Why sleeping 6 hours a day is as bad as not sleeping at all

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Scientists confirmed this during the experiment and explained the reason.

Lack of sleep is bad for your health and productivity. You've probably heard this many times. But can you feel that your abilities have deteriorated? It turns out not.

In 2004, an interesting experiment was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia to prove this. The sleep deprivation study involved 48 adults. Some of them had their sleep reduced for two weeks to four, six or eight hours. Others did not sleep for two days.

All this time, the laboratory tested the state of the subjects every two hours (with the exception of the hours allotted for sleep), checked the cognitive functions and reaction time. The participants were also asked how they themselves assess their condition, how sleepy they feel.

Why six hours of sleep is not enough

As you can imagine, subjects who slept eight hours a day had the best cognitive performance. People who slept four hours a day were getting worse and worse every day.

And those who slept for six hours kept their intelligence at a high level until about the tenth day of the experiment. But in the past few days, these subjects performed as poorly as people who were sleep deprived at all.

It turns out that, resting for only six hours, you act as badly as people who have not closed their eyes for two days in a row.

One of the most impressive findings from the study is the fact that people who slept for six hours did not feel sleepy. They didn't even know how much their results had deteriorated.

Sleep-deprived people felt more and more sleepy and talked about it. At the end of the experiment, they wanted to sleep twice as much as at the beginning. But after six hours of sleep, the subjects felt only a little sleepy. Although their indicators of cognitive activity did not differ significantly from those of those who were not sleeping.

This discovery raises an important question: How can people cope with lack of sleep if they don't even realize they are?

We don't know how much we really sleep

A study by the University of Chicago found that people as often overestimate the amount of sleep as they underestimate it. Another study found that people overestimate sleep time by 0.8 hours on average.

So if you think you slept for seven hours, it is possible that you actually only got six hours of rest.

It turns out that no one can say for sure how much he sleeps and when he will get enough sleep. Everyone believes that they sleep more than they actually do.

Determining how much you sleep is not as easy as it sounds. But there are some common tips that will definitely help you sleep better:

1. Go to bed at the same time.
2. Do not use gadgets half an hour before bedtime.
3. Don't drink alcohol.
4. Add physical activity throughout the day.

Another piece of advice that is less common: to sleep better, you need to lose weight. According to the US National Sleep Foundation, there is a direct link between insomnia and obesity.

Other causes of sleep disturbances are physical and mental problems. Even stress and bad mood can negatively affect sleep.

Yes, calculating sleep deprivation is difficult. But you can try to increase its quantity and quality and, as a result, increase your productivity.