What Is Healthy Sleep?
Healthful Vitality | 12/21/2022 | What Is Healthy Sleep?
Usually, children and young adults are healthy, have lower stress, and often have a sound sleep. However, as people grow older, sound or healthy sleep becomes an issue.
Poor or unhealthy sleep is now regarded among the most significant factors causing chronic health disorders, along with a sedentary lifestyle and obesity. Thus, improving sleep will boost your mental health and reduce the risk of chronic health disorders.
However, what is healthy sleep?
When discussing healthy sleep, there are two things to understand: quantitative and qualitative sleep aspects. It means that healthy sleep is when a person sleeps for sufficient time or number of hours and also has a good sleep during that time with minimum disturbances, wakening, and more.
Understanding sleep duration
First, let’s begin with sleep duration. Remember, this is not the amount of time one spends in bed. It is about time one spends sleeping. Duration of sleep differs for people and depends on age.
Thus, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that adults should have 7 or more hours of sleep. This duration is 8-10 hours for teens and 9-12 hours for school-age children.
However, these days even young adults are suffering from insufficient sleep.
Many people have unhealthy sleep as they do not follow sleep hygiene. Thus, some of the reasons for unhealthy sleep are substance abuse, lack of physical activity, electronic devices, and so on.
Understanding sleep quality
Even if you have a night of sufficient sleep or sleep for 7-8 hours a day, it does not necessarily mean that you have healthy sleep.
In many people, sleep quality is poor. There are many reasons for poor sleep quality, like chronic health disorders, nocturia (urge to pee at night, thus frequent awakening), and other reasons.
Healthy sleep consists of two main stages: non-REM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.
Non-REM sleep is further divided into three stages, light sleep, deeper sleep, and deepest sleep. This is followed by REM sleep when one dream. During the night, one undergoes these stages or cycles multiple times, and each cycle (non-REM plus REM) lasts for about 90-110 minutes.
Each sleep stage has distinct benefits. Thus, having a relaxing effect, regenerative, and so on. The REM stage is better for sorting out information in the brain, while the deepest sleep is quite good for growth and regeneration.
Suppose any of these stages are shortened frequently, or disrupted. In that case, it results in unhealthy sleep patterns and is harmful to health.
Thus, healthy sleep is about sleeping sufficient hours and ensuring good quality sleep, which means maintaining sleep cycles. All this means that human sleep must not be disrupted, with minimal nighttime awakenings and so on.
Once we know what healthy sleep is, we must learn about so-called sleep hygiene. Which essentially means taking measures to improve sleep duration and quality. It means creating a proper sleep environment, like not using gadgets in the bed, maintaining proper temperature, using comfortable mattresses, etc. Just remember that healthy sleep is not just about waking up fresh the following day. It is also about lowering stress hormones and the risk of chronic health disorders.
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