If you struggle getting a good night’s sleep, you’re not alone. Researchers estimate that about 16% of the world’s population lives with insomnia, while a recent survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that six out of every 10 adult Americans report they don’t get enough sleep.
Past studies have linked inadequate sleep to several health conditions that can negatively impact a person’s quality of life and life expectancy, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal issues, and dementia.
“Sleep plays a vital role in nearly every biological process within our body, yet it is still one behavior that I think we commonly take for granted,” Andrew McHill, PhD, associate professor and director of the Sleep, Chronobiology, and Health Laboratory in the School of Nursing at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), told Medical News Today.
“It is something that is easy to put off until the weekend or deprioritize based on work or social events, but getting shorter sleep truly has ramifications for our health and wellbeing,” McHill added.
He is the senior author of a new study recently published in the journal Sleep Advances, which found that insufficient sleep had a more significant impact on decreased life expectancy than other lifestyle factors, such as diet, physical activityTrusted Source, and social isolation.
Insufficient sleep affects health outcomes
For this study, researchers analyzed data from the 2019-2025 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveysTrusted Source to look for a link between insufficient sleep and life expectancy.
“While sitting in on a research advocacy meeting with government officials, someone mentioned that if you want your research to truly make an impact, you need to look at how it affects people in your local community and state,” McHill recalled. “It got me to thinking, ‘how do people in Oregon sleep?’ and it set me and my team off on an adventure.”
“We first examined the relationship between insufficient sleep and [the] number of health outcomes in Oregon, to which there were robust relationships, particularly with life expectancy, which was somewhat surprising that the relationship was so strong,” he continued.
“So we thought, let’s look at other states. And time and time again, when we analyzed the relationship between rates of insufficient sleep and life expectancy at the county level, regardless of state, there were strong relationships across the country.”
– Andrew McHill, PhD
Inadequate sleep one of the most powerful drivers of lower life expectancy
At the study’s conclusion, McHill and his team discovered that when compared to common behaviors associated with life expectancy — such as diet, physical activity, and social connection — inadequate sleep was a more powerful driver of lower life expectancy than any other factor other than smokingTrusted Source.
“These findings really highlight the importance of sleep among all other behaviors that we commonly think of being essential for health — the food we eat, the air we breathe, or how much we exercise,” McHill said.
Additionally, researchers found that not getting enough sleep was significantly negatively linked with life expectancy in most U.S. states from 2019-2025.
“These findings really deliver the message that regardless of where you live, whether it be rural, urban, north, south, east, or west, sleep plays a vital role on our health and wellbeing,” McHill emphasized.
“Moreover, because we had multiple years of data, these findings also highlight that even when faced with extreme circumstances (i.e., COVID pandemic), sleep still plays a key role in our health,” he added.
“We are hoping to really dive into the specific reasons as to why sleep is associated with shorter life expectancy,” McHill continued. “We are currently doing this through tightly-controlled in-laboratory studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, but we are also hoping to get into the local community and different pockets across America to identify specific mechanisms by which sleep impairs health.”
