One Lost Hour of Sleep Can Spike Heart Attacks | Matthew Walker

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0:42what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years what is that saying to your genes? And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life? So firstly, we know that short sleep duration. So using that sweet spot, and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep, because I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much. But using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact, firstly, across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.

1:21That short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on? Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep? And what we know is that a lack of sleep, and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep, is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, high risk of dementia. And I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very, very strong. And then downstairs in the body, we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer.

2:01After, if I were to take you and limit you to, let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic. Oh my goodness. So that's not a lifetime, that's just one week. And there's an even more interesting experiment that I think speaks to the subtlety of this because there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted. And it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year. And it's called daylight savings time. Now, in the spring, when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity, firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24 % increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me.

2:51And what's fascinating, in the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, there's a 21 % reduction in heart attacks. So it's bidirectional, And that's just one hour of sleep. And you see, there was some great recent data. You see a very similar profile regarding that daylight savings shift for road traffic accidents on our streets. I've heard about this. And tragically, suicide rates as well. And then even more recently, what we discovered is that during that spring time shift, when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of sleep that they dole out harsher sentences.

3:40so you know we can walk you know you can ask the question what about a lifetime we don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep we can ask about these really you know one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep and I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep and you could then ask well you know why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours. You know, I'm still not too bad. I'm in fairly decent shape. Why is sleep the exception to that rule? And the answer seems to be this.

4:22Human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason. Why is that? And it was such a unique thing. And what that means is that Mother Nature, through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival, and I can speak about some of the exceptions, but human beings are strange like this. In other words, Mother Nature hasn't had to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation, because she's never faced it in the course of evolution. And so there is no safety net in place here.

5:00And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly, mentally, cognitively, and physically caused by insufficient sleep.

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