National Sleep Foundation Updates Recommendations For How Much Sleep You Really Need
Feb-03-2015

Some of us feel well-rested after a solid eight hours of sleep. For others, closer to nine feels best. For others still, a little less will do. How much sleep we prefer to get is highly subjective -- but how much sleep we need is a bit more concrete.

After web analytics showed the vast popularity of the How Much Sleep Do We Really Need? feature of the National Sleep Foundation's (NSF) website, a panel of experts set about to reassure that the information provided there was the most accurate and up to date.

"Sleep duration was basically one of the most visited pages on the NSF website, and it wasn't really clear how those recommendations for the ranges had been arrived at," Max Hirshkowitz, Ph.D., chair of the National Sleep Foundation Scientific Advisory Council, told The Huffington Post.

To do so, a panel of six sleep experts and 12 other medical experts from organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Psychiatric Association and the Society for Research in Human Development, conducted a formal literature review. The panel focused on the body of research surrounding sleep duration in healthy human subjects that had been published in peer-reviewed journals between 2004 and 2014. From the 312 articles reviewed, the experts were able to fine-tune existing sleep duration recommendations as detailed below:

� Newborns (0-3 months): 14-17 hours (range narrowed from 12-18)
� Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours (range widened from 14-15)
� Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours (range widened from 12-14)
� Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours (range widened from 11-13)
� School-Age Children (6-13): 9-11 hours (range widened from 10-11)
� Teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours (range widened from 8.5-9.5)
� Young Adults (18-25): 7-9 hours (new age category)
� Adults (26-64): 7-9 hours (no change)
� Older Adults (65+): 7-8 hours (new age category)

(In addition, the NSF has also added categories for the outliers among us, supplying the range of hours of sleep that have been deemed both "May be appropriate" and "Not recommended.")

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