According to Scientific American, 17-year-old Randy Gardner set an all-time world record in 1965, all for a science fair project as part of a sleep deprivation experiment by staying awake for 264 hours or 11 days. The first day his eyes stopped focusing, he subsequently lost the ability to recognize objects by touch, became moody and uncoordinated. At the end of this experiment he had problems with concentration, short-term memory, became paranoid and began to hallucinate. Gardner recovered with no physical or mental harm, as you see, getting the right amount of sleep can make a big difference in a person's life today. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay I will tell you about how much sleep a person really needs and why we need sleep before going to bed tonight this may come to mind the time where you want to fall asleep and wake up only to get the right amount of sleep. You may be wondering right now how much sleep do we really need? Sleep requirements vary from individual to individual. There is a recommendation that decreased sleep requires that adults need seven to eight hours of sleep at night while adolescents need ten hours. There are certain sleep-inducing chemicals that play a role in our sleep the increase in sleep-induced chemicals like Addison's and melatonin puts a person into a light sleep by causing our breathing and heart rate to slow down and our muscles to relax. This is the time when DNA is repaired and our body cools down during non-rapid eye movement or REM sleep. You might be thinking why do we need sleep and lots of it. Here are some tips that will change your mind about the importance of sleep. Why do we need sleep? Sleeping has physical and mental benefits, for example sleeping is a building process restores the body's energy reserves that have been depleted during our daily activities by getting the right amount of sleep our body rebuilds itself and restores our muscles by secreting a hormone of growth .Spending all day thinking and creating takes up a lot of our mental energy when we sleep, we restore our mental energy just like our phones, you can be plugged in to reach full battery charge at the end of the day we need to be recharged too. Liz Miller, director of Bethel Health Services, points out that constant sleep deprivation will greatly affect your ability to retain information that affects your grades, which then leads to stress along with many other harmful consequences that David Wolf, states for example a Sleep deprivation causes you to become more aggressive, discouraging your interpersonal responses and making you easily angered. Secondly, it also weakens your immune system causing you to be at greater risk of catching a cold or illness and will make you gain weight by increasing levels of a biochemical called ghrelin, a lack of sleep which stimulates your appetite will increase diabetes by type 2 and will increase blood pressure. Not getting enough sleep can impair brain activity by blocking the production of neurons which increases stress levels. Sleep deprivation leads to memory loss deteriorating the brain and finally, getting the right amount of sleep will increase the risk of cancer now that you are more awake when it comes to sleep, now you know how much sleep is enough and why we need sleep.