A new sleep study reveals that getting 6 hours of sleep a night may be equivalent to getting no sleep at all for 2 days, Lifehacker reports.
If you’re only getting six hours of sleep each night, you might be just as sleep deprived as someone who got zero hours of sleep for two days.
That’s what researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found in their sleep study. They took 48 adults (ages 21-38) and restricted their sleep to four, six, or eight hours of sleep each night for two weeks. One unfortunate group was forced to stay awake for three whole days.
For each group, the researchers tested participants’ cognitive performance and reaction time every two hours when they were awake.
Unsurprisingly, those who got the full eight hours of sleep performed the best, while those who got only four hours a night did worse each day. The biggest surprise was for the six-hour sleep group. As Fast Company reports:
The group who got six hours of sleep seemed to be holding their own, until around day 10 of the study.
