Healthy sleep is one of the most significant factors affecting people’s productivity and quality of life. Its duration has an impact on numerous things – from behavior to ability to work and health state. Changes in sleep quality and its duration have inevitable repercussions connected with health’s psychological and physical aspects. Thus, it is crucial to assess the quality of sleep and consider the individual characteristics to develop the general health condition.
The recommended duration of sleep for different age groups has been under discussion for decades. However, nowadays, more and more scientists tend to agree on the number of hours required to maintain the body’s health condition. The research on Sleep duration and health in adults revealed facts, which allowed to developed recommendations for the sleep required to provide optimal health in adults. In particular, the average duration of sleep per night required for adults regularly to promote optimal health is seven hours (Chaput et al., 2020). The following factors explain the choice of this number of hours.
Firstly, systematically sleeping less than 7 hours per night can lead to such symptoms as adverse health outcomes. They may include cardiovascular disease, weight gain, and obesity, and diabetes. In addition, it causes a higher risk of heart disease and stroke, depression, cognitive disorders, and increased mortality (Chaput et al., 2020). On the other hand, long sleep duration, implying more than nine hours of sleep per night, is connected with a considerable increase in mortality regardless of the cause (Jike et al., 2018). However, no significant correlation of depression, dyslipidemia, and hypertension with long sleep duration was revealed (Jike et al., 2018). Thus, the consequences of non-compliance with the healthy sleep schedule are severe and more potent than commonly assumed.
My average hours of sleep are reflected in Table 1 – Sleep Duration (Appendix) and vary from 5 hours and a half to 8 hours a day, with the total number of hours being 47.5 hours in an entire week. My sleeping pattern is almost the same every day. If I do not work, I stay awake all day, wake up early in the morning, drink my coffee, and have something to eat. On the days when I work, I come home, cook, watch TV, and study. Additionally, I almost do not take naps and prefer to sleep once a day during the night hours. I sometimes have difficulties staying awake in the morning and frequently at night.
Regarding the research mentioned above, I suppose that my sleeping patterns are not healthy enough, as almost half of each week I sleep less than 7 hours a day. Thus, to avoid health-related problems, I should pay more attention to the number of hours I spend sleeping. However, the fact that I do not take naps reflects that my body can function well with the sleep amount I am getting now.
To conclude, sleep has a more powerful influence on people’s bodies and mentality than we are used to reckoning, being able to cause different diseases and affect the functioning of some vital systems. A systematic lack of sleep time would most certainly lead to the worsening of general health state depending on the disease-related predispositions of the organism. In this regard, it is substantial to control individual sleeping habits to avoid diseases and maintain the condition of health on a high level.
References
Chaput, J. P., Dutil, C., Featherstone, R., Ross, R., Giangregorio, L., Saunders, T. J., Janssen, I., Poitras, V. J., Kho, M. E., Ross-White, A., & Carrier, J. (2020). Sleep duration and health in adults: an overview of systematic reviews. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism. 45(10), 218-231.
Jike, M., Itani, O., Watanabe, N., Buysse, D. J., & Kaneita, Y. (2018). Long sleep duration and health outcomes: A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 39, 25–36.
Appendix
Table 1 – Sleep Duration.