How Important is Sleep?

We all sleep, and almost certainly not as much or as soundly as we would want. Just how important is sleep? Are there hazards connected with not sleeping as long as we would prefer? New research implies that sleep is substantially more important than you might have believed.

Animal research suggest that sleeping is as critical as food for survival. Rats, for example, typically live about two or three years, but they live only about 5 weeks when they are deprived of REM sleep and merely 2 or 3 weeks if they’re deprived of all of the sleep stages-a time period similar to death resulting from starvation. But how much sleep do people really need? To help answer that issue, scientists look at how much people sleep when time and agenda are not at issue, the average degree of sleep amongst different age groups, and how much sleeping tests show is required to be most effective.

Any time healthy adults receive unrestricted opportunity to sleep, they sleep on average between 8 and 8.5 hours a night. However sleep needs vary from one person to another. Some people apparently require only about 7 hours in order to avoid problem sleepiness whereas some others will need 9 if not more hours of sleep. Sleeping preferences also shift through the entire life cycle. Newborns rest between 16 and 18 hours a day, and youngsters in preschool sleep somewhere between 10 and 12 hours each day. And how important is sleep to kids? Well, school age children and teenagers need to have at least 9 hours rest each night.

The bodily hormone influences of puberty tend to alter youngster’s Circadian_rhythm. Consequently, teens will probably turn in later than younger children and adults, plus they tend to want to sleep later each morning. This sleep-wake habit is opposed to earlier morning start times of a lot of high schools and helps make clear the reasons why most teenagers get an average of just seven to seven and a half hours of sleep each night. It also helps explain why teens can be so very difficult!

As people get older, the pattern of sleep also changes-especially the amount of time spent in the deep sleeping stages. Children seem to require much more of their sleeping time be spend in deep sleep than do adults. This explains why children can sleep through loud noises and why they might not wake up when they are moved from the car to their beds. Once the adolescent years begin, a large part of this deep sleep is replaced by much lighter stage 2 sleep. Between young adulthood and midlife, the percentage of deep sleep falls again- from less than 20 percent to less than 5 percent, one study suggests-and is replaced with lighter sleep (stages 1 and 2). From midlife through late life, most people’s sleeping pattern has more interruptions by wakefulness during the night. As these sleep interruptions increase with age we are faced with losing even more sleep.

Many older people complain of various sleeping disorder symptoms; difficulty falling asleep, early morning awakenings, frequent and long awakenings during the night, daytime sleepiness, and a lack of refreshing sleep. Many sleep problems, however, are not a natural aspect of sleep in the elderly. Because older people are more likely to have illnesses that can disrupt sleep, their sleep complaints often may be due, in part, to illnesses or the medications used to treat them. One research study targeted true sleeping problem in older adults and found that there were, in reality, very few. Some of the other, non sleep related causes of disrupted sleep included restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, issues with a bed partner, and others.

We spend about a third of our time on earth asleep yet science is just beginning to understand what it means to “sleep”. We are beginning to understand our need for sleep changes as we age and there are true conditions termed “sleep disorders”.