Sleep this way to add years to your life

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CNN
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Want to live longer? Then prioritize sleep in your life: Following five good sleep habits added nearly five years to a man’s life expectancy and almost 2.5 years to a woman’s life, a new study found.

“If people have all these ideal sleep behaviors, they are more likely to live longer,” said study coauthor Dr. Frank Qian, a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and internal medicine resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“If we can improve sleep overall, and identifying sleep disorders is especially important, we may be able to prevent some of this premature mortality,” Qian said in a statement.

What do you do? First, make sure you get a full seven to eight hours of sleep each night. That’s tough for many people: 1 in 3 Americans have a sleep deficit, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But you have to do more than just lay in bed longer — you also need have to have an uninterrupted, restful sleep more often than not. That means you don’t wake up during the night or have trouble falling asleep more than two times a week. You also have to feel well rested at least five days a week when you wake up. And finally, you can’t be using sleep medications to achieve your slumber.

“We’re talking about not just quality and quantity of sleep, but regularity, getting the same good sleep night after night,” said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. He was not involved in the study.

“Recent studies have shown irregularity in sleep timing and duration have been linked to metabolic abnormalities and higher cardiovascular disease risk,” he said. “Encouraging maintenance of regular sleep schedules with consistent sleep durations may be an important part of lifestyle recommendations for the prevention of heart disease.”

The preliminary study, presented Thursday at an annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, analyzed data from over 172,000 people who answered sleep questionnaires between 2013 and 2018 as part of the National Health Interview…