Poll: How many hours do you sleep? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How many hours do you sleep?

39 pointsmethane42 comments

I sleep 3-7 hours per day (so average 5), I think it's bad for my brains and health in general. What about you, what's your average?

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What a terrible breakdown. How is 7-10, which is what I imagine the majority of people sleep, a single category?

Try something like: (< 4, 4-5, 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-9, 9+)

Yeah, I just now realized that choices are not very cleverly made. I just expected(haha) that everyone sleeps pretty much as me (maybe I was trying to justify my sleep hours..?).

But now, probably, I should not change choices as there are plenty of votes. Sorry for that.

I'd have posted it as a +/- against the 'standard' 8 hours :)

I spent years in a mildly sleep deprived state, then I started sleeping 8+ hours and became 2x more productive. I recommend it to anyone who feels like they need a nap midday.

I'd recommend that if you need a nap midday, then nap midday.

I generally wake up around the same time in the morning, regardless of what time I went to bed. This can sometimes lead to me feeling very sleepy midday, which kills my productivity. Coffee can sometimes help, but sometimes it just makes my head even more cloudy. If I'm in a position to do so (if I'm in a location where I can lie down and I don't have a meeting soon), I generally take a short nap (~45 minutes). This brings my productivity back to normal in most cases.

I personally don't do well with midday naps. Takes a chunk out of my day and it takes me hours to really feel awake again...then night time comes around and I'm not tired. Using the weekends to get back on a good sleep schedule is usually my go-to move.

3-4 hour a night people (all 4 of you(•)): what the heck? For how long have you slept this little? Is that natural, or are you pushing yourself (for some reason)? Do you feel awake right now, or has reality become some sort of weird half-awake, half-asleep fantasia?

(•)as of this writing

I have what might be either terrible insomnia or just lesser need for sleep (totally undiagnosed). As long as I can remember I haven't been able to sleep for much more than 4 hours at a time, the odd times when I sleep ~6 I wake up feeling terrible and exhausted.

I sleep 5~9am typically, and function fine if this is the case. If something requires me to wake up earlier than 9 it kills me for a few days. It's aslo near impossible to sleep before ~4am and some nights I'm unable to sleep at all.

As long as I can remember. Even very young, I would just read at night rather than sleep. Sometimes I crash and sleep for 5-6, once or twice I've slept more after going a few days without sleep.

I have always seen sleep as one of the biggest problems with life. If we could cure it, our effective lifespans would increase. So it's possible my sleeping habits are partly psychosomatic.

By the way throughout highschool I only slept two hours, midnight to 2am. It seemed to me that if you wake up before reaching your REM cycle you do not feel tired.

Wow. My best-guess(/understanding, from popular media) is that, long-term, you need REM sleep. It's interesting that you (feel you) were able to short-circuit it, at least for a while.

Anyway, the take-away I'm getting from your reply is that you are deliberately "sleep deprived", i.e., that you are driven, philosophically, to keep sleep to a physiological minimum.

(Which tempts me, strongly, to view your sleep-deprivation (quote, unquote) as something akin to chronic drug use and/or anorexia.‡

((‡ I might be way off-base here, of course.))

I agree. That amount of sleep can't be healthy. I read a story about a startup founder who was pushing himself that hard for a long time. Even though he exercised regularly and had a great diet, he died young of cardiac arrest. I don't remember any mention of a prior condition, but remember that his sleep schedule was strongly suspected of causing his heart to weaken.

I agree that it's not enough for the majority of people (myself included), but I have a great aunt that has, for her entire life, slept four hours a night (midnight to 4am). She's a retired school teacher, no commitments that are keeping her awake, and that's still the schedule she keeps. She apparently just doesn't need as much sleep as most people do.

7-8 for sure. Anything less for a sustained period of time and I lose a ton of productivity.

I was seriously considering going on a polyphasic sleep experiment for a while to cut down on the hours, but after doing a lot of research it didn't really seem legit. Does anyone here have any real experience with polyphasic sleep?

For about 6 months during high school I would take a 1.5 hour nap after dinner from about 7:30pm until 9:00pm then sleep again from either 2:00am or 3:30am until 6:30am when I had to wake up (multiples of 90 minutes).

With 4.5 or 6 hours of sleep per night, I had more energy during the day than I ever have since sleeping 7-10 hours. I stopped because I was waking my parents at night and since then I haven't been able to work it back into my schedule.

Some caveats: (1) I needed somebody to call me to wake me up at 9:00 (I used my long-distance girlfriend for this – it was a good excuse to talk anyway). If I didn't have somebody to wake me up, I would often sleep through my alarm and wake up at 6:00am. Sometimes I found my alarm clock and/or bedside lamp on the floor. (2) My state of mind after the early evening nap was very much unlike normal waking experience. There was a sense of unbreakable tranquility and bodily calmness, as if a thin membrane had been stretched over experience and time had stopped. I read somewhere that certain writers are known to have induced this state for the purpose of doing their work.

I blogged my experience at the time, but it appears that the blog is now gone and I don't have an archive to my knowledge: <http://alternatesleep.blogspot.com/>.

You may be interested to read this person's log: http://polyphasic.blogspot.com/ – my experience was similar to his.

Blogger/Blogspot is on blog deletion rampage.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=%22blogger+deleted+my+blog%22

I experimented with polyphasic sleeping a couple summers ago. I wouldn't recommend it if your only interest is to maximize productivity. However, sleep deprivation and radical sleep patterns change your perspective and state of mind, and for that reason it's a cool experiment.

I'd usually sleep 6 to 9 hours, but our newborn baby is keeping me up at the moment, so it's more like 5 hours. Result: instant illness :(

Overall, I feel great through the day when I get 9 hours straight (rare); with 6, I wake up very productive (adrenaline is pumping!), but I'll inevitably crash in the afternoon. Any value in between, I'll need caffeine to wake up; my body works on 3-hours cycles.

I sleep 8 hours a day now. Sometimes I can't sleep because I'm thinking about some code, and on those nights I sleep less.

I sleep ~4 hours a night during the week. I find that if I sleep more (~6-8), I am not tired again by the time the remaining hours have passed and it is time for me to sleep again. For instance, when I sleep 6 hours, I am not ready to sleep again 18 hours later. This becomes a real problem after two nights or so, at which point I have a lot of trouble falling asleep.

I do tend to sleep more on the weekends, but I often end up essentially forcing myself to sleep come Sunday night.

I try to average somewhere between 7-8 hours of sleep per night. I've pushed myself through phases of about 5 hours/night but it was always a strain, and I got a lot more colds then.

Sleep is fun if you do it right. Cozy blankets, a cuddle partner or a cat or two make sleeping a good investment :)

I sleep a long time, but I also awake up a long time. More than 24 hours total, which means the time I go to bed (and thus the time I wake up) is slowly pushed back. Sounds a lot like Non-24 Hour Sleep Wake Syndrome, but I do not know.

Made school nearly impossible, anyway.

i use to sleep for 5 hrs on weekdays, 8-10 hrs on weekends. It was good initially but after 6 years now this habit has started to hit back.

My memory has been almost killed, i cant sleep well at night due to irregular sleeping patterns that i had as well productivity has gone downwards since i started feeling sleepy the next entire day. Less sleep might get u a spike in productivity but it wont hold much in long term.

I strongly advice people to sleep for a minimum of 7 hrs, not more than 9 hrs with a same time pattern.

7-8, every night. I find I can't think clearly enough to code if I don't get enough sleep consistently.

I used to sleep less than 5 but I realized I am way more productive if I sleep 8-9 even 10.

5-7 depending on the night, but would prefer to sleep more. infant and a startup...

It depends... 3-6 hours or 8-11 depending on if I took my sleeping pills or not.

7-8 on a good night, 6 on average, 1-2 if I forget to take the melatonin.

8. And I keep the same sleep schedule on weekends.

college student double majoring in business / CS , 5-6 hours a night. Def. think / aware that 8 hours = more productive though!

Yeah, I am a CS student too... Hope after finishing my degree I will get enough sleep.

The phrase "Hope after [anything] I will do [anything else]." seems to rarely happen, in my experience. My life tends towards more demands on my time, not less.

Entropy tends to increase; in almost everything.

5-7 on weekdays, 10-11 on weekends.

Most non-American folks have a midday nap. I'm seriously considering instituting one personally b/c i'm around 4/hrs a night

Is it really most? Can you justify that?

6 on week-days, 7 on week-end

sleep and exercise. You got to do it.

10.5

8-10 hours

6-7

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