Sleep

Sleep is essential for your mental health and physical well-being. Sleep allows your body to have time to repair and replace damaged muscles and tissues, and lets your brain rest after a busy day.

Since everyone has different bodies, everyone needs different amounts of sleep. Teenagers and young people need at least eight to nine hours of sleep each night to maintain physical health, school performance and emotional well-being.

Having poor quality sleep makes you feel fatigued during the day, weakens your immune system and plays havoc with your skin and eyes. Your mental health, mood regulation and relationships can really suffer without sleep.

You might find yourself in situations where you are eating and drinking too much at once and more frequently because you are always tired.

Heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are linked with a lack of sleep. Not getting enough sleep also makes it difficult to focus, learn or participate at school or work.

The Sleep Foundation describes good quality sleep as:

• spending at least 85% of the time you are in bed asleep
• falling asleep in 30 minutes or less
• waking up no more than once per night and being awake for 20 minutes or less after initially falling asleep.