Don't Let The Man Tell You How To Sleep

My whole life, people have told me that I need eight hours of sleep a night. I remember parents, teachers, doctors, journalists, and podcasters professing that “any less than eight hours is undersleeping, which has severe negative effects on developing brains.” But I cannot figure out why they’re all convinced of this eight hour number, and I’m quite confused about where it came from. I have never slept eight hours a night, every night, for any consistent period of time. The amount of sleep I need varies substantially from night to night. One night it might be 10 hours, the next 0, the next 6. People talk like I am an outlier and that most people need eight hours of sleep a night, but I don’t believe them. Needing 8 hours of sleep may be the average experience, but it is far from the majority experience. To answer this question we need fancy empirical methods. The NIH (the [American] National Institute of Health) recommends that adults sleep between 7 and 9 hours a night. It also found

My whole life, people have told me that I need eight hours of sleep a night. I remember parents, teachers, doctors, journalists, and podcasters professing that “any less than eight hours is undersleeping, which has severe negative effects on developing brains.” But I cannot figure out why they’re all convinced of this eight hour number, and I’m quite confused about where it came from. I have never slept eight hours a night, every night, for any consistent period of time. The amount of sleep I need varies substantially from night to night. One night it might be 10 hours, the next 0, the next 6.