Good day everyone and welcome to my blog. I have been on Steemit for more than 90 days now and it has been fun on here. I’d like to appreciate my Steemit mentor @addempsea for his advice and constant pressure on delivering well-prepared STEM posts. I belong to a community of young, savvy and achieving writers. They are well known and gradually they are been seen on the front pages of where well-documented and interesting writers features. These guys @rharphalle @temitayo-pelumi @sogless @mrbreeziewrites @olajidekehinde @adetola and more have been doing the community proud. I’m proud of you guys!

In between thinking about writing a post, I became ecstatic that I was finally going to drop my first STEM post. I dropped my PC for a while and went back to the movie (Warcraft) I hadn’t finished. I wasn’t into the movie for long that I fell asleep again. Now I know why I dropped my PC in the first place. It wasn’t for the love of the movie; it was for the love of the sleep I had longed for or the sleep that had longed for me.

Can nature long for human or is it the other way? Now I am afraid.

Stressed man from pixabay under CC0 Licence

I envy my uncle who is an accountant and a lover of his job. I don’t really know why I envy him though, maybe because he’s hardworking or because he is well to do. He is a cultured man who hates laziness and he is so committed to his work. Through his influence, I got an internship in an oil company and I stayed with him and his family for a couple of weeks. My uncle comes home late every evening due to high traffic and he wakes up back early in the morning. Going to work each and every morning with my uncle was straining but I never showed him. I am a late sleeper and I get normally a maximum of 7 hours sleep. My first 3 nights at his place only provided me with a maximum of 5 hours sleep.

I wanted to break into tears but I remembered Saturdays and Sundays. Those two days gave me hope.

Each morning, I got a wake-up call from the gateman at around 4:00 am and I was expected to be done before 5:00 am. Companies were to resume by 8:00 am so that means we had 3 hours to prepare for a journey that really shouldn’t be more than 45 minutes. I hated Lagos at first. Who wouldn’t? I lamented every time I was woken at that odd hour. I got to work a little tired or half sleepy by noon. ‘Is my body not in support of my sleeping system and why am I tired at work?’ I always ask myself.

Now, this brings us here…

One of the most frequent questions asked by those concerned with good living and especially those who are scared of one breakdown or the other is the question of how well should I sleep. I have heard this over and over again, ‘sleep is Mother Nature, you can’t cheat it, and it finds a way of coming back to you.’ As an observer, I have seen a few numbers of people sleep for the littlest of time and still work maximally. Yes, it’s possible! Folks from Lagos, Nigeria in which my Uncle earlier stated is one or whosoever stays there would agree that they do not get the recommended hours of sleep but think all is well. Is all truly well? Can you cheat Mother Nature? How long can you sleep for? All of these questions are going to be answered right here. Stay back and enjoy as I lead you to what you need to know about sleep.

What is generally understood by sleep

Sleep is not falling over or crashing on either a soft bed or a hard sofa. Sleep also goes way beyond taking nap or siesta. Those are actually very short compared to the subject matter. Sleep is a key signal of our overall well-being. You’d note that a man underperforming would tell his boss he never really had time to sleep and he now lives on caffeine or Nescafe (this is the most used beverage that prevents us from sleeping in Nigeria). Nescafe is been used mostly by university students when exam approaches. It actually helps for a short period of time because constant usage for a long period of time could cause abnormality in sleeping pattern. It is weird to say the average human spends one-third of his/her life sleeping, and the total state of man’s sleeping well being remains an essential question throughout generations.

Why is sleep so important?

When it comes to sleep, a lot of questions arise. If we define why it is important from our own perspective, can we be assured we’d give a satisfying definition?

Why then is sleep crucial?

Sleep is more than just a division of time whereby the body and most importantly the mind goes to rest. The hardest of the work done by the body occurs when we are completely asleep. While we work, our muscles wear out and our brain piles up plaque. A rebuilding in the muscles and a wiping off of plaques in the brain is usually done while we sleep.

CAN YOU SEE WHY SLEEP IS CRUCIAL?

The quality and not necessarily the quantity of the sleep we get affects our health. What do I mean by quality and quantity? Take for instance; Mr. Mark decides he is going to finally rest for 7 hours after overseeing all the work at his Facebook’s HQ. He goes to bed at exactly 10:00 PM and 2 hours into his sleep, he got a call from his lawyer on if he could carry on with a suit from an individual. He rose to answer him and afterward stayed on the bed for 15 minutes before he could sleep back. He was about 4 hours into the second round of his rest that he once again got a call from another worker telling him about the advances they made in their Artificial Intelligence.

It is, of course, a great achievement in the future of Facebook. Mr. Mark was happy about the calls that came in but he was unhappy about the time he spent sleeping. He slept for about 6 hours but it wasn’t quality enough, his mind was not in total rest. All he did all night was to think about the whole situation that came up. Elsewhere, sleep for Mrs. Oprah is quite different in that she gets her 6 hours sleep daily without disturbance compared to Mr. Zuckerberg. In this sense, quality and not quantity is the real deal. Looking at our non-sleeping life which is a sum total of strength, thinking capacity, emotional balance, our daily productivity, and our immune system, these and more are greatly influenced by the quality of sleep.

It is expected of me as a Poet after sleeping for more than 6 hours to outperform a colleague who just had a rough 4 hours sleep. I tend to creatively etch out my words with balanced emotions and at the end of the day, come out productive.

To clear you of the wrong thoughts, sleep is not just a time when the body goes off. Again, while we all sleep, the brain remains super busy, often time making check and balances in biological maintenance. This maintenance ensures that the body keeps running in the best condition possible. By maintaining also, you get prepared for the next day’s job. Trying to communicate, learn or even create something extraordinary at the best level may be difficult without quality hours of sleep. Sleep is repairing and refreshing.

Seriously consider to get a good hour of sleep, make time out to have your whole body rest. Your health will take a new shape and your efficiency would reach a new level.

What are the health consequences of not prioritizing sleep?

Newborn babies and most often, children enjoy a great number of hours of sleep. I wish I were younger now. They sleep a lot because they are not concerned with what happens to them for now. The only task they see is to have their scheduled meals. With their long hours of sleep, they tend to be healthier, smile well, play well and enjoy being a child. I did anyway.

Over the years, it has been noted by surveys carried out by me that over one-third of adults and two-thirds of University students don't get adequate sleep each night. Sadly, not getting enough quality sleep causes much more harm than just feeling tired.

One negative effect is that, if you deprive yourself of quality sleep, your decision-making abilities become redundant, accidents lurks around and you lag behind it things you used to do best. This is partially due to the fact that not getting enough sleep harms the cognitive performance. How is this so?

In memory, how much you sleep actually has to do with learning, sustenance, and recovery of memories. When you deprive yourself of sleep, you negatively affect both your short-term memory and your long-term memory. In sleep-deprived people, their response to their environment is always different in that their reactions are always absurd. As further shown in researches, they lack proper documentation and also lack focus for the work at hand.

When you do not have the required sleep, you stay up thinking about how much you don’t rest. This leads to depression and mental disorder most often. Even worse, not getting enough sleep also increases your chances of developing chronic diseases like obesity and heart disease.

A lot still happen while we sleep, in the brain, there is a formation of paths in the neurons and they help store up and process data or information just learned. If enough sleep is not had, the brain becomes tired and going over information would be tiring. So, as a student, lecturer, worker and even the paper reader type, you should set out to know how many sleeping hours is needed to have a balanced and healthier life.

How much sleep do you need?

An alarm clock from pixabay under CC0 Licence

Enough of the negatives of sleep deprivation; I know you are definitely on your toes to change your sleeping duration. How much sleeping time is needed depends on a lot of things.

Our preferences and taste as individuals differ, and the answer to the question is no different. Age is the major determinant in the decision of how many hours are needed all night.

The official recommendations for quality sleep time are broken down below;

Age difference	Age	Duration
Newborn & infants	0-11 months	12-17 hours
Toddlers	1-2 years	10-14 hours
School children	3-13 years	9-11 hours
Teenagers	14-17 years	8-10 hours
Adults	18-64	7-9 hours
Older adults	65 & above	7-8 hours

However, some other people are recommended to have less or more sleep due to the following factors;

The quality of sleep

Your personal sleeping quality impacts the amount of sleep you are to have. Tiredness is the easily seen and firstly encountered negative if you deprive yourself of quality sleep. Been a good sleeper (sounds weird) allows you to have a lesser amount of sleep if the need arises. You’d be able to make do with a few hours for a period. This is not to make you sleep less unless you are been told to by a medical personnel.

Genetic composition

Another major determinant of the duration of rest you need to get is your genetics. Research and studies have it that some genetic variation affect the number of hours spent sleeping and at whatever time of the day you intend to sleep.

A very good example are those with an ad hoc genetic composition or another who even with 6 hours uninterrupted sleep do well compared with those without any genetic composition who need a minimum of eight hours sleep. The sad thing is that since your genetic composition or makeup is one thing you can’t change, you are left with no means of knowing if you house these compositions. Sleep deprivation negatively affects the genetic composition.

Conclusion

Paying attention to how you feel or the way your body feels leads you to the actual amount of sleep you need.

Finally, promise yourself to in all way get a good hour of sleep. If noticed that you aren't sleeping well despite all you have done or you are always tired and don't know why, seeing your doctor wouldn’t be a bad idea.

The next time I come here, I would be asking each and everyone who drops a comment if they had a quality sleep. A gift sure awaits good responses.

NB: A gift could be another health related post.

Pay attention to your health, sleep well till we meet next time.

REFERENCES

• helpguide - Get the sleep you need

• sleepfoundation - Excessive sleepiness

• healthline - How much sleep you need