THE AWESOME POWER OF SLEEP

Matthew is a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the international bestseller, Why WeSleep: The New Science Of SleepAnd Dreams, published by (£10.99, Penguin Random House).

- DR MATTHEW WALKER

Our 24/7 society seems to be slowly robbing us of our slumber, but at what cost?

Sleep is the single most effective thing we do each day to reset the health of our brain and body. It’s an extraordinary elixir that can help you age well and live longer. Here’s what we know about Mother Nature’s cure-all...

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU HAVE TOO LITTLE SLEEP?

Short sleep is associated with an increased chance of having high blood pressure, a heart attack, and/or a stroke. Even the loss of a single hour of sleep can be heartbreaking, quite literally. There is a global experiment conducted on over 1.5 billion people across 70 countries twice a year. You know of this experiment. It is called Daylight Saving Time. According to a study published in 2014 in the journal Open Heart that looked at more than 42,000 hospital admissions for heart attacks, in the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, there is a 24 per cent increase in heart attacks the next day.

Even your hormones take a turn for the worse when sleep is lost. Young healthy men sleeping just four hours a night for four nights end up with a level of testosterone equivalent to that of someone 10 years older, according to a small study published in the journal JAMA in 2011. In other words, inadequate sleep, even for a few nights, will ‘age’ a man by over a decade in terms of such hormonal virility. We see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health and hormonal profiles due to a lack of sleep.