[Unfatigued]

As a target sleep efficiency when implementing sleep restriction, that is.

The reason I ask is that I tried sleep restriction (with a target sleep efficiency of 85%) for about 10 weeks, and after that time I considered the experiment a failure, because I was still getting about 6 hours sleep each night, which is more or less how much I was getting before I started – and is not enough for me to feel refreshed.

The next thing I tried was a fixed sleep window of 8.5 hours, from 10:30pm to 7am, every day – including weekends. Before long I settled into a rhythm of about 7 hours sleep a night – a sleep efficiency of 82%. So by abandoning that arbitrary-sounding 85% target sleep efficiency, I ended up getting an hour of sleep more each night than I otherwise would have with SRT!

Just wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience. By the way, some sources state that a sleep efficiency of 80% or more is considered normal, whereas others I’ve seen go with the 85% or more that seems ubiquitous in SRT practice. Who should we believe? 🙂

[Chee2308]

I wouldn’t get too caught up with the formalities and numbers. It doesn’t matter what your sleep efficiency is, because ultimately, knowing that you CAN sleep (but duration is really not up to you to decide) is key and obsessing over the finest detail is really not that important nor helpful.

[Martin Reed]

Welcome to the forum!

Sleep efficiency probably doesn’t matter all that much.

We can live a rich and meaningful life whether our sleep efficiency is 20%, 50%, 80%, or 90%. When we focus a lot on sleep we can get a bit distracted from life, the world around us, and doing what matters — and we can also set ourselves up for a bit of a struggle since sleep itself cannot be directly or permanently controlled.

Sleep restriction is intended to help us move away from the struggle that’s created by chasing after sleep. If it’s used in an attempt to create a certain amount (or type) of sleep, it can actually backfire and create more struggle!

—

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[Unfatigued]

Point taken about fixating on numbers, but to do SRT by the book you do at least need to pay some attention to them.

As for being able to live a rich and meaningful life at 20% sleep efficiency – I very much doubt it. That means to get even 4 hours of sleep, you’d be spending 20 hours in bed every day. Not much of a life, that! 🙂

[Chee2308]

Well you just said it yourself. To be alive is to be awake. Not much of a life either trying to achieve X% sleep efficiency, or X hours every single night or whatever other unnecessary or unrealistic conditions you set for yourself. And then spend every minute of your waking hours worrying over whatever sleep metrics some author you never met or know well told you to keep monitoring. That’s not living. It’s like forcing yourself to eat an exact X amount of calories for every single day and you must eat at X, Y, Z o’clock, without exceptions!

• This reply was modified 12 months ago by Chee2308.

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