The Eight-Hour Habit that Boosts Your Heart HealthInstead of focusing on negative cardiovascular incidents like heart attacks and strokes, a new study now shows you what to do to experience ideal heart health.

This is good information for those who want to be perfectly heart healthy, rather than just prevent cardiovascular disease and potentially fatal cardiovascular events.

It takes eight hours of your time every day but, you don’t have to worry, it is considerably easier than it sounds. And everyone can do this, no matter how busy you are.

A paper presented on 10 November 2015 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions revealed that people who slept eight hours per night were substantially more likely to meet the criteria for ideal heart health than those who slept less than seven hours.

The researchers were not interested in the question of poor heart health outcomes like heart attacks, but rather in ideal heart health, as set out by the American Heart Association.

The criteria for ideal heart health included a body mass index below 25, blood pressure below 120/80 mm Hg, cholesterol below 200 mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter), blood glucose below 140 mg/dL, 150 minutes or more of weekly exercise, and a score of eight on the American Heart Association’s ideal diet and non-smoking tests.

Those of their 9,700 subjects who slept eight hours per night were 2.7 times more likely to meet six or seven of these criteria than those who slept fewer than six hours.

They were 1.3 times more likely to have the ideal blood pressure and 1.7 times more likely to have an ideal body mass index. On average they also had healthier lifestyles: 2.4 times more likely to get the required exercise and 1.6 times more likely to eat a good diet.

Up to now, scientists have established that insomnia increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease. In one large literature review published in a 2011 edition of the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, in which researchers included only the very best scientific studies, they concluded that insomniacs were 45 percent more likely to develop or die of cardiovascular disease – even though cardiovascular disease had been verified to be absent at the beginning of the study.

After a study in which he found that insomniacs were to to 5 times more likely to suffer heart failure than those who slept well, Norwegian scientist Lars Laugsand warned in 2013 that insomniacs secreted more stress hormone (cortisol), which led to higher blood pressure, fast heart rate, and an increase in the secretion of pro-inflammatory substances. Consider that if insomnia actually causes heart disease, this may well be the reason why.

But the new study indicates that the causal relationship may be more complex than that. The discovery that good sleepers also have healthier lifestyle habits than insomniacs suggests that the heart health of good sleepers result not only from straightforward biological factors like normal levels of cortisol and pro-inflammation chemicals, but also from regular exercise and healthy dieting, two habits known to be heart healthy.

In other words, if you can exercise more regularly and eat a healthier diet, you can affect your body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose. If you manage to do this, your habit of sleeping fewer than eight hours a night may not detrct as much from your ideal heart health. Who knows, exercise and healthy dieting may even help you sleep.

If you have trouble sleeping eight hours per night, click here to learn a simple technique that will soothe you to sleep in minutes and keep you out for eight hours…

If you already have high blood pressure, discover how 3 easy exercises drop your blood pressure below 120/80 – starting today…

Or if high cholesterol is the issue, follow this step-by-step strategy to normalize your cholesterol levels in less than a month…