Study Says You Need 7 Hours Of Sleep To Function Properly, Parents Everywhere LOL

Study says 1/3 of Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, parents everywhere say ‘WTF is wrong with you guys?’

If you hardly sleep and have kids, get ready to have your MIND BLOWN. According to CDC researchers who’ve been granted time and taxpayer money to conduct valuable studies, your health may suffer catastrophically if you don’t catch enough shut-eye. Unsurprisingly, if your parental lifestyle doesn’t allow for you to snooze at whim or, say, sleep for several hours at a stretch without being interrupted by whining or weeping, you might be less healthy. You are now welcome to pick your drooling jaw up off the laptop, because duh.

Experts insist that in order to combat “increased risk for obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke, frequent mental distress, and all-cause mortality,” you’ve got to get at least seven – 7! – hours of sleep per night, preferably eight. Oh, and I’m sure they’d prefer your sleep to be continual and your dreams merry and not interrupted by flailing arms, potty assistance requests, and an insistence that the nightlight is just a little bit too bright. And somehow these wizards of the obvious managed to poll an audience of over 400,000 people – presumably non-parents – to achieve the result that 65% already get the recommended amount of sleep while spinning that 35% don’t.

Waaaah! WAAAAAH! 1/3 of Americans don’t take the opportunity to sleep when they can. Too freaking bad. If you have young kids, or sick kids, or noisy kids (fine, just kids at all) maybe you should take a moment to remember those blissful days when you’d sleep as late you want only to cure your hangover with a champagne brunch… but dream only a moment, because you’ve got shit to do. Gather that laundry, Mama.

While your kids are complaining at 5:45 am that they don’t have enough milk in their Cheerios but now it’s too much milk and will you please start over with a new bowl, there are living, breathing humans who may have consciously decided not to partake in the glorious bounty of sleep in favor of some other activity. If they’re just tooling around on the internet reading anything Kardashian-related, they deserve a punch in the throat.

For the love of Sesame Street WHY would someone consciously elect not to take advantage of a snuggly bed and a marshmallow pillow for as long as possible, at least on average, during the week? It’s probably because they think they can eventually catch up on it, though research indicates a person can only alleviate “sleep debt” by adding on an hour or two per night for a period of time, and not via a marathon sleep session. Well, Jerkwads, I’d at least like the opportunity to TRY to catch up on it, but it’s just not in the Go Fish cards. As pathetic as it sounds, I yearn for just enough continual slumber to perform basic functions like assemble mediocre lunches and push the racecar grocery cart in a straight line.

Maybe now that these researchers are done sharing the unmistakable and recommending banal sleep-improvement advice like “cut the screen time,” – groan, no thanks, that’s how we survive – they can perform the same study with just parents. They’d hopefully definitively conclude that we are worthy of pity and create a government-funded program to give us babysitting once a week for a lengthy siesta. Til then, turn down the lights and hand my kid an iPad – I’ve got 15 minutes to doze, then it’s back at ‘em.