Not Getting Enough Sleep? You Might Be Shortening Your Life Span
In the United States, insufficient sleep strongly correlates with life expectancy, even more than diet, exercise or social connections do, a new study suggests
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Sleep is a mysterious yet essential biological process, supporting everything from muscle recovery to memory consolidation. Now, new research suggests it may also play a role in longevity.
In a study published in December in the journal SLEEP Advances, researchers report a strong correlation between sleep and life span. More specifically, they describe an association between inadequate sleep and shorter life expectancies, which suggests that regularly getting enough z’s may be one of the keys to leading a long life. Sleep was even a stronger predictor of life expectancy than diet, exercise or social connections.
“We often fall into a mind-set that you can ‘get by’ with less sleep and can use that time to do something ‘more productive’ or fun,” study co-author Andrew McHill, an integrative physiologist at Oregon Health and Science University, tells SELF Magazine’s Korin Miller. But the new work “really does highlight the importance of sleep among all other behaviors that we commonly think of being essential for health—the food we eat, the air we breathe or how much we exercise.”
Scientists have understood for decades that sleep is important for overall health. And previous research has linked inadequate sleep with a higher mortality risk. But for the new study, the researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between sleep and life expectancy by county across the United States.
They wondered if this approach might reveal potential inequities between neighboring areas or, possibly, point to communities or populations where targeted public health initiatives focused on sleep could be beneficial.
So McHill and his colleagues looked at county-level life expectancy data and other information collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2019 to 2025. Conducted monthly via telephone, the CDC surveys ask U.S. residents about behavioral risk factors known to affect human health, such as their smoking and exercise habits, alcohol consumption, seatbelt use and immunizations.
The survey also includes the question: “On average, how many hours of sleep do you get in a 24-hour period?” The CDC recommends that adults get at least seven hours per night, the same number recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, although more than 35 percent of grown-ups in the United States aren’t getting that amount of snooze time.
Did you know? Even brainless animals need to sleep
A recent study found that two brainless animals—a jellyfish and a sea anemone—spend about one-third of the day asleep, like humans. The findings suggest that the behavior evolved in animals to reduce DNA damage in nerve cells, which are distributed throughout the marine creatures’ bodies.
When the researchers crunched the numbers, they found a clear correlation between insufficient sleep and shorter life expectancy in each year and in most U.S. states, even when they accounted for other common mortality risk factors, such as smoking and obesity. The findings highlight the importance of adequate sleep in “all communities regardless of income level, access to health care services or geographical classification,” they write in the paper.
Overall, aside from smoking, sleep was the biggest predictor of life expectancy—outpacing food insecurity, low physical activity and loneliness.
“To see that insufficient sleep outweighs the impact of diet and exercise as a predictor of life expectancy is a stunning and powerful confirmation of what we often try to impress upon our patients,” Pakkay Ngai, a pediatric sleep physician at Hackensack Meridian Health who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Medical News Today’s Corrie Pelc. “It reinforces the message that sleep is not a luxury or something to be sacrificed; it is a biological necessity on par with, and in some ways more impactful than, other cornerstone health behaviors.”
The researchers did not directly investigate why insufficient sleep is linked with shorter life expectancy. However, based on past studies, scientists know that getting sufficient sleep is related to “so many aspects of health, including cardiovascular health, our immune system and even weight management and mood,” says Beth Malow, a neurologist at Vanderbilt Health who also wasn’t involved with the research, to SELF Magazine. “That translates into the importance of sleep on our life span.”
In the future, “we are hoping to really dive into the specific reasons as to why sleep is associated with shorter life expectancy,” McHill tells Medical News Today. He and his colleagues are currently conducting additional research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to investigate the causes, and they aim to eventually explore mechanisms affecting sleep in individual local communities.
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