The amount of sleep each person needs depends on many factors,
including age. Infants generally require about 16 hours a day. For most adults,
seven to eight hours a night appears to be the ideal amount of sleep, although
a few people may need a little as five hours’ sleep or as much as ten hours’
sleep each day.
Getting too little sleep creates a sleep debt, and
eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid.
A large member of people over 65 have frequent sleeping
problems, such as insomnia, and deep sleep stages in many elderly people often
become very short or stop completely. Microsleeps, or very brief episodes of
sleep in an otherwise awake person, are another mark of sleep deprivation. In
many cases, people are not aware that they are experiencing microsleeps. The
widespread practice of burning the candle at both ends in western
industrialised societies has created so much sleep deprivation that what is
really abnormal sleepiness is now almost the norm.
