Lack of sleep makes people far more likely to get a cold

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sneezes into a tissue after addressing the members of parliament on her positions ahead of an EU summit and on Greece rescue efforts at the Bundestag lower house of parliament in Berlin on June 18, 2015 (JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

Not getting enough sleep makes people far more likely to get a cold and breaks people’s physical health, according to a new study.

A study saw people subjected to differing amounts of sleep and then exposed to the cold virus — and found that those that got less time in bed were considerably more likely to get ill.

Those that sleep less than six hours a night were more than four times more likely to catch a cold than those that had slept more than seven hours, the study found.

"It goes beyond feeling groggy or irritable," said Aric Prather, one of the lead authors of the study, in a statement. "Not getting enough sleep affects your physical health."

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The study put 164 adults through a series of screenings and questions to build up a picture of their lives and health. It then tracked their sleep over seven days that watched how deeply and long they slept.

The subjects were then put in a hotel and exposed to the cold virus. They were then monitored for a week using mucus analysis to see whether the virus had taken hold.

The findings showed that those sleeping for under six hours were 4.2 times more likely to get the cold. Those that slept less than five hours were 4.5 times more likely to get it.

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"Sleep goes beyond all the other factors that were measured," Prather said in a statement. "It didn't matter how old people were, their stress levels, their race, education or income. It didn't matter if they were a smoker. With all those things taken into account, statistically sleep still carried the day and was an overwhelmingly strong predictor for susceptibility to the cold virus."

Prather said that the results showed that people should treat sleep in the same way they do diet and exercise, as an important part of their help. "We need more studies like this to begin to drive home that sleep is a critical piece to our well-being,” said Prather.