Sleeping in on the weekend leads to a longer life

Yes, you read that right: sleeping in on the weekend not only makes you an incredibly nice person, but it also ensures that you live longer. It's a small effort to turn over one more time this morning, I thought. How does it work exactly? And especially: how you can easily justify your extra long sleep sessions on the weekend from now on? I'm going to tell you.

Although we all hear how bad long sleeping is for us, that sleeping too little increases the chance of depression and that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn't work, this isn't entirely true. In fact: researchers actually disagree with that and now tell us that sleeping in on the weekend will give you a longer life. Over 43,000 participants from Sweden were examined and their sleep patterns were questioned. Then, they were studied again thirteen years later. And guess what? It turned out that people who regularly slept only five hours or less per night were more likely to die than those who treated themselves to a longer night's rest or caught up on a few extra hours on the weekend. Long story short: compensating on the weekend simply works. However, a small ‘yes but’ is added to the research, because participants indicated how many hours they would sleep themselves. This was not recorded, so for now we just have to take them at their word and enjoy the extra tolerated hours that we can now grab on Saturday and Sunday. I say: 11:00 AM is the new 9:00 AM, yay.