I will never ask if you don't ever tell me
Apparently, sleep is now bad for you. In fact, too much of it will kill you.
Or so says the results of a six-year long study of more than a million adults, coincidentally conducted by psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of UCSD (I did not even know we had a psychiatry major). Someone who sleeps an average of 6-7 hours a night supposedly will have a lower death rate than a person who sleeps an average of 8 hours a night.
Now, being the scientific-minded, sleep-loving person that I am, my first instinct is to immediately question the validity of such an experiment. I mean, using people in an experiment is hard enough to control. But using over a million people?! There is just a staggering amount of variability there, with no way to control for it. The differences in sleep could be due to a number of reasons: emotional state, physical state, age, sex, and everything else that is different from one person to another. All this experiment really proves is that there is a link between people who sleep slightly less and a lower mortality rate. Which really amounts to nothing.
Think about it. If a person that normally slept 8 hours a night read this study and decided to sleep an hour or two less a night, would that person automatically reduce their mortality rate? Probably not. I am more inclined to believe that the chance of that person dying has more to do with their emotional and physical health, but maybe that's just me. But you know what? THAT might actually be a worthwhile experiment to carry out. THIS experiment does not prove anything except to be an atrocious waste of time and my tuition money.