I mean to ask about the issue from a medical perspective. I know that one might sleep so much that one would miss deadlines, not have a life, etc. But in terms of health, is there anything wrong with, say, sleeping 10 hours in a night, even if one has no sleep debt?
Bumping this question and rephrasing it as: Is there an optimal number of hours to sleep per night?
Is there any evidence that there is an optimal number of hours to sleep for peek mental health/performance? The obvious answer is that this varies from person to person, and of course that must be true. Still, perhaps there are some good guidelines?
I recall reading a few years ago that something close to 7 hours of sleep per night was correlated with optimal performance, but I do not remember the details of the study and maybe it just meant that people who were naturally inclined to sleep 7 hours per night also happened to be good performers… Anyone have a link to this or other relevant studies?
Thanks.
I think it’s logical to conclude that, barring medical problems, the “optimal” amount of sleep to get is how ever much you naturally get if nothing external wakes you up, so it would vary. That’s a total WAG, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Is one study that seemed that 7 hours is optimal, but it’s only correlated to the least amount of problems. But everyone knows correlation doesn’t equal causation. But too much/too little sleep can be co-morbid with other problems that may be going on in the body.
Sleeping patterns vary pretty widely from person to person. I don’t think it’s possible to oversleep, unless there are underlying physical or mental problems. I naturally tend to sleep about 9 or 10 hours a night if left to my own devices, so I am not very functional if I get less than 8.
I’ve read that almost as important as getting a minimum total number of hours is waking up during the correct part of the sleep cycle. They even sell watches now that help you accomplish this.
Doesn’t it change quite a bit based on age? Back in high school and college, I was a 9-10 hours a day kinda gal, and consequently often miserable because my schedule made it difficult to get that. Now I’m still in school, but at age 27 I find I only need 7 hours or so, which is easier to manage.
The one thing in college (and now, in optometry school) that made me a little bitter was that my parents, in their early 60s, who didn’t have any need cut into their sleeping time to complete coursework, seem to do just fine getting 5-6 hours a night of sleep and making up for it on the weekends. My grandmother, who is retired and has plenty of time on her hands, can get by on even less then that. Seems particularly unfair to me!
IANAD, but I interviewed one for an article on sleep disorders a few months ago. According to her, you should get enough sleep to be rested and refreshed when you wake up in the morning.
The best way to achieve this is to go to sleep when you get tired. If you do this as a matter of course, even if you’re setting the alarm to get up in the morning, you’ll wake up easily when the alarm goes off – no sleeping through the alarm or hitting the snooze a dozen times.
How much sleep that is varies from person to person. For most people it’s seven to nine hours, though some do fine with a little less.
Not getting enough sleep once in a while isn’t a problem – when you’re consistently not getting enough sleep, you start doing serious damage to yourself, mentally and physically.
Yeah, my gramma claims she goes to bed at midnight and wakes up at six. She always seems to forget that an entire crew of burglars could cart off the entire contents of her house between 1p and 4p while leaving her to her peaceful slumber. 
I’m not yet as old as your gamma - I look forward to the days when I can sleep like that. One of the thing I envy about children is their ability to go into a deep, seemingly boneless, sleep. I would give much to be able to sleep like a 5 year old.
I read a study a while ago that put volunteers in windowless rooms for a few days to see how their sleep patterns change when there are no cues or social obligations. It turns out they slept around 10 hours a day. That seems to be our natural setpoint and humans have probably had the 10 hour night for quite a long time. So if there’s a danger level, it most likely is well past 10 hours.
Ive personally have extra groginess if I sleep more than 11 hours, so theres probably a law of diminishing or negative returns in there, but I doubt anything as serious as what happens when you lack sleep or suffer from sleep apnea, RLS, etc.
I know that I’m supposed to take short 20-30 minute naps for a nice refresher but I’m terrible at that. My naps are often 2-3 hours long and sometimes longer. When I oversleep I usually get a headache. My WAG is that there is a big difference between being in a coma and oversleeping and that oversleeping is actually quite hard to do. My body wakes me up eventually, usually with aforementioned headache.
A scan of the Google Scholar snippets for “oversleep” suggests that sleep researchers often use this as a condition and that it has negative cognitive outcomes for the subjects.
If ten hours a night was good enough for Einstein, then it’s good enough for me.
Actually, while I did need ten hours a night when I was younger, that’s no longer true. My sleep habits changed throughout my twenties and now in my thirties I find I can get by on five hours a night for a few days, and seven or eight is plenty the rest of the time. If I get less than five hours sleep, I tend to wake up trembling, which is weird and not a nice start to the day.
There’s two things to remember, as one poster said, sleep needs vary. Some people need only six, some need 10 hours. From what I’ve read 6-10 hours seems to be within normal range.
The older you get the less sleep you need.
The other thing to remember is sleep studies work only for people with correct sleeping ability. Many of us have various degrees of sleep problems, sleep apnea to night terrors. These may be very little problematic or a huge issue. Some people with sleep apnea, will stop breathing hundreds of times a night. These people may never get enough sleep because they aren’t sleeping proper at all.
Personally when I was younger I never had a problem making up sleep. I could go to bed at 5am and wake up at 7am and go to work. Sure I’d be tired, but I’d make it up on Sunday and never had an issue.
Once I turned 40, boy was it a different world. If I don’t get at least 7 hours of sleep, I hurt. I mean I PHYSICALLY ache the entire day.
Yes. Sleeping more than what you really need can cause health problems, and the other way is that a lot of medical issues can cause over-sleep.
As far as sleeping more when in highschool: i think it’s because you have not finished ‘growing’ yet. Hormones are not as stable as in adult years.