From what I understand, it’s best to wake up at the end of a cycle, and each cycle is 90 minutes, right?
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The 8hrs of sleep thing was taken from (I believe) a small number of studies. People were asked how much sleep they need a night. Some said 6, some said 8, some said 10, etc, so they just averaged it out to 8 for everyone. It’s kinda like how some people need more or less than 2000 calories to be healthy. It all just depends on the person and their genetics.
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Its broadly about what people average in adulthood. Kids, teens its a bit more, decreasing as you age.
However any neat number like this in medicine is almost always just a rough estimate subject to individual variation.
Do you really need a tetanus shot every 10 years rather than 9.5 or 11 years – almost certainly not exactly, but 10 is neat and seems to work. Any roundish number we’re probably just saying its near enough.
The other side of this is research – less so with sleep which we can measure a bit more objectively, but for a lot of things there has to be a cut off – when checking when people would benefit from a second covid shot we’re probably splitting it by weeks, so we won’t know that 7.5 weeks is actually better than 8 weeks.
Interestingly on sleep, a more natural pattern seems to be an early 4 hours or so, then an hour or two awake, then back to sleep for another 4 or so. Ideally if you can, get decent daytime sunlight, avoid most artificial light especially screens, and see what your body settles into. That’s probably about right for you, as long as you feel well rested.
Ok so instead of getting a bunch of BS which is what most of the other comments seem to contribute, let me share the conclusions I have come to. Obviously this is just personal conclusions and not much better than the other comments as I won’t be including scientific links, but hey if you’ve read this far good on you.
You sound exactly like me 10 years ago when I first learned about the 90 minute sleep cycle. I like that science and all the articles came to the same conclusion. Then I did the math and had to come up with why it didn’t add up.
I came up with the fact that the average amount of time it takes someone to fall asleep is 30 minutes. I found if I didn’t set an alarm I would wake up close to a sleep cycle and tried to judge how long it took to fall asleep. It almost always came out being the difference between when I fell asleep.
More important than any of the above, all humans are different. It is wonderful you are looking into your sleep as it can literally make or break your life. In college I functioned really well off of 6 hours a night (so really planned for 6.5 hours) I felt on top of the world, but as I got into difficult course load and my efficiency was increasing I found that I was making simple mistakes. I couldn’t figure out why. So I decided to try 8 hours and damn did that make a difference I could focus on very specific items and my mistakes decreased drastically. A couple years later I wanted to test if it was really the sleep so I went back to 6.5 hours and 1 month into it I started to make simple mistakes again.
TLDR; Average time for a person to fall asleep is 30 minutes. Every person is vastly different in needs and ability to sleep. Look at sleep as a form of exercise and take it very seriously.
The same reason they say your normal temp should be 98.6, they just picked a number that is in the middle for most people. The reality is people need more and less sleep than 8 hours, and most people these days have a resting temperature closer to 97.5 on average from what I’ve seen, but it varies by population.
They actually recommended 7:30 abs allowed half an hour for falling asleep and waking up, 15 mins either side.
They recommend a range, normally they say something like at least 8 hours. To get the exact right amount of sleep, you simply go to sleep then once you’ve had enough sleep your body will wake you up naturally. If you are using an alarm to wake you up then almost by definition it means you aren’t getting enough sleep.
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