Sleep and you. I was talking to a woman the other day who mentioned that because of living in the desert southwest, she gets up at two in the morning to take her morning walk. After that she cleans her house, makes breakfast, gardens and runs errands.
As she continued to list all her activities, I marveled that she seemed to be wide awake and relatively healthy. We were in a yoga class together, and she was doing better than I was. I asked her when she went to bed at night. I figured she must absolutely collapse somewhere around five in the afternoon. “Oh, no,” she replied. “I go to bed around nine o’clock.”
The woman survives on five hours of sleep a night and seems quite happy with that.
On the other hand, I belong to the group of people who needs more sleep. My average is about seven hours. But there are a number of times I’ve wondered if even with that generous sleep allotment if I’m not still a little sleep-deprived.
According to Ying-Hui Fu, a human geneticist at UC-San Francisco, only a small segment of our population can get by on fewer than six hours of sleep a night. Ninety percent of our population needs between seven and nine hours of sleep per twenty-four hour period.
That would put me at the lower end of normal, but perhaps giving myself an extra half an hour a day might not be a bad idea. Lack of adequate sleep makes us less alert. Our memory isn’t nearly as good and we also find ourselves less tolerant of daily stressors.
According to Ying-Hui Fu, sleep deprivation is one of the most expensive problems our society faces today. Sleep loss is tied to everything from obesity and heart disease to reduced fertility and learning problems.
When we haven’t had enough sleep, we can’t make good decision. Simple problem solving skills elude us. Our communication efforts are often misunderstood. We become inflexible in our behaviors and can’t think creatively.
Unless you’re truly a “short sleeper”, one of a very few in our general population, you need more sleep. Short sleepers thrive on far less than the average amount of sleep, and it seems to run in families.
But most people who think that the less they sleep, the more they have to brag about, need to think again. You’re probably lying to yourself. You are either genetically predisposed to being a short-sleeper, or you’re one of the walking zombies of sleep-deprived Americans subsisting on increasing amounts of caffeine to power ourselves through our day.
Check yourself. Take an entire week and sleep nine hours every night. Are you more productive? Innovative? Cheerful? Then you need more sleep than you’ve been getting.
Warning. Sleeping longer than nine hours a day seems to cause as many problems as sleeping fewer than seven hours a day. Find your happy medium and enjoy life through newly wide-awake eyes.
Photo Credit : Sad man holding pillow from Vic via Flickr