Dealing with Chronic Fatigue
Getting quality sleep is one of the most important aspects of a healthy lifestyle, but studies show that around four out of every five people say they have sleep problems once a week and wake up feeling exhausted.
If you’re waking up and feeling like you’re not getting enough rest, there are some things you can do to try and evaluate why this might be the case.
Centers Health Care has a look at three of these ways you can see if you’re getting enough sleep.
- Know How Much Sleep You Should Be Getting
The magic number is seven hours per night for most adults. From around age 18 to 64, seven to nine hours is in the normal range. After age 65, it drops to seven to eight hours. It also helps if you go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time each day.
To see if you’re achieving those goals, monitor your sleep patterns. Write down the time you go to bed and wake up and determine the total number of hours you slept. Mark down whether you woke up in the middle of the night or took a nap the previous day, and note how you feel in the morning.
- Don’t Rely on the Alarm Clock
To get a better handle of your sleep needs, if you have the luxury of not having to be up at a certain time for a two-week period, don’t set your alarm clock for that span. The key, however, is to go to bed at the same time each night. You may sleep later the first few days if your body needs to catch up on sleep, but by the end of the experiment, a pattern of how much sleep your body needs should begin to emerge.
- Take Results to Your Doctor
Show the results from your two studies to your doctor because the reason you are waking up tired may be directly related to the issues listed above, but it also could be a medical condition like sleep apnea that prevents you from getting a good night’s sleep.
