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 the same for everyone.

A new review from Brain Medicine challenges the notion that all adults require eight hours of sleep a 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. . .

Long before the implementation of the 40-hour workweek, the invention of alarm clocks and the use of cellphones, 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. (Read more from “Forget 8 Hours — New Research Reveals how much Sleep Adults Really Need” HERE)