Getting More Sleep
We’ve all heard it before. Getting more sleep is better for us. But it’s not easy. With hectic schedules and busy home life, it is getting harder and harder to really get the quantity and quality of sleep that our bodies need. However, research shows that even the slightest increase of the amount of sleep can have a great effect of health.
According to a recent article in The Reporter, several studies have been conducted on the effect of increasing the amount of sleep per night.
Stanford University researchers set up an experiment with seven members of the Cardinal football team, asking them to make an extra effort to get more sleep during the season — a minimum of 10 hours a night — and kept track of their wakefulness with a monitor and through a sleep journal. After seven to eight weeks of sleep extension, the average sprint times on two distances decreased by one-tenth of a second.
The article goes on to highlight several other studies that measured the effect of sleep in groups of daytime and nighttime workers.
Another article over at Dr. Cutler highlights a study on chronic insomnia and its health effects.
Scientists surveyed 2,242 participants in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study for their findings. Participants completed two to three mailed surveys for years 1989, 1994 and 2000. Participants were considered to have chronic insomnia if they reported insomnia symptoms on at least two of the surveys. Results indicate that the adjusted hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was three times higher in people with chronic insomnia than in people without insomnia.
So, now we know that the more sleep, the better. But, how do we go about getting more sleep? Here are few articles to help answer that question.
