Adults need 7 to 9 hours. Children need 9 to 13 hours. Toddlers and babies need 12 to 17 hours. Going to bed when you feel tired and getting up around the same time helps teach your body to sleep better.
Try to avoid taking naps whenever possible. For children ages 6 to 12, the NHS recommends 9 to 12 hours of sleep each night. For younger children, more than 10 hours of sleep each night is recommended, while for adults, at least 7 hours of sleep are needed each night to reap the benefits of sleep. There are no official guidelines for how much you should sleep each night because everyone is different.
How long should I sleep? Ask an adult room and you're likely to get a variety of different answers based on your personal preferences, your body clock, and whether you have young children at home or not. This is a type of talk therapy that aims to help you avoid thoughts and behaviors that affect your sleep. Alternatively, if you feel like you could easily go back to sleep, you probably aren't getting the right amount of sleep. And Artis says, if you wake up in the middle of the night, try to avoid looking at the clock, which can create “anxiety” and make it harder to go back to sleep.
They can temporarily increase your energy and focus, but they can alter your sleep patterns even more in the long term. In the long term, this level of lack of sleep puts you at risk for serious medical conditions, such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes, and shortens your life expectancy, according to the NHS. Sleep medications can sometimes be helpful for people with an acute sleep problem (that is, an acute sleep problem), but medications do not address the root of the sleep disorder, the unhelpful thoughts and behaviors that sustain the sleep problem. You may not get enough sleep if you feel constantly tired throughout the day and that affects your daily life.
If you've had months of restricted sleep, you'll have accumulated significant sleep debt, so expect recovery to take several weeks. Your family doctor will first try to identify and treat any underlying health conditions, such as anxiety, that may be causing your sleep problems. It is usually the first recommended treatment and can help improve long-term sleep. Therapy can be done in a small group with others who have similar sleep problems, or individually with a therapist.
At the end of these sleep cycles, many people will experience a brief period of wakefulness in which they could crawl in bed or flip the pillow over the cooler side before going back to sleep. In fact, this experience, which is known as “sleep inertia”, involves your body and brain taking a moment to fully wake up from sleep.
