Is getting more sleep beneficial?

Do you get enough sleep, or do you need more? Sleeping is a remedy to stress, anxiety and a way towards a healthy lifestyle. The hectic life in 2021 is sleep-deprived, and therefore, we need new alternatives to complete our sleep.

Sometimes, we think that extra hours in bed will relax us more and improve our health. But, this is not the case as per a new study from India, if you are having good-quality sleep, then adding extra hours to it won’t give any additional benefits.

The research in Chennai, India, involved 452-low income workers with disturbed sleeping nights. Their measurements were taken by Actigraph, a small wearable device used to measure sleep cycles.

Workers slept for an extra hour each night, but the observation didn’t give the expected health benefits. The workers in the experiment slept for an average of 5.5 hours and that of 8 hours per night. They were put to sleep 38 min before and had 27 min extra sleep all over.

“It was surprising to notice that the extra sleep had no positive outcomes or any results we thought,” says Frank Schilbach of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The benefits such as work productivity, creativity, and physical well-being were absent rather than the average work timings went down. It indicates that more bedtime implies less work.

Extra sleep does no good, but proper one is needed by every individual, as it can have immense benefits on the overall health.

Lack of slumber can have serious consequences, including the risk of dementia. It needs to be sound and peaceful, but the workers in the experiment did not have a regular sleeping pattern and had 31 breaks on average the entire night. This indicates that people are suffering from insomnia or sleep apnea in a developed nation.

In particular, in Chennai, a person usually has a rickshaw, a small room with five others living in it, lots and lots of mosquitos, and a hot climate day and night, which are plenty of factors to disrupt the sleep of any person.

Moreover, better psychological well-being is seen when the workers took a nap in the afternoon. Though, the working hours were hampered and couldn’t be restored by the workers even when the work efficiency increased along with several positive results, including improvements in cognitive function, and psychological well-being.

Researcher says that furthermore studies should be done in the developing nations where people are under actual circumstances of life with many inadequate factors rather than sitting in the lab of wealthy countries.

“I really hope people will study it more in developing countries and poor countries, focusing on outcomes that people value,” said Schilbach.

Stress, worry, and low income affect sleeping habits. And a study in a developing nation will give better results.

In a similar article, we discussed how taking breaks during the study period can be beneficial for you.