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Why Polish nurses live 20 years shorter?  Excerpt from the book “How to live to 100”

Why Polish nurses live 20 years shorter? Excerpt from the book “How to live to 100”

Nowadays, it is no longer an art to live to be eighty or even one hundred years old, but how to enjoy good health and the best possible shape at this age? There are many ways to do this, some seem obvious, others less so. Julian Sobiech, a physiotherapist, dietician and author of the popular blog jakdozycsetki.pl has collected them in his book.

Time cannot be stopped, but … you can successfully slow it down. By properly caring for the body, we make it wear out more slowly. Just what does “properly” mean? This is what you can learn from Julian Sobiech’s book “How to live to be a hundred”, an excerpt of which is published below. Based on research, its author explains what we should pay special attention to in order to improve our condition and health. And for a long time.

When work shortens life…

Chronic sleep deprivation worsens and shortens life. This is particularly evident on the example of people working in shifts, who also perform their duties at night. They constitute eight percent of professionally active Polish women and men. And this is a very important eight percent, because among them there are representatives of professions without which social life would not be possible – for example nurses. Reports about their lives reveal a picture of specialists (and specialists) with an ambivalent approach to their profession. On the one hand, helping and saving lives is a source of satisfaction for many of them, but it also costs a lot of strength and stress – although this is a huge understatement.

According to the data of the Supreme Chamber of Nurses and Midwives from 2020, the average Polish nurse dies 20 years earlier than the average Polish woman from outside the industry, living to be 61, not 81! Statistically, he loses a quarter of his life, and in addition to stress and physical strain, sleep disorders are a significant part of the blame.

Many studies on this subject have been carried out in our country, and their summary can be found in the report by Dr. Beata Babiarczyk and Małgorzata Bujok with a telling title: Occurrence of sleep disorders among nurses working in shifts. Here are some of the most important conclusions:

• 53 percent of surveyed nurses had sleep disorders

• 27 percent suffered from chronic insomnia

• the more advanced the age, the more frequent sleep disturbances are

• the more night shifts, the more frequent sleep disturbances.

A very important clue is the part about the number of night shifts. According to the authors, the easiest way to limit the damage is to take no more than one such shift per week. Among nurses who worked from zero to five nights a month, six percent had insomnia. Among those taking nine or more nights, 44 percent.

Staying up late at night and health

There are at least a few reasons. For example, it has been shown that working night shifts reduces the production of melatonin – a hormone responsible for sleep and circadian rhythm control. In the short term, this is a reasonable adaptation on the part of the brain: since its owner must be active at night, you must try to limit its drowsiness. Later in the day, unfortunately, it is impossible to make up for the losses, so night shift workers on average have far too low levels of melatonin. As a result, it is harder for them to fall asleep and sleep well. The negative effect increases with age, because the production of the sleep hormone decreases anyway over the years – the pineal gland, its factory in the brain, calcifies. Therefore, we should take care of sleep at any age, but the older a person, the more important it is.

Staying up at night also disturbs the secretion of cortisol (stress hormone) as well as ghrelin and leptin (hunger and satiety hormones). Therefore, regular night work increases the risk of obesity. Healthy and effective weight loss (at a moderate pace and without the risk of deficiencies) consists of many factors, and most of them are under our control. However, there are no strong against dysregulated hormones – strong will is not enough, as many women suffering from hormone fluctuations during PMS (premenstrual syndrome) know. If your resolutions sabotage your own body, it is much harder to succeed in the pursuit of a healthier figure. By the way, the symptoms of PMS – irritability, sadness, low self-esteem, but also swelling, intestinal problems, joint pain or migraines – can also be aggravated by working night shifts.

Pregnant women are also at risk. When developing recommendations for them, one must be very delicate and careful, because not one life is at stake, but at least two. Scientists are also cautious in their conclusions. Despite this, the data collected so far indicate that the risk of premature birth or miscarriage is higher both for women who work night shifts and for those who work more than 55 hours a week. The scientific evidence is so strong that it would be reasonable for managers or politicians to consider abandoning forced maternity staffing on night shifts. If a pregnant woman wants to work and feels up to it, she has the full right to do so, of course, but from a medical point of view, she should not overexploit the body.

Working at night increases the risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases by 17 percent. This is an average result – just after starting a night job, the harmful effect is small, but every five years of working in this mode increases the risk by seven percent. In short, the longer you work night shifts, the higher your risk of having a heart attack or stroke. And in addition, if it comes down to it, it is 20 percent harder for doctors to save such a person.

Does waking up time matter?

However, if 53 percent of nurses and nurses working in shifts suffer from sleep disorders, it also means that almost half … do not have such problems! They feel tired, experience the effects of sleep deprivation, but they can adapt to the situation quite well – enough to fall asleep efficiently and rest reasonably effectively. It is interesting to see how people who are able to sleep the sleep of the righteous fare even when their schedule or environment is not conducive to them. Most of the solutions they use can be used by every healthy person.

We know for sure that it is the quality of sleep that counts, rather than its quantity. Statistically, it’s best to sleep for 7-8 hours, but if you sleep five, six or nine hours and feel like you’re really getting enough sleep, then this mode will also be very good. And if you need more than 10 hours of sleep or you don’t sleep at all, think about seeing a doctor – preferably in the so-called. a sleep clinic staffed by qualified medics and psychotherapists. The participation of the latter is equally important, because taking care of sleep often involves working on fears, thinking patterns or learning to de-stress and relax the mind.

The time of getting up doesn’t matter. From a medical point of view, getting up at five in the morning is no better than getting up at nine. For everyone, the effective part of the day lasts more or less the same – if someone gets up three hours earlier, they also have to go to bed three hours earlier. Possible differences in the length of the active part of the day in healthy people result only from natural needs – one person will sleep in six hours, and another in nine hours. It doesn’t matter what time you go to bed and wake up. The real question is what is the perfect time for me?

Each of us has our own chronotype (owls, larks or neutral), and it is like a spring – you can bend it a bit, but it will return to its original shape at the first opportunity. It’s a trait we get in DNA, and it’s encoded by many different genes. Of course, this does not mean that an owl cannot get up at five in the morning and get to work. It will do it if necessary, but it will not achieve optimal efficiency in the first hours (…).

Subheadings are editorial.

Excerpt from the book by Julian Sobiech, How to Live to Hundred, Wydawnictwo Wielka Litera, Warsaw 2023.

Source: Gazeta

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