Managing Your Sleeping Patterns

By Helena Young 13 October 2015

Two men fast asleep on the tube

Maintaining a balanced sleeping pattern can be vital, it can have an effect on your day to day life. Even missing an hour of sleep at night can have a huge impact on how you function the following day.

Sleep patterns are a measure of your sleep routine and how it affects your functionality throughout the day. Just missing an hour of sleep can a negative  impact on your ability to think straight and have an impact on your response speed. It also compromises your cardiovascular health, energy balance, and your ability to fight infections.

Some people think that getting ridiculous amounts of sleep can cure their daytime fatigue. But you have to bare in mind that quality is more valuable than quantity, you should only sleep when your body is telling you to. Sleeping for no reason can actually have a negative effect on your body and sleeping pattern as it will make it harder for you to get to sleep at the night time.

It is ideal to catch up on lost sleep during the weekend. Although this sleeping pattern will help relieve part of a sleep debt, it will not completely make up for your lack of sleep. Furthermore, sleeping later on the weekends can affect your sleep-wake cycle so that it is much harder to go to sleep at the right time on Sunday nights and get up early on Monday mornings.

The majority of adults are getting between 6 – 7 hours of sleep per night, although this may seem like enough and you are able to function on this amount. Adults are actually advised to get between 7.5 – 9 hours of sleep per night. This extra amount of sleep could greatly improve the functionality of your brain and should greatly reduce tiredness felt throughout the daytime.

Overall, your sleeping pattern is extremely important and can impact how you function throughout the daytime. It’s essential that you have a consistent sleeping pattern so that you don’t suffer from sleep fatigue.

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