Sleep Added to Essential List for a Healthy Heart
UNDATED -- The American Heart Association has added sleep to its list of heart health essentials.
Since 2020, they have said there are seven components to having a healthy heart - maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, being physically active, eating a healthy diet, and controlling blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar - all keys to ideal cardiovascular health. Those components have been dubbed Life's Simple 7.
Now, in a publication released Wednesday, the AHA says sleep duration joins those seven original metrics in a revised scoring tool now called Life's Essential 8.
They say adults should average seven to nine hours of sleep a night. The advisory notes that both too much and too little sleep are associated with heart disease and that poor sleep health is linked to poor psychological health, an important driver of heart disease.