Scientists claim that maintaining a healthy diet and exercise routine can help you feel young, but the secret to feeling youthful may lie in getting enough sleep.

According to a recent study, you can feel years younger if you get seven or nine hours of sleep each night.

In the meantime, Stockholm University researchers found that sleeping less than eight hours a night can make you feel ten years older.

Being youthful is more than simply a feeling. Research has revealed a positive correlation between feeling young and improved health results.

A longer, healthier life expectancy and a younger brain are linked to feeling younger than one’s actual age.

Leonie Balter, researcher at the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University, explained: “Given that sleep is essential for brain function and overall well-being, we decided to test whether sleep holds any secrets to preserving a youthful sense of age.”

“While previous literature has shown that feeling older is associated with worse sleep quality, our data indicate that sleep may be more important for subjective age than the other way around,” researchers wrote in the paper.