It has been years now, since scientists began debating over the way in which our sleeping schedule can affect us, and multiple conclusions have been reached. However, all of them have something in common: the fact that bad sleeping habits are indeed detrimental to our health.
After 10 years of extensive research, scientists at the Duke – NUS Graduate School in Singapore can confirm it too. Their study, “Short Sleep, Aging Brain” consisted of gathering almost seventy senior volunteers in order to analyze the effect that various sleep patterns have on their brain, and requiring them to complete a questionnaire, and more importantly, to have an MRI every two years.
The results speak for themselves: the volunteers who didn’t dedicate enough time to sleep started to gradually experience brain swelling in several important regions of the brain, which can lead to the acceleration in cognitive decline, as the publication in the scientific journal “Sleep” tells us.
This study shed light on the countless beliefs about the relation between how much we sleep and how young and healthy we actually are. The study’s senior author, Dr Michael Chee, Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke – NUS, strongly believes that:
Work done elsewhere suggests that seven hours a day for adults seems to be the sweet spot for optimal performance on computer based cognitive tests. In coming years, we hope to determine what’s good for cardio-metabolic and long-term brain health, too.
Researchers from Warwick University in England have also completed yet another interesting study about sleep. With nine thousand volunteers at hand, the Englishmen have taken a close look at how sleep affects us, realizing that both the people who sleep for less than six hours and the ones who sleep for more than eight hours per day are prone to issues with their memory and decision making abilities.
In short, if you want to live a long and happy life, it is best that let your brain recover from all the daytime effort by having enough sleep. Just don’t exaggerate with it too.