Too Little Sleep May Hasten Big Sleep and What To Do About It

First the bad news: researchers at the University of Chicago, the city that almost never sleeps, have concluded that, for middle-aged adults, missing an average of one hour of sleep a night over
five years raised the risk of developing high blood pressure by 37
percent. Reuters reports that the study, involving 578 adults with an average age of 40, found that volunteers slept six
hours on average, and only 1
percent slept eight hours or more. They found that those who slept less were far more likely to develop
high blood pressure over five years, and that each hour of lost sleep raised
the risk.
Wait, there’s more. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania now believe that watching television, a routine that many people believe helps them fall asleep, actually keeps them up. The L.A. Times reports on the research, which found that seven in 10 Americans spend some part of their final two waking hours
each day in front of the television, and most of those people let television
programming — not their level of sleepiness or their need for a full
night’s sleep — dictate when they go to sleep. The Times reports that roughly 40 percent of American adults sleep fewer than seven to eight hours,
even though doing so raises their risk of daytime sleepiness, obesity,
illness and even death.
How should we get to sleep? Still more research suggests that we should swap the shallow nothingness of CSI reruns for the deep nothingness of meditation. HealthDay reports that researchers at Northwestern University divided 11 participants aged 25 to 45 with chronic insomnia
into two groups. One group participated in Kriya Yoga, and the
other group was given tedious information about improving health through
exercise, nutrition, weight loss and stress management.  After two months, the meditation group reported improvements in sleep quality, how long it took to get to sleep, total sleep time, and sleep efficiency. That’s right: sleep efficiency.