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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。
美国《新闻周刊》撰文：多长时间的睡眠时充足的？如果你的睡眠时间比理想的睡眠时间少，但你感觉正常，这是否仍会损害你的健康？我们的睡眠时间比过去少了吗？最近的研究提供了一些令人吃惊的答案。
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个小时才能感到恢复彻底、状态良好。然而，美国人的睡眠时间与过去相比越来越少。全国睡眠基金会在2005年的一次调查中发现，美国人平均睡眠时间为每晚6.9个小时，与19世纪相比，每晚减少约2小时，与50年前相比，每晚减少1小时，甚至与2001年相比也减少了约15至25分钟。
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。
遗憾的是，我们没有很好地意识到睡眠不足的不良影响。宾夕法尼亚大学的研究人员要求志愿者在两周时间内每晚睡眠时间少于6小时。尽管这些志愿者在两周后认为他们的身体运转相对正常，然而，测试表明，两周时间里，他们的认知能力和反应时间逐渐下降。到测试结束时，他们健康受损程度与那些48小时不睡觉的实验对象是一样的。
