Survey Shows South Africans Are Not Getting Enough Sleep
Ever lay in bed at night exhausted only for your brain to decide it’s gong to remember everything you’ve ever said or done in great detail? Join the club. It’s not surprising that a recent sleep survey conducted by The Bed Shop reveled that majority of South Africans struggle to sleep at night. After seeing many international studies revealing a rising problem in sleep quality, the franchise bed retailer recognised that it was time to run a survey to check out South Africa’s sleeping patterns and the results do not paint a pretty picture.
Yes indeed, if you’re struggling to sleep you can at least take solace in the fact that you’re not alone as 68 percent of South Africans say they experience poor sleep most nights and a whopping 80 percent say they feel tired and unrested in the morning.But we’re not alone in our plight, with the International Survey of Sleeping problems revealing that sleeping problems affect 56 percent of Americans, 31 percent of western Europeans and 23 percent of Japanese, it’s clear that a lack of sleep is becoming a major global issue.
While we’ll all probably admit that life is better in pyjamas, most of us just aren’t getting enough sleep as the survey revealed that around 47 million adults don’t receive restorative sleep at night. This is the key stage in your sleep cycle that is responsible for memory consolidation, information processing and resetting your body, so when you doesn’t reach this stage you don’t feel rested or awake when your alarm goes off at 6.30am.
Sure, it might seem alright to skip a few hours of sleep every night but not getting enough sleep decreases your productivity levels and has also been linked to illnesses like Alzheimer’s and diabetes. That’s why it’s important to get in your hours everyday.
Your bed can also have a major impact on your sleep quality, especially if you share it with a partner at night. Sharing a bed with a partner can have a major impact on how well you sleep, particularly if the heavier partner is a restless sleeper as one partner can get woken up every time the other one rolls over. And, while beds these days come with super impressive shelf lives, many people are sleeping in beds more than 10 years old with most failing to make the connection between their quality of sleep and their bed.
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