The key to stable mental health may be much simpler than we think.
A group of scientists from Binghamton University in the United States have found that people who sleep less than 8 hours a day have very serious mental health problems.
Professor Meredith Coles and her student Jakub Nota observed a group of 52 people with sleep problems.
They regularly complained of anxiety, apathy and other negative emotional states. The participants in the study had to give their assessment of images that cause various states such as shock, sadness, joy. The movement of their eyes was recorded as they gave their answers.
The study found that the less a person sleeps, the more his attention is focused on images that evoke negative emotions.
According to Professor Coles, chronic sleep deprivation causes people to be “locked up” in a severe emotional state from which there seems to be no escape.
Scientists believe that if they can improve sleep, they can fight some serious mental illnesses, such as obsessive thoughts that lead to death.
In addition to our emotional state, good sleep is good for the immune system, heart function and even, according to some researchers, is a prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and a number of diseases of the brain and nervous system.
Lack of sleep can be especially dangerous for people who have several risk factors for cardiovascular problems, such as obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.
Researchers claim that sleep deprivation can double the risk of death from heart attack or stroke.
The study, quoted by AFP, involved 1,344 participants with an average age of 49. 42 percent of them are men who agreed to sleep one night in a laboratory environment.
39 percent of the participants had at least three of these risk factors, which together make up the metabolic syndrome, the study authors said.
The health of the participants was monitored for more than 16 years, during which time 22 percent of them died.
Metabolic syndrome sufferers who slept less than 6 hours in a laboratory setting were 2.1 times more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke at age 16 than those who slept for less than 6 hours in a laboratory setting. there are no such risk factors.
Those affected by metabolic syndrome are also 1.99 times more likely to die from any cause than those not affected. For those affected by the metabolic syndrome, who slept more than 6 hours, the risk of death is 1.49 times higher.
This is the first study that focused on the duration of sleep in a laboratory environment.
