内容摘要：A person walks past the One-Pillar Torii Gate at Sannō Shrine, the only gate remaining of four gates after the 1945 atomic bombing in Nagasaki, southern Japan, Friday, April 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

A person walks past the One-Pillar Torii Gate at Sannō Shrine, the only gate remaining of four gates after the 1945 atomic bombing in Nagasaki, southern Japan, Friday, April 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

When you’re trying to figure out how much sleep you need, it’s important to think about the quality of it, Pelayo said: “What you really want to do is wake up feeling refreshed — that’s what it’s about.”“If somebody tells me that they sleep many hours but they wake up tired, something is wrong,” Pelayo said. “You shouldn’t leave your favorite restaurant feeling hungry.”

The amount of sleep we need changes throughout our lives. Newborns need the most — somewhere between 14 to 17 hours.“Definitely when we’re babies and children, because we are growing so rapidly, we do need a lot more sleep,” Atwood said.The National Sleep Foundation recommends most adults between 26 and 64 get between seven to nine hours of sleep. People who are 65 and older can get slightly less, and young adults between ages 16 and 25 can get slightly more.

Humans cycle through sleep stages roughly every 90 minutes. In the first portion of the night, Atwood said that more of the cycle is slow wave sleep, or deep sleep, which is essential to repairing and restoring the body. It’s also when “growth hormone” is released.In the latter hours of the night, more of the sleep cycle is spent in rapid-eye movement sleep, or dream sleep, which is important for learning and memory consolidation, or the process in which short-term memory gets turned into long-term memory.

Kids get more “deep sleep,” with about 50% of the night in that realm, she said. That drops at adolescence, Atwood said, because our body doesn’t need the same kind of repair and restoration.

Something else interesting happens around puberty: Gender-based differences in sleep start to crop up.An Indigenous woman from the Wayuu community feeds her baby in the Belen neighborhood on the outskirts of Riohacha, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia)

Ingrid Gonzalez, a Wayuu community leader from Maracaibo who’s lived in the Villa del Sol settlement near Riohacha for six years, says those more traditional Wayuu homes, made with sticks and covered in mud, are very susceptible to the rainy season.“There are many, many houses that flood and fill up with water,” said 29-year-old Gonzalez. “A strong river of water passes through here, and the mud houses collapse.”

“Some people manage to preserve their homes by reinforcing them, but the damage is still significant,” she said. “Several of my own roofing sheets were blown off.”Samuel Lanao, head of Corpoguajira, La Guajira’s environment authority, said in 2024 extreme winter floods caused significant losses of homes, crops, and domestic animals in Indigenous communities, particularly among those coming from neighboring Venezuela. “Because of climate change, there’s been a rise in vector-borne diseases like dengue and Zika. Dengue, in particular, has hit Indigenous communities very, very hard,” he said.