How good sleeping habits benefit your heart health.
Sleep is the “keystone of life.” That’s how Sarah Zallek, MD, medical director of OSF Sleep in Peoria, sees it.
“Sleep has to be enough and of good quality,” Dr. Zallek said. “For an adult, enough sleep is seven-to-eight hours. Eight is biological, that’s how we’re programmed. Getting six or fewer hours of sleep has significant risk.”
For kids, the amount of sleep needed changes by age.
“Babies need 16-17 hours a day. Toddlers need 14 hours, but by the time children are six years old and out of kindergarten, kids shouldn’t be sleepy at all during the daytime. They should be exquisitely awake and sleep 12 hours a night,” Dr. Zallek continued. “A 10-year-old needs about 10 hours of sleep, while teens need between eight-10 hours of sleep a night.”
Consistently failing to sleep enough can lead to a variety of health problems. One in particular is heart disease. Frank Han, MD, a cardiologist with OSF HealthCare who specializes in pediatric and adult congenital heart disease, says heart disease isn’t something that happens overnight, but over time.
“The link mainly comes in when you don’t have enough sleep. It then triggers some of the stress hormones of the body,” Dr. Han stated. “If you’re changing your sleep schedule a lot, that can mess around with your circadian rhythm.”
Another problem is an increase in inflammation in the body, and inflammation can cause all sorts of things, including heart disease.
The plethora of health problems can be caused by a wide variety of daily choices we make. Dr. Zallek noted caffeine can keep one from sleeping. Both Dr. Zallek and Dr. Han say screen time before bed needs to be avoided.
“Don’t play your computer games right before you go to sleep. Don’t have a TV inside your room,” Dr. Han advised.
Some people use alcohol to help put them to sleep. Dr. Zallek says while an alcoholic drink can make you sleepy, there are negative consequences to your sleep schedule, as well.
“The trick with alcohol is it wakes you up in the second half of the night. Even if you’re not aware of it, you’ll have less good-quality sleep with alcohol on board,” Dr. Zallek remarked.
“Getting a bad night’s sleep isn’t just sleeping too little, it can also be sleeping too much. If you are sleeping less than six hours a night, you’re at a greater risk for heart disease. I like to think of six as the magic number,” Dr. Zallek said. “And fewer than five hours of sleep almost doubles the risk of coronary artery disease.”
For some people who work the night shift, sleeping eight hours straight is extremely difficult. If you do need to work on a “split sleep” schedule, that’s still better than only sleeping a few hours a night.
“If you’re awake at night, all sorts of systems in your body expect you to be sleeping, and you feel funny because you’re awake,” Dr. Zallek contined. “So, when you’re working a night-shift and your stomach feels funny, you’re hungry when you shouldn’t be, not hungry when you should be or even hungry for the wrong foods, that’s very biological.”