Scientists analyzed data from studies of nearly 380,000 people aged 40 to 69
In recent years, several studies have been published on the effects of daytime sleep on health. For example, it is said to be associated with an increased likelihood of stroke in older people. If daytime sleep lasts more than 8 hours, there is a risk of a shorter life expectancy. However, scientists from the USA and Uruguay have completely different opinions. In the journal Sleep Health, they publish arguments for the benefits of daytime sleep.
The scientists analyzed data from studies of nearly 380,000 people aged 40 to 69. The main goal was to establish the relationship between daytime sleep and brain health. Researchers found that people who tend to nap during the day have a larger total brain volume.
Especially in the elderly, this is an indicator of good health, as a reduction in brain volume is commonly associated with dementia and other mental disorders. With age, the organ decreases in size and a person loses his cognitive functions. It was found that the brains of sleeping people were 2.6-6.5 years “younger”.
Conclusion: There is indeed a link between daytime sleep and larger brain volume. The habit of taking a nap during the day for 10-15 minutes, according to scientists, increases cognitive abilities and even slows down the ageing process and improves memory.
This is not the first time that different scientists have expressed opposing opinions regarding the same phenomenon. Such are the laws of science, it develops in contradictions and discrepancies. But what’s a common man to do? Probably the simplest advice is not to go to extremes and listen to yourself first.
By the way, in many Mediterranean countries, the afternoon nap is a centuries-old tradition.
However, the quality of sleep is much more important to the quality of life than the duration of sleep. This was established by a study by Czech researchers, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, Neuroscience News reported.
Although many studies have linked sleep quality to a person’s overall quality of life,
there is little research on the relative impact of changes in sleep duration, quality, and timing on long-term quality of life.
To investigate this question, authors Michaela Kudrnachova from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague and Aleš Kudrnach of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences used data from the annual Czech household survey for the period 2018-2020. Different adults in the same household filled out a survey, a total of 5,132 Czech adults responded to the survey in 2018 ., 2,046 in 2019 and 2,161 in 2020.
The authors analyze responses to questions covering life satisfaction, well-being, happiness, subjective health and workplace stress, along with self-reported responses to sleep duration, sleep quality, and sleep time, or when socially determined sleep rhythms and innate biological sleep rhythms do not match (e.g. when starting a new job workplace with different working hours).
At the individual level, reported sleep quality was significantly associated with all five quality-of-life measures except for workplace stress. Sleep quality was also significantly positively related to all quality of life measures.
The study found that sleep duration was significantly related to subjective health and happiness, and the discrepancy between the biological rhythm of sleep and the rhythm imposed by social life is significantly related to life satisfaction and stress at work.
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