Get Second Opinion
Ask Doctor
Lack of Sleep Can Doubles the Risk of Heart Disease, Here’s How:
Sleep, Exercise, and Nutrition are the three pillars of a healthy life. The quality and quantity of sleep, exercise, and nutrition directly impact the vitality of our day to day health. While exercise and nutrition give the brawn our body needs, sleep helps our body rest, grow and refresh to gets us ready for the next day.
Lack of Sleep & Risk of Heart Diseases:
Not getting adequate sleep puts immediate stress on the body affecting every body’s function both mentally and physically. Lack of adequate sleep does show an immediate impact the next day, and it is easy to scoff it off. But do you know that this chronic lack of sleep can double the risk of your heart diseases?
Yes, lack of sleep in middle-aged men and women who receive less than adequate sleep (6 hours a night) is found to have doubled their risk of heart disease, according to multiple large scale research studies performed by heart disease researchers around the world.
Sleep and your heart health are more linked than you think, to help you understand better here’s how lack of sleep slowly wrecks your heart:
Obesity, Weight Gain & Heart Diseases:
The accumulated evidence of both observational & experimental and studies suggest that insufficient sleep is the most important contributing factor for obesity.
Sleep deprivation disturbs the balance of hormones which control of feeling of hunger thereby increasing your appetite and while doing do increase the craving for sugar-laden and fat foods. When combined with environmental and genetic factors can rapidly increase the risk of obesity which translates to higher cholesterol levels, increased blood pressure and risk of diabetes which together wreck your heart in the process.
Sleep Deprivation & High Blood Pressure:
High blood pressure is one of the primary risk factors for heart diseases such as heart attack and it is often the first thing that happens when you don’t rest your body with a minimum of 6 hours of sleep.
As we sleep our body reduces the blood pressure thus relaxing our heart and blood vessels. When you don’t give your body adequate sleep, the blood pressure stays elevated for the rest of the day. Lesser you sleep, longer your blood pressure stays high, straining your heart and blood vessels.
Not only weight gain and hypertension both primary risk factors of heart disease but the lack of sleep also triggers the stress hormones which inflames the heart. When you sleep for less than 6 hours you also disrupt the hormonal balance that can make you vulnerable to a host of health problems which further increases the risk of heart diseases.
So if you want to help your heart stay healthy and decrease the risk of heart diseases, good sleep hygiene – 7 to 8 hours a night, must be made a mandatory part of your lifestyle.
Need more tips to help you decrease the risk of heart diseases? Dr. Alla Gopala Krishna Gokhale is the best heart transplant surgeon in Telangana who can help you improve your heart health. You can contact him here.