Hello peers!
I hope you are all doing well both physically and mentally. In my blog today, I will be talking all about sleep. To elaborate, I will be covering the basics surrounding how much sleep we get, what sleep is, how we sleep better, and how much sleep we should be getting every single night. Please enjoy this happy baby who certainly got enough sleep.
73%. That is around the percentage of high school students who believe that they are not getting enough sleep. Additionally, 59% of high school students also report feeling sleepy or tired during the day. A survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that under 15% of teens sleep an average of 8 ½ hours or more on school nights. Considering the average amount of sleep a teenager gets during the school week is between 7 hours and 7 ¼ hours, I am not surprised. Consistent sleep deprivation is certainly unhealthy and will lead one to be susceptible to a variety of unpleasant conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. The one takeaway I hope you hold onto by the end of this journal is that teenagers are not getting enough sleep.
What is sleep and why is it important? Sleeping is something almost everyone does every single night. While we sleep, our bodies undergo a transformation from a conscious state to the exciting landscape of dreamland. After waking up, it is typical to forget pretty much everything that went down in your mind the previous couple of hours. Sleep for humans is a period of reduced activity where one is normally lying down on a bed with their eyes closed. Our bodies all need long periods of quality sleep because not only does sleep help us feel refreshed, sleep also initiates muscle growth along with repairing damaged tissue and creating and balancing important hormones.
How do we sleep better? First things first, schedule more time to sleep. If you were to follow all of the succeeding steps, but were only to make out 5 hours of sleep a night, you would quickly encounter many problems. Next, if you want to sleep easier, expose yourself to bright light during the day, and avoid blue light (light emitted by personal devices such as smartphones and laptops in large amounts) 1-2 hours before going to bed. To many people, this is not reasonable. Personally, I have found that powering off my smartphone even 30 minutes before going to sleep was noticeably beneficial to my quality of sleep. Last tip, avoid drinking coffee past 2 pm, if possible. Research has shown that coffee takes a long time to wear off and may cause problems with your quality of sleep even if you don’t notice it.
8 hours of sleep every night. Minimum. Because my intended audience of this blog are high school students, that is the demographic I have focused mainly on the necessary amount of sleep for teenagers. I will post an image below with a friendly depiction of how much sleep we should be getting depending on how old we are. Please sleep more. This is my first post on sleep, and because I value sleep so much, this will likely not be my last post mentioning sleep.
Hi Zach, thanks for showing us a picture of your sleepy baby! I’m just left with one question after reading your wonderful article. Is it possible to get too much sleep? I often find myself waking up on a weekend far past noon feeling groggy and unrefreshed, the opposite of what I would expect from sleeping for a sufficient number of hours.
Hi Kevin. Thanks for reading my blog. To answer your thoughtful question, “Is it possible to get too much sleep?”, the answer is yes. A new study has shown that sleeping for over above recommended range of sleep (over 10 hours for Teenagers and over 9 hours for young adults) may reduce cognitive and impair reasoning skills. Also there is no such thing as a successful sleep marathon. If you are waking up more than 2 hours past your typical wake up time because you are sleeping in on a weekend, this is known as oversleeping and will likely lead you feeling groggy. If you are not getting adequate sleep during the workweek and you would like to sleep a little more on the weekend, try to limit the amount of extra sleep you get to 1-2 hours.
I gotta admit, I feel attacked by this post on so many levels (in the best way possible). On school days, I usually get anywhere from 1 to 3 hours of sleep, and I told myself that because I’m used to it and can (somewhat) function with that amount of sleep, IT’S ALL GOOD. This topic really slapped me in the face, and I appreciate that. Everyone tells me to get more sleep but now I have actual measures I can take to try to do that. 🙂
Hi Abigail, thanks for reading my blog. I am glad to slap you figuratively in the face and provide you with measures to assist you on getting a healthy amount of sleep.
Hi Zachary, I really enjoyed your post! I especially liked the image of the newborn, it looks much happier than many teenagers (probably because it got a lot more sleep). I am thankful that you clarified exactly what sleeping is, it can be a confusing concept for some people. Thanks for the great tips on how to sleep more! I definitely should implement them into my life, but unfortunately, I cannot start today because I had coffee after 2 pm. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow if possible! Do you have any recommendations for people who do not sleep because they are obsessively watching tv shows? I can’t seem to figure out a solution to this recurring problem. Thank you!
This is an absolutely phenomenal thing to bring up with today’s youth, as sleep is becoming more and more sacrificed. Although I for one have experienced problems falling asleep quickly, in order to get the sufficient amount of sleep time. Though I have talked to you personally to ask for advice, I also want to know the legitimacy of sleep strategies that are possible to find online. So my overall questions are, Is there a easier more consistent way to get better results. For example the military tactic of falling asleep consisting of following the same regime right before sleep for the weeks (This can be found by just looking up military sleep strategy and i was wondering your opinion)? And I was wondering what you thought about certain people switching to an entirely different sleep schedule, where you sleep for 3 hour shifts, and two different time throughout the day? Just questions that I have had, and if you don’t know anything at the moment don’t feel the need to go out of your way to find out.
Hey Vaughn, I really liked your blog! Unfortunately, the image of the baby wouldn’t come up on my computer but I’m sure they were very happy. I’m glad that you are interested in the topic of sleep because I too am fascinated with sleep, more specifically the dreaming we do as we sleep. For my entire life I’ve been able to remember my dreams and more recently I started looking into what they mean. I’d like to learn more about this along with how drastic a small increase of sleep can be to our health. I was wondering if you knew anything about how beneficial naps can be to someone who does not get enough sleep at night? Also are you aware of any cases of people who are able to function fully with a minimal amount of sleep? Hopefully we can talk more about this topic and others related to it next week.