Why is it important to sleep enough?
Good sleep improves your brain performance, mood, and health. Not getting enough quality sleep regularly raises the risk of many diseases and disorders. These range from heart disease and stroke to obesity and dementia.
Getting adequate sleep also increases your productivity by making you feel more energetic and giving you the time you need to rest. It also helps our lives be in a good mood, and good sleep puts a person in a good mood. Sleeping enough also allows our minds to function correctly and in a better way.
Students should get the proper amount of sleep at night to help stay focused, improve concentration, and improve academic performance. Children and adolescents who do not get enough sleep have a higher risk for many health problems, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, poor mental health, and injuries.
For adults, getting less than seven hours of sleep a night on a regular basis has been linked with poor health, including weight gain, having a body mass index of 30 or higher, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and depression.
Sleep is an essential and involuntary process, without which we cannot function effectively. It is as essential to our bodies as eating, drinking and breathing, and is vital for maintaining good mental and physical health. Sleeping helps to repair and restore our brains, not just our bodies.
Not only is sleep an essential process to the body's everyday functions, it can also help to ward off cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Our brains use around 20 percent of the body's total energy consumption. One of the main functions of sleep is to replenish the hard-working brain circuitry.
Sleep is not only beneficial to physical health but to emotional health, safety and quality of life. A good night's sleep improves learning of any type as it helps in maintaining attention, making decisions, and being creative.
Sleep is absolutely essential to all animals, including humans. Insufficient sleep reduces our learning, memory and cognitive abilities, causes brain impairment and increases the risks of numerous diseases from cancer to diabetes, coronary heart diseases and even death.
“Sleep affects almost every tissue in our bodies,” says Dr. Michael Twery, a sleep expert at NIH. “It affects growth and stress hormones, our immune system, appetite, breathing, blood pressure and cardiovascular health.” Research shows that lack of sleep increases the risk for obesity, heart disease and infections.
Sleep needs can vary from person to person, but in general, experts recommend that healthy adults get an average of 7 to 9 hours per night of shuteye. If you regularly need more than 8 or 9 hours of sleep per night to feel rested, it might be a sign of an underlying problem, Polotsky says.
What is good quality sleep?
The recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult is at least seven hours. Most people don't need more than eight hours in bed to be well rested. Go to bed and get up at the same time every day, including weekends. Being consistent reinforces your body's sleep-wake cycle.
Scientists agree that sleep is essential to health, and while stages 1 to 4 and REM sleep are all important, deep sleep is the most essential of all for feeling rested and staying healthy. The average healthy adult gets roughly 1 to 2 hours of deep sleep per 8 hours of nightly sleep.
Sleep is a state of rest. When we wake up, we feel fresh, become alert and ready for the normal activities of the day. During sleep, our muscles relax and the heart beat becomes slower. Sleep is the most common experience.
While we may not often think about why we sleep, most of us acknowledge at some level that sleep makes us feel better. We feel more alert, more energetic, happier, and better able to function following a good night of sleep.
Word. The word "sleep" comes from the old Old Germanic verbs for sleep. In Old and Middle High German, it was called "SLAF". The original meaning of the word was "to slap", which was related to the word for "flabby" (not hard or firm).
Sleep is nature's method of repairing the body,and proper sleep keeps us healthy, strong and resilient both physically and mentally. Countless studies have shown the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, which include heart disease, stroke, diabetes and depression, just to name a handful.
Some of the most serious potential problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation are high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, heart failure or stroke. Other potential problems include obesity, depression, reduced immune system function and lower sex drive.
A number of chronic health conditions may be affected by not getting enough sleep on a regular basis. These include high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, coronary heart disease and some cancers. You may also be more likely to have a stroke. You're at greater risk of injury.
Rest is vital for better mental health, increased concentration and memory, a healthier immune system, reduced stress, improved mood and even a better metabolism.
“While consistently getting less than the recommended amount of sleep has been associated with multiple adverse health outcomes, sleeping more than nine hours per night regularly may also be detrimental,” Makekau says. She says oversleeping can lead to: Increased fatigue and low energy. Decrease in immune function.
How does sleep reduce stress?
Sleep decreases cortisol levels
A lack of sleep can cause the body to react as if it's in distress, releasing more of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol is responsible for your fight or flight reaction to danger, increasing your heart rate in anticipation of a fight.
Other factors that affect sleep include stress and many medical conditions, especially those that cause chronic pain or other discomfort. External factors, such as what we eat and drink, the medications we take, and the environment in which we sleep can also greatly affect the quantity and quality of our sleep.
Your quality of sleep is just as important to your well-being and often more strongly relates to your overall health than does the quantity of sleep.
Sometimes life calls and we don't get enough sleep. But five hours of sleep out of a 24-hour day isn't enough, especially in the long term. According to a 2018 study of more than 10,000 people, the body's ability to function declines if sleep isn't in the seven- to eight-hour range.
Recommended Hours of Sleep by Age
Older adults require seven to eight hours of sleep per 24-hour period. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers less than seven hours per night to be short sleep. cdc.gov , which means for most people, six hours of sleep is not enough.
For most people, 4 hours of sleep per night isn't enough to wake up feeling rested and mentally alert, no matter how well they sleep. There's a common myth that you can adapt to chronically restricted sleep, but there's no evidence that the body functionally adapts to sleep deprivation.
No, 5 hours of sleep isn't enough once a week. For optimum energy levels, good health, and maximum performance, you need to meet your individual sleep need each night — which is most likely more than 5 hours.
| Age Group | Recommended Hours of Sleep Per Day | |
|---|---|---|
| Newborn | 0–3 months | 14–17 hours (National Sleep Foundation)1 No recommendation (American Academy of Sleep Medicine)2 |
| School Age | 6–12 years | 9–12 hours per 24 hours2 |
| Teen | 13–18 years | 8–10 hours per 24 hours2 |
| Adult | 18–60 years | 7 or more hours per night3 |
People should aim for 7–9 hours of sleep each night. However, the best times to go to sleep and wake up will vary among individuals. Many different factors, including a person's age, work schedule, and sleep patterns, affect the ideal sleep time.
It boils down to your biological sleep need. Seven to nine hours may be the gold standard for a solid night's kip, but your personal requirements are determined by genetics. A handful of bright-eyed outliers benefit from a mutated gene, hDEC2, which allows their body to thrive after just four hours between the sheets.
Do naps count as sleep?
If you nap in the morning, the sleep consists primarily of light NREM (and possibly REM) sleep. In contrast, napping later in the evening, as your sleep drive increases, will comprise more deep sleep. This, in turn, may disrupt your ability to fall asleep at night. Therefore, napping late in the day is discouraged.
The longest recorded time without sleep is approximately 264 hours, or just over 11 consecutive days. Although it's unclear exactly how long humans can survive without sleep, it isn't long before the effects of sleep deprivation start to show. After only three or four nights without sleep, you can start to hallucinate.
Your height fluctuates by roughly 0.3 inches from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed due to compression on your spine throughout the day. If you measure yourself in the morning, you'll likely notice that you're slightly taller than you are in the evening.
Insomnia is a common sleep disorder that can make it hard to fall asleep, hard to stay asleep, or cause you to wake up too early and not be able to get back to sleep. You may still feel tired when you wake up.
This is because our brain is constantly forming new connections while we are awake. The longer we are awake, the more active our minds become. Scientists believe that this is partly why sleep deprivation has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. However, there are negative outcomes of this, too.
He says he likes getting around six to six-and-a-half hours of sleep per night. Sleeping in is not an option for him, saying it affects his performance more than if he sleeps less. After getting up, he showers, dresses, and enjoys a morning cup of coffee.
Having trouble getting that ideal 8 hours of sleep? So is everyone else. But there's some good news — you may only need 7 hours of it. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and the Sleep Research Society (SRS) have issued a new recommendation, saying seven is the magic sleep number for most healthy adults.