Standing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC offers insight on how to get enough sleep after a recent study resulted in the shocking conclusion that nearly a third of the population of the United States does not rest properly. This was the conclusion drawn by the group after studying more than 400,000 individuals across all 50 states.
It is known that a healthy amount of daily sleep involves at least 7 hours of shuteye. Failure in sleeping for at least that long will not only affect your work, family and social life, but has dire consequences and effects on the overall health of both the body and the mind. Studies suggest that lack of sleep is one of the main factors that increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and mental illness.
There seems to be an increase of occurrences of individuals not getting enough sleep, and all signs suggest that the likeliness of that happening in this era is strongly related to unhealthy habits, technology dependency as well as stress and overworking. While the study reported that across the United States 65.2 percent of the participants were getting a healthy amount of sleep, the most affected states such as Hawaii only scored 56.1 percent of healthy sleepers, while South Dakota went up to 71.6 percent of people getting at least 7 hours of sleep a day.
This led CDC to the conclusion that there needs to be an initiative to increase public awareness and offer education regarding healthy sleep. The group believes that this is not just something that should be done by independent, non-profit organizations, but that companies and corporations should also join in and offer these types of things to its employees. Especially in the case of shift workers and high activity sectors.
It is worrying to see just how much the sleep factor has been missed out on in case of the multiple types of health concerns that individuals are educated on. There is plenty of effort put in educating the contemporary society about why we should eat right, not live a sedentary life, quit smoking or do things in excess, but not so much about sleeping.
CDC proceeded to forward several pieces of advice to people facing sleeping issues, including how to plan your sleeping in order to ensure you get the minimum requirement of hours a day, as well as factors that could lead to disrupting a normal sleeping cycle, such as exposure to blue light when it’s near bed time.
Image Source: 1