Your body may be slumbering, but your brain never stops working. It stays busy, constantly instructing your systems to keep functioning — breathing, digesting, pumping blood and all the other tasks that keep you alive while you sleep. Otherwise we would never wake up each morning.
But sleep is crucial to brain function and help consolidate the effects of waking experience — by converting memory into more permanent and/or enhanced forms. Research shows that people who sleep so little over many nights do not perform as well on complex mental tasks as do people who get closer to seven hours of sleep a night. Studies among adults also show that getting less or much more than seven hours of sleep a night is associated with a higher mortality rate. Sleeping problems are almost always involved in mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, as well as head injury. And symptoms are strongly influenced by the amount of sleep a person gets.
The amount of sleep you need depends on various factors — especially your age. On an average, an adult should take sleep for 7-8 hours; a school aged child should have 9-10 hours to function properly.
Source: Star Health Desk
