What’s The Proper Amount Of Sleep Needed?
Most of us know about the 8 hour rule – you need 8 hours of sleep per night. This is actually a falsehood which has been long disproved.
We do not regain energy based upon the total number of hours we’ve slept, but instead the total number of sleep cycles we complete.
What is a Sleep Cycle?
A sleep cycle is one “cycle” through each of the brain’s states during sleep. To overly simplify, we have two states of sleep- REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM. During non-REM sleep, our brain doesn’t have much activity and we have very weak dreams. It’s in REM sleep that we have our deep sleep and vivid dreams. It is also in REM that we refuel our bodies.
So, one study conducted by CentACS showed that a sleep cycle consists of roughly 65 minutes of Non-REM sleep, followed by 20 minutes of REM sleep and finished off with 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. Throughout the night, we progressively increase our REM sleep duration.
On average, each cycle takes about 90 minutes to complete. What does this mean? That to maximize our energy, we should sleep in chucks on 90 minutes. 1.5hours, 3 hours, 4.5hours, 6 hours, 7.5 hours, 9 hours, and 10.5 hours is the approximate time table you should use to pick a amount of time you need for sleep.
What does this mean for the 8 hour rule? Its wrong. You will actually feel just as refreshed from 7 1/2 hours of sleep as you will from 8 hours.
Please note, this study was done a while ago (2005 I believe), so if anyone has any new info, please leave a comment.
If you're in real need of sleep, I recommend the Sleep Once Again Strips. They are all natural, totally safe, and WILL put you to sleep within 15 minutes. I always have them in the house just in case.
Hmm… interesting. But what about taking into account the time it takes one to fall asleep? Sometimes it can take me an hour to fall asleep, but I never know how long it will take. And so it’s hard to exactly what is 9 hours after I fall asleep. Hard, if not impossible.
Plus I often wake up at night, usually because one of the dogs needs to go out or is just fidgeting. So it’s hard to factor that in too.
I do prefer 9 hours of sleep though, or even 10, on the days I can!
Well, the average person falls asleep in about 15 minutes (this is healthy). Falling asleep in under 5 minutes is a sign of sleep deprivation and falling asleep after more time show’s that there is something preventing you from getting a full night’s sleep.
Generally, if you wake up naturally, without an alarm or any external disturbances (such as sunlight), you will wake up at the end of a cycle. From that, you can estimate how much sleep you got.
Dog’s in need of a walking you can’t do much about. I walk my dog on the rare night he begs to be to walked as well. But I find that I fall asleep really fast when I get back to bed.
In fact, its one method used to induce lucid dreaming… wake up in the middle of the night (usually closer to morning) and stay awake for an hour. When you go back to sleep, you go straight into REM sleep (which is where you gain your energy).
So the best advice is to try and wake up without an alarm. If you practice telling yourself when you want to wake up, your body does so for you and naturally waking up is much better than by alarm.
i wish i could wake up for school with out an alarm ^_^ , if i tried I’d wake up at 3:00 and school would be over.I don’t get much sleep because i wake up at 5:30 on school days,only if i get a good nights sleep that is. I don’t have a hard time staying asleep or anything,it’s falling asleep for me,sometimes I’d go to bed at 9:30,but only fall asleep at 10:30 or even 11:00.