Many of us see sleep as being an inconvenient interuption to the day. Many pride themselves on how little sleep they need. But Sleep is not just a break in the day but a vital part of how we live a healthy life.
It's great to see that this insight is moving into the mainstream. Here is an article today in the Globe and Mail. Snip here.
"It is no coincidence that, over the past 50 years, citizens of the industrialized world have, as well as getting fatter and more anxious, lost about an hour of sleep a night – roughly one full night’s worth every week. And because of city lights, social media and such habits as eating and exercising later at night, what sleep remains is often not the soundest. As Till Roenneberg, the author of Internal Time, points out, 80 per cent of the world now needs an alarm clock to get up each morning. As a result, the head of human chronobiology at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology says, we live in a permanent state of “social jet lag.”
And no segment of the population is more jet-lagged than teenagers. Surveys show that no fewer than three-quarters of them fail to get the rest they need, and find themselves in school the next morning expected to learn when their brains want them to sleep.
Society is increasingly torn when it comes to sleep – we lament its loss even as we boast of how little we require. Because rising at dawn made more sense when most people were farmers and candle wax was expensive, the shift from early bird to nighthawk seems of no great consequence.
Yet as science demonstrates how, without enough sleep, the brain falters, there is a growing campaign to turn back the clock. Researchers are calling for more specific school-based interventions, particularly for elementary students, to establish better sleep habits early on life, and to make sleep education more central in health classes."
Here are some excellent resources to help you get more and better sleep.
How much do you need and some tips as to how to get more sleep
Here is an excellent guide that covers a lot of ground and is also very practical
My new book You Don't Need Medicine to Get Healthy will be out in March and will put all of the factors that drive our health into one master context.
