There are people who wake up every day a few minutes before the alarm goes off. On the other hand, for others the alarm clock violently pulls them out of sleep. They would have stayed sleeping for a while longer, which is why they wake up tired and, of course, in a very bad mood. To combat insomnia you must first know if you are getting enough sleep. Do you know how many hours you need to sleep?
The hours you need to sleep
- Usually, 7 or 8 hours is established as the ideal time for an adult to sleep well and wake up better. It is also said that a baby needs about 12 hours of sleep, a school-age child 9 hours and an elderly person only needs 5 hours. But the truth is that it depends on each person and the needs of their organism. The reasons why one person can rest with only 6 hours of sleep, while another needs 8, are also unknown.
- In any case, there is a trick to know if you are sleeping the necessary hours, which is to compare the hours you sleep during the week, when you get up with the alarm clock, with the hours you sleep on the weekend when you wake up naturally. Logically, to do this test you cannot afford excesses on the weekend and you will have to follow a regular time to get up and go to bed, something that will not harm you at all, since it is one of the basic rules of sleep hygiene.
Sleep less hours
- If you sleep more hours during the weekend than during the week, do not think that you are sleeping the hours that you should have during the week. It is necessary to be very clear that the dream does not recover. If you don’t get enough sleep, the consequences can be very varied, from lack of concentration to having an accident, going through sudden mood swings. That is why it is so important to combat insomnia from the moment the first sleep problems are detected.
- And unfortunately, we usually get less sleep than we need. Just check how many people have to deal with daytime sleepiness. Specifically, Spain is the European country that sleeps the fewest hours, since we go to bed very late while working hours begin at the same time as in neighboring countries.
- To this time imbalance we must add that we are increasingly delaying bedtime in an attempt to squeeze a few more hours of leisure out of the day. Those hours that we take away from sleep we generally give to social networks or television. And there is no shortage of those who are convinced that sleeping is wasting time. Nothing is further from reality.
