How much sleep do you need?
admin September 25th, 2007
There is a book called “The Promise of Sleep”, an excellent read and highly recommended. The book was written by the MD who discovered REM sleep as a medical student and devoted his life to sleep research. The book presents scores of research information that will blow your mind and change the way you think about sleep.
Studies done on people without time constraints of family, workouts, work, crying babies, sleepovers, etc … OK, mostly 20 something army recruits and college aged kids… showed that the vast majority of people need very close to 8 hours of sleep per night with very little variance, mabye plus or minus 15 minutes. But informal polls (like this one) will reveal most people saying they only need 7 hours of sleep per night. The truth is that they “Function” on 7 hours a night, but they need more.
Sleep debt is cumulative and for every hour under 8, you need to make that hour up. Top end studies on sleep debt were done only for 2 weeks (imagine the logistics of doing a sleep study on a confined group of people for longer than 2 weeks), and it held tru for the duration of the 2 week study….miss a few hours of sleep, and even 2 weeks later, your body still craves the need to make it up, and when given a chance, it will do so, hour for hour. (so if you lose some sleep one night, plan to go to bed x hrs earlier the next night and you should feel great)
Sadly, most people get far less than this and have learned to tolerate it. They may say that they only need 5, 6 or 7 hours of sleep, but they have only just learned to function that way. THey really need right round 8 hours of sleep.
Ever notice how if you go on vacation, or say get a 4 day weekend off or whatever, you are capable of sleeping 10-12 hours each night? It’s your body trying to catch up…yes, you CAN catch up on missed sleep.
My father retired a few years ago, formerly got about 6 hours of slepe a night and thought that was all he needed. He now routinely sleeps 10 hours a night without difficulty with the time constraints of work removed…and he feels much better than he used to.
A seventeen year study of 10,000 government workers in Britain, just released yesterday from London associated increased risks of heart disease with getting fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night.
So you may all wonder, if I’m so knowledgable about sleep, what in the world am I doing up at 2:30 AM? I do shift work and just came off night shifts..trying to flip back to days.