In high school health classes, students are taught 8 hours of sleep each night is healthy. Aside from difficult to pull off for busy/insomnia-riddled America, the 8 hour sleep cycle never had a lot of data to prove its efficacy.
In reality, studies show a U-shaped relationship to health and sleep. Too little is as detrimental as too much. Time magazine reported a variety of health issues including depression, obesity (in addition to their confounding health ailments like heart disease) that linked to too much and too little sleep.
In 2002, Daniel Kripke studied the sleep habits of one million Americans, and compared sleep to their overall health and mortality. He found that the lower healthy limit of sleep is 6.5 hours, while the upper healthy limit is 7.5. Individuals who strayed outside of this bracket don’t seem to live as long. Sleep affects so much of a person’s patterns of life that it is difficult to accurately say more or less sleep will make a person live longer. What is important is that time spent in bed and time spent asleep are quality hours, providing maximum mental and physical recovery for the day.
There are many things that people can do to improve the quality of sleep they get each night. Regular exercise, especially cardiovascular, is beneficial to sleep cycles, with the best timing for improved sleep in the early evening. This has to do with your body temp rising and falling to prep your body for rest and recovery. Early morning exposure to natural light helps reinforce the sleep/awake cycles your body has naturally.
For other ideas on getting better sleep, consult your physician or naturopath.
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