of sleep per night thing. My last year of undergrad required two 18-hour semesters to finish all of my courses in four years. I got it done, but the cost was sleep. Late nights in the computer lab working on projects, working 25-30 hours per week at my internship, and spending time in class ate up the majority of my schedule. And I wasn’t opposed to going out for beers once or twice during the week either. After I graduated, I started working full-time. At this point, I was up at 6:30 to get ready for work, I’d work till 5:30, head to the gym or to martial arts, have dinner, and then get on the computer until midnight or later, or talk on the phone to the girl of the month until 1am. Sometimes I’d stay out till 2 or 3am hanging out or drinking. Getting out of bed was never an easy task. I had to have the alarm across the room on full blare to make sure I actually woke up before turning it off. Not that it stopped me from turning the alarm off, turning on the light, and falling back asleep until 7:30. I was always tired, craved poor foods, and often found myself struggling to stay awake. Today, my alarm clock is my phone set to a low level, I get out of bed as soon as it goes off at least 90% of the time, and I don’t struggle to stay awake while at work or driving.

One book that I highly recommend is Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. This book details all of the ways that lack of sleep affects your health and the evolution of our use of light and how it has affected our bodies (hint: lack of sleep makes you crave carbs). Just like all animals, humans have evolved with and are tied to the natural rhythms of the earth. I recently sold off all of my books but a select few. This was one that I kept.

One thing is for certain…in 50 years or so (less for some ), none of us are going to wish we had spent another few hours at the office. The quality of your health, your relationships, and the life you’ve led are what you’ll wish you’d spent more time on, not working harder to buy more stuff. Just turn off the TV and go to bed earlier. There really isn’t anything that important going to happen on Letterman.