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Comment by jfoldi | Hacker News Reader

You don't feel like you over slept after 9 hours of sleep?

Either way I have to agree with doing what works for you. I always made an attempt to sleep a full 8 hours and failed. I get by on 4-5 hours of sleep a night and feel fine!

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I find my acceptable waking points occur in 1.5 hour sleep cycles, and how many I need depends on how mentally taxing the stuff I'm working on is. For ordinary work, stuff I know how to do fairly well already, I need 8 hours. If I'm learning something new or putting in long hours that require concentration, I'll need 9.5 hours. If I'm thrown into a completely new situation - say, I need to decide the architecture of my startup and learn 3-4 new frameworks all at once, or I've just moved cross-country and started a new job - I'll need 11 hours. I can also function on 6.5 hours but feel pretty crummy, and there's a noticeable performance penalty for anything that requires concentration (math, computer programming, etc). On 4 hours of sleep, I'm a zombie - I do okay with everyday tasks and social interaction (with people I know), but can't really learn anything new and retain it. Curiously, I feel better on 4 hours of sleep than on 6.5, 9.5, or 11 - I'm more alive and less groggy, I just notice that my performance on external measures declines.

I recall in the 2010 there were a bunch of athletes that all said the secret to their success - besides training hard - was getting 9 hours of sleep at night. IIRC both Sasha Cohen and Shaun White mentioned it.

I think I'd also read brain research that REM sleep (which tends to be back-loaded towards the end of the night) is when your brain converts experiences from that day from short-term memory into long-term skillsets. That'd be consistent with my experience that more mentally demanding tasks require more sleep, and the experience of those Olympic athletes, and that I don't really suffer a short-term penalty from lack of sleep, it's more a long-term problem.

But how do you do this? You wake up and go to sleep again and again? I wake up naturally after 7 or 8 hours, would be kinda hard for me to sleep 11.5 hours.

I've never had problems sleeping up to 12 hours. Might be a personal thing, or related to whether you have accumulated sleep debt.

I find that I'll often come up to a point of half-consciousness at about 8/9.5/11 hours, but as long as I don't sit up or get out of bed or start checking my e-mail on my phone, it's pretty easy to fall back asleep.

Whether I want to depends on how much mental activity I've been doing; I'm far more likely to think "That was a nice dream, I don't wanna get out of bed yet" if I've got a thorny challenging problem in my head than if I'm like "Gotta get into work and start coding."

I think it also depends how much light you have in the room. I think you would find it easier to sleep longer if the room was still dark after 8 hours.

I feel similarly to the OP, in that I need usually more than the 8 hours recommended. It sometimes seems people are critical when I tell them I feel fully refreshed only after 9+ hours of sleep, usually implying that I'm just lazy. Like most things in life, a person's optimal amount of sleep varies. Some people can make do on 5-6, whereas some need 9 or more. I'm personally toward the 9+ side. Definitely a "what works for you" thing.

As for segmented sleep, I'm not sure I could ever do that. If I even nap for like 30-60 minutes after 7pm, the chances of me falling asleep by midnight are pretty much nil. I'd be screwed if I tried to sleep from 8-12 and then again at 2-3am.

My sleep patterns are a lot like the parent commenter. I usually sleep about 7 to 8 hours, but occasionally sleep 9 or so. Do I feel like I've overslept? Sure in that I've "lost" an hour or two that I could have used. But my body doesn't feel like it's overslept. When it does, it tells me. With a half day of headaches.

'oversleep' is often dehydration.

What do you mean? Am I just dehydrated when I feel overslept, or oversleeping causes dehydration? The latter makes little sense to me, but I'm asking for clarification because this issue happens to me quite often.

> oversleeping causes dehydration? The latter makes little sense to me

Well, when you're awake you will get thirsty and drink if you overheat. If you're asleep you won't.

both. the longer you are asleep the more dehydrated you are, exacerbating grogginess.

What works for you isn't necessarily what works for someone else. 4-5 hours a night turns me into a zombie after about two days. My optimal duration seems to be about 8.5 hours, up to 9 hours if I heavily exerted myself the previous day.

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