Not just smoking and drinking, if you do these six things you’ll take years off your life

Not just smoking and drinking, if you do these six things you’ll take years off your life

LAZINESS and too much sleep could take years off your life, according to new research.

Scientists have created a list of factors that increase the risk of an early death, which includes sitting for too long and having lie-ins.

Alongside the usual suspects of smoking, alcohol intake, inactivity and a poor diet, new studies suggest sitting for more than seven hours and sleeping for long durations can reduce lifespans.

Sedentary behaviour — the amount of time spent sitting — and getting too much or too little sleep can have detrimental effects especially when combined with other factors.

The list outlines six categories of activity that lead to higher probability of having a shortened life. The higher the rating in each category, the more chance you have of losing years.

However it is the combination of these activities which proves most dangerous.

Official stats from the PROS Medicine reports show that a person who combines smoking, heavy drinking and lack of sleep is more than five times as likely to die over a six-year period compared to those who are more clean living.

Limited physical exercise combined with oversleeping and prolonged sitting throughout the day can be almost as threatening as possessing all six harmful habits.

Smoking and binge drinking aside, other individual factors only slightly increased risk of premature death.

The Australian researchers responsible for the findings claimed that the study “reaffirms the importance of healthy lifestyles”.

The six-year study involved more than 230,000 people aged 45 and over.

Leading researcher Dr Melody Ding, from the University of Sydney, said: “Short and long sleep durations were separated as two different risk factors, as their associations with mortality may be explained by different mechanisms.

“This analysis investigated four established and two [new] risk factors, namely, prolonged sitting and unhealthy sleep duration, which may be added to behavioural indices or risk combinations to quantify health risk.’

Earlier this year the University of Cambridge researchers warned that people who choose to snooze for over eight hours a day are twice as likely to have a stroke — with women at particular risk.

The UK study found that “short” sleepers were more susceptible to ischaemic strokes caused by clots preventing blood from reaching the brain.

“Long” sleepers, however, run the risk of hermorrhagic strokes where blood vessels burst and bleed into the brain, according to the research.

Sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley recommends getting regular hours of sleep, warning that those who normally get little sleep and then indulge in lie-ins can potentially be harmed.