How well do you sleep?

Here’s a little quiz. What’s the best amount of sleep? A) Less than 7 hours, B) 7-8 hours, or C) more than 8 hours? If you answered B, congratulations! That’s the optimal amount of sleep to support wellbeing.

Five factors that put sleep at risk

Not everyone, however, enjoys a solid night’s sleep. Some people have risk factors that put uninterrupted sleep at risk. Here are five sleep risk factors that can rob you of good health:

1. Less than seven hours of sleep
2. Trouble falling asleep
3. Trouble staying asleep
4. Not waking up feeling rested most days
5. Use of medication to fall asleep or stay asleep

A 2024 published study of 172,321 U.S. adults found that people who had optimum sleep (meaning the fewest of these risk factors) had lower risk of death in the following categories:

Cause of death	Healthy sleep lowers death risk
All causes	30% less risk of death
Cardiovascular disease	21% less risk of death
Cancer	19% less risk of death

On average, life expectancy was 4.7 years longer in men and 2.4 years longer in women for those who had 0-1 of the same five risk factors.

How poor sleep damages overall health

Everyone has an internal clock with that operates on a cycle of roughly 24 hours. It’s called a circadian rhythm. It regulates when you feel sleepy, when you sleep, and when you want to eat. It influences complex systems that include how you metabolize energy, how healthy your immune system is, your endocrine (hormonal) balance, and how cells proliferate. When poor sleep disrupts your circadian rhythm, a paper in the World Journal of Clinical Oncology states that it sets up conditions for poor health outcomes, including metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases, infections, and cancer.” Clearly, optimum sleep is essential for maximum wellness.

Poor sleep and prostate cancer

The conditions that arise from poor sleep are linked with the development of cancer in several endocrine organs: breast, ovaries, testicles, thyroid, pituitary, adrenal gland, and prostate. With specific regard to prostate cancer (PCa), the same paper cautions that “… environmental, lifestyle, and circadian rhythm disruptions may contribute to PCa formation. … Sleep patterns, sleep quality, and duration are also factors that may affect PCa risk.” This brings up two particular aspects of our modern lifestyle that play havoc with circadian wellness: shift work and digital screens.

Shift work throws circadian rhythm off

Progress since the Industrial Revolution now enables work to get done around the clock, usually in three 8-hour shifts: morning, afternoon, and night. According to one work management resource, “Rotating shifts are known to help distribute the burden of less desirable hours but can also pose challenges for workers’ work-life balance and health.” Many jobs involve night-time staffing: airline pilots, hospital workers, law enforcement, firefighters, factory workers, etc. A study of Norwegian offshore petroleum rig workers notes they are busy on a 24/7 basis, and rollover shift work increased prostate cancer risk over time. As the authors wrote, “Compared with day work only, an increased hazard of aggressive prostate cancer was found in workers exposed to ?19.5 years of rollover shift work.” 

Blue light makes it hard to sleep

Do you play a videogame or check email you go to bed? With regard to digital screens, exposure to artificial light at night, particularly “blue light”, at night interrupts one’s internal clock.  This type of light has short wavelengths. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Biomedical Physics and Engineering cautions, “While blue wavelengths during the day can enhance attention and reaction times, they are disruptive at night and are associated with a wide range of health problems such as poor sleep quality, mental health problems, and increased risk of some cancers.”

Preparing to sleep

Therefore, it stands to reason that good nightly sleep habits preserve a healthy circadian rhythm for optimum prostate (and overall) health. Understandably, if you’re a night shift worker you can’t avoid circadian disruption. The Sleep Foundation offers advice for maximizing rest when your job requires you to flip day and night. But, when it comes to artificial blue light at night, a 2011 national sleep survey found that 90% of Americans reported using a technological device in the bedroom in the hour before trying to sleep. This is not a wise practice. If you value the well being of your heart, your mind, your immune system, your prostate gland, turn off your devices earlier in order to reduce the amount of blue light entering through your eyes to your brain. This can help your circadian rhythm naturally prepare for sleep as well as boost the quality of sleep you get.

Here’s an example of how improved sleep might help prostate cancer patients who go through prostatectomy surgery and have urinary incontinence as a side effect. A 2024 study titled, “Sleep Quality and Urinary Incontinence in Prostate Cancer Patients” linked poor sleep with worse incontinence. The evidence showed that PCa patients who suffered from insomnia had longer term urinary leakage during their recovery than those whose problem resolved sooner thanks their good night’s sleep.

This is not an Aesop’s fable, but it comes with a moral: Let sleep be thy prostate health’s guardian.

NOTE: This content is solely for purposes of information and does not substitute for diagnostic or medical advice. Talk to your doctor if you are experiencing pelvic pain, or have any other health concerns or questions of a personal medical nature.