Sleep – a lot like eating food – is one of those things we need to live, but seemingly there are plenty of ways to do it wrong.
A new study has weighed into the debate. Looking at UK Biobank data from almost 500,000 adults, researchers conclude that seven hours of sleep per night is the optimal amount for good mental health, wellbeing and cognitive performance, for people in their late 30s to early 70s.
Around 48,500 of the participants also underwent neuroimaging, and almost 157,000 participants completed an online mental health questionnaire follow-up. All these data points went together to provide a pretty comprehensive view of how the amount of sleep people get correlates to other aspects of their mental and brain health.
"While we can't say conclusively that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis looking at individuals over a longer period of time appears to support this idea," says one of the researchers,"But the reasons why older people have poorer sleep appear to be complex, influenced by a combination of our genetic makeup and the structure of our brains."
As you can see in the figure below, the changes are much more apparent on the far ends of the scale, such as one hour or 13 hours of sleep a night. Seven is just the optimal number in the middle of the curve.Graphs showing significant nonlinear association between sleep duration and cognitive function and mental health.
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