sleep needs

Treat sleep with the respect it deserves, and learn how much sleep you really need.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—It's a no-brainer that you should get a good night's sleep if you need to be at your best the next day. But some new research adds a qualifier to that advice: For younger people, getting chunks of good, deep, quality sleep may keep your brain in high gear even if you can't get the hours of sack time you need. On the other hand, regarding older folks' sleep needs, it seems like quantity is key. Such are the implications from research into people's sleep needs recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

THE DETAILS: In the study, 33 adults aged 67 on average, and 29 adults aged 27 on average, stayed overnight in a sleep lab run by sleep expert Sean P. Drummond, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California–San Diego. The researchers measured the sleep duration and quality for each subject, then tested everyone the next day on a variety of brain-activity, learning, and memory tests.

Among the older group, the absolute minutes of sleep they got had the most influence on their cognitive tests, says Drummond. For example, those who got more sleep time—regardless of its quality—were able to remember a list of random nouns better than those who slept for shorter periods. By contrast, with the younger group, individuals who managed to sleep in quality, deep-sleep chunks scored better on the cognition tests than those who got less quality-sleep time. Total sleep time had no bearing.

Read on for advice about getting the sleep you need.