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  Are You Aware Of Exactly How Much Sleep You Need Every Night?Precisely how much sleep you need every night will very much depend on your state of health and your age. However sleep is not only about the time spent sleeping, but is also a matter of the quality of that sleep. Thus, if you are enjoying the right amount of sleep and are still getting up in the morning feeling tired and going through the day not able to concentrate fully, and possibly being a little touchy, then it is very possible that you are not enjoying enough deep sleep and may very well be suffering from insomnia.In terms of age, newborn babies clearly need the most sleep and will normally sleep in cycles of approximately four hours, waking when it is time to be fed and changed. On average, a newborn baby needs somewhere in the region of fourteen to sixteen hours sleep every day. By the time infants reach the age of approximately four to six months they should be sleeping through the night and will start to spend greater periods of time awake during the day when they will begin to take a greater interest in what is going on around them and start to play. At this stage their requirementneed for sleep will drop somewhat, but they will still require anywhere from ten to fourteen hours sleep each day. Surprisingly enough older children and even teenagers should also be enjoying the same amount of sleep and ten hours sleep each day for children in general is not a bad figure to aim for. For some time it has been thought that children, and especially teenagers, who sleep for more than eight hours each day are simply lazy, but this is in fact far from the case. Taking into account the amount of activity that the majority of children are involved in every day, both at school and in their spare time, and the fact that their bodies are growing and changing very rapidly, there is a genuine need for more than the traditional eight hours sleep if they are to be given the best possible conditions for development. For the majority of adults about eight to eight and a half hours sleep every night is just about right and should be sufficient to permit the body to recharge its batteries and to have you alert and refreshed in the morning. Yet another myth is that the older we are the more sleep we need. This again is not the case, unless there are also accompanying health problems, in which case more sleep could be necessary. A tendency for older adults to nap during the day is often taken to be a signal that they require more sleep but in fact a daytime nap is almost always offset by less sleep at night. One exception in the case of adults is that of pregnant women, who should usually increase their sleep during pregnancy by around two or three hours. The test of whether you are enjoying enough sleep is a fairly simple one and consists of merely assessing whether you feel refreshed when you get out of bed in the morning and can to function normally and focus on things during the day. Should you find yourself unable to focus or doze off during the day then you are probably not enjoying enough sleep. Missing the odd few hours of sleep now and again will not do you any harm but if you find that you are regularly missing out on sleep then this can have serious consequences. We all suffer from the occasional insomnia, but insomnia that carries on for more than a month or six weeks will have a marked affect on both you quality of life and health. Free Article Source: http://www.za77.org About The Author: Help-Me-To-Sleep.com looks at various sleep disorders and covers everything from finding a natural cure for insomnia to the use of daily meditation |