How to Determine How Much Sleep you Need?

Sleep is a key part of our lives, the times when we need to recharge our batteries and fill up on energy and vitality. No matter what age you are you will need to get a good amount of sleep in order to be your best productive self.

Determining how much sleep you need depends on many factors:

• Your average sleeping hours
• What type of person you are in terms of sleeping times ( night owl or morning person)
•  The type of work you are doing ( how much does it exhaust you mentally and physically)
• Any sports or other hobbies you are doing
• The average tasks you have to do daily

The question of age:

There has been several articles which discuss the age as a key factor in terms of sleep. But apart from the fact that babies and kids need to have a much larger amount of sleep than the average adult, recent studies have shown that it’s a misconception to think that the older you get the less sleep you need. The new researches provide proof that you need the good average amount of sleep no matter how old you are.

The average time of sleep for an adult is roughly between 6-10 hours. This also depends on how much sleep someone is used to and also on how much sleep someone can afford to get on a daily basis.

How can you work out your own sleeping schedule?

The easiest way to see how much sleep you need is to give yourself time to sleep and see how much sleep you get naturally, without any alarms. The best way to test it is to go on vacation when you really have nothing to do (or a few days off alone when you have kids) and see after how many hours you would naturally wake up.

The good thing in this method, is that it would bring sure results after a few days, not all at once however, because first you need to sleep off the previous days’ tasks.  It would only revel after these first few days, when you are well-rested and so your body would show you the correct results.

Further tips for a better sleep:

• If you have any difficulty falling asleep then you need to choose a method which can help you to fall asleep.  Especially when you feel that you wake up every day not feeling fresh while you had enough time on you to get a good sleep.
• Establish a good sleeping environment: unfortunately many factors can have a bad effect on our sleep from a high-traffic street to noisy neighbors. Help yourself, get earplugs, make sure your window has a good curtain in front of it and that your sleep will be as undisturbed as possible.

These are all the key to determine how much sleep you need and also to work out a sleeping pattern whereas you make sure you sleep at least a given amount of time in the same period.

If you are still struggling with sleep issues, please see Doc Orman’s Sleep Well Again book.