How Mush Sleep Does One Need?

If you are interested in protecting your health and feeling as good as you can, there are tons of steps that can be taken to improve your overall wellbeing. When it comes to health and wellbeing, there are few areas of your lifestyle that are as important as your sleeping habits. Sleep serves a variety of important biological purposes and one of the keys to a happy and healthy life is getting the right amount of sleep every night. With that being said, it can be somewhat difficult to determine the appropriate level of sleep that an individual should be getting.

Unfortunately, the proper amount of sleep is not something that can be boiled down to hard number that will work for everyone. A wide-range of factors play a role in determining how much sleep you need and some of these factors are hard to measure. The appropriate amount of sleep can be affected by your age, health factors, environment and lifestyle. It is also believed that there are certain genetic factors that may cause some people to need more sleep than others.

Age

In regard to the amount of sleep that you need, age is one of the easier factors to quantify. For young children and infants the general rule is that they should get about 9-10 hours of sleep a night and about 3 hours of nap time during the day. With older children and teenagers the rule is about 9-11 hours per night and for adults the figure is about 7-9 hours. Older adults need the same amount of sleep as younger adults, but for older adults, there tends to be a lack of sleep quality, which requires them to spend more time in bed. That’s pretty easy to understand, but the problem becomes a little more complicated when you consider the other factors that contribute to your sleep needs.

Sleep quality

The amount of time that you spend in bed is only as useful as the quality of sleep that you are getting. If your sleep is restless and constantly interrupted, the quality of sleep is not very good. Poor sleep quality will mean that the individual will need to spend more time sleeping to make up for the lack of quality. The quality of sleep can be diminished by a variety of factors such as pain, stress, environmental disturbances and health problems.

Sleep debt

Another problem with determining the appropriate amount of sleep for the individual is what is known as sleep debt. This is a term that is used to describe the amount of sleep that an individual is missing. If you are regularly meeting your sleep needs, you won’t build a sleep debt. Individuals that frequently fall short of their sleep needs will have a sleep debt and over time this builds up. This affects the amount of sleep that is needed, because the individual will need more time to make up for the sleep that they missed on previous nights.

Getting the proper amount of sleep is a significant factor in regard to health and happiness. A lack of sleep can have an impact on your health in a variety of ways. It can be a contributing factor to things like heart disease, respiratory conditions, kidney disease, depression and obesity.

Getting the right amount of sleep is also important for proper brain function. This can impact your motor skills and your ability to learn or perform basic tasks. Since sleep is a part of the foundation of good health, every individual should be concerned with the amount of sleep that they are getting and we should all take steps to ensure that we are getting the right amount of sleep on a regular basis.