[wendywen]

I need 7-8 hours of sleep every night. I have no problem falling asleep, but I wake up after getting 5-6.5 hours every night. Even when I’m really tired on the weekends, I still end up waking up earlier than I need to (after 5-6 hours). I know this isn’t terrible… a lot of my friends say “5-6.5 hours is what I got normally, that’s not bad.” But for me it’s terrible. I know my body needs 7-8 hours. I feel like a whole new person when I get 7-8 hours. And it’s killing me that I am falling just slightly short.

All the other case studies on this website are so extreme–people who’ve slept less than 5 hours and then they exit the coaching session sleeping 6.5 and more. That’s not very reassuring to me. I want to know that I’ll be able to sleep 7-8+ hours on average every night consistently…

[Edgar]

How long have you had this? How old are you?

Well, you’ve hit a sore spot on these here pages, but I get you. I get 5-6 hours of sleep per night, and it is NOT enough. Just today I was asked if I’m sick, and yesterday it was even implied (albeit jokingly) that I must be a drunk since I look so beat every day, with pale skin, dark bags and red eyes.

There are no answers, sadly, at least not from my experience, and I’ve been a poor sleeper most of my life. You’ve probably read all the usual advice on ACT/mindfulness (which doesn’t help unless you have anxiety or depression) , and you’ve probably already been advised on sleep restriction (the very thing that you are already doing, by default). Insomnia is a tough nut to crack, and honestly I don’t know if anybody who has really suffered from it has ever been rid of it for real. The best that everyone’s got is “good enough”, i.e. 5-6 hrs. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, there are people who suffered from insomnia for say 6 months, got rid of it and are now calling themselves cured, when in reality it was just a temporary thing.
Your friends who say that they are getting 5-6 hours themselves are probably not being realistic, not counting in 2 hour naps during the day or whatever else it is that they’re doing. Most people sleep fine (and I mean most. Real, persistent insomnia is rare.)
If your insomnia persists, 5-6 hours will be your new normal, and you will function on that. If insomnia stops, as it sometimes does (if you’re one of those 6 months people), then all the better for you. In any case, good luck. If anything, you are not alone.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Edgar.

[Borgesbi]

Agree with Edgar in some points. I’m one of those people who used to sleep really well and needed around 7-8 hours every night to feel refreshed. Anything less than that was troubling back then. Now that my insomnia is better, I tend to get more like 6 or 6.5, sometimes even less and my body has truly adapted to it. These days I feel very refreshed on that amount of sleep or less, it’s like my body learned to do all the healing/regenerating/etc that is done during sleep, faster than it used to. Not struggling with insomnia seems to be a big piece of the puzzle though; only when I stopped fighting it I started feeling really refreshed regardless of the amount of hours slept!

[Martin Reed]

Hello Wendy!

Often, when we don’t get the amount of sleep that we strive for, we can monitor for the effects of curtailed sleep (even subconsciously). So, if we get six-and-a-half hours instead of seven hours, we might notice higher levels of fatigue or even some niggles and aches and pains that we would never have otherwise noticed.

In other words, every time we aren’t satisfied with the sleep we get, we notice negative consequences — but every time we are satisfied with our sleep duration, we don’t notice any negative consequences and so we feel great!

Deep sleep is the most restorative stage of sleep — and we get pretty much all of our deep sleep in the first third of the night. So, even if we only manage two or three hours of sleep, we are almost certainly getting all of the most restorative stage of sleep.

Of course, this isn’t to say that we’d all feel great after just two or three hours of sleep — but the sleep we get after this point has less of an effect on how we feel during the day than we usually think. This helps explain why some people can do just fine on as little as five or six hours of sleep every night.

If you regularly managed between seven and eight hours of sleep in the past, then you may well be able to manage that again — as long as you don’t strive to get a certain amount of sleep! As soon as we try to get a certain amount of sleep, we make sleep more difficult because sleep is an autonomous process that we can’t directly control.

I would suggest that you start by observing a sleep window that’s aligned with your current average nightly sleep duration to help consolidate your sleep, and go from there.

I hope this helps — good luck!

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