Do You Know Precisely How Much Sleep You Should Be Getting Every Night?

Just how much sleep you ought to be enjoying every night will very much depend on your state of health and your age. But sleep is not only a question of the time that you spend sleeping, but is also a question of the quality of that sleep. Accordingly, if you are enjoying enough of sleep and are still getting up each morning feeling tired and going through the day not able to concentrate fully, and perhaps being a bit touchy, then there is a very good chance that you are not enjoying enough deep sleep and could very well be suffering from insomnia.

In terms of age, newborn babies clearly need the greatest amount of sleep and will usually sleep in cycles of approximately four hours, waking up when it is time to eat. Typically, a newborn baby requires between fourteen and sixteen hours sleep every day.

Once infants get to the age of about four to six months they ough to be sleeping right through the night and will start to spend greater periods of time awake during the day when they will begin to take a greater interest in what is going on around them and start to play. At this point their requirementneed for sleep will fall somewhat, although they will still require anywhere from ten to fourteen hours sleep a day.

Surprisingly enough older children and even teenage children should also be enjoying the same amount of sleep and ten hours sleep a day for children in general is a good figure to aim for.

For some time it has been thought that children, and especially teenagers, who are sleeping for more than eight hours each day are just lazy, but this is in fact not true. Taking into account the level of activity that the majority of children are involved in every day, both in their spare time as well as at school, and that their bodies are growing and changing very rapidly, there is a very real requirement for more than the traditional eight hours sleep if they are to enjoy the best possible conditions for development.

For the majority of adults approximately eight to eight and a half hours sleep a night is just about right and this should be sufficient to permit the body to recharge its batteries and to have you alert and refreshed in the morning.

Yet another myth is that as we get older we need more sleep. Once again this is not true, unless there are also accompanying health problems, in which case additional sleep may be needed. A tendency for older adults to nap during the day is frequently taken to be a sign that they require more sleep but in reality a daytime nap is invariably offset by sleeping less during the night.

An exception to the rule is that of pregnant women, who should usually increase their sleep during pregnancy by approximately two or three hours.

The test of whether you are enjoying enough sleep is a fairly simple one and involves merely judging whether you feel refreshed when you get out of bed in the morning and can to function normally and focus your attention on things during the day. If you find that you are not able to concentrate or doze off during the day then you are probably not enjoying enough sleep.

Missing the odd few hours of sleep here and there will not do you any harm at all but if you find that you are frequently falling short on sleep then there could be serious consequences. We all suffer from the occasional insomnia, but insomnia that continues for more than a month or six weeks can have a significant affect on both you quality of life and health.

Article Source: www.articlesnatch.com. About the Author: help-me-to-sleep.com/ looks at various sleep disorders and covers everything from finding an insomnia cure to the use of daily meditation help-me-to-sleep.com/meditation/.

Article Source: http://www.sleepdisorderarticles.com

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