A new study has found that young people who are getting less than five hours sleep each night are tripling their chances of developing a mental illness.
The study, conducted by the George Institute for Global Health, surveyed around 20,000 Australians between the ages of 17-24.
Their results showed that the people sleeping less than five hours a night are three times more likely to become mentally ill than those sleeping for the recommended eight or nine hours.
The results were published in the journal Sleepwhich also connected sleep deprivation with cardiovascular disease and weight gain. Professor, Nick Glozier, the lead author of the study, said that the average amount of sleep for a young adult should be around eight to nine hours per night; however figures have shown that this has been decreasing over the past ten years.
“Over the past few decades young adults have been sleeping fewer and fewer hours, whereas the rest of us…have generally been sleeping more hours,” says Glozier.
“There is a whole bunch of gadgets that kids and young adults now have in their bedrooms that they never used to have.
“Yet of course they got to get up to go to school or go to college or go to uni at exactly the same time.
“So there is group of them who are becoming more and more sleep deprived.”
Researchers discovered that half of those people surveyed who had less than six hours sleep per night had higher levels of psychological distress in comparison to around 25 per cent of those sleeping eight to nine hours each night.
“It’s those chronic mental health problems when you are an adolescent or you are a young adult, that lead onto the more important adult forms of the disorders, like major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder,” he says.
“So if we can do something around that group of people when they are beginning to become chronic or preventing those chronic, persistent problems then we may have a really good target for an early intervention.”
A professor of youth mental health at the University of Melbourne, Dr Patrick McGorry, said that he thinks the results point out the effects of disturbance in chronobiology – the timing of biological rhythms.
“It might be a very important marker or risk factor that we can actually measure and help us with identifying people who are at particular risk for these problems,” says McGorry.
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