How about if I have a few bad nights?
If we don’t get good sleep on one night or two, we can probably catch up. Our bodies and brains will recover and we will be fine.
But if we don’t have enough sleep or not good quality sleep for a long time, that’s different. As sleep controls so many aspects of our health, this can really mess with our bodies and brains.
We are more likely to fail a year at school, put on weight, become depressed and get pretty sick for a long time, just to name a few examples.
So it’s really best to set up good sleep patterns early in life so that doesn’t happen to us.
How much is enough sleep?
Not everybody needs exactly the same amount of sleep. But people who study sleep, like me, think someone in your age group, Hedya, usually needs between nine and 11 hours a night.
We also need good quality sleep. This means it needs to be restful, without too much waking up at night. It also means we need to make sure we go to bed and wake up around the same times every day.