Everything alive requires some sort of sleep or resting period in order to function properly. How much sleep is required each day for each of us varies with age and with activity levels, but there are some standards for just how much 'shut eye' we are advised to get to prolong our lives and make the best of our conscious hours.
Why should we care about how much sleep we get? W.Christopher Winter, M.D., a board-certified sleep-medicine specialist and medical director of the Sleep Medicine Center at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, says that if your sleep cycles are lacking, that "Changes in blood pressure, heart rate, hormones, glucose metabolism, temperature regulation, and appetite can be seen quite quickly. The sleepless individual could get catabolism—that is, an increased metabolic rate and protein breakdown—and susceptibility to disease from a weakened immune system." [Yikes...]
What he and many other medical professionals in the field of sleep say people who sleep between 6.5 and 7.5 hours a night live the longest. Is more better? NO. Surprisingly, those who sleep 8 hours or more don't live as long! (Keep that in mind oh you 2PM wakers...) And if you get less than 6 hours you won't live as long either. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as sleeping too short and if you sleep longer than 8.5 hours its worse than sleeping less than 5!!
Wow, am I glad that I get on average about 6.5 hours of sleep a night... just enough to make the best out of my waking hours and enough to live long. So what's up with always being told that at least 8 hours of sleep per night is ideal??? Where did these people get their facts from! I feel so robbed of time, I want a do over!
Ok, so enough of my raving. There is also a sleep method called 'Uberman' or something that says the most ideal sleep and conscious functioning comes from having 6 20-minute naps per day every 4 hours. The results of those who participate are so varied though that I would not bank on this method. I flash back to the movie 'The Machinist' where Trevor Reznik (played by Christian Bale) is the perfect example of what you would morph into as a member of the waking dead on Uberman. Plus this doesn't work well for the majority of us who have a professional life and have a family to manage.
I am going to stick to whatever my body asks for. Now, if my body is asking for more awake time to be tickled with thoughts or otherwise, bet your boot that I am not going to sleep instead! I think of my balance of sleep and wake time as a negotiation with a sleep bank....you take a loan of 2 hours one day, then pay back that 2 hours later on in the week. Six hours a day (42 a week) can easily be balanced by Monday morning. The nutshell of my point here is sleep well whenever you do sleep, hopefully with your SigO next to you, but also take advantage of the daylight while you can.
The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. ~Charles Caleb Colton
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