Goodnight Moon.

Sleep…can you ever get enough? Most healthy adults need between seven and a half to nine hours of sleep each night to function at their best. In actuality, most adults are barely getting by with six. Lately, I have been feeling like my own sleep bank is little overdrawn.

My grandmother used to get up at 5 am everyday with no problem. I was really looking forward to adding that extra time to my day. Much to my chagrin, our need for sleep does not decrease with age. Older people still need at least seven and a half to eight hours of sleep. Older adults often have trouble sleeping for long periods of time. They may have to use naps during the day to keep their sleep banks full.

Did you know that getting just one hour less sleep per night can affect your daytime functioning? You may not feel sleepy during the day but it can still affect your ability to think and respond quickly. It also compromises your cardiovascular health, energy balance, and ability to fight infections.

Your body does not adjust quickly to different sleep schedules. Your internal clock can be disrupted by factors such as night-shift work, traveling across time zones, or irregular sleeping patterns—leaving you feeling groggy, disoriented, and sleepy at inconvenient times. The production of melatonin can also be thrown off when you're deprived of sunlight during the day or exposed to too much artificial light at night—especially the light from electronic devices, including TVs, computers, tables, and mobile phones. It can take more than a week to readjust your internal clock.

Extra sleep at night cannot cure you of problems with excessive daytime fatigue. 

When it comes to sleep, it is quality not quantity. Some people sleep eight or nine hours a night but don’t feel well rested when they wake up because the quality of their sleep is poor.

Sleep debt is the difference between the amount of sleep you need and the hours you actually get. The debt will have to be repaid; it won’t go away on its own. You can’t make up for lost sleep during the week by sleeping more on the weekends. A weekend make-up sleeping pattern will help relieve part of a sleep debt; it will not completely make up for the lack of sleep. Furthermore, sleeping later on the weekends can affect your sleep-wake cycle so that it is much harder to go to sleep at the right time on Sunday nights and get up early on Monday mornings. Every time you sacrifice on sleep, you add to the debt. 

I know it's a challenge, families are so busy these days but, try to stay on schedule and keep your sleep bank full if you want to be the best "you" everyday.