Sleep. It seems that everyone is always talking about how much they love it, how much they need it, and how deprived they are of it. Sleeping is essential to our well-being. It is said to be the “single most important factor in predicting longevity, more influential than diet, exercise, or heredity”. So why do we get so little of it? And how many hours should we actually be receiving each night?

Sleep is a much more complex process than simply resting one’s head on a pillow and dozing off. There are five stages: one, two, three, four and REM (rapid eye movement). Getting enough REM sleep is essential. This period is when our eyes twitch (hence rapid eye movement) and our limbs become temporarily paralyzed. When one loses sleep, their time in REM is cut short. Sleep deprivation is such a negative condition because the brain “processes emotions, information, memories, and stress” during this stage and when it is shortened, we loose this essential function.

Enough about the technical nature of sleep, the real question is why don’t we get enough of it? The National Sleep Foundation reports that teenagers require eight to ten hours of sleep each night to function properly, but evidence shows that only 15% actually receive this amount of sleep. Teen’s circadian rhythm is changing and gets pushed back later and later due to distraction such as homework, studying and social media. A study from Harvard found that the color blue tends to keep people awake, and almost all forms of social media have a blue background to them – Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. No wonder teens spent all night surfing the web and spending time on social media!

Sleep is so vital to us in many ways. According to The Sleep Foundation, lack of sleep has many negatives, including increased irritation, forgetfulness of simple facts, weight gain, and can even cause you to break out in pimples! It fact, one study examined if sleep deprivation can put you more at risk for developing a cardiovascular disease, a soft point. Researchers conducted an observational study for a group of 3,000 randomized people over the age of 45 and asked them about their sleep habits. They found that people that slept less than six hours a
night were “twice as likely to have a stroke or heart attack” based on their health history than those that got their recommended eight hours of sleep. On the other hand, a rare amount of sources I discovered found that sleep has little importance. Since the actual mechanism for sleep in unknown, some argue that we sleep just because we feel tired sometimes, but this theory has little evidence backing it up. However, sleep   deprivation has proved have a hard point. In one study, it was found that a lab rat that was forced to stay up would die after three days. This is startling because a usual life span for a lab rat is about three years. Although we are evidently not rats, this study proves that sleep is definitely important.

Even though is can be extremely difficult to get the recommended eight hours of sleep per nigh- trust me, I personally know- sleep is so important to our health and well being. Plus, a good night sleep just feels so good!

Doesn’t everyone look like this when sleeping? No?

Photo credit: http://www.livescience.com/39669-sleep-beauty-science-look-attractive.html