The advice to get a good night’s sleep is great, but a little vague. How do you know if you’re getting sufficient rest?
“In the past, we defined sleep by its negative outcomes, including sleep dissatisfaction,” says Maurice Ohayon, director of the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center in a New York Magazine article. “Clearly, this is not the whole story.”
Ohayon, along with several other sleep experts, attempted to define what makes a good night’s sleep by reviewing more than 200 previously published sleep studies, the article notes.
Their study, published in Sleep Health, a journal of the National Sleep Foundation, outlined four criteria.
- Taking half an hour or less to fall asleep
- Waking up no more than once a night
- Falling back asleep within 20 minutes after you wake up
- Sleeping for at least 85% of the time in bed
“With this initiative, we are now on a better course of defining sleep health,” Ohayon says.
