How much sleep should we get?

Sleep is one of the basic human needs and is necessary for survival, allowing us to “recharge our batteries”, so to speak. But why can’t we just sit down and rest our bodies; why do we need to go into this alternate state of mind called “sleep”? The answer lies with the brain and how it differs to the rest of your body. If you sit down or take a bath, you are relaxing the muscles and joints in your body, but your mind is still fully active and it can only be shut-down during sleep. Even during hypnosis, where the person goes into a trance-like state and cannot control their actions, the brain is still active, it is simply acting subconsciously.
There is the argument that your brain is the only organ that benefits from sleep, as this is the only time that it can shut-down, and that the rest of your organs couldn’t care less whether you are conscious or not. One of the best ways to get the right amount of sleep is to ensure that you are comfortable throughout the whole night. You can do this by using a good quality memory foam mattress that will shape around your body and account for body movements during the night that might disrupt your sleeping pattern.
It is said that you go through a number of 90-minute sleep cycles every night and that the key determinant of how refreshed you feel when waking up is how many full cycles you enjoy rather than the total length of time spent sleeping. One sleep cycle is broken up into the following phases:
• 65 minutes of non-REM sleep
• 20 minutes of REM sleep – this is the time during which we dream
• 5 minutes of non-REM sleep
Following this system, if we were to sleep completely naturally, without alarm clocks or other disturbances, then we would awaken after a multiple of 90 minutes, such as 6 hours, 7 ½ hours or 9 hours. This contests the claim that the optimum amount of sleep to get per night is 8 hours, as you are halfway through a sleep cycle. Waking up 30 minutes earlier, at the end of a cycle, is much more effective than getting an extra half-hour’s sleep which some people would see as invaluable. There are difficulties with this system because many people do have to get up at a specific time, such as for work or school, and as we cannot pick and choose the exact time at which we fall asleep, achieving this pattern is very difficult.
Many people see “sleep debt” as something that should be made up for as soon as it is incurred, such as sleeping an extra two hours at night if they got 2 hours less than normal the night before. This might not necessarily be the case, as the number of hours sleep lost is unlikely to amount to a full sleep cycle and by attempting to make it up, the problem is only worsening.

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