How much sleep do you really need?

If you’re like many of us, juggling a career and a family while trying to keep everyone in clean socks doesn’t leave much time for sleep. Sure, we all try to get the commonly recommended eight hours of shut-eye, but do we really need all that rest? After all, so many people seem to function just fine on just five or six hours. We asked Helen Driver, a Kingston, Ont.-based sleep researcher and president of the Canadian Sleep Society, to help us understand how much sleep we really need—and why.

Most people feel their best after eight hours of sleep

The idea that it’s necessary to get eight hours of sleep each night partly comes from studies that ask people how much time they normally spend sleeping.

For example, in a survey conducted by researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., more than 17,000 students in 24 countries were asked how much sleep they got each night. Sixty-three percent of participants said they slept from seven to eight hours.

“[Eight hours] is the norm for the amount of time that most people sleep,” says Driver. “On an individual basis, it’s the amount of sleep that allows you to wake up feeling refreshed and able to stay awake during the day.”

Culture influences our need for sleep

The amount of time we sleep is also based on the demands of our society. North American adults are what experts call monophasic sleepers, meaning we sleep and awaken only once in a 24-hour period and we do so during the darkest time of day. But it wasn’t always this way, notes Driver.

“When we were still keeping ourselves warm with fires, people would go to bed when it got dark, have one good sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, stoke the fires and go back to bed for a second phase of sleep,” she says.

Electricity eliminated our need to doze off when the sun goes down, so our sleeping habits evolved. Driver says that what’s accepted as the normal amount of sleep is still changing to meet cultural demands.

“Our sleep time has decreased over the last two decades. Before, people were sleeping closer to nine hours. Some people argue that we live in a sleep-restricted society. I would predict that over the next few years, people will decrease their sleep time [further],” she says.

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