Adults accept it as conventional health wisdom that we require eight hours of sleep each night in order to be healthy. Yet an expert on human evolutionary biology recently argued that this might actually be misleading.
“Do you lose sleep over whether you sleep too little or too much?” Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor at Harvard University, wrote for The New York Times on Sunday. “You can now relax, because scientists have figured out precisely how much sleep you really need. In a recent study in Nature, an international team of experts reports that the ‘sweet spot’ for adults is between 6 hours 24 minutes and 7 hours 48 minutes. Less or more than this ‘Goldilocks’ zone is associated with faster rates of aging in the brain, heart, liver and other vital organs, plus higher rates of illnesses such as heart disease and depression, and ultimately shorter lifespans.”
Lieberman added that a recent study analyzed self-reported sleep habit data from hundreds of thousands of people. It found that people who sleep more than 8 hours per night suffer health problems just like their counterparts who sleep less than 6 hours and 24 minutes per night. In theory, this would demonstrate that excessive sleep can hurt a person’s health just as much as insufficient sleep.
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