Do you really need 8-hour sleep every night?
????Sleep is so important, we need it to live.?And when we can’t sleep, we’re desperate for help.?But lately, our fascination with sleep feels as if it’s taken on an urgency.
?????Do a quick internet search for sleep, and you will find a slew of articles about how to make your sleep perfect.?New gadget, fancy alarm clock, stay away from blue light.?There are lots of services, products, and advice columns.?That tell us we are sleeping wrong.?Not enough: wrong quality sleep, wrong position.?Even worse, you might find scary messaging, claiming that if you are not sleeping right, your life is gonna be shorter, you gonna get all kinds of diseases.?One of the biggest worries we have about our sleep is that we are not getting enough.?And that anything that less than 7 hours a night means that we are doomed to bad health.?Everything from high blood pressure to Alzheimer’s disease.?
????But there are two flaws with these kinds of messaging.?
????The first flaw, is that it’s not completely accurate.?7-8 hours of sleep, while, recommended for adults is just an average.?And while messages have to be simplified for health communication to the public, sometimes important nuances get lost.?So yes, it’s true not getting enough sleep in the long term is associated with health problems, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression.?But fixating solely on the 7-8 hours of sleep ignores the fact that there is a range of sleep that people need.?The duration of a good night's sleep can be different for different people.?Some adults need 8, but someone are just fine on 6.?
????The second? flaw with this kind of doomsday messaging is that can be?counterproductive.?Especially for people who do have trouble sleeping.?For instance, in 2019, it was estimated that 21% of adults in the US were wearing sleep-tracking devices, and that number is probably growing.?And I get it, it’s fascinating to see how much sleep you’ve gotten each night.?And to know what part of your night was spent in deep sleep or dreaming.?But having all that sleep data is causing some people to become obsessed with it,?so much so, that it’s leading to a condition, some called orthosomnia.?A preoccupation with the constant need to achieve perfect sleep.?And this condition ironically is causing more sleep problems.?Now orthosomnia might be am extreme example.?But the anxiety of not getting enough sleep is keeping some of us up at night.
????So here’s what some experts are saying.?Stop fixating on the number.?Because that can lead to unrealistic expectations of sleep.?According to doctor Colleen Carney, a?psychologist and the head of the Ryerson university sleep lab.?The basic questions you should ask yourself are:
Do I feel reasonably well rested during the day
Do I generally sleep through the night without disturbances
Or if I wake, do I fall back asleep easily
Can I stay awake through the day without involuntarily falling asleep
?????If your answers are yes to all three, you probably don’t need to worry about your sleep.?And if you’re struggling with your sleep, instead of buying expensive blue light filter or fancy sleep trackers.?Try talking with your doctor?to make sure there aren’t any medical condition needs to be explored first then try evidence-based recommendations.?Laid out by the American academy of sleep medicine.?What’s really cool is that there a highly effective therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia?Or CBT-I.?It doesn’t have any medication involved, and it has a really low failure rate
