Does Your Sleep Impact How You Walk?
On our list of healthy lifestyle aspirations, getting enough sleep every night is probably near the top. And that’s no surprise — according to the Sleep Foundation, almost half of Americans report feeling sleepy three or more days a week, and more than one out of three adults are sleeping less than seven hours a night (the recommended amount of sleep is seven to nine hours).
You’ve likely experienced how a lack of z’s can affect your brain’s ability to function, and it’s usually not pretty. Research published in PNAS in June 2018 showed that chronic lack of sleep doubled the time it took for the brain to react and increased lapses in attention fivefold. Now a study, published in Scientific Reports, suggests that inadequate sleep can have a negative impact on one of most basic daily activities: walking.
“The results show that gait is not an automatic process, and that it can be affected by sleep deprivation,” Hermano Igo Krebs, PhD, a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and a coauthor of the study, told MIT News.
Excerpted from Everyday Health
