How long is a healthy sleep?

For many years, doctors and scientists have been discussing what is the normal duration of sleep for a person. For a long time it was believed that it was an eight-hour rest that restores strength in the body as much as possible. But in recent years, not everyone agrees with this.

Sleep is a very complex phenomenon. And the duration of sleep is far from the only factor that affects a person's well-being. The continuity of sleep, the presence of sleep phases, the emotional state with which a person falls asleep are very important.

Sleep is considered to be the mechanism that is able to translate all the events that happened to a person during the day or simply experienced in life into a form convenient for analysis. This is a kind of function of the brain, with the help of which the body tries to build all experiences and emotions into a single correct chain. And in parallel with this, physical strength is also restored.

Scientists have proven that if we sleep less than 8 hours, a special protein, amyloid, accumulates in the blood, which destroys the walls of blood vessels and affects the connective tissue, causing heart disease.

As a rule, in a dream a person is disturbed by those moments that the subconscious considers the most important for the emotional state and life of a person. Sometimes a person himself does not understand why he dreams of some people or events that he does not think about at all and does not even remember. But the fact is that here the subconscious mind itself decides what is really important for a person.

Each of us needs to work out for ourselves the optimal duration and mode of rest. If a person is deprived of sleep, then he will begin sleep-deprivation psychosis, against which pathologies develop in the form of hallucinations. Sometimes a person goes into a coma. In other words, the body simply begins to sleep while awake.

Duration of rest for people of different ages

As a rule, the more experiences and emotions a person experiences during the day, the more he needs to sleep at night. For this reason, babies and children at a very young age sleep so much. But still, scientists calculated the average number of hours of sleep for people of different ages. Let's consider all this in more detail, based on the descriptions of such time intervals.

The amount of sleep needed varies as the brain takes different times to recover at different ages.

Babies who are still breastfeeding should sleep about 14 to 16 hours a night. In this case, all the time of sleep is considered in total, since it is often not possible to put the child to bed so that he sleeps continuously for many hours in a row. This is due to the need for periodic frequent feeding of the baby.

The average duration of night sleep for children from one to two years is 10-11 hours. The long sleep time is explained by the fact that during the day the child has a lot of emotions, as he begins to explore the world around him. At the same time, he perceives everything new emotionally at first, so the rest should be appropriate.

When the baby gets a little older, he should sleep for 12-13 hours. This applies to all children aged 2 to 6 years. Such a slight decrease in sleep duration is explained by the fact that the child learns the world, but reacts to all new things not so emotionally.

From 7 to 14 years, the duration of night sleep should be reduced even more - up to 10 hours. Despite the fact that this age is characterized by increased physical activity of children, this time is quite enough for the body to fully rest and restore its strength.

From the age of 15, a child is already considered old enough, so scientists note that the time of night rest should be 7-8 hours a day. This also applies to all other people who are not yet 50 years old. The exception is people who are sick. For them, the rest time should be increased so that the body can recover as much as possible in a short period.

For people over 50 years of age, the norm of healthy sleep is 5-8 hours a day. The reduction in sleep duration occurs due to the fact that at an older age, the processing of a decreasing amount of new information no longer requires as many resources as before.

Healthy sleep rules

In order not only to choose for yourself the optimal duration of rest at night, but also to make your sleep healthy, you need to follow a few simple rules.

They are absolutely the same for everyone, but if you do not forget about them, then the state of health will always be normal.

First of all, you should learn how to correctly determine for yourself the actual duration of sleep. In an adult, it consists solely of the number of hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. Therefore, if a person believes that sleep begins from the moment he goes to bed, despite the fact that later he can still read a book or watch TV, then this is wrong. Only the real dream has to be taken into account.

It is very important to determine how much sleep a person currently needs. Here it is proposed to conduct a small safe experiment. It is necessary to try to go to bed for several days when the body itself requires it. But at the same time, get up not on an alarm clock, but when the body wakes up on its own. As practice shows, in most people after this experience it is observed that the time of sleep necessary for a complete rest of the body is about 1.5-2 hours more than the actual daily one.

If this is true, then you need to seriously think about how to increase the actual sleep time on weekdays to the minimum necessary for the body. After all, usually a person's working capacity increases by 30% if he sleeps as much as necessary.

Do not lie in bed answering calls or emails. Also, don't watch TV in bed. The bed should be associated with sleep, not wakefulness.

Next, you should develop an approximate schedule for yourself, according to which on weekdays you should try to go to bed and wake up at the same time. In the first two months, this may seem like a rather difficult task, but after a while the body is fully synchronized with the new biological clock. As a result, sleep will become more healthy and full, it will be easy to fall asleep at the appointed time, and in the morning it will be easy to get up when you need it, even without an alarm clock.

It is important to ensure uninterrupted sleep for yourself. After all, if a person constantly sleeps restlessly, then he will no longer be able to feel good throughout the day. This usually happens with older people who wake up many times during the night. And then during the day they are constantly half asleep.

But often this can also be seen in young people who are busy with nervous work or who have certain serious problems in life that cause strong feelings. To prevent this, you need to drink herbal teas, natural sedatives. This will help you sleep soundly.

Individual sleep duration

It is especially important to choose for yourself an individual optimal duration of rest. To do this, for 10-14 days you need to go to bed when the body requires it, and get up in the same way. Every day you need to record the time of clean sleep.

After completing such a simple experiment, you should sum up the daily hours of sleep, and then divide all this by the number of days. This will turn out to be a constant, which will show how much sleep is needed for normal well-being during this particular life period.

At a young age, it’s not even as important to go to bed at the same time as it is just to have a good rest. It may also happen that a person will only need 4 hours to rest. However, every day so little sleep is also harmful. It is necessary to compensate for this by other days, for example, weekends.

So, what should be the normal total duration of sleep in an adult, now it has become quite clear. As for daytime, the duration of daytime sleep can be independently regulated by a person. But this applies only to those cases when the body simply requires a little extra rest.