But the amount that any single person needs is so constant that its amazing. Although you may end up sleeping longer one night then you do another night depending on the circumstances, the number of hours that you sleep over the course of a week or a month will usually average out very much the same. You'd be surprised to learn that one week usually falls within only ½ hour of a separate week.



The usual quoted average amount of sleep that everyone says you are supposed to get is 8 hours. This is actually not true. For most people the more accurate number would be 7 to 7 1/2 hours. But yet even that number is only a general average and really has nothing to do with what's good or bad to each individual. A good nights sleep, technically, for any one person can range from less than 4 hours to more than 12.

Approximately 150 years ago people in our society slept around eight hours or more. This was before the invention of the electric light. Some people say that the electric light did not hurt people's sleep time by forcing them to stay up longer than they wanted and in fact all we do is sleep more soundly and deeply. Yet other people say that Thomas Edison's invention of the electric light lead us to stay up longer than our bodies naturally should and is responsible for this modern living frenetic pace.

No one expects or thinks that everyone in the world should wear the same tennis shoes, but somehow people think that we should all be sleeping the same amount of time. Everyone tends to be worried if someone they know doesn't get that magical eight hours of sleep, and if someone needs more sleep than that, we often tend to call them lazy. But surprisingly, two people out of every 10, sleep less than 6 hours every night, based on research by the NHCS. Also, about one person in 10 sleeps 9 hours or more each night.

Sleep researchers call people who sleep 6 hours or less short sleepers and people who sleep 9 hours or more long sleepers. Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Edison were short sleepers. They were reported to get little more than 4 to 6 hours each night. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, was a very long sleeper, as many other people who are creative in science and in the arts have proven to be.

Some people seem to get by on what other people term or deem very little sleep. When a couple of sleep researchers put an ad in a local newspaper asking for people who sleep only a few hours each night, they found a 50-plus year old corporate executive and a 30-plus year old craftsmen who both said they slept less than 4 hours a night. These two spent a week in the researcher sleep lab which confirmed the claims of their short nights sleep. Both the executive and the craftsmen claim that they didn't feel they needed anymore sleep than what they were getting.

So how much sleep you need varies greatly from person to person. Individuals have different sleep needs. So if you feel like you're getting the amount of sleep you need, even if it's below the 8 hours that everyone says you should get, then you're probably getting the exact amount that you need.