Even if you don’t have insomnia, there’s still a decent chance you aren’t getting enough sleep. The amount we need varies from person to person, but a 2016 review study concluded that most adults need more than seven hours of sleep a night. Anything less than that is associated with an increased risk of obesity, dementia, diabetes and heart disease, among other issues. The number of Americans who get six hours of sleep or less each night is rising, however.

“When you disrupt your sleep over the long term, it starts to erode your health in many, many ways,” says Michael Twery, director of the US National Center on Sleep Disorders Research ...

About 90 million Americans get nudged, elbowed or awakened each night because they’re snoring. Though loud snoring is something of a joke in our culture, it can signal obstructive sleep apnea, a serious sleep disorder in which a person’s breathing is interrupted repeatedly throughout the night as they sleep, sometimes hundreds of times.

Because they can’t get a good night’s sleep, their brain and body never fully re-energize. Low oxygen and sluggish blood flow through the arteries may make breathing difficult. Blocked airways may lead to high blood pressure in the heart-to-lung system, a condition called pulmonary hypertension. Now, your heart must work harder to pump blood back to the lungs. That can strain the heart and can be life threatening.

Your long-awaited vacation is right around the corner. As the calendar days peel away and you compile your to-do checklist, the issue of jet lag looms if your getaway involves crossing multiple time zones.

Jet-lag syndrome occurs when a person travels quickly across several time zones, confusing the circadian clock by not letting it adjust to the new timing of light and darkness at the point of destination.