Lack of sleep has been proven detrimental to health and overall well being of a person. There are many cases of people who fell asleep behind the wheels as they were too tired due to lack of sleep and tragedies occur where innocent lives were lost in road accidents.
I remember a case not too long ago where a girl returned to her room after about a week of no sleep, only to collapse after opening the door to her room, she died of exhaustion.
How many hours of sleep do we need? A newborn baby sleeps for nearly 22 hours and only wake up for a total of 2 hours accumulated throughout the day for feeding, changing of nappy and bathing. As humans grow older, we need less and less sleep.
However, it is said that compared to only 30 years ago, our adults nowadays sleep a lot less than our predecessors. From the ideal 8 hours of sleep a day, we wanted to do more by 'borrowing time' from the bed, sacrificing sleeping time. It is not uncommon now to have adults sleeping for only 5-6 hours or even less than 4 hours a day. In the long run, it isn't really good for the body.
How to avoid 'borrowing zzz time' and have quality and enough sleep?
Prioritise, have good time management and don't do unnecessary things which can wait till tomorrow. Is the laundry really important that it cannot wait another day? Is the filing of the documents really important that not doing it tonight will cause your boss to fire you? Why didn't you do it in your office before coming home? Not enough time you said? What did you do in the office today that you need to bring work home? Is there any problem with your time management?
Then if you have kids, it is inevitable to sleep less than 4 hours a night in those first two years. Some are lucky their babies could sleep through the night in a matter of a few months before they even turned one. Okay, somehow you can survive that, true. But once the kids are grown up, are there any other 'valid excuse' to stay up late and sacrifice your sleep?
Sleep is essential for your internal organs to rest and most importantly for your liver to detoxify and perform its functions. You are damaging/putting stress on your organs by pushing them to overwork and not giving them enough rest. Ever wonder why you get pimples/zits when you lack sleep? The Liver doesn't have enough time to detoxify.
The olden people slept more than us, what makes us think we can sleep less than them since our physical body hasn't really evolved since a few thousand years ago. Let's zzz more today.
Pix below of an olden day bed chamber in post-revolution China.
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