If you are one of those who toss and turn every night trying to get a good night's sleep the latest research from Britain will not make you feel any better.
{IMAGE}According to a new British study people who do not get the recommended amount of sleep each night are putting themselves at an increased risk of dying.
A study by researchers at University College London and Warwick University has found that lack of sleep can almost double your risk of developing heart disease.
In one of the first studies to discover a link between the duration of a person's sleep and their risk of heart disease, the researchers also found that too much sleep is not good either.
These conclusions were arrived at by analyzing 17 years of data regarding the sleeping patterns of 10,308 civil servants and the associating rate of mortality.
The data was first taken in 1985-88 and then followed up in 1992-93.
Even after other factors such as age, sex, marital status, employment grade, smoking status, physical activity, alcohol consumption, self-rated health, body mass index, blood pressure were taken into account it was still found that those who cut their amount of time sleeping from 7 hours to 5 hours or fewer, were 1.7 fold more likely to die from multiple causes, and were also twice as likely to develop heart disease.
Professor Franceso Cappuccio from Warwick University says fewer hours of sleep and greater levels of sleep disturbance have become widespread in industrialised societies.
Professor Cappuccio says the change which is often the result of cutting down on sleep to create more time for leisure and shift-work, has meant that reports of fatigue, tiredness and excessive daytime sleepiness are more common than a few decades ago.