An adequate amount of sleep that an adult requires ranges from seven to nine hours. However, work schedules, day-to-day stressors, a disruptive bedroom environment and medical conditions can prevent us from receiving adequate and peaceful sleep. Hence, a healthy diet and good lifestyle habits can ensure a good amount of sleep each night. However, for some people, chronic lack of sleep may be a sign of a sleep disorder.
Sleep reflects one's state of mind and overall health in general. Good sleep is one that is age-appropriate in duration, qualitatively divided into various sleep stages of adequate periods and which eventually makes a person feel refreshed in the morning and throughout the day. Although there is a wide variation in the amount of total sleep required by healthy adults to maintain a good daytime function, it is widely accepted that a good, consolidated 8 hours of uninterrupted night-time sleep is essential for the majority of adults.
An adequate amount of sleep duration is extremely important to maintain good mental and physical health. A sleep-deprived person often experiences a decline in cognitive function, poor memory, inability to concentrate on tasks at hand and easy irritability with frequent mood swings. Even if the sleep duration is adequate, an interrupted and disrupted sleep with poor sleep quality devoid of deep sleep is also associated with excessive daytime sleepiness with declining cognitive function.
Lack of good sleep, both in terms of duration and quality, can adversely affect physical wellbeing with such individuals being more prone to develop both infectious as well as lifestyle-related diseases. With the millennial generation adopting a 24-hour lifestyle without any defined periods of sleep, an increase in the total screen time during COVID-19 lockdowns due to exponential increase in online classes and meetings, and poor sleep hygiene, have all resulted in a variety of sleep disorders.