World’s largest sleep study conducted by the University of Western Ontario suggested that people having a sleep of about 7 to 8 hours every night have a better performance in their daily routine as compared to those who have less or more hours of sleep.
About 40,000 of the people around the world participated in this online scientific investigation that involved filling of a detailed questionnaire along with filling a spate of rational performance activities.
Describing the analysis of the study, one of the researchers Adrian Owen, said: “We really wanted to capture the sleeping habits of people around the entire globe. Obviously, there have been many smaller sleep studies of people in laboratories but we wanted to find out what sleep is like in the real world.”
He added, “People who logged in gave us a lot of information about themselves. We had a fairly extensive questionnaire and they told us things like which medications they were on, how old they were, where they were in the world and what kind of education they’d received because these are all factors that might have contributed to some of the results.”
Roughly, half of the participants testified that typically sleeping less than 6.3 hours per night, about an hour less than the study’s recommended amount. One of the surprising revelations was that most of the participants who took a sleep of a span less than 4 hours, felt that they were almost 9 years older.
“We found that the optimum amount of sleep to keep your brain performing its best is 7 to 8 hours every night and that corresponds to what the doctors will tell you to need to keep your body in tip-top shape, as well. We also found that people that slept more than that amount were equally impaired as those who slept too little,” said Conor Wild, the lead author of this study.
