A good night sleep makes you feel like winning a lottery worth $ 250000.

Getting the right amount and good quality  sleep is as beneficial to health and happiness as winning the lottery, according to research by the University of Warwick. The paper was published in March issue of Sleep Journal to mark  World Sleep Day on March 17, 2017. [1]

Lack of enough sleep has already been recognized as a major public health problem and has been linked to many chronic health diseases like hypertension, diabetes, depression, and obesity, as well as from cancer, increased mortality, and reduced quality of life and productivity.

CDC recommends that adults between the age of 18-60 years need a minimum of 7 or more hours of good quality sleep. [2]

Dr. Nicole Tang in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in England, analyzed sleep patterns of more than 30,594 people in the United Kingdom for a period of 4 years.

The study assessed three key patterns of interests, sleep quantity, sleep quality, use of sleep medication. The outcome of interests were general health and well-being which were measured by General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12; Likert scoring)  and the 12-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12).

About 77% participants reported an average sleep duration of 6–8 hours per night, nearly 80% reported good sleep quality while 16% took sleep medication at-least 3 times a week.

After adjusting for baseline variations and known confounders it was seen that good night sleep is associated with benefits in health and well-being, with quality of sleep is more important than quantity of sleep. Physical benefits of sleep take longer time to occur than mental well-being. Sleep is a multi-dimensional experience where the quality also matters along with the quantity.

“The current findings suggest that a positive change in sleep is linked to better physical and mental well-being further down the line,” said Dr Tang.

“It is refreshing to see the healing potential of sleep outside of clinical trial settings, as this goes to show that the benefits of better sleep are accessible to everyone and not reserved for those with extremely bad sleep requiring intensive treatments.

Association between sleep deprivation and medical errors like clinical performance deficit, and daytime fatigue are well established by earlier studies. It has also been linked to many vehicular accidents, industrial disasters and other work related errors.

Taking sleep medication is worse for health and these group of patients performed worse over course of years than those not requiring sleeping aides.  

An estimated 50-70 million US adults have sleep or wakefulness disorder and Questions about sleep are seldom asked by physicians.

Sleep has recently emerged as a feasible target for applying preventive measure to improve health of public. 

The full text of article  can be accessed here.

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[1] https://worldsleepday.org/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/how_much_sleep.html