Enough sleep makes you more attractive
After a good night’s sleep of around 8 hours, you look more attractive, healthier and fitter than after a less restful night. These findings by Eus van Someren of the LUMC and the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition , together with researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, were published on 15 December in the authoritative British Medical Journal.
Beauty sleep
In the study, 23 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 31 were photographed after a normal night of eight hours of sleep, and after a short night’s sleep followed by a period of 31 hours of being awake. The test subjects in the photographs were then assessed as to how attractive, healthy and fit they looked. Tiredness turned out to strongly correlate with a less attractive and less healthy appearance, which might in turn influence the clinical assessment of a patient by a doctor. The research of Van Someren and his Swedish colleagues is the first scientific proof of the value of beauty sleep.
Wanted: good and poor sleepers
There is so far no information on whether people suffering from chronic insomnia would be assessed differently. The expectation is that there will be a high level of individual variation within this group. The Dutch group which contributed to the publication is trying, by means of a large-scale national internet questionnaire, to bring about a breakthrough in this as yet ill-understood disorder. They are looking for thousands of participants who can fill in from home an occasional questionnaire on their sleep patterns and their psychological and physical health (see ). Poor sleepers, but also good sleepers, since, even if they are not aware of it, they know the secret of a good night’s sleep.