Shut down your computer and hop into bed (but not before you finish reading this of course!). Though abysmal eating habits are definitely a huge aspect of obesity and poor health, a new study shows all those late nights spent watching David Letterman and surfing YouTube is also be contributing to the problem.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that chronic sleep loss may increase health risks such as obesity, diabetes, depression and high blood pressure, to name a few. Of the adults surveyed, 10 per cent indicated they had not slept an adequate amount of time every night of the prior month, while 38 per cent admitted to not sleeping enough for sever or more days of the previous month. Overall statistics indicate that the number of adults sleeping six hours or less each night increased from 1985 to 2006, with 50 to 70 million Americans suffering from chronic sleep loss and disorders.

"At night, we're doing everything except for sleeping — we're on the Internet, we may be watching TV. With these new lifestyles we have kind of taken sleep for granted as something that we can do when we have time or we can catch up on it on the weekends," CDC behavioral scientist Lela McKnight-Eily, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "We don't realize that sleep is a vital part of overall health and that chronic sleep loss is related to both physical and mental health issues," she added. "It's getting worse."

I admittedly am horribly guilty of this bad habit. I always intend to get into bed early and then inevitably find every little distraction under the roof of my home to prevent it from happening. And of course when I'm at work the following day, staring at my computer screen desperately trying to keep my eyes open, I can't even recall what was so important that I couldn't crawl into bed at a reasonable time. Maybe I need to start keeping a "sleep" journal - sort of like a food journal, but instead of documenting what I eat, I can write down my activities prior to going to bed to see if I can pinpoint some of my habits and work on changing them.

» MSNBC Health