10 Biggest Myths About Sleeping, According To Researchers

(CNN) — Hey, sleepyheads. What you believe about sleep may be nothing but a pipe dream. Many of us have notions about sleep that have little basis in fact and may even be harmful to our health, according to researchers at NYU Langone Health’s School of Medicine, who conducted a study published Tuesday in the journal Sleep Health. “There’s such a link between good sleep and our waking success,” said lead study investigator Rebecca Robbins, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. “And yet we often find ourselves debunking myths, whether it’s to news outlets, friends, family or a patient.” Robbins and her colleagues combed through 8,000 websites to discover what we thought we knew about healthy sleep habits and then presented those beliefs to a hand-picked team of sleep medicine experts. They determined which were myths and then ranked them by degree of falsehood and importance to health. Here are 10 very wrong, unhealthy assumptions we often make about sleep, an act in which we spend an estimated third of our lives — or, if we lived to 100, about 12,227 combined days. Stop yawning. It’s time to put these unsound sleep myths to bed. 1. Adults need five or fewer hours of sleep “If you wanted to have the ability to function at your best during the day, not to be sick, to be mentally strong, to be able to have the lifestyle that you would enjoy, how many hours do y...
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