How much sleep do we need ?
Health & Fitness By KEMI ILORI
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I have come across a couple of people who put "sleeping" under hobbies when they fill forms or write their curriculum vitae (CV). I find this rather odd. I remember that if you sleep for abnormally long periods of time, people ask if you have been bitten by "tsetse fly" or if you have "sleeping sickness." I guess most people enjoy sleeping within the right amount; but the question is, are we supposed to sleep as much as we can, or there is a certain amount of sleep that is enough? But how much sleep do we really need?

The answer to this question is not the same for us all. The amount of sleep humans need, varies depending on various factors;

Age: Age definitely affects the quantity and quality of sleep that we need, as well as the amount of sleep we are able to have. The relationship between sleep and age is an inverse one. Infants need the most amount of sleep and the usually sleep for about 16hours a day! At the other end of the spectrum, older people tend to sleep more lightly and for shorter time spans. In between, teenagers require about 9hours of sleep a day whilst most adults require between 7 to 8 hours a day.

Amongst young adults, it has been said that some people may need as few as 5 hours (short sleepers) or as many as 10 hours (long sleepers) of sleep each day. Older people seem to have the lowest quality and quantity of sleep. As they get older, people tend to sleep more lightly and for shorter time spans, although they generally need about the same amount of sleep as they needed in early adulthood. About half of all people over 65 have frequent sleeping problems, such as insomnia, and deep sleep stages in many elderly people often become very short or stop completely.

Physiological condition: Pregnant women need more sleep than the average man or woman. Also people who are recovering from illness or such other condition need more sleep.

8hours-a-day: The general assumption is that an adult needs 8 hours of sleep a day. This recommendation is deeply engrained in the sleep requirement advice of both medical and non-medical practitioners. Is there any real reason for this? Well, there is! Scientific research helped specialists, to arrive at that conclusion.

Sleep debt: There is a saying that ‘Your sleeping life affects your waking life.’ When you deprive yourself of the right amount of sleep that your body needs, you accumulate what is called a "sleep debt". It is like borrowing from your sleeping time and you have to pay it back with sleep. If you do not repay your sleep debt by sleeping, it affects your waking life. All lost sleep accumulates progressively as sleep indebtedness. Furthermore, your sleep debt does not go away or decrease. The only way to reduce your individual sleep debt is by obtaining extra sleep over and above your daily requirement. Not doing this, may have dire and dangerous effects.

Reducing sleep by as little as one and a half hours for just one night reduces daytime alertness by about one-third. Excessive daytime sleepiness impairs memory and the ability to think and process information, and contributes to a substantially increased risk of sustaining an occupational injury. One of the people who confirmed the value of sleep is the popular Golf champion Tiger Woods, who said that one of the best things about his choice to leave Stanford University for the professional golf circuit was that he could now get enough sleep. Despite the fact that he abandoned his degree, sleep has probably helped his acuity on the golf course!

In sleep indebtedness, drowsiness is a red alert! Especially for drivers, pilots, operators of heavy machinery, etc. It means you may drop off to sleep at any minute; no matter what you are doing! At the wrong time and place; this is a life threatening situation. It is the cause of a lot of accidents and loss of lives, e.g. in road accidents by tired long distance drivers or night drivers. Why and how does this happen? Well, there is a powerful brain mechanism that regulates the daily amount of sleep called the "Sleep Homeostat".

The sleep homeostat mechanism simply balances our sleep deficit situation by increasing the tendency to fall asleep progressively in direct proportion to the increasing size of the sleep debt, this homeostatic process ensures that most people will get the amount of sleep they need, or close to it. There is an elevated sleep tendency together with the associated drowsiness and an intense desire for sleep when we are sleep deprived or in other words have sleep debt.

This intense desire for sleep would ordinarily prevent most people from becoming dangerously sleep deprived and make them fall asleep. That is when excessive daytime sleepiness occurs. In the right place, we simply go to bed early, or sleep late. Unfortunately, in our present day society, we are prone to ignore or resist nature's signal that we need more sleep, and we often resist far too long. At the point when we have intense desire for sleep, we cannot resist falling asleep.

Depending on when and where this happens, falling asleep can be tragic, or merely inconvenient. While the tragic ones can be fatal, the inconvenient ones can be embarrassing. Many heads of government have been shown on CNN sleeping at very important international meets with their counterparts from other countries!

What we need to know is that we must get enough sleep. As far as is currently known, nothing can change an individual's fundamental daily sleep requirement. If your sleep debt is very large, no amount of stimulation can keep you awake, you will sleep on top of river Niger if need be. Drowsiness means you are seconds away from sleep.

Seconds away from sleep may mean seconds away from death. If you are behind the wheel, just a few seconds of sleep can lead to a catastrophic disaster. Try not to accumulate too much sleep debt. Always find a safe time and place to balance your sleep requirement before nature demands it from you.