Expert says you need 8 hours of sleep. How much do you really get each night?
It's no secret that sleep deprivation does bad things to your brain and your body. But how many Zzzz's do we really need to get by-and how much more would we require in order to be at our best every day?
A recent study by David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the magic number is eight. Test subjects who logged a solid eight hours of sleep per night had very few any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the course of Dinges' two-week study, but subjects who got just six hours of slumber "were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight - the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk," The New York Times reported.
With plenty of stimulation (coffee, anyone?) we do cope, of course. And even Dignes acknowledges that not every sleeper is the same; about 5 percent of the population, he estimates, are fine with five or fewer hours of sleep per night-possibly for genetic reasons-while another small percentage needs nine or even 10 hours just to get by.
"We expect to sleep for eight solid hours, but that's actually not normal compared with global populations and our own evolutionary history," Carol Worthman, PhD, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reader's Digest. "People naturally wake up two or three times a night. It's worrying about it that's the problem."
As the breadwinning mom in a blended family who works full time outside of the home, I don't think I've consistently gotten a solid eight hours of shut-eye since the late-1990s. Sugar and caffeine are my best buddies, and I'm only partly joking. Does anyone with kids really get a solid eight hours every night-or at all? (And if so, please share your secret!)
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