Many people, mostly college students and adults will use the phrase, "sleeping is overrated". I completely and utterly disagree. Not only is there no merit to that statement but there is overwhelming evidence that lack of sleep is unhealthy. I'm not going to make this post a scientific discussion and start linking all kinds of sites describing various sleep studies, scientific explanations, etc. I'll just use my own experience and experience of others as my proof.
First off, let's talk what is an adequate amount of sleep. Scientists say 8 hours, or simply one third of the day. That is just the right amount of time needed for the body to refresh. If you've ever taken naps after being tired from either not sleeping enough or after strenuous physical activity, you would notice that for every unit of time you sleep, you will be fresh and awake for about 2 units of time. So 15 minutes of sleep should give you at least 30 minutes of quality awake time. Sometimes you can trick your body to be awake for longer than 2 units of time but eventually you'll crash and you'll need an extended amount of sleep time to recover.
So how do you feel after 8 hours of sleeping and after a normal, average day? Most likely great or at least with no complaints. If I sleep 8 hours after a normal day, when I wake up I am more focused, have more energy, I am more driven to get things done, think clearly, happier, cheerful, you name it. I have absolutely no negative effects of sleeping the "adequate" amount of time.
If I sleep less than 8 hours after a normal, average day, I do not feel so good. My overall feeling varies depending on the actual amount of sleep I got the night before. If I slept slightly less than 8 hours, let's say 7 hours, I will still have a good day but only after the initial 30 minutes of lousy wake up. Most likely I will need some coffee to get me through the day and I will possibly be able to go to bed at the normal time. If I slept 5 or 6 hours then I will have a very slow morning, eventually recover but still be ok for the first half of the day. Second half will be a race to survive until I get home from work and I can only recover from that by drinking two cups of coffee (or two double shots of espresso). I might be able to get to normal bed time but most likely I will either have a nap during the day or I will go to sleep early.
If I sleep less than 5 hours of sleep, forget about that day. I can hardly get out of bed, I have little energy, can't focus at work, will need to nap (losing more time out of my day), will generally be lazy throughout the day. Simply, getting less than 5 hours of sleep is not even worth going through rest of the day.
But if I sleep MORE than 8 hours and I had a normal, average day ... then I ALSO feel like crap. If I sleep 9 or 10 hours, I am just as exhausted and not focused like I would be if I slept 6 or 7 hours. The only time I can sleep for longer than 8 hours and still feel good is when I've had a very tiring day due to sports or some other physical activity or if I didn't sleep enough several days in a row.
My sleeping pattern has changed throughout my life, as I'm sure yours has too. When I was a baby (so I'm told) I used to sleep for 10-12 hours a day and feel great (I honestly can't remember). When I got to college, my sleep times started getting shorter but I could "handle" it because I was full of energy anyway. It started getting bad when I started working and needed to get up early in the morning ... 5 DAYS A WEEK! That's when the shorter sleeping times started to have an affect on me. Still, I continued sleeping less than 8 hours often because of many nights of partying and sacrificing the sleep to "live the life". However, after I noticed the lack of energy and increase of shitty days (which coincided with me getting older) and after experimenting with different lengths of sleep, I went back to the original 8 hours of sleep.
Now I try to sleep 8 hours or so as much as I can. I will rather come to work late and leave late but feel refreshed than get up early, cut my sleep short and shortchange the entire day.
Finally, in my pursuit of perfect sleep, I read about an application for Android phones called Smart Alarm Lite. The application uses the accelerometer in your phone to sense your movement while you are sleeping. It then wakes you up at a certain time interval during which you want to be waken up. It wakes you up when it senses that you started moving. The reason why you should wake at this time is because at the time the body is moving during sleep is the time the body is coming out of REM sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Every human goes through several sleeping cycles, usually 5 cycles, during normal sleep period. Each cycle has a period of REM sleep although the last cycle is usually called REM sleep because it is the longest cycle. Unless you have a sleeping disorder of some sort, meaning unless you are NOT an average human being, your body will not move during REM sleep of each of the cycles. The brain essentially paralyzes the body during REM sleep. The initial cycles are shorter while the last cycle is the longest.
Ok, so why wake up after REM sleep? Because the period of sleep right after REM sleep is a period of light sleep, a period during which you can easily wake up. NOT ONLY THAT, but the period right after REM sleep is the period during which if you wake up, it will leave you feeling the most refreshed. If you wake up during REM sleep, you will feel crappy. If you wake up after early REM cycles, you will feel better than if you woke up during those cycles. However, each progressive cycle leaves you feeling more refreshed, especially the last one. Therefore, you ideally want to go through all 5 cycles, which in total take about 7-8 hours and then wake up right after the last cycle.
The Smart Alarm Lite application senses the body movement after the REM sleep and it wakes you up. The key is to set the alarm for about 8 hours after you go to sleep and set it for a sufficiently long interval so that you don't get woken up during REM sleep. For example, if I go to bed at midnight, I will set the alarm for 8 am with a 45 minute interval. That means that at 7:15 am the application will trigger the alarm only after it senses movement. The application senses movement the entire night (and it displays the chart of your movement) but will not wake you up until it hits the trigger point. I used it twice so far but both times I woke up earlier than the alarm. I'm going to use it for the next few weeks and report on the results.
For more information on sleep, please see http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm.
Happy sleeping!
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