Chances Are You’re Cheating Your Body Out of 1 Night of Sleep Each Week
You might be more sleep deprived than you think. Get your beauty sleep like Gigi Hadid. (Photo: Instagram/@gigihadid)
Everybody knows we need our beauty sleep, but amid hectic jobs, managing families, and trying to maintain social lives, shut-eye often falls by the wayside and even becomes an inconvenience. As it turns out, if you think you don’t get enough sleep, you’re probably seriously underestimating the severity of the issue.
A new study from the Royal Society for Public Health finds that British people miss out on an entire night of sleep every week, getting only 6.8 hours each night on average and reportedly needing 7.7 hours. Missing out on an hour of sleep each night doesn’t seem like the end of the world, but when you do it every night it adds up to an entire night’s sleep each week and a huge pile of sleep debt by the end of the month. And the problem is scarily common: four in 10 people aren’t getting enough sleep and one in five sleep poorly most nights. Cut your cranky coworker some slack, he’s probably exhausted.
And Americans, you’re not in the clear either. “Perhaps the greatest awareness of the problem has been in the US, where it has been estimated that 50 to 70 million adult Americans have a chronic sleep disorder that contributes to poor health,” the study reports. “And one in three adults is sleeping less than seven hours per night, an amount at which physiological and neurobehavioral deficits manifest and become progressively worse under chronic conditions.” Sleep deprivation can create a mass of other health problems that are harder to ignore than a little drowsiness, so shut your computer and go count sheep.
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