World Sleep Day

International World Sleep Day is celebrated every year on March 18th, so we thought today is a great opportunity to share some thoughts about why this day is so important. Everyone spends around one third of their life sleeping, so it should be something we all know a lot about, right? Doing something everyday for this long should have taught us a thing or two, but research shows that the majority of people suffer from some form of sleep deprivation whether that is a lack of sleep, the quality of sleep, or something else. Here we’ll share you some very interesting facts about sleep and why it’s so important:

1. After multiple nights of sleep restriction, there is a progressive reduction in sustained attention and speed of processing of information. Sleep more!
2. 75% of adolescents in the US sleep less than 8 hours! The recommended sleep is 7-9 hours per night, try to get that every night
3. 6 hours of sleep for 14 nights or total sleep deprivation for 2 nights has the SAME decreased attention effect!
4. In simulated real-world scenarios, experimentally induced sleep deprivation has shown to increase risk-taking in adults.
5. Individuals getting better quality of sleep are perceived to appear more: attractive, alert, youthful.
6. The three elements of a good quality sleep: Depth (sleep is deep enough to be restorative), duration (length of sleep), continuity (sleep without interruptions)
7. Just ONE night of poor-quality sleep negatively impacts: attention span, memory recall and learning ability
8. A number of population-based studies involving more than 500,000 adults and 28,000 children have identified an important, yet fixable, risk factor for obesity: short sleep duration
9. What do studies suggest has the greatest impact on quality of life and daytime functioning? Quality of sleep and quantity of sleep
10. The economic cost of insufficient sleep among the working population in the US is $411 billion per year
11. 2 billion people are estimated to be living with insomnia

Hope you enjoyed these facts and learned something about sleep!

Sleep Better :)