Every day there seems to be more and more distraction keeping us from going to bed. You might have work to do that results in you working furiously into the night or maybe you fall prey to the allure of social media and can’t help yourself from staying awake and wasting your time. Whatever you’re doing you will probably finally decide to call it a night at around 2-3am on your worst days and around midnight to 1am most others. The truth is we all know by now that sleep is important for us. Not just to function properly throughout the day but also for our immune system, memory and reaction times to name a few. 

 

But if sleep is so important, why do we neglect it so much? Well it’s simple: we live busy and distracted lives and we love to waste our own time and energy. If we didn’t procrastinate so much or just stopped scrolling on social media for one second maybe we would actually be able to get some much needed shut eye. The people who think they are getting a bare minimum of 7 hours of sleep are kidding themselves. You don’t realise it takes roughly 15 minutes to half an hour for you to fall asleep and that not to mention you wake up multiple times during the night only to be woken up by an ear piercing alarm. 


The fact of the matter is that you get less sleep than you realise. The bare minimum amount of sleep you get should be 7 hours. But given all the factors I’ve mentioned that means you should be aiming to be in bed for a total of 8 hours. And considering that the average person, as found in a 2014 study, gets less than 7 hours of sleep it's not unlikely that you are one of these people. It’s important to understand that you might be sleep deprived and not even realise it due to being so used to how little sleep you get or how bad your sleeping schedule is.

In order to improve your overall sleep you should eliminate distraction 1 hour before you go to sleep, open your blinds to wake up to natural lights, pick an alarm that actually sounds nice and have a minimum of 8 hours sleep.