Today the National Sleep Foundation released new guidelines, serving to clarify the meaning of "enough" in the tedious rejoinder, "Most people don't get enough sleep." The sleep-advocacy foundation convened a panel of experts, led by Harvard professor Charles Czeisler, to review hundreds of studies, reminding us that too little sleep can lead to weight gain, depression, and relative deficits of attention—and that too much sleep is, likewise, inadvisable. The recommended sleep allotments are:
- Newborns (0-3 months): 14-17 hours (previously 12-18)
- Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours (previously 14-15)
- Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours (previously 12-14)
- Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours (previously 11-13)
- School-age children (6-13): 9-11 hours (previously 10-11)
- Teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours (previously 8.5-9.5)
- Younger adults (18-25): 7-9 hours (new age category)
- Adults (26-64): 7-9 hours (previously the same)
- Older adults (65 and older): 7-8 hours (new age category)
These new recommendations do little in the way of upsetting the old, with minor variations and clarifications for older adults and young children. And the numbers may vary among people with medical conditions, and among the few outliers who still function optimally outside of these ranges. But these are the amounts that the panel wants people to consider "rules of thumb." The issuance of new guidelines, however familiar they are, serves at least in an effort toward awareness amid an ongoing public-health effort to rebrand sleep deprivation as less of a testament to mettle and more of a serious medical hazard.
