Too Much or Too Little Sleep Ages the Brain

Living in a sleep-deprived society, chances are you are familiar with the many negative consequences associated with lack of sleep. Through your own experience, you may already know that sleep deprivation causes fatigue, lack of energy, inattention and irritability. Perhaps you have read in a magazine or seen on TV that quality sleep helps you lose weight and that even too much sleep can be detrimental to your health.

Growing evidence suggests that lack of sleep, as well as too much sleep, causes an additional health impairment, one that most people know little about.

According to a recent study conducted by Dr. Jane Ferrie, who led the research in the department of epidemiology and public health at the University College London, and colleagues, failure to get the appropriate amount of sleep can cause your brain to age prematurely.

truth is that cognitive decline occurs as we age, regardless of our sleeping habits. The important thing to remember, however, is that too much or too little sleep can accelerate this process while the right amount of sleep can slow it down.

Set out to determine how too little or too much sleep affects the brain, researchers tracked three groups of middle-aged subjects over the course of five years, consistently asking them to perform memory, vocabulary and logic tests.

The first group in the study, comprised of both men and women, averaged seven hours of sleep a night and performed better on reasoning tests than both the group who slept fewer than six hours and the group who slept more than eight.

According to Ferrie, people who got either too little or too much sleep showed a loss in brain function that was the equivalent of aging four to seven years.

In finding the amount of sleep that will keep you healthy and free from premature aging of the brain, sleep scientists recommend somewhere in the range between six and eight hours of sleep a night.

The results of the study also found that maintaining a consistent sleep routine comprised of seven hours of sleep a night can help naturally reduce the regular cognitive decline and memory loss that occurs with age. This is especially important considering that people tend to sleep less when they age.

Finally, it is important to know that time in bed is not the best way to measure sleep, as people may lie in bed struggling with insomnia. To function at your best and keep your brain young, you need around seven hours of quality sleep each night, and not just seven hours in bed.