Watching TV could be bad for your heart health
Forty percent of Americans, and a third of British people do not get enough sleep. Without it we are setting ourselves up for future health problems.
Getting adequate sleep is a very important factor in our health and well-being. It is essential for the body to be able to repair and rejuvenate itself. However, increasing sleep deprivation is ocurring among people from the the United States, and the United Kingdom, and this is being linked to serious diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and other cardiovascular problems.
One of the major contributing factors to lack of sleep, has surprisingly been unearthed by a recent study into TV viewing habits, and the effect that they have on the sleep patterns of thousands of volunteers.
Half the population watch TV just prior to going to bed
About half of us Watch TV during the late evening, in the preceding two hours before going to bed. This appears to be one of the main factors in us experiencing reduced quantity and quality of sleep. The problem appears to be linked to the psychology of watching a television program right up until the end of the show, not wishing to miss the end, without prior checks on what time the program was actually due to finish at the start.
This has the effect of delaying the time at which many people go to bed each evening, whilst most people’s waking time is fixed, and governed by work, educational or commuting requirements. The result is that television viewing is stealing sleep time from millions of individuals who end up in ‘sleep deficit’.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that TV viewing is inherently sedentary, so not only is it robbing us of our sleep, it is also depriving us of much needed exercise and other physical or sporting activities.
What is the optimum amount of sleep ?
There is a lot of research about how many hours of sleep we need each day, and studies have shown that 7 hours sleep is the healthiest amount to have. However, if we are regularly getting 5 hours sleep per night or less, then we face a nearly three quarters increased risk of dying from all causes, and double the risk of dying specifically from cardiovascular causes.
What can be done about it ?
well, according to the American organisation – Associated Professional Sleep Society – we should be prepared to give up some of our television viewing time to pay back some sleep time, for the sake of our heart health, and other health related benefits.
Related article – sleep apnea is bad for heart health
Heart Risk from Lack of Sleep
If you regularly sleep for less than seven and a half hours per night, you may be putting your heart health at risk, especially if you already suffer from high blood pressure, according to a Japanese sleep study published in the jounal ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’ by Doctor Kazuo Eguchi from Jichi Medical University in Tochigi, Japan.
20 Million People in the UK get less sleep than they need
Sleep enables the physiological and psycholigical restoration and repair of the body. Increasingly stressful modern living, longer commuting and working hours, and all-night shopping and entertainment have all contributed to a worldwide trend towards shorter nights sleep than ever before. Although the average for the United Kingdom is around seven hours, a third of the population – 20 million people – regularly only manage to grab 5 hours sleep or less.
Lack of sleep increases risk of heart disease
However, this lack of sleep may be putting us at increased risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke as the scientists have discovered that having less than seven and a half hours sleep per night increases the risk factor for heart attack and stroke by up to four times.
The sleep study involved a total of 1255 Japanese patients who were suffering from hypertension, over a period of four years. The patients were aged between 33 and 97 years old, with an average ago of 70. It was discovered that those who had insufficient sleep had a 68 percent increased risk of heart attack, stroke or death from cardiac arrest, with 99 incidents occurring during the study period.
High Blood Pressure and Sleep Deprivation increases risk of cardiovascular problems by 400 percent
The researchers also carried out extensive monitoring of the patients’ blood pressure changes as part of the reseach, and discovered that a relatively small number – twenty of the sleep deprived participants, failed to experience the normal overnight reduction in blood pressure whilst asleep. This smaller subset of the study group were found to be at four times greater risk of cardiovascular problems.
Doctor Eguchi’s team looking for a reason for the sleep study’s findings, believe that a lack of sleep results in greater activity of the nervous system, which also occurs when a persons blood pressure does not fall during the night. This combination in hypertensive patients may cause increased stress of the cardiovascular system, and account for the increased heart disease statistics. It recommends that doctors caring for patients with high blood pressure should investigate and monitor their sleeping patterns more carefully.
It should be noted however, that this study involved patients whose average age was 70 years old, and the results may not necessarily apply to younger people, or those who do not already suffer from high blood pressure.
Chronic deprivation of sleep can also be linked to a number of different health problems, including diabetes and obesity, and there is a link betweeen childhood sleep deprivation and future obesity in adulthood.
What about getting too much sleep ?
Another sleep study carried out at Warwick University in the United Kingdom in 2007 has shown that not only is too little sleep bad for your health, but sleeping for too long can also have harmful effects on your health. This study, carried out by Professor Francesco Cappuccio from the Warwick University Medical School involved over 10,000 government workers in the United Kingdom over a period of 11 – 17 years, and concluded that the optimum amount of sleep is 7 hours per night. However it also uncovered the startling fact that those whose sleep is excessive – more than 8 hours per night, doubled their risk of dying. In these cases however, the cause of death was not primariliy due to heart diseases.