Those of us on the never-ending quest for the perfect night's sleep may finally have an answer to the question "When should I go to bed?" While everyone’s sleep needs are different, it turns out there is a simple trick to help you figure out the perfect bedtime.
Yahoo spoke with Michael Breus, PhD, a board-certified sleep specialist and author of Good Night: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health. “The average sleep cycle is 90 minutes long, and the average human has five of those sleep cycles per night,” he explains, which means we need about seven and a half hours of sleep per night. (Not eight hours; Breus says that rule is outdated.) You can calculate your ideal bedtime by working backward from when you need to wake up. Breus explains that your wake-up time is "socially determined by when you have to get up to get to work, get the kids ready, all those external factors.” If you have to get up by 7:30 a.m., count back 7.5 hours and you'll find that your bedtime should be 12 a.m. Breus goes on to say that if you follow that bedtime for 10 days in a row, you'll start to naturally wake up a few minutes before your alarm clock sounds. Imagine how nice a morning without a startling alarm would be.
To learn more about when you should be going to sleep, read on at Yahoo Health.
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