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Scientists have understood for decades that sleep is important for overall health. And previous research has linked inadequate sleep with a higher mortality risk. But for the new study, the researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between sleep and life expectancy by county across the United States.

They wondered if this approach might reveal potential inequities between neighboring areas or, possibly, point to communities or populations where targeted public health initiatives focused on sleep could be beneficial.

So McHill and his colleagues looked at county-level life expectancy data and other information collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2019 to 2025. Conducted monthly via telephone, the CDC surveys ask U.S. residents about behavioral risk factors known to affect human health, such as their smoking and exercise habits, alcohol consumption, seatbelt use and immunizations.

The survey also includes the question: “On average, how many hours of sleep do you get in a 24-hour period?” The CDC recommends that adults get at least seven hours per night, the same number recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, although more than 35 percent of grown-ups in the United States aren’t getting that amount of snooze time.

Even brainless animals need to sleep
A recent study found that two brainless animals—a jellyfish and a sea anemone—spend about one-third of the day asleep, like humans. The findings suggest that the behavior evolved in animals to reduce DNA damage in nerve cells, which are distributed throughout the marine creatures’ bodies.

When the researchers crunched the numbers, they found a clear correlation between insufficient sleep and shorter life expectancy in each year and in most U.S. states, even when they accounted for other common mortality risk factors, such as smoking and obesity. The findings highlight the importance of adequate sleep in “all communities regardless of income level, access to health care services or geographical classification,” they write in the paper.

Overall, aside from smoking, sleep was the biggest predictor of life expectancy—outpacing food insecurity, low physical activity and loneliness.

“To see that insufficient sleep outweighs the impact of diet and exercise as a predictor of life expectancy is a stunning and powerful confirmation of what we often try to impress upon our patients,” Pakkay Ngai, a pediatric sleep physician at Hackensack Meridian Health who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Medical News Today’s Corrie Pelc. “It reinforces the message that sleep is not a luxury or something to be sacrificed; it is a biological necessity on par with, and in some ways more impactful than, other cornerstone health behaviors.”