How Poor Sleep Habits Affect Your Health

Dr. Cherry

According to the National Sleep Foundation, "Sleep deprivation has measurable negative effects on performance and physical and mental health. If you haven't had a good night's sleep, you're likely to pay for it. The price may be high: reduced energy, greater difficulty concentrating, diminished mood, and greater risk for accidents, including fall-asleep crashes. Work performance and relationships can suffer too. And pain may be intensified by the physical and mental consequences of lack of sleep."

So if you think that your sleep habits don't have an effect on your health, and that you are just fine with only a few hours sleep a night, you might want to consider this: Sleep experts say most adults, regardless of age, need between seven and nine hours a sleep each night for optimum performance, health and safety. And without adequate sleep, we put ourselves at increased risk. In fact, the National Sleep Foundation also states that "sleep deprivation has been linked to health problems such as obesity and high blood pressure, and negative mood and behavior."

Not getting enough sleep each night - or sleeping too much - may also increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to research conducted at Yale University and published in Diabetes Care. In the study, Dr. Henry Klar Yaggi and his colleagues studied the long-term (15-year) impact of sleep duration on the development of diabetes in more than 1,100 middle-aged and elderly men who were free of diabetes at the start of the study. They found that men getting no more than six hours of sleep per night, as well as those getting more than eight hours, were at significantly increased risk for developing diabetes, compared to men getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night. Specifically, "the risk of diabetes was roughly twofold higher in men reporting short sleep duration and more than threefold higher in those reporting long sleep duration," says Dr. Yaggi.

Orfeu Buxton, Ph.D., an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, agrees: "Habitual sleep restriction could play a very important role in increasing risk for diabetes later in life, especially if maintained over many years and decades, much like a sedentary lifestyle or poor eating habits. It's not something that catches up with you in a week or in two weeks, but it's something that over decades can shorten your life."

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For more information on Dr. Cherry's ministry, visit his Web site: www.AbundantNutrition.com.