How Much Sleep Do Adults Need?

A good night’s rest doesn’t necessarily mean eight hours of sleep. It could be as few as seven hours or as much as nine, with another hour-plus of wiggle room in either direction on top of that.

The point is, there’s no one-size-fits-all magic number of sleep hours for adults (roughly defined as ages 26 to 64), says a New York sleep expert. Recently, the National Sleep Foundation released age-specific guidelines for the recommended hours of sleep in a 24-hour period.

“It’s considered a minimum requirement to get at least seven hours of sleep for most healthy adults, but there is a lot of interindividual variability from person to person,” said Preethi Rajan, MD, who works in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine for the North Shore-LIJ Health System.

In general, getting less than the average recommended amount of hours of sleep has been linked to various medical conditions such as:

• hypertension
• obesity
• metabolic syndrome
• poor cognitive performance during the day
• sleepiness during the day
• and other quality of life issues

“The important thing to remember is that if people are sleeping the required amount according to these guidelines but are still sleepy during the day or are waking up frequently during the night it may either be that they are a long sleeper or have a sleep disorder that’s unrecognized or undiagnosed and they need medical attention for that,” said Dr. Rajan.

To see a video about this, click here: http://bit.ly/1ONCBMS