Sleep Throughout Life: Sleep Disorders
Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School
Sleep throughout life
To a certain extent, heredity determines how people sleep throughout their lives. Identical twins, for example, have much more similar sleep patterns than nonidentical twins or other siblings. Differences in sleeping and waking seem to be inborn. There are night owls and early-morning larks, sound sleepers and light ones, people who are perky after five hours of sleep and others who are groggy if they log less than nine hours. Nevertheless, many factors can affect how a person sleeps. Aging is the most important influence on basic sleep rhythms, because it affects how much sleep you get in a typical night as well as your sleep architecture (see "Sleep architecture").
Snoozing newsThe average length of time Americans spend sleeping has dropped from about 9 hours a night in 1910 to about 7–7.5 hours today. |
| Last updated: | January 23, 2007 |
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Medical content reviewed by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School. Harvard Health Publications, Copyright © 2007 by President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Used with permission of StayWell.
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