From verywellhealth.com
By Mira Miller
Key Takeaways
- Sleeping between 6.4 to 7.8 hours a night is linked to the slowest biological aging across multiple organ systems.
- Too little sleep (less than 6 hours) and too much sleep (more than 8 hours) can accelerate biological aging through different pathways.
Getting enough sleep is an essential part of staying healthy throughout the lifespan. New research suggests that the ideal amount is between 6.4 to 7.8 hours, while getting either more or less than is associated with increased biological aging.
What the Research Shows
Researchers conducted the study, published in Nature, by analysing self-reported sleep data from half a million participants in the UK Biobank and comparing it with data about their biological age. Biological age refers to how slow or fast their organs are aging compared to their actual chronological age.
The researchers found that sleeping between 6.4 to 7.8 hours was associated with the slowest biological aging across multiple organ systems, including the brain, liver, lungs, immune system, skin, adipose tissue, and pancreas.
"This study suggests that sleeping too little or too much can accelerate biological aging," said Karen Lincoln, PhD, a professor of environmental and occupational health at UC Irvine Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health. "It also confirms that sleep is foundational to healthy aging."
Specifically, researchers identified a consistent U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological aging, meaning biological aging is lowest in the middle range and increases at both extremes of sleep duration.
Too little sleep is defined as fewer than 6 hours, while too much is defined as more than 8.
Why Does Sleeping Too Much or Too Little Matter?
Shorter and longer sleep duration have distinct biological pathways, Lincoln explained. She said short sleep is a direct driver of accelerated biological aging as it's associated with heightened physiological stress, systemic inflammation, immune dysregulation, and metabolic disruption which can affect cardiovascular, metabolic, musculoskeletal, and neuropsychiatric systems.
Long sleep, on the other hand, appears to be more concentrated in brain-related and neuropsychiatric outcomes, like depression or cognitive issues, she said. It might be a marker of underlying disease that the body is already managing, or an adaptive response to stress, rather than a direct driver of accelerated aging.
"The findings reinforce that sleep duration isn’t just a lifestyle choice, it is a biological signal," said Joseph Dzierzewski, PhD, a sleep scientist who directs the scientific mission of the National Sleep Foundation. "Deviating too far in either direction can reflect or contribute to accelerated aging across the body."
Where the Study Falls Short
The study does have an important limitation worth noting, Lincoln said: it relies on a single, self-reported measure of sleep by asking participants how many hours they sleep per day, on average.
But Lincoln said sleep is multidimensional and there are a wide range of measures to determine one’s sleep health. For example, sleep regularity measures whether you’re going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, sleep latency measures how long it takes you to fall asleep after you go to bed, and sleep disruptions include whether you have difficulty falling back to sleep after waking up at night.
Sleep disorders like sleep apnoea also impact many adults and are disproportionately underdiagnosed and untreated in many Black Americans, she added.
"While the number of hours you sleep is important, it doesn’t capture sleep quality and represents only one slice of a much richer picture of sleep health," she said.
What It Means For You
Despite the limitations, Dzierzewski said the results provide a biological stamp of approval for the National Sleep Foundation’s widely cited sleep duration recommendations, which state that most adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night and most older adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night.
"The NSF ranges remain the right target for overall health and well‑being," he said. "If your goal is specifically to support healthy biological aging, this study suggests that consistently sleeping in the 7–8 hour zone may be especially protective."
While this may be true for most people, everyone is different, so Lincoln said it's most important to gauge how you feel when you wake up.
If you feel rested, restored, and energised, she said you are likely getting enough sleep, regardless of whether the clock says 6.5 or 7.5 hours. But if you consistently wake up tired, foggy, and have low energy, that is a signal worth paying attention to, even if your sleep duration is within that recommended range.
"Sleep is essential for healthy aging: your brain clears metabolic waste, your immune system recalibrates, and your organ systems repair during sleep," she said. "Good sleep quality is important for your health no matter how you measure it."
https://www.verywellhealth.com/sleeping-hours-and-aging-11978844
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