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Perhaps your kids are getting more sleep than ever these days with their social activities strictly limited and more time at home. Boredom can increase sleep time, too. Or maybe your kids are pulling all-nighters watching Netflix, making TikTok videos, chatting with friends or, now that school has begun, doing homework and actually reading.
Whatever life’s activities are, everything can be done better and with more enthusiasm and joy when we are well-rested. The same rings true for your kids.
Depending on your child’s age, there are very specific recommendations about how much sleep they should get. Question is: are they? After all, it’s your job as a parent to ensure their wellbeing and since sleep is fundamental to growth and a strong immune system, to learning and their physical development as well as their emotional wellness, it should be a top priority.
While you, as an adult, likely have adapted to getting less sleep and still being able to get through your day, babies, children and teens don’t cope as well and need significantly more sleep than adults. A child’s early years are so important in terms of development.
Different amounts of sleep are needed through different stages of development, from babies to a child to a teen—sleep is part of a healthy, holistic lifestyle. So, what’s the rule of thumb? Here’s a chart giving age appropriate and science-based recommendations for total hours of sleep each day including night and daytime naps combined.
As with everything health-wise, knowing the rule of thumb is a great start, but of course, you know your child best. If your baby, child or teen seems to function better on even more sleep, use the above guidelines for sleep as a baseline and add more as you deem appropriate up until the maximum because there is such a thing as too much sleep. In these cases, you may want to evaluate the underlying reason for excessive sleep.
As we’ve established, sleep is a healthy addition to a holistic lifestyle and critical for your child’s growth and development throughout childhood. This is because, just as sleep can have a positive effect on your child’s health, not getting enough sleep can lead to long lasting health effects if it persists.
What doesn’t sleep affect? Below is just a short list of the many benefits that sleep can have on your holistic health:
The effects of sleep deprivation go far beyond sleepiness during the day. Here are just some of the negative effects that result from sleep deprivation in babies, children and teens:
Sometimes, half the battle is just getting your child, teen or babies to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Getting quality sleep can often be solved by employing some simple tactics and creating habits, including:
In some cases, all that is needed to sleep better is creating the right environment for rest—starting with a cool, dark room and a natural, non-toxic bed. At SAMINA, we believe a Healthy Sleep Solution is a holistic solution.
To learn more about SAMINA healthy sleep products, contact us today and start sleeping better tonight.
When you consider how many different factors can negatively affect your sleep, dehydration isn’t usually high on the list. We all know that pillows, mattresses, room temperature, pre-bed routines, and body positioning play significant roles. But if you’ve been having trouble getting quality sleep and can’t find a culprit, you may want to explore dehydration as a possibility.
Keep reading to find out how dehydration affects your sleep and what you can do about it.
It is possible to be dehydrated even when you don’t feel thirsty, so relying on thirst alone to guide you is never a good idea. The consequences of dehydration can range from mild to severe, and include headaches, dizziness, confusion, fatigue, organ failure and even death in extreme cases. At night, dehydration can disrupt your sleep so you wake up not rested and still tired. It can also lead to a dry throat and nasal passages that lead to snoring and a raw, parched mouth in the morning. Trying to sleep while dehydrated can also lead to leg cramps and muscle spasms that will keep you up.
Surprisingly, dehydration actually increases the urge to use the bathroom in the middle of the night!
It makes sense that sleeping in a dry environment can dehydrate you faster than an environment with higher humidity levels. If your bedroom is particularly dry, you can become dehydrated while you sleep, or if you already are dehydrated, the situation will be made worse. And if you sleep in an environment that is conducive to dehydration, the sleep hormone melatonin may be affected, which can throw off your circadian rhythm and lead to poor quality sleep.
In 2018, the journal Sleep published research that found adults that sleep six hours per night or less have a higher chance of being dehydrated than those who slept longer.
Some believe these findings indicate that poor sleep symptoms like fatigue, headache or muddled thinking that many people experience in the morning may be caused by dehydration during the night.
The research was performed on around 20,000 Chinese and US adults. Those who claimed to sleep six hours a night or fewer across both groups had a 59% higher risk of being dehydrated than those who slept seven to eight hours regularly. The key may be a hormone called vasopressin. While you sleep, your pituitary gland uses vasopressin to signal the kidneys to retain fluid. Typically, more vasopressin is released later on in the sleep cycle, which is a period the shorter duration sleepers don’t reach.
It’s important to start the night well hydrated because you will lose fluid simply through the act of sleeping. The act of breathing leads to fluid loss, and this is exacerbated if you breathe through your mouth or snore during the night. As mentioned above, sleeping in a dry environment can increase fluid loss, as can exercising intensely in the evening or drinking alcohol to excess before bed.
It’s easy to assume that guzzling copious amounts of water before bed would be the solution to staying hydrated and having a more restful sleep, but that might not be the case. You may end up making multiple trips to the bathroom during the night, which would disrupt your sleep anyway.
It’s better to think of hydration as a whole day type of activity and not just think of it when you are faced with going to bed.
Some useful tips you can use include:
Staying hydrated at night to avoid the negative effects of dehydration can be challenging, but it’s definitely within reach. At SAMINA, we have a wide range of products that can help you have a holistic, natural sleep and avoid sleep-related dehydration. For pricing or any other questions, request more information here.