Unzureichender Schlaf geht mit einer verringerten Lebenserwartung einher. Als Verhaltensfaktor für die Lebenserwartung ragte der Schlaf stärker heraus als die Ernährung, mehr als Bewegung, mehr als Einsamkeit – ja sogar mehr als jeder andere Faktor außer dem Rauchen. Man sollte wirklich danach streben, 7 bis 9 Stunden Schlaf zu bekommen.
https://news.ohsu.edu/2025/12/08/insufficient-sleep-associated-with-decreased-life-expectancy
23 Kommentare
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/sleepadvances/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sleepadvances/zpaf090/8373869
From the linked article:
**Insufficient sleep associated with decreased life expectancy**
OHSU researchers find catching at least seven hours of sleep a night will improve how you feel, how long you live
A good night’s sleep is more than a luxury: New research from Oregon Health & Science University suggests that insufficient sleep may shorten your life.
The study published today in the journal SLEEP Advances.
Researchers tapped a vast, nationwide database looking for survey trends associated with average life expectancy county by county. They compared county-level data about average life expectancy with comprehensive survey data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2019 and 2025.
**As a behavioral driver for life expectancy, sleep stood out more than diet, more than exercise, more than loneliness — indeed, more than any other factor except smoking.**
Andrew McHill, Ph.D., has short brown hair, a dress shirt and tie, smiling in a garden area.
Andrew McHill, Ph.D. (OHSU)
“I didn’t expect it to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy,” said senior author Andrew McHill, Ph.D., associate professor in the OHSU School of Nursing, the OHSU School of Medicine and OHSU’s Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences. “We’ve always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: **People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep** if at all possible.”
In addition to extending your years, proper sleep makes your years more enjoyable. I developed chronic insomnia years ago, and every day was terrible because I was so drained. Insomnia will harm nearly every aspect of your life to some degree. Take insomnia seriously, and seek professional help if you develop it. Your future self will thank you. I waited longer than I should have to seek help, and it wasn’t until I talked to my doctor about it and got on a plan that I finally got insomnia under control. I wish that I had done it sooner.
This tells me science is not working hard enough. I should be taking a pill to eliminate sleep by now.
The article really ought to state exactly how many years of life are lost / gained through various factors. If 1 hour less of sleep each night led to a 1 year reduction in my lifespan, getting 1 less hour of sleep would actually INCREASE my overall conscious time as a human if I lived long enough. If I lived to age 72, that’s 3 more years of consciousness but 1 year of life lost, for a net gain of 2 years of conscious time. (this is just a hypothetical, but you get my drift… We need actual numbers here to sort this out).
I saw only strengths of association, no actual, measurable results. Why not give us the results?
Bryan Johnson vindicated.
I wonder what the calculus on this is. If you sleep 2 hours less a day, then technically you’re experiencing life longer at a rate of an additional 30.4 waking days (24 hours). That’s realistically 1.3 months more a year if you go by 18 hour days spent awake.
Will a person live longer than the additional 1.08 years a decade lost in waking hours getting those 2 hours of additional sleep?
Regardless, adequate sleep does improve your quality of life tremendously, so I’d bet on that.
how do i stop my body from waking up 5 hours after I go to sleep?
This makes sense and means nothing for indivduals. Insufficient sleep has multiple causative influences. Thus, if you look at sleep duration and all the causative agents for poor sleep at the same time, you will have a much stronger association from the tip of the funnel than from all the things above the funnel. I’m not sure how this passed scientific review at OHSU before the study was approved.
Somebody tell my newborn that. I don’t know how people have kids back to back for years
Oh good. One more thing to stress about when I can’t sleep.
Okay, but being asleep feels like being dead. You aren’t conscious for either of them. So wouldn’t you rather have more conscious time while you are young???
Setting my alarm to 3 hours a night.
If only it were as easy as choosing to sleep more.
Well then it’s a good thing I quit smoking
More and more science confirms capitalism is killing us.
Looks like I’ll be dying any minute now, based on how crappy I’ve been sleeping for the last 35 years
Ok so there’s a really a good book on this topic written by a sleep researcher with decades of experience, „Why We Sleep“ by Mathew Walker. In short, 7 hours is absolutely the bare minimum, but it can impair your concentration, cognitive abilities, etc. Also there are some people who can sleep very little and be fine, but this is so rare, that it barely happens. There’s also a lot of information about chronotypes and sleep disturbances. I really recommend it.
I started prioritising sleep after I read it and it did improve my life.
Having a 3.5 y.o. that still wakes up every single night sucks, and reading this makes me feel bad 🙁
I take ADHD meds med and it makes me sleep 5 hours max. Afterwards I’m wide awake. If I’m not taking meds I can easily do 8 and deeper. Thats sucks
The effect size here is wild, but I’d really want to see how hard they pushed on confounding. Short sleep is also a marker of shift work, low SES, chronic disease, meds, stress, etc. Definitely a reason to prioritize sleep, just not a clean “sleep more, live X years longer” knob.
Really gotta reinforce the sleep work sleep work cycle
I have no interest in a long life. Don’t even wanna see 50.
I have a strong interest in having more spare time after a 40 hour work week with limited remote office. And sleep is the easiest part of the day to steal time from, unfortunately.
What if people that tend to get more sleep just have a higher quality of life?
How does this compare to people that take regular naps once per day?