Keep a sleep diary

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

You’ve probably heard the standard advice that adults need on average 7 to 9 hours sleep per night.

But the reality is more complex than that because everybody is different.

There are many factors that can affect how much sleep you need from one day to the next.

And it can vary throughout your life depending on your circumstances.

Here are just a few things which will determine how much sleep you might need:

• Your age
• Your health
• How physically and mentally active you are
• Your diet and other lifestyle choices
• Your genetics

When trying to work out the magic number of exactly how many hours you need, you may have to ask a different question.

“How much sleep do I need to function at my best and not feel sleepy the next day?”

The point being that it is going to be up to you to work out how much sleep you need to go through life happily.

How much sleep you need according to your age

Despite the vagueness of the information so far, luckily scientists do generally agree on one thing. That there are standard average amounts of sleep that people need based on their age.

You can see this in the table below, and it gives you a starting point to work out more accurately how much is right for you.

Age	Hours needed
New borns (0-2 months)	12-18
Infants (3-11 Months)	14-15
Toddlers (1-3 years)	12-14
Preschoolers (3-5 years)	11-13
School-age (5-10 years)	10-11
Older children and teens (10-17 years)	8.5 - 9.25
Adults (18+ years)	7-9

Some people don’t seem to need much sleep at all though…

You can see from the table that adults should be aiming for between 7 and 9 hours.

However, scientists argue that most adults need at least 7.5 hours sleep to avoid the risk of sleep deprivation.

So why is it then that some lucky people seem to do fine on 6 hours sleep a night, or even less?

The answer is that is depends on your genetics.

Unfortunately though the gene which allows this miraculous sleep habit is only present in around 3% of people.

So the chances are you are in the 97% that need an average of 7 hours per night.

So how do you work out exactly how much sleep you need?

First of all you need to decide which of two questions you want to answer:

1. How much sleep do you need to get by?
2. How much sleep do you need need to function optimally and be happiest?

The answer to these two questions might be quite different. For example, you may think that you can scrape through the day if you’ve had 6 hours sleep.

But is 6 hours enough to enjoy your day, and to function to a high standard all day long? Or does 6 hours turn you into a coffee fiend? Does it have you looking forward to going back to bed from the minute you wake up?

Keep a sleep diary

The way to work out how much sleep you need then is to evaluate how you feel during the day, and to do this over a couple of weeks.

It may help to keep a sleep diary for 2 or more weeks. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but during the morning or night you should fill in these key points:

• What time you went to bed and got up
• How much sleep you think you actually had
• How you felt during the day

Then after a couple of weeks have a look back through your diary and do some analysis.

If you felt alert, energized and able to do things well all day long, then you probably got the right amount of sleep of those days.

But if you start feeling symptoms of sleep deprivation, you may be not be getting enough sleep the night or two before.

Sleep deprivation symptoms to watch out for:

It’s possible to experience sleep deprivation without even being aware of it.

So have a look at the following checklist and see if any apply to you when you are filling in your sleep diary:

• Always needing an alarm clock to wake up
• Using the snooze button a lot
• Finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning
• Feeling sleepy in meetings, lectures, classes or warm environments
• Feeling particularly tired after a heavy meal, in the afternoons or even when driving
• Being grumpy or irritable
• Having difficulty concentrating or remembering things
• Noticing a change in appetite or experience weight gain
• Finding it hard to make decisions
• Having blurred vision
• It only takes you a couple of minutes to fall asleep at night
• Susceptible to colds and infections
• Stressful things are difficult to cope with
• Finding it hard to motivate yourself to do things
• Your reaction times are reduced

There may of course be other explanations as to why you experience some of these. But in the context of experimenting to see how many hours sleep you need, you should note them down.

Look back over your diary to see if you experience several of these on days when you have less sleep, but not when you have more sleep. That will then be a good indicator that you are not getting enough sleep on those days.

After a couple of weeks you should be able to work out how many hours you need to only be writing ‘felt fine all day’ in the diary.

Don’t panic if you’re not getting the amount of sleep you need

It’s important to understand that even though these guidelines exist, you shouldn’t panic if you don’t always get that optimum amount.

If you’ve worked out that your golden number of hours sleep is exactly 8, then the temptation will be to start worrying when you only get 7.

The reality though is that most people generally do manage to get by just fine on less sleep from time to time.

If you have one of those nights when you just can’t seem to get to sleep easily, try not to start worrying that the next day will be awful. This will only keep you awake longer.

If this sounds like the kind of worry you might have, you may find it helpful to read this article explaining what to do if you can’t fall asleep quickly.

Meditaion and sleep, Meditation, Science of meditation, Spiritual Health, Yoga