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How much sleep is enough? If you get less sleep than the ideal amount but you feel fine, could you be damaging your health anyway? Are we getting less than we used to? Recent research provides some surprising answers。
美國《新聞周刊》撰文：多長時間的睡眠時充足的？如果你的睡眠時間比理想的睡眠時間少，但你感覺正常，這是否仍會損害你的健康？我們的睡眠時間比過去少了嗎？最近的研究提供了一些令人吃驚的答案。
Adults typically need seven to nine hours of sleep each night to feel fully rested and function at their best. However, Americans are getting less sleep than they did in the past. A 2005 National Sleep Foundation poll found that Americans averaged 6.9 hours of sleep per night, which represents a drop of about two hours per night since the 19th century, one hour per night over the past 50 years, and about 15 to 25 minutes per night just since 2001.
成年人通常每晚睡7到9個小時才能感到恢復徹底、狀態良好。然而，美國人的睡眠時間與過去相比越來越少。全國睡眠基金會在2005年的一次調查中發現，美國人平均睡眠時間為每晚6.9個小時，與19世紀相比，每晚減少約2小時，與50年前相比，每晚減少1小時，甚至與2001年相比也減少了約15至25分鐘。
Unfortunately, we are not very good at perceiving the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania restricted volunteers to less than six hours in bed per night for two weeks. The volunteers thought they were functioning relatively normally. However, formal testing showed that their cognitive abilities and reaction times progressively declined during the two weeks. By the end of the two-week test, they were as impaired as subjects who had been awake continuously for 48 hours。
遺憾的是，我們沒有很好地意識到睡眠不足的不良影響。賓夕法尼亞大學的研究人員要求志愿者在兩周時間內每晚睡眠時間少于6小時。盡管這些志愿者在兩周后認為他們的身體運轉相對正常，然而，測試表明，兩周時間里，他們的認知能力和反應時間逐漸下降。到測試結束時，他們健康受損程度與那些48小時不睡覺的實驗對象是一樣的。
