While You Were Sleeping

Think you can get away with under six hours sleep a night and still look radiant? Think again. Getting your beauty sleep is an actual thing.

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Sleep, and whether we are getting enough, has become a modern day obsession. But instead of tucking ourselves into bed early to get the seven to eight hours the experts recommend, we’re slicing into our slumber in order to squeeze in other, more ‘important’, things.

With stress at an all-time high, workloads getting even heavier and total smartphone dependence the norm, sleep seems the most obvious part of our day to scrimp on. The problem is, if we regularly cut into our shut-eye, eventually we will pay for it in the form of health issues such as illness, depression, anxiety, weight gain, infertility – or just not being able to keep our eyes open when 3pm rolls around.

‘Sleep is vitally important to our physical health,’ says Dr Carmel Harrington, sleep expert at Sleep for Health. ‘Without it we are susceptible to infections and more likely to develop certain cancers as well as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Obesity is also linked to lack of shut-eye.’