Why is 7 hours of sleep sometimes better than 8?
Society is constantly tormented by the eternal question of how many hours of sleep we should get per day in order to be in excellent shape and health. Until recently, it was firmly believed that the golden number was 8, but scientists are now on the way to prove that the number 7 is much more optimal.
What is reality?
It has always been considered that the optimal option is somewhere between 7 and 9 hours for a healthy adult, but everything still depends on the personality of the specific person. More and more people are trying to figure out how many hours a day a person needs, especially in the conditions of the ever-shrinking sleep time in modern society. It is a fact that modern man today sleeps much less than his predecessors in the past.
The latest research suggests that seven hours of sleep a night is the ideal amount we can get, although other scientists still question the reduced figure.
On the other hand, it has been conclusively proven that if we reduce our sleep time even by just 20 minutes a night, our quality of life, concentration and overall performance the next day will be negatively affected. However, the same goes for oversleeping. If you are regularly in the habit of sleeping too much, you put yourself at increased risk of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular problems and a host of other troubles.
Professor Shawn Jungstedt of Arizona State University says that the best health and lowest mortality are observed in individuals who sleep about 7 hours a night. He then adds that sleeping more than 8 hours a night is risky for health.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding a whole group of scientists doing research in this area, and the final results are expected to come out around 2015.
Psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of San Diego, California, claims that based on 6 years of cancer studies of more than 1.1 million people, he can conclude that people who sleep for 6 .5 to 7.4 hours have the lowest cancer mortalitycompared to people who sleep more or less.
In another study published in the journal Sleep Medicine in 2011, Dr. Kripke said that there is a growing body of evidence that the optimal sleep duration is less than the previously thought ideal of 8 hours
strong>. The study was conducted among 450 elderly ladies, whose sleep and wakefulness behavior was monitored thanks to a device they wore on their wrist. The study found that women who regularly slept less than 5 hours or more than 6.5 hours had higher mortality rates.
Other experts believe that such studies are groundless and wrong, since the category of longer sleepers includes practically all people with health problems who really need more sleep.< /p>
According to Timothy Morganthaler, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, these studies just show some statistics, but they don’t tell us what exactly lies behind them and miss a number of circumstances.
Dr. Morganthaler is adamant that a healthy person needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night on average, but says that individual needs can vary, so it’s best to monitor yourself and sleep. as many hours as make him feel his best and in top shape.
Good sleep is one of the key factors that determine how in shape a person will feel the next day, and observations show that we need at least 7 hours.
Not long ago, a large-scale study was conducted in which 127,000 people were given arithmetic problems to solve. The results showed that the percentage of those who successfully coped was directly related to the duration of sleep. The more people slept, the better results they showed. After the 7 hour barrier, however, the results started to deteriorate again.
After the seven-hour barrier, sleep stops bringing benefits to the person. This alarms Professor Morali Doraiswamy from Duke University in North Carolina.
The fact is that most studies to date have analyzed the negative effects on the physical and emotional state of people who get too little sleep. David Dings of the University of Pennsylvania says that even 20 – 30 minutes less than the mandatory 7 hours leads to decreased attention and impaired ability to concentrate the next day.
Experts advise that the best way to find the ideal length of sleep is to do our own research. They advise using the period when we are on holiday and not to use alarm clocks to wake up during the experiment. We should go to bed when we feel exhausted and get up when we are well rested. This is followed by a recording of sleep duration and a comment on how we felt during the day. This will ultimately be the best analysis to fully trust.
For now, future analyzes by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Association for Sleep Research are expected to examine sleep duration in people of different ages and genders, says Dr. Morganthaler.
Another group called the National Sleep Foundation is a non-profit association that also analyzes sleep duration and tries to find the answer to the question of how many hours of sleep are actually needed. Their research has concluded that the ideal duration is between 7 and 9 hours.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute advises that adults get between 7 and 8 hours of sleep, teenagers about 9 to 10 hours, and children 10 or more hours.
“I don’t think you can overdose on healthy sleep. When you get a good night’s sleep your body will wake up on its own.” That’s according to Safwan Badr, chief of pulmonary health, emergency care and sleep medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit.
The journal Clinical Sleep Medicine has apparently already proven all of this. For this purpose, a study was conducted in Germany. A group of 5 people were subjected to living conditions typical of the Stone Age period. They were deprived of electricity and running water, no clocks or any technology. The results were conclusive. People were getting more sleep than in their daily lives before. And the average duration of sleep was exactly 7.2 hours.
