Is this much enough? Clang/Trunkarchive.com
WE ALL know 8 hours is the magic number for a decent night’s sleep. Or is it?
Nobody seems to know where this number came from. In questionnaires, people tend to say they sleep for between 7 and 9 hours a night, which might explain why 8 hours has become a rule of thumb. But people also tend to overestimate how long they have been out for the count.
According to , who studies sleep at the University of California, Los Angeles, the 8 hour rule has no basis in our evolutionary past – his study of tribal cultures with no access to electricity found that . “And those people are pretty healthy,” adds at the University of Surrey, UK.
Sleep – a user’s guide: We answer all the questions keeping you up at night
So perhaps 8 hours is the wrong target and we can get by just fine with 7. This seems to be a minimum requirement. A recent analysis in the US concluded that regularly getting less sleep than that increases the risk of obesity, heart disease, depression, and early death, and recommended that .
Sleep: the magic numbers
By this benchmark, recent reports seem to suggest we are walking around in a state of sleep deprivation. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 35 per cent of US adults are getting , and a survey in the UK found that . The media widely state that…
