Welcome to Sleepmo! This is the home of ‘The Sleep Manifesto’. I believe that our attitude to sleep in the 20th and 21st century have been extremely damaging to billions of people.
Our understanding needs to change, and it will. That’s what The Sleep Manifesto is about.
Sleepmo is also a sleep blog and sleep information center. Learn about sleeping better and understand the health benefits of good sleep.
How much sleep do you need? Are you getting enough sleep? How can you get better quality sleep? These are the sorts of questions that I’m interested in and try to cover here.
Have a look at the latest articles about sleep from Sleepmo to start learning and improve your sleep tonight! Feel free to comment on any of the articles with your questions or suggestions.
How important is sleep?
To put it briefly: sleep is extremely important. Along with food, water and air, sleep is an essential requirement for our life and survival. Various studies have demonstrated that long-term sleep deprivation causes serious mental dysfunction and even death in extreme cases. But even short-term sleep deprivation can have a noticeable impact on your day to day health and functioning.
I think it’s really important to make more people realize that sleep is one of the three pillars of good health, along with diet and exercise. Too few people accept this, and believe that neglecting sleep can be a good way to gain more time in their day or get more work done. This kind of thinking can actually be very damaging, and a change in our thinking is needed.
So why do we neglect our sleep?
In the past, before the industrial revolution, people tended to sleep more. This wasn’t necessarily because they respected the importance of sleep any more than we do today, though. It was mostly because there wasn’t a great deal to do after the sun went down and it got dark. People followed a more “natural” sleep schedule and followed their body clocks, and this was likely a much healthier way of sleeping (on the whole). In fact, people tended to sleep for so long each night that they would actually break their sleep into two separate sections with a waking gap in the middle!
Of course, we shouldn’t assume that just because something is “natural” it is necessarily better, or that the past was some sort of golden age of sleep health (life expectancy is higher today, after all). But it is true that more people today are suffering from sleep problems than ever before. The reasons for this are more complex than any site could ever cover (more than any researcher or institution could cover in a lifetime), but there do seem to be some general patterns. One of these is the increasing array of activities that we may prefer over sleep and do during the evening when we should be relaxing.
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