Nashville. Less sleep for the same health? Researchers have found that the ideal sleep duration for adults is shorter than previously thought.
On average, humans need seven to eight hours To sleep. This is the urgent recommendation based on scientific research to date. Those who sleep less for long periods of time are harming their health, we warn. Now, a new large-scale study shows that there apparently isn’t much to it after all. To sleep has to be. So we don’t need to worry so much about the question “Am I really getting enough sleep?”
A team led by doctors Neil Zheng and Evan Brittain of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, analyzed data from Fitness Trackers by nearly 7,000 people in about five years. The result of the digital data: the average Sleep duration of the study participants was just 6.7 hours per night – and most of them were completely healthy. The researchers have now published these findings in the journal “Nature’s Medicine“.
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The team compared sleep duration and Sleep quality of participants also with their susceptibility to chronic diseases Illnesses. It was found that people who slept too much or too little had a higher risk of hypertension, depressions It is anxiety pink. People who slept just under seven hours a night actually had the lowest risk of these three diseases.
However, this does not mean that everyone should only get about seven hours of sleep. Sleep duration rangewhich provides researchers with a great Health could relate, was on the relatively broad end. According to the study, sleeping six to eight hours a night resulted in comparable health outcomes.
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“Our results support the assumption that seven hours of sleep for adults represents the middle of the healthy range, rather than the lower limit,” the research team writes in their paper. But how is it that suddenly a healthy range is also Sleep duration of just six to seven hours a night for physical activities and mental health maybe it’s already completely enough?
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Researchers see the reason for this in the susceptibility to errors of the previous ones Studies. They mainly obtained their data from questionnaires that volunteer study participants filled out. But self-reports are highly prone to error and therefore not sufficiently reliable, Brittain told English-language news portal iNews.
For the new study, Brittain and Zheng’s team used data from Activity trackerswhich were made available to them as part of the so-called “All of Us” research program. Why Trackers Accurately Monitor Sleep and recording sleep phases directly digitally, according to the researchers, they produce significantly more accurate results than is possible with self-assessments.
Sleep is an individual matter – you should keep this in mind
Of the 6,785 study participants, a good 70 percent were women, and a good 70 percent reported having a Academic degree and almost 85% were white. Participants had a mean Old of about 50 years.
Like researchers before them, the scientists emphasize that Need for sleep is individual for each person and also depends on a person’s general state of health. New findings can therefore only serve as a guide. For example in obesity and sleep apnea, a condition that causes the patient to wake up several times a night, reduced the likelihood of high pressure or depressionsif affected people slept more, as the new study also shows.
As Techniker Krankenkasse emphasizes, they are the ones who offer Holidays a good way to figure out your individual sleep needs. The advice: go to bed at the same time every night, don’t set an alarm, and only get up when you’re awake. did you sleep well feelings. You should also keep a record of how much sleep you get each night, according to their website. From this you can determine your personal sleep quota, which should also be adhered to during the work week.