Sleep is a blissful experience but only a few of us allow ourselves the amount of happy slumber we really need.
Everyone has experienced the dreaded effects of sleep deprivation. Your eyes feel droopy, your legs go wobbly and your brains is so tired that you exist in a sort of fog.
To prevent this, we’ve all been told as adults to get eight(8) hours of sleep but isn’t that a myth? how many hours of rest do we actually need?
Back in the year 1938, Researcher Nathaniel Kleitman dragged one of his students into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.
The pair lived for an entire month in an environment completely devoid of sunlight.
When the researchers went back and analyzed their own sleep patterns, they found that slept around eight(8) hours a night. They were in a pitch-black cave with no sunlight to wake them up.
In a more recent study, researchers had participants stay in a lab overnight and allowed them to sleep in for as long as they wanted.
Turns out that even those free sleepers still ended up voluntarily sleeping about eight(8) hours a night. But what happens if you get less than those optimal eight hours of sleep?
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Sleep plays a vital role in the functioning of nearly every organ system in the body. An obvious one is your brain and subsequently your cognitive functioning.
In 2002, a pair of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Walter Reed Army Research Institute deprived participants for two weeks straight of an increasing number of hours of sleep.
They found that for every last hour of sleep, participants’ cognitive functioning went steadily down. In fact, they found that one sleepless night is the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
That’s settled, we should all be getting no less than eight(8) hours of sleep per night. No exceptions but we are all busy. So is it ok to get less than eight hours on the weekdays but make up for those lost hours on the weekends.
Unfortunately, that would be too easy. The researchers found that once you’re asleep deprived, it takes longer than three days to recover from those lost hours. Even if you are allowed to sleep as much as you want for those three days.
If you are one of those people that thinks they can survive on less, try for those perfect eight(8) hours for a few weeks. You just might find yourself seeing things more clearly.
Reference: Popular Science
