Is A Lack Zzz’s SHORTENING Your Life?
With the pandemic still at large, it’s easy to lose sleep.
But don’t overlook this critical factor in your health.
Getting enough sleep—and quality sleep—is just as crucial for your overall health as eating well, getting plenty of movement, and spending time in the sun.
Case in point: A recent study shows that poor sleep contributes to one of the top killers in the country.
I love it when studies come out proving that you don’t need pharmaceutical drugs to keep your heart healthy.
Simple lifestyle fixes do the trick every time.
A study just published in the journal PLOS Biology showed the critical connection between sleep and heart health.
More specifically, it found that poor sleep can dramatically increase your risk of heart disease.
Researchers evaluated the sleep quality of 1,600 adults using two common sleep assessment tools (a polysomnography and an actigraphy).
Then they used blood cell counts to measure two types of white blood cells that drive up inflammation (neutrophils and monocytes).
What the researchers found was that people with fragmented sleep and higher neutrophils had more evidence of hardening of the arteries than those who got good quality sleep.
In other words, poor sleep increased inflammation, which increased atherosclerosis.
Interestingly, this connection remained significant even after accounting for other factors known to increase the risk of coronary artery disease, like BMI, smoking, and even blood pressure.
Other studies find that lack of sleep increases inflammation in the body, which causes hardening of the arteries, and that there’s a connection between poor sleep and heart problems.
This study connected the dots by showing that inflammation is the reason why poor sleep contributes to heart disease.
This is a significant finding because about 35 percent of Americans report having poor sleep quality.
The good news here is that there are two simple steps you can take to improve the quality of your sleep.
- Get plenty of morning sunlight, which will help set your circadian rhythm.
- Minimize blue light exposure at night, which shuts down the production of your sleep hormone, melatonin.
