Science has all but confirmed at this point that getting too little sleep will eventually damage your brain in the long term. Years of poor sleep have been linked to everything from memory decline to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. So naturally, the obvious solution would seem to be to go hard in the opposite direction and sleep as much as possible.
According to new research covered by The Washington Post, science has swooped in to ruin that plan, too.
A massive study published in Nature found that both too little and too much sleep are essentially the same, with both associated with accelerated aging across nearly every organ in the body. Researchers analyzed biomedical data from roughly 500,000 people in the UK Biobank and used machine learning models to measure the biological aging rates of organs, including the brain, heart, and immune system.
Scientists Say Sleeping Too Much Might Be Its Own Problem
Using this giant mountain of data, the researchers identified a “Goldilocks” curve for the optimal amount of sleep. The healthiest range was somewhere between 6.4 and 7.8 hours of sleep per night. Anyone who regularly got any more or less sleep than that had molecular signs linked to faster aging.
Lead researcher Junhao Wen of Columbia University said the key factor appears to be consistency. Chasing some elusive perfect number of hours every night wasn’t doing much for your body. Some people naturally function better on six hours, while some need closer to nine just to be a functioning normal person. But the data suggests most adults probably operate at their best somewhere in between.
The study challenges the classic idea that the more sleep, the better. The researchers say that excessive sleep could sometimes be a symptom of a potentially serious underlying issue, like depression or poor physical health, instead of a direct cause of aging itself.
Sleeping 10 hours every day might not be as restorative as you think, and because of it, we can now officially add sleep to the ever-growing list of things we have to do in moderation.
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