Answer to the 7 most frequently asked questions about better sleep

On average, adults need about 8 hours of sleep per night. Only 1 percent of the population needs less than six hours of sleep.

With children it is different. To make it clear we have the desired sleep hours per age category in a table:

Curious about sleep tips per life stage? Then also read the following articles:

• Insomnia in toddlers
• Insomnia in children and toddlers
• Insomnia in teenagers
• Insomnia in adults

It is good to ask yourself the following two questions: Do you have an alarm clock needed to wake up? And are you tired during the day? Is the answer ‘yes’? Then you probably have too little sleep.

Still, it may be that you answer ‘yes’ to these two questions, while you do sleep more than 8 hours. Unfortunately, the duration of your sleep does not say much about the quality of your slaap. Wanneer je bijvoorbeeld licht slaapt of niet voldoende in je diepe sleep phase comes, it may also be that you do not get enough rest.

Nowadays we have more distractions than before. For example, we watch more TV, we have more activities in the evening and spend a lot of time on our smartphone. Even if there is no smartphones would be, we would sleep much more and better. To become sleepy you need to namely ‘to be a little bored in the evening. Now that it is easy not to be bored, the temptation to stay up late is greater.

Do you not sleep well and want to sleep better? Then it is good to first to look for the cause of your poor sleep. You can do this by keeping a sleep diary. Here you write what you do and consume in a day. Important are the last few hours before you goes to sleep. In addition, you write down how your night was. After a while, you may be able to see a pattern discover.

If you have trouble falling asleep and/or staying asleep, a weighted blanket can help you sleep better. Weighted blankets apply subtle pressure on your body causing your nervous system to relax, you calm down and falls asleep more easily. In addition, the blanket encourages your body to lie stiller, which you sleep through more easily.

When you have a night shift, this remains something unnatural for your body. This causes poorer sleep. If you are an extreme evening person, you can handle that a bit better cope with it better than someone else, but it remains unhealthy. In young people who work night shifts or have irregular days, this has less effect because their biological clock is more flexible than older. Younger people can therefore cope more easily with an irregular sleep pattern.

When you do not sleep well or long enough at night, it can help to to take a power nap during the day. In twenty minutes you can already feel much better. Do not sleep too long during the day, because then you risk waking up in your deep sleep and this only makes you more tired.

When you have had too little sleep, an extra nap during the day no effect on your next night's sleep. If you sleep extra, it may be that in the evening you are again sleep less well. This is because you are then not tired enough.

The quality of your sleep has a great influence on your functioning. Yet there are companies that do not realize how much impact this has on functioning. Too little sleep means less productivity, less creativity, higher absenteeism and higher costs.

We hope that after reading this blog, you have become wiser about how to sleep better. If you still have other questions about sleeping better, please feel free to contact us up. We are happy to help you sleep better again!