On average how much sleep do you get on a weekday?

On an average weekday how much do you sleep? What's your average sleeping and awake times?

How much do you need, do you get enough?

I try to get 8 and half hours a night following the advice of Matthew Walker but find its hard to fit in. On average I get to sleep at 11 and wake up at 6: 15.

Ideally I would like to sleep from 11 to 7:30.

I love sleep (Yeah this is what happens when you only work 38 hours a week lol. )

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As of recently I have tried out a few different sleeping techniques.

This is probably the best I have found. Currently I am sleeping from 7:00am-9:00am and 8:00pm-12:00am. I find this maximizes my efficiency with the way that I work. I am probably 2X as productive than most people in my opinion.

So I sleep about 6 hours a day on average. Some days 4 some days 8.

I work to my own schedule. Unless there are scheduled meetings or something like that.

I want to try a Leonardo Da Vinci sleep schedule of 20 minute naps every 4 hours. But have not yet committed to it.

 
"thistooshallpass"On average I get to sleep at 11 and wake up at 6: 15.

Pretty much exactly this, although I'm prone to fall asleep earlier and wake up earlier

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

I try to head to bed around 8pm. After stretching, sex, talking with the wife, and reading, I usually retreat to my tatami mat around 10:30 and fall asleep quickly if everything goes well. Sometimes, I can't fall asleep for a while if I start thinking about the wrong thing. Based on season and state of mind, I wake up naturally around 4am-6am. As I grow progressively more manic, I start waking up earlier than that and having a harder time falling. My days grow more frenzied. I get a lot done. I finally can't stand it anymore and have to drink and smoke heavily for a few days to normalize. I spend about 6 hours a day sober - enough to work out, eat, and stay afloat with work. Until my energy levels have normalized and I return to normal patterns for another period of time. And the cycle repeats. Sometimes, I don't feel like being awake and choose to take a certain blend of supplements and do certain activities to fall asleep as early as 6pm-7pm.

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I listened to the matthew walker podcast with Rogan and thought "yeah, this science is really interesting, but give me something I can actually use"

true, it would be great to get 8.5 hours of sleep a night, but it's just not realistic. I like to think I have a pretty efficient schedule with short commutes in a major (but not as big as NYC/LA/SF) SE city,, but it's still tough. I get to work 7-730, for reference

530-7 - wake up, cook breakfast, shower, get in car to arrive at work 730-6 - work 6-630 - get dressed & drive to gym 630-730 - work out 745/8 - arrive at home, begin preparing dinner 8-9 - eat with wife 9-? wind down, usually watching a documentary or sports

so if Dr Walker were to look at my schedule, he could potentially tell me to go to bed right after dinner to get my full 8 hours in. let me tell you something kiddies, you need to wind down. I'm willing to short sleep in order to spend some QT with my wife and unwind from the day. it is important to have discipline, try to get your sleep in sync with your circadian rhythm/sleep cycle duration, but unless you're a tim ferris life hacker who's outsourced everything, 8.5hrs every night just seems like a pipe dream.

I wouldn't trade a few extra years in my 80s or 90s for the time I spend with my wife, or the late nights with the boys if there's a good game on. life's about choices, I don't dispute the science (because he's largely right), but I don't think we should take his recommendations in isolation. I'd rather have a healthy marriage and a growing business versus being 100% rested 100% of the time and never see the people I care about.

 

I cook breakfast everyday, that's not just eating, I make my wife's breakfast, shit shower shave (I shave my entire head and face), and wear a suit every day. also within this is usually checking morning emails, overnight news from asia/europe.

idk what else to tell you bro, I'm unwilling to have a beard or hang onto scraps, the shit takes time.

 

4-5 hours per night during the week (sometimes 6 if I'm lucky).

8-10 hours per night on Friday and Saturday night.

 

~10pm - 4:45am on weekdays, with more variance than I'd like on the going to sleep part. Weekends are just too random to even try to generalize.

 

7 - 7.5 hours during the week. 8-9 on Sat/Sun. I am just about finished with his book, and it has done a pretty good job scaring me into sleeping more.

The one thing I think people aren't accounting for is the time spent awake throughout the night. I have an OURA ring which tracks my sleep and if I am in bed "sleeping" for 8 hours, I usually have 30-45 minutes of awake time throughout that night... and I am not one that just wakes up in the middle of the night and can't fall back asleep. It is just the normal tossing and turning that adds up.

I agree that for most it is nearly impossible to get 8.5 hours of sleep during the week. I am fortunate enough to only work 45/week, so that gives me plenty of time after work to get to the gym and still make dinner, have time with the gf, etc.

Now, rather than watching an extra episode of the Office with my gf, I make the conscience effort to get in bed and read around 10:00/10:15. Gives us enough time to partake in adult activities and still be asleep by 11. Going from 6 hours to 7+, I have definitely noticed an improvement in my overall mood and reduced cravings for shitty food.

 

I'd disagree that 8.5-9 on weeknights is easy in college if you enjoy a pretty active social life and live with some of your best friends. Wouldn't give back going out to the bars on a Tuesday or just shooting the shit with my buddies until the wee hours of morning to get a full 8 hours for some joke of a class the next day.

 

Over the years I found out there's no one-size-fits-all answer to this. Not only are we all different people with different physiology, even the same person's sleep needs change due to life events. I used to have serious insomnia in the beginning of my career but was able to function just as well at work with a few hours of sleep.

However, you're right in that sleep need has a normal distribution with a mean of 8 for the 'right amount' for most people. A better advice I got a while ago is to wake up at the same time every day, both weekdays and weekends. Pay off sleep debt by going to bed early if you need to. Tough but works great IMHO.

 

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