Unlock the Secret to a Longer Life with These Five Healthy Sleep Habits

A recent study has revealed that people with high-quality sleep have a lower risk of premature mortality caused by cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other factors. This study found that individuals who practiced five key healthy sleep habits enjoyed a longer life expectancy compared to those who did not. Men who adopted these habits lived an average of 4.7 years longer than those who did not practice any of them, while women experienced a smaller increase in life expectancy of 2.7 years. Therefore, if you want to improve your overall health and potentially add years to your life, developing healthy sleep habits is crucial.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Frank Qian, who is a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internal medicine resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, emphasized the importance of identifying sleep disorders and improving overall sleep quality to prevent premature mortality. By incorporating healthy sleep practices into your daily routine, you may be able to unlock the secret to a longer, healthier life.

Five healthy sleep habits
In a study presented Feb. 23 at an annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, researchers identified five healthy sleep habits:
• getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night
• falling asleep easily most nights
• staying asleep most nights
• waking up rested most mornings
• not using any sleep medications
They used these factors to rate the sleep quality of over 172,000 people who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018.
This annual survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics includes questions about sleep and sleep habits.
After about four years, researchers used data from the National Death Index to identify which participants had died, in order to see if there was a link between poor sleep and the risk of dying early.
They also took into account other factors that could have affected a person’s risk of dying, such as socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol consumption and other medical conditions.
“Compared to individuals who had zero to one favorable sleep factors, those who had all five were 30% less likely to die for any reason, 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, 19% less likely to die from cancer, and 40% less likely to die of causes other than heart disease or cancer,” according to the news release.
In addition, for men with all five healthy sleep habits, their life expectancy at age 30 was 4.7 years longer than that of men with none or only one of those habits.
Women gained a smaller boost from good sleep habits. The expected life expectancy at age 30 was 2.7 years longer for women with all five healthy sleep habits, compared to women with none or only one.
More research is needed to know why sleep habits affected women’s life span differently than that of men.