Ever been lying in bed furious that your partner won’t stop snoring? You’ve done the thing where you bounce on the bed hoping it will wake them so you can get to sleep in the brief window where they’re not snoring. You’ve done the “pretend like you’re not prodding them but prod them” move. You’ve ever done the full push. Nothing has helped. Maybe the solution is less TV.
A study out of the Harvard Medical School found that spending more time in front of the TV increases your chance of sleep apnoea by 78 per cent. They monitored the health of 138,000 different folks and found that people who watched four plus hours of television a day were more likely to snore come bedtime.
It’s not just television, though, any sedentary behaviour increases people’s risk of their face producing the sound of a freight train when they shut their eyes. Office jobs, or sitting and staring out the window for hours on end had the same effect. Those people in the study who sat a lot were 49 per cent more likely to develop sleep apnoea.
There was no research on whether watching The Project helped with sleep, but surely there couldn’t be any harm in watching the whole hour every night and then rewatching it again on TenPlay. Just don’t watch four hour’s worth of The Project nightly. That’s when the trouble starts.
If you’re having to prod your partner in the middle of the night, maybe prod them off the couch earlier in the evening. Go for a run instead. Actually, that’s a weird idea. Don’t go for a run at night. Maybe stand up and watch a movie together. Would that help? The study isn’t clear if that would be a helpful idea. Somebody call the Harvard Medical School up and ask them if standing and watching Men In Black II is good for your sleep.