Forget 8 hours new research reveals how much sleep adults really need

When it comes to sleep, is eight hours really the magic number?While adequate rest is undoubtedly an important component of human health, how much sleep we need isn’t necessarily the same for everyone.A new review from Brain Medicine challenges the notion that all adults require eight hours of sleep per night to be healthy.“Human sleep patterns in pre-industrial societies exhibit substantial flexibility, suggesting that contemporary norms of consolidated nocturnal sleep are not evolutionarily fixed,” according to the authors.In other words, healthy sleep patterns can vary from person to person — and history supports this idea.Humans, of course, have always required sleep.Long before the implementation of the 40-hour workweek, the invention of alarm clocks and the use of cell phones, people relied on a more natural sleep cycle — one that often didn’t amount to eight hours a night.Per The Conversation, researchers have studied hunter-gatherer communities — whose lifestyles share more similarities with those of our ancestors and who have limited or no exposure to artificial light — to better understand natural sleep duration in humans.The publication then cites a study published in Current Biology, which found that people in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia slept for between 5.7 and 7.1 hours a night.“The short nights also seemed to be enough: people did not make up for them with long daytime naps.

Without an alarm clock, they tended to wake close to dawn, regardless of the day of the week,” the outlet states.Additionally, an analysis published by the Royal Society Publishing estimates that people slept an average of 6.4 hours per night in pre-industrial societies.The journal also acknowledges that modern sleep patterns “are delayed relative to the natural light-dark cycle,” per The Conversation.“Most of us do not wake naturally before dawn.

Many of us have short sleep during the working week and longer catch-up sleep on work-free days,” t...