Only 15% of all people were able to sleep properly
A study of 67,000 people and 11 million nights found that only 15% of its participants slept seven to nine hours at least five days a week. The rest had either insufficient or excessive sleep most of the time, which equally leads to health problems.
Different people follow different daily routines: some people are more comfortable going to bed after midnight rather than before 10:00-23:00 p.m., as doctors recommend; sleepy people have trouble falling asleep in the evening. However, seven to nine hours of sleep every day is necessary for everyone without exception.
A large-scale study by experts from the Adelaide Institute for Healthy Sleep (Australia), Flinders University (Australia) and the Interdisciplinary Center for Sleep Medicine (France) found that the sleep of only 15% of people around the world can be called sufficient for the body. The findings were published in the journal Sleep Health.
To obtain data on how much sleep people of different ages, scientists used a special analyzer, which were attached under the mattress. The study involved 67,254 adults, including 52,523 men and 14,731 women. They lived in different countries, mostly in Europe and North America.
The average amount of sleep was between seven and nine hours in 70% of the study participants. However, even those who "chose" this norm, 40% of nights a week slept less than this amount of time. On other days, there was either more or less time left for sleep. Women generally had longer sleep durations than men, and middle-aged people had shorter sleep durations than younger or older study participants.
The findings concerned the researchers because sleeping an average of less than six hours a night increases the risk of death and leads to a host of serious diseases: hypertension, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. If a person sleeps less than seven or more than nine hours a night, eating behavior is impaired, and nervous system and behavioral disorders appear.
The authors of the scientific paper called for a national call to encourage people in different countries to make healthy sleep a priority and help them get enough hours of sleep every day. The researchers recommended that people find and maintain a sleep schedule that will maximize the frequency of feeling rested. It may be helpful to wake up at the same time every day, including weekends, and lie down as soon as sleepiness occurs. If a sleep schedule is impossible to keep due to the nature of the job, it is worth making time for extra rest.
For anyone who has symptoms of sleep deprivation such as daytime sleepiness, fatigue, problems with concentration and memory, the researchers advised to think about sleep hygiene. For example, avoid caffeine and alcohol in the afternoon and generally reduce their consumption, and avoid large meals before bedtime. If you have insomnia or stop breathing in your sleep, you should consult a doctor, the authors of the article noted.
The authors of the study conclude that most people can not provide themselves with a full-fledged sleep "according to standards" for many days of the week - even if the average seems to choose the right time to sleep. It's worth noting that there are alternative approaches to this issue. A few years ago, another group of scientists studied sleep in hunter-gatherers of our time. Such tribes have no problems with sleep: even the very concept of such problems is unknown, as well as the corresponding words.
Despite this, it turned out that their real time of pure sleep is from 5.7 to 7.1 hours a day. At the same time, they are in bed from 6.9 to 8.5 hours, but part of it is spent on talking, sexual activity and so on. It follows from this study that healthy sleep does not necessarily require seven to nine hours of time. It is difficult to exclude that the problems with it in our contemporaries are connected not with the lack of time for sleep itself, but with some other reasons, still remaining in the shadows.