How much sleep should you aim for?
If you eat well and exercise regularly, but don’t get at least seven hours of sleep every night, you may undermine all your other efforts to be healthy. It’s important to focus on getting enough sleep, something many of us lack. But how much sleep do you actually need?
Thanks to a report from the National Sleep Foundation, you can aim for a targeted sleep number tailored to your age. Here are the Foundation’s updated recommendations, broken down into nine age-specific categories with a range for each, allowing for individual differences:
- Older adults, 65+ years: 7-8 hours
- Adults, 26-64 years: 7-9 hours
- Young adults, 18-25 years: 7-9 hours
- Teenagers, 14-17 years: 8-10 hours
- School-age children, 6-13 years: 9-11 hours
- Preschool children, 3-5 years: 10-13 hours
- Toddlers, 1-2 years: 11-14 hours
- Infants, 4-11 months: 12-15 hours
- Newborns, 0-3 months: 14-17 hours
Why it’s important to get enough sleep
Genetic, behavioral and environmental factors help determine how much sleep an individual needs, but a minimum of seven hours of sleep for adults is a step in the right direction to improve your health.
Your doctor urges you to get enough sleep for good reason. Shorting yourself on shut-eye not only impairs school and work performance and quality of life, but also contributes to serious health issues, like diabetes, heart failure, and stroke, and increases automotive accidents that can be deadly.
Even though our 24/7 society robs many of us of sleep, understanding the importance of getting adequate shut-eye and knowing how much you really need is the first step in improving your health.