British and Italian researchers are warning that not sleeping enough can considerably shorten your life span. They define this as sleeping less than 6 hours a night.
Their research shows that people sleeping for less than 6 hours a night are 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than people who sleep for the recommended 6-8 hours a night.
A link was also found for people who sleep for more than 9 hours, however this is thought to just be a sign of poor health.
Sleep journal reports the findings, based on 1.5m people in 16 studies.
This new study looked at the relationship between sleep and mortality by using earlier studies from the UK, US and European and East Asian countries.
All causes of premature death were linked to getting either too little or too much sleep outside of the recommended six to eight hours per night.
Professor Francesco Cappuccio, leader of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the UK’s University of Warwick, said: “Modern society has seen a gradual reduction in the average amount of sleep people take and this pattern is more common amongst full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to societal pressures for longer working hours and more shift-work.
“On the other hand, the deterioration of our health status is often accompanied by an extension of our sleeping time.”
If the link between a lack of sleep and death is truly causal, it would equate to over 6.3 million attributable deaths in the UK in people over 16 years of age.
Prof Cappuccio believes that further studies are needed to determine exactly why sleep is so vital to our long term health.
Professor Jim Horne, of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre, said Other things may be the issue and that sleep could just be an indicator of what is going wrong.
“Sleep is just a litmus paper to physical and mental health. Sleep is affected by many diseases and conditions, including depression,” he said.
And getting improved sleep may not make someone better or live longer, he said.
“But having less than five hours a night suggests something is probably not right.
“Five hours is insufficient for most people and being drowsy in the day increases your risk of having an accident if driving or operating dangerous machinery.”
There are many medicines available to help with sleep disturbance and insomnia.