Science 7 #62: Sleep

It is very important to get enough sleep at night. If you don’t get enough sleep often enough, you can develop diseases. Having high quality sleep is also really important, because if you’re sleeping lightly for 10 hours, you’re not in deep sleep as long as you should be. Sleep deprivation can have other bad effects, especially on your mood and your productivity. You will probably get up in the morning tired and grumpy, and have to rely on caffeine to keep you awake at all.

Make sure you go to sleep at a reasonable time, so that you can make sure that you get enough sleep. You should also try and turn off your devices 20-30 minutes before you go to bed. You also need to remember that nobody can force you to go to sleep, not even yourself. So the best you can do is make your sleeping environment the best it can be. Don’t drink caffeine before bed. A hot shower before bed helps make one (or at least me) fall asleep more quickly.

Depending on how old you are, you should be sleeping for different amounts of time. Teenagers should be getting 8-10 hours of sleep at night, but if they are expected to go to bed too early (for example, 8 o’clock pm) and expected to get up at a specific time (7:00 am), that means that they are expected to get 11 hours of sleep total, which is an hour over the maximum recommended time. That means they are going to be awake in bed for several hours, which is really quite pointless. It is also quite frustrating for the unfortunate victim, should anybody be so unlucky as to have the bedtime rules stated above.