Since laying awake in bed is not sleeping, I'm pretty sure they mean the 8 hours spent not awake.
I have a fitness watch that tells me how much I've slept, seems pretty accurate as the times it notes me being awake match up with the times I remember being awake through the night
If I go to bed 8 hours before I wake up , I only usually get 6 and a bit hours of sleep. To actually get 8, I need to get into bed 10 hours before I wake up
When 8 hours of sleep is recommended, do people generally mean getting into bed 8 hours before getting up and having a relatively uninterrupted sleep, or should I actually be GETTING 8 hours?
Thanks, Max
Since laying awake in bed is not sleeping, I'm pretty sure they mean the 8 hours spent not awake.
I believe the recommendation for 8 hours of sleep came from Henry Ford's factories when he popularized a work system based on 8 hours of labour, 8 hours of leisure and 8 hours of rest per day.
So, technically the recommendation is just 8 hours in bed.
In reality, the amount of sleep you need depends on several factors and may have a large range. You should be able to feel when you are getting insufficient sleep or the time in bed is sufficient, but the quality of sleep is poor.
Not sure about the Henry Ford part, but it is definitely true that 8 hours is an estimate based on norms, and not a magic number determined to be the best for everyone. This is an estimate of sleep duration, not time spent in bed, and has been studied, and for most adults, 7-8 seems to work fine, but the normal range is more like 5-9. Some people seem to do fine with 4, and some do best with 10. Most of us know what we need, based on basic observation. If generally you are feeling well, and able to everything you want to do, then you are probably sleeping enough. If you need to "catch up" on weekends, you're probably not sleeping enough during the week. If you sleep 6 hours, and like to take an hour nap in the afternoon, that's cool. Unless your boss has other ideas.
Basically, to get the full benefit of sleep, you should get enough (whatever that means for you) and get it on a regular schedule. If you sleep 8 hours and don't feel rested, you might just be someone who needs 9 hours, or you may have sleep apnea, another sleep disorder, or a non-sleep-related problem that is causing fatigue.
Sleep remains fairly mysterious to medicine and science in general. We don't really know why it's so important, but you die without it. Since evolution has not found a way to eliminate the need for sleep in prey or marine mammals, where sleeping can be deadly, it must be pretty darn important.
Here's the National Sleep Foundation expert panel review results on sleep duration. They looked at a bunch of studies and did their best to come up with a consensus: https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/a...015-7/fulltext
Bottom line: don't stress about the 8, use it as a starting point and figure out what you need. If you feel good with 6 or 7, you're not doing anything wrong. "Extra" sleep is not needed or helpful.
Since most people's sleep cycle is 90 minutes, you're better off aiming for 7.5 or 9 hours anyway. My personal experience is that 6 hours leaves me more rested than 8 because of the interrupted sleep cycle at the end of an 8 hour span.
Not that I always get 8 hours of sleep, but it’s does take me 10 hours in bed to get 8 hours of sleep. If I don’t have an am work meeting (1 day a week, and I’m not going snowboarding, I only have to be up early enough to check my email by 8:15 or so on those days, I go to bed at 9:30 and get up at 8. It takes me a half an hour to go to sleep and I’ll wake up several times. I’ll also lay in bed awake for 20 minutes or so before getting up. So yeah, my experience is that one needs 10 hours in the bed to get 8 hours of sleep. Furthermore, like anything else, you have to work on improving your sleep: blackout windows, melatonin, tea, valerian root, sleep aids, THC, monitors screen time in the evening, blue blockers for watching TV... whatever you have to do to improve your sleep tends to be worth it.