How much sleep do I need?

Apparently, 49% of people living in the UK don’t think they are getting enough sleep at night (according to a YouGov poll carried out in 2022) but how much is enough and is it the same for everybody?

The answers to these questions are ‘it depends’ and ‘absolutely not’. How much sleep you need is individual like your shoe size or eye colour, and it changes throughout your life, night by night, season by season and year by year.

So, if it’s different for each of us, why does everyone seem to think that eight hours is the magic number? It turns out that eight hours is the average number of hours of sleep that adults get, but for some reason, this has been seized upon as the ideal number we should all be aiming for. It’s true that most people get somewhere between seven and nine hours a night but anywhere between four and twelve hours is considered normal if that is your individual need. Some people thrive on six hours, for example, while others need more than nine to feel fully refreshed.

It is also important to note that these figures are usually based on subjective accounts of sleep length, i.e. participants are asked how much sleep they think they get. When you look at objectively measured results – i.e. participants are rigged up to some form of monitor to record how much sleep they actually get – the average length of sleep duration drops to between five-and-a-half and seven hours. We tend to conflate ‘being in bed’ with ‘being asleep’ and therefore over-report the amount of sleep we get. The true figure is likely to be lower than we think.

But the exact number of hours and minutes you get doesn’t really matter. As I said, it changes night by night and month by month and it varies a great deal from person to person. Furthermore, you are unable to increase the amount of sleep you need, even if you wanted to. Like height and eye colour, it’s genetic i.e. it’s handed down to you by your parents and can’t really be altered. Trying to get more sleep than you need on a regular basis is a bit like trying to be taller or trying to have blue eyes.

So, if your father is a short sleeper, say, you are also likely to need less sleep than the average. This is true of chronotype, too – if your mother is a night owl, chances are you will be too. And, to make things even more complicated, sleep duration gets shorter as you age, so even if you regularly got eight hours in your twenties, this number is likely to have reduced to between six and seven hours in your fifties and sixties.

I am hoping that understanding all this will take some of the pressure off getting eight hours every night, because trying to sleep more is not only unlikely to succeed, it can also backfire horribly, leading to increased sleep anxiety and even full-blown insomnia. Don’t worry about the numbers and trust that your body knows what it’s doing.

Still wondering whether you are getting enough? The official guideline is ‘you know you are getting enough sleep when you have enough energy to do what you want most of the time most days’.

The way I see it is that if you fall asleep fairly quickly when you go to bed, get back to sleep easily if you wake in the night and mostly wake up without the need for an alarm clock, you are almost certainly getting what you need (even if that’s less than what you think you should get). However, taking more than an hour to get to sleep, waking more than once or twice a night and struggling to get back to sleep or regularly waking too early can be signs that you might need more sleep, especially if you rarely feel refreshed and really struggle to get through the day. If this is the case, perhaps I can help?