I'm 25 and I require 8.5 hours of good sleep for optimal performance.
I did some benchmarking about three years ago by timing myself trying to solve similarly-challenging Sudoku puzzles in a Nintendo DS game. With good sleep, I'd consistently approach 14 minutes with zero mistakes. After about 2-3 days of not having good sleep, it would drop to 16-20 minutes with more mistakes. I would also consciously notice various effects like diminished memory recall, more stuttering, poor focus, etc.
I've also been hearing that the length of sleep required is typically reduced with age. I don't have any citation on this though, would love to read more on the topic if anyone has more insight.
I didn't focus on that but anecdotally I find that consistently oversleeping (over 9 hours) would leave me groggy and generally reduced performance (at least temporarily in the morning) but not as bad as sleep deprivation. Whereas getting one or two nights of mild oversleeping after being sleep deprived for several days does seem to speed up the recovery time.
Of course there were many other variables like exercise, diet, health, and mood, where each seems to have some minor effect on my sleep requirements one way or the other. The Sudoku benchmarking was performed on more or less "idling" lifestyle (no unusual healthy or unhealthy activities, and I wasn't consuming alcohol/caffeine or smoking).
9 hours of sleep followed by 18 hours of being awake (instead of 8 + 16) is comfortable for me. Unfortunately, it means your personal day keeps shifting relative to most other people's.
I did that for most of a 4 month period and several other smaller stretches about 15 years ago. It worked great for me at a time.
As I've gotten older, it's become easy to fall asleep and wake up when I want to. Two things are critical to that:
1) no screen time in the 2 hours before bed. No TV, no computer. The only exception is reading books on my phone in night mode at the lowest setting.
2) no caffeine except for small amounts of chocolate.
My wife teases me because I can fall asleep in under a minute, and taking more than 10 minutes to fall asleep is actually one of the signs of a sleep disorder. (I don't have any of the other signs). It's not normal, but no TV or computer at night and no caffeine are not normal, either.
I did it for a few months while writing up my Ph.D., and I wish I could continue, but various commitments mean I'm stuck with 7x24. 6x28 suited me very well, felt much better than I do on 7x24.
Sort of. I sleep for 9 hours if I've been up for more than about 14 hours prior and there's no alarm. If I've been awake for more than 24 hours it goes up to 12hrs.
If I've had several drinks (alcohol), I never sleep for 9 hrs, it's always less, but I haven't tracked post-alcohol sleep times closely enough to notice if it's still a multiple of 3.
However, I can also do 6 hrs or 3 hrs, and I don't feel groggy but I'll get tired sooner the next night. Not adhering to a multiple of 3 hrs (rem cycles I assume), or reasonably close to that, ends up badly.
What I really need is an alarm hooked up to a primitive EEG so that it can start the clock when I fall asleep, and set off an alarm after a programmable number of minutes. That way I could sleep for 6 hrs without ever being groggy. But even the cheapest EEG stuff I've seen connectable to a computer is not cheap.
> What I really need is an alarm hooked up to a primitive EEG so that it can start the clock when I fall asleep, and set off an alarm after a programmable number of minutes. That way I could sleep for 6 hrs without ever being groggy. But even the cheapest EEG stuff I've seen connectable to a computer is not cheap.
There are various devices for sleep enhancement, e.g. "the sleep watch"[1]. I haven't tested any of them, though (nobody ships stuff to Russia).
Being able open your eyes, refreshed, some time early in the morning, without the need for any alarm, is as good as it gets. This is well within reach if you don't have any dependants.
I need to get back to that. I feel so much worse without it.
I've been doing the same, it's been really helpful. My wife has been very patient with me through this. Any day I get up before I feel like I'm ready, my sharpness and work endurance is substantially worse.
I had the same problem (actually ten hours) until I was 27. It made my academically-rigorous engineering school an extreme challenge. But then I was able to get by with 8 and now 7, which makes things a lot better. No idea why.
I'm 30 and get around 5-7 hours of sleep every night and am usually fine with that. I use a fitbit and actually have a log of all my data. Here's the graph of the past 30 days for me: http://socialblade.com/c/2011-09-17_1140.png
I'm 17 and I get between 3 and 7 usually on weekdays, which my body has adapted to do over time. Probably rather unhealthy. On the weekends I get much more. I'm most productive in the early hours of the morning which is why i've turned out this way.
3-7? Are you crazy? Your body hasn't adapted to anything, you just don't realise the effect it's having on your learning capacity. Get your sleep kid, trust me, it pays off.
Just a warning: I'm the same age and lack of adequate sleep came back to bit me hard last semester. (Getting about 4.5-7 hours of sleep every day, working out a lot, school, programming). It took me a long time to recover from some sickness and that required some sleeping - now things are so much easier / faster than before. The difference is incredible in terms of focus and work done. Now I'm getting about 6.5-8.5 hours of sleep, and it's much better. I still need to be better in terms of going to sleep, but going to sleep at 10:30-11:30 and waking up at 6-7 isn't bad at all.
For the last 3 years, I was visiting a cooperative university where you work half of the semester as a regular employee of a company and studying the other half of the semester. During the theory semester, I was sleeping between 3 to 4 hours on weekdays, leaving home somewhere around 5:40 in the morning and sometimes arriving at home at 8:00 in the evening, eating, and then hitting the gym for one hour.
As long as I was able to get some sleep on the train commute, I was actually able to cope with that tiny amount of sleep pretty well, I think. Looking back at that time, it might very have been the most productive I had yet.
I felt sooo much better getting up at 4:30 in the morning than I feel now when I get up at 6 or 7 (or even later).
Sleeping more than usual on the weekends is usually a sign of sleep deprivation, though it often doesn't feel like it.
I used to feel like I was doing alright on ~6 hours but I often slept 8-10 on weekends. Since then I've started to wake up the same time everyday and there's definitely a difference.
I was always staying up late before school, until 12-1 and waking up at around 7 on weekdays. When I got home I almost always took a nap, from half an hour to a full occasionally. On weekends I stayed up late too, but then I slept a lot longer so I got about 10 hours or more.
Now when me and my girlfriend lives together I've been forced to adjust and I often go to sleep at 10, read a bit before sleep and wake up after about 8 hours even on weekends. I feel a lot better now and I wouldn't want to go back to how I had it only a year ago.
I haven't really thought about sleep deprivation but in retrospect it kinda fits.
Sadly my situation is worse. 3am is probably average. I think I need to be more strict with time management on projects and also just go to sleep and maybe get up earlier, before school.
