"Sleep," Winston Churchill once said, "to gather strength for the morning."

He was right: Sleep is immensely important. And though you may think you're getting enough, odds are you are probably not:

Three factors determine 80%+ of our longevity — diet, exercise and sleep. Of those, sleep is by far the easiest to get right.

...We aren't. 1 in 3 American adults don't get enough sleep — defined as 7 or more hours a night — per a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

• The average American adult slept 7.9 hours a night in the 1940s. That has dropped to 6.8 hours a night.

How important is getting a healthy amount of sleep each night? Very:

• Medical research has linked insufficient sleep to obesity, depression, anxiety, and even heart failure and dementia.
• Lack of sleep also drives up individuals' costs of health care and companies' loss of productivity, studies have shown. Employees who aren't getting enough rest are far likelier to be unfocused, miss days of work or get injured on the job.

Basically the message is: Go to bed earlier!

Sleep is still rather poorly understand, but what we do understand about it underscores its importance:

"Sleep is not a dead state," says Cappuccio. "It's like pressing the 'save' button on a computer."

• Your body is repairing tissue, organizing thoughts and consolidating memory.

Get that sleep, folks! Your life kinda depends on it!

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