Most nights I wake up around one or two in the morning and lie there—sometimes for an hour or more—before going back to sleep. I’d rather my sleep wasn’t broken, but I don’t worry about it. At times, during these wakeful periods, I’ve solved problems and come up with good ideas. I never get eight hours. It’s usually between six and seven.
One primary care physician writes that “good sleep, or the
lack thereof, is one of the most evergreen concerns I hear about as a primary
care doctor. My patients track sleep hours and sleep scores.” Apparently, there’s
a new, unhealthy, preoccupation with achieving perfect sleep that’s driven by wearable
sleep-tracking devices. This obsession is called orthosomnia.
Here’s what studies show about the relationship between
sleep patterns, health, and mortality:
- There’s not a magic number below which health suddenly falls off a cliff.
- In studies that compare sleep duration and mortality, the lowest risk clusters around seven hours.
- Adults with the highest mortality rates are those who sleep nine to 11 hours a night. (People who are sick sleep more. So do those who are struggling with depression.)
- Getting less sleep is strongly correlated with living in poverty, working a job that requires night shifts, psychiatric conditions, and chronic pain and illness.
The hunter-gatherer Hazda people of Tanzania sleep an average
of 6.25 hours per night, although they’re in bed for up to nine hours. During
that time, they’re awake for two or more hours. My kind of people!
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
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