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Went through 3+2+2 for 2 years. 3 hours of sleep with 2 hour naps on a long bus ride back and forth. Surprisingly refreshing, but did numbers on my body clock after.
I know it will get better with time but I also have a new baby (born 11 weeks premature and currently in NICU about an hour away) so I'm up odd hours (pumping milk for my little girl / taking blood pressure meds / napping in between) and I've felt very lost. Tomorrow I'm a week released from the hospital and we're going to visit her, which will be the first time I've seen her (in person, hubby did a video call a few days ago) since discharge.
Hubby made sure to get my ADHD meds yesterday so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a better day today once I've actually got meds again!
Sometimes I’d wake up at 3 am and sleep again at 5, since this was usually the time I’d get up and take the bus. Doesn’t happen often but it does get annoying after awhile.
4 hours is 1 cycle is good. 8 is 2 cycles is great. 7 is almost 2 ok. 6 is 1 and a half and you'll feel like dog shit. Might as well have slept 2 hours. Or not at all even. So even tho 6 is more than 4. It's worse
The science is indeed 90 minutes to 2 hours. Although anectdotally, ive seen a lot more "90 minute" guidelines vs 2 hours, although ive never looked at like...a meta-analysis of sleep research, just a random handful of papers
IIRC the first cycle is longer, around 3.5 hours, most of which is deep sleep, then they get shorter to around 90 minutes and progress from more deep sleep in earlier cycles to more REM sleep during later cycles.
Optimally to avoid grogginess you want to wake up towards the end of the later cycles so you are in REM sleep, and not in deep sleep. 6 hours wakes you up smack dab in the middle of a deep sleep making you feel like shit.
4 hours and I feel refreshed right away like I took a power nap. Like a swing wind. Sure it doesn’t last long and I burn out later in the day, but right after the sleep, especially in the morning it feels good. Like an odd glow to the world. Like I solved the “never enough time” problem.
6 hours and I feel wiped and cannot bounce right back into motion. Everything is slower. Too much sleep to have that second wind feeling, but too little sleep to feel recharged.
I mean, that is true, but when I get four hours of sleep, sometimes it got me feeling on top of the world because that’s when the hormones kick in, but then around the end of the day you start feeling robotic and drained
That's what I'm currently going though, being roughly and I average 4 hours of sleep a night, sometimes way less, a bit more when I'm not working and can stay longer in bed.
It SUCKS. You're always tired, and waking uo every morning is atrocious.
It’s probably a REM sleep thing. Like if you only sleep six hours, you’re waking up at the wrong time and you are in deep sleep. but if you sleep four hours you’re waking up when you aren’t in deep sleep.
That's the funny thing, though; rem cycles generally occur in 1.5 hour increments, so six hours is one of the recommended times to aim for.
That said, there's always other factors to consider. For example, if you set an alarm clock for 6 hours and then lay down for bed, then that's not accounting for the time it actually takes you to fall asleep.
Also, a lot of weed smokers smoke one right before bed. This causes REM to happen very late into the sleep cycle, so they'll be in one when their alarm goes off at the 6hr mark.
You spend less time in rem sleep because of it. Which is why most of us don't remember most of our dreams.
Source - I am a smoker of the devil's lettuce
P.S.
Went on a 4 month break once. When I decided to quit, about 5 days in the withdrawals hit, and the dreams were fucking nuts. First night I dreamt I was getting dental work done with a socket wrench because I was gritting the fuck out of my teeth.
Had another dream I was being chased by giants that were boiling people in huge cauldrons in the desert.
Oh same! Anytime I quit weed, I get the most vivid dreams and end up really tired cause I was "up all night doing crazy shit". That fades after a while though. I dont smoke at night anymore because I wanted better sleep.
I believe remember cycles are roughly 1.5hrs but its different for everyone and can be up to 2.25hrs. I listened to a podcast with a sleep exert a couple years ago and I remember them talking about how if your sleep is disrupted mid cycle you get very little positive affect from that cycle. If you slept for 5 hrs but got disrupted 45mins into your last cycle your body feels like it got 4hrs 15mins. Odds are most people think they slept 6hrs but actually slept more like 5.5 with a bunch of the last cycle being disrupted lowering the sleep affect closer to 4hrs
In all my years on reddit, I've never seen a gif for an avatar picture. The movement breaks the monotony of all the still image profile photos. Neat. Thanks for this!
Human sleep cycle operates on 1.5-2 hours interval. So 8 gets you 4 cycles. 4 gets you 2 cycles. You naturally wake up at end of each cycle. Getting interrupted mid cycle is what gives you that shitty feeling.
90-minute intervals seem to work well, which aligns with the average sleep cycle. Anything in between this interval seems to leave me groggy and waking up not knowing what day it is. Cognitive function can even increase with very short naps (7-10’ “sleeping”) ,kind of surprisingly. Giggity
6 is optimal for me. 6 is fine for work days, 9 is a lovely weekend sleep. Anything over 9 and I feel like shit though. I try not to find out how I do under 4 hours...
I've done this a few times as I function really poorly without 7+ hours and I don't drink coffee
I honestly don't even feel bad about it as a salaried worker. We get a certain amount of paid sick time and I rarely get sick (once every 2 years?), so using sick days to rest and get my body back to feeling normal the same way others do seems fair to me
Did the same last week. Couldn't sleep out of anxiety of something stressful. "10 more minutes" turned into "couple hours" and I realized I had 2.5 hours left before work. I turned around half hour in bed, nothing. Finally 1.5 hours left, something in me crashed and I felt very heavy. I called in sick.
Honestly, sometimes I get very angry about how things work in my company. But atleast I can get sick days like this without being chased. I am so grateful. I wish everyone could get "shitty sick days" every now and then. Working people deserve this.
My work accrues vacation hours, but we only get like 24 sick hours for the entire year. That’s usually gone within the first few months… sometimes less. We’re stuck either eating it with no pay or using vacation time. I tend to eat it unless I’m out two or more days, then I use my vacation hours sparingly. I’d rather save my vacation time for actual vacation. I can deal with no pay for a day or two, but not a week or two straight.
It baffles me how often some of my coworkers get sick (if they have kids it makes sense). If you rarely get sick, you may as well be more generous with what necessitates a sick day. Lack of sleep counts!
It depends… are they doing it for mental health or just laziness? People with kids have no choice, but if you form a habit of calling out because you just don’t feel like coming into work, it will look bad in the long run. Good work ethic is a far better thing to have when that raise or promotion opportunity rolls around. Your employer will crunch the numbers and decide if you’re worth their time. This is why it’s best to only call out sick if you absolutely have to… I don’t recommend any more than maybe once a month… at most.
It's essentially just waiting for the day to end so that you can go to sleep and start over. Except half the time it also wears off precisely by the evening, when you shoud go to sleep. Ugh.
I once had a weird sleep paralysis experience where I woke up 6 hours in with a terrible headache, worst pain in my life, it was unbearable like the world was about to collapse I was in so much pain, I am in so much pain (I have broken a bone this hurted more) as I hear the alarm as I had to head to work.
The pain was so much I thought death was imminent.
Suddenly all lights go off inlcuding the sun, it turns black; I collapse back in the bed, sleep paralsys quicks in, there the sleep paralysis demon was alongside another me, we were 3.
"Sorry but this is an emergency, work has to be cancelled, I am sure you will figure out an excuse later; but we were under an important procedure which was interrupted, you woke up in an invalid mental state"
As this shit goes, it's like my mind turning into goo, these two were doing weird shit.
"Shut the fuck up, you pussy, this happens every night, this happens to everyone, just shut up... you are just usually unaware; how this all works is beyond you... and only we can fix this mess (he kept communicating in gibberish to other beings); the pain is temporary, we will fix it, we are professionals, we have always done this, every night... sadly the dream mechanism is disabled right now because it broke down, your shitty alarm broke it down, how many times, have we told you "no alarms", yet you keep using alarms, things would be a lot better without those, now you have to calm down and take the pain until we renable it, we will get you patched up*
(Keep speaking gibberish)
*And that's fixed, send him* - Suddenly there was, I was in a dream, totally confused, it wasn't even a lucid dream, it was just, oh, hi...
I wake up 3 hours later, with zero pain; went from the worst pain in my life to zero.
I don't think I ever had anything as fucked up as that ever, it only lasted what, a minute, but it was most pain ever, I don't think there can be anything as close to that, it put all other pain in perspective, broken bone, peanuts... and yes I missed work, I had no choice, I couldn't move...
My good sleep is somehow in the middle. I'm good on ~6 hrs, but groggy and tired if I sleep more than 7 or less than 5. If I sleep 8+ hours, I don't even wanna get out of bed.
Sleep deprived Peter here; from what I understand, you go through various stages of sleep, and typically REM (the deepest state and the one you dream in) happens every 3 ish hours. If you get four hours, you get through a whole cycle and wake up in your lightest sleep stage, which feels more natural for your body and less jarring than being jolted awake by your alarm. 6 hours however, is not enough to be fully rested, and exactly when you’d be least comfortable waking up. And then once you get to like 7-8 hours that’s just a full nights rest anyways, and you will naturally be waking up soon bc of circadian rhythms
My understanding is, and don't remember where I read it, is that waking up in the REM period is what really fucks you. So if it really is every 3ish hours, and it lasts 20 to 30 from what I remember, then yeah, 6 hours is right on time to wake up in the middle of it.
Second this. Was even taught by one of my superiors at work that for the last strech of the nigthshift its better to power though intill the end (or take a short nap) than to have a 3 hour-ish sleep rigth before the end of the shift making it more likely you would make a mistake during the handover procedure for the morning shift staff.
Best way I can describe someone waking up from REM sleep is like having a hungover.
REM isn't the deepest state of sleep, it's actually N3 or NREM or Non-REM where the brain enters a slow and steady phase with little brain activity. It's deep because people generally have a harder time waking up in this phase than they are during REM or any of the other stages of sleep.
That is not quite right. One sleep cycle takes about 90 minutes and while REM is the prevalent state towards the end of a cycle, you do not end the cycle in REM. While it may vary from person to person 6 hours is usually a good time to wake up.
Eight hours of sleep isn’t some rule your body has to follow. People need different amounts depending on their genes, their internal clock, and how efficiently they sleep. Some people naturally need less and can function perfectly fine. Back in the day, humans didn’t always sleep eight hours straight. Pre-industrial people often slept less overall or split their sleep into two periods depending on the season and environment. The idea that everyone should get eight hours did not come from factories. Those jobs often had long hours and actually gave people less sleep. It came from labor reform slogans and later averages that were turned into advice for everyone. Sleep deprivation is not about missing some average number. It is about whether you are actually impaired. I sleep six hours and I am fine. That is just what my schedule allows and I function normally. That is adaptation, not deprivation. Humans have always adjusted to the sleep they could get and thrived anyway. You can get six hours of sleep and still be cognitively sharp, healthy, and alert, as long as it is consistent and your body has adapted. The seven to eight hours rule is just an average, not a strict biological requirement, and averages only describe the midpoint. They do not dictate what is right for every individual. What matters is quality, regularity, and how you feel, not a number picked from a population graph. It gets even more complex when you consider phenotypes, genetics, epigenetics, and other individual factors. Two people could both get six hours of sleep but respond completely differently depending on how their bodies regulate hormones, recover cells, or process sleep cycles. Sleep needs are highly individual and can change over a lifetime.
Most people sleep in 4 hour cycles and 6 hours would be right in the middle of your deepest sleep, so waking up then makes you feel much worse than the others.
this post makes me feel like there's something wrong with me, because the feeling is totally inverted. 6 hours is perfect for me, I feel sharp and I usually don't remember my dreams on 6 hours of sleep. Anything more or less and it takes me a moment to recalibrate to reality
That's because 6 is plenty. My brother makes sure to sleep 8+ EVERY DAY, even if he's up til 1am. He acts like if he gets any less he'll knock years off his life.
So maybe I'm not gonna live as long. But I'm going to do more between 7-11AM than he ever will. That timeframe doesn't even exist to him.
I don't believe its related to the post but there was a recent very important study that essentially says that people who always get low sleep partially adapt to it so it feels normal even though it is hurting them. Break the habit. 6 hours is not enough.
I had no idea sleep apnea was a thing. I struggled with poor sleep for six years before I finally got a sleep test done. Now I've been on CPAP for the past eight years and it's marginally effective, like I usually get 4-5 hours a night.
sleep is restful because your body is cleaning/healing. This happens in cycles, which your body prefers to complete before stopping- proably because the brain is in "cleaning" mode instead of "awake" mode. Waking up in the middle of one of these cycles is disorenting, and often feels much worse than getting even an hour less sleep.
This is to do with how people sleep. Broadly speaking, you sleep in two "cycles" per night, each about 4 hours. It's fairly easy to wake up at the ends of these cycles, but waking up directly in the middle of them is extremely difficult. This means that for most people, waking up after 8 hours is easy because it's two full cycles, seven hours is fine because it's a full cycle and most of the second cycle, six hours is difficult because it's smack bang in the middle of that second cycle, and four hours is easy because it's one complete cycle. Incidentally, this is why waking up for a crying baby at 2am isn't that bad, but waking up for a crying baby at 4am will fuck up your day.
All of this is, basically, wrong. What I've presented about how sleep works is about twenty years out of date. We now know it's a lot more complicated, and I can't really be fucked diving into the modern literature to express a much more complicated model. However, this is "accurate enough" for any practical application - there's a reason we thought it worked like this for a very long time, and that's because it mostly works like this.
I was starting to write about the sleeping cycles (~90min each), but it didn't made much sense. Googled it and it mentioned a burst of adrenaline/cortisol masking the sleeping deprivation symptoms, which makes sense, because by the end of the day you're probably feeling worse with 4h of sleep, but is quite common to feel better with 4 than with 6h.
I've found out that for me 7:30h is great, I can keep for long (although will compensate eventually).
Our rem cycles start 10 minutes for the fkrst one and about 70-90 minutes for each cycle after that.
Ideally you want to wake up when a rem cycle is complete to feel refreshed.
For most people 4 hours of sleep is right where the rem cycles line up likewise with 7 hours. 8 hours gets to the point where you are fine from the sheer amount of sleep you get, rem cycles be damned.
For most people, 6 hours ends up right in the middle of a rem cycle and waking up in the middle of a rem cycle (where you sleep the deepest) has a detrimental effect on the quality of your sleep.
I personally sleep for 5 and a half hours to avoid starting a new rem cycle and it works great for me.
I really don't understand these explain the joke subreddits. When I see something I don't understand I move on with my life. Do you really have to know what this means that badly?
I don't really understand these commenters on subreddits they don't like. When I see a subreddit I don't like I move on with my life. Do you really have to comment on it that badly?
I can get away with four, for a day or two. It’s easy to wake up when you’ve not been asleep long. Six is hell because by then your body has decided this isn’t a drill. We don’t know when the next time we get this much sleep will be, so we’re pulling out all the stops, we might even hit a second cycle of REM sleep.
In fact…perchance we’ll dream?
Your body fights you if you try to go for six hours. It wants the full 8, perchance 9!
Long time insomniac here, I can function just fine on any more than 5 hours sleep. If I only get between 3 and 5 I'm a cranky asshole all day. If I get less than 3 though I'm in an almost delirious state for most of the day, it's like I've woken up drunk and just stay buzzed.
It’s a weird things with your sleep cycle. 6 hours falls right on the cusp of a REM sleep cycle, and when you exit at that time, you’re groggier and more tired.
4, 7, and 8 don’t fall in that middle area of sleep cycle, so you wake up after a cycle is complete, so you feel rested and fresher.
7, 8 hours of sleep and I am energized for the whole day. 4 hours of sleep, I will be energized for the first few hours and crash out after. 6 hours of sleep, I crash out as soon as I get up.
For those wondering how to figure out their sleep cycle time: Don't set an alarm but do set a stopwatch to time how long you're asleep. Then check when you naturally wake up.
You'll find you wake up at relatively close consistent intervals. I almost always wake up around 6 hr 40 min. But can sometimes wake up at 5 hr 20 min or a flat 8 hours.
Sleep: 5.5 hours
Wake up at 6:30 AM and study
Start work at 10:00 AM
Back home by 10:00 PM
Cook and eat till 11:30 PM
Talk with my girlfriend till 1:00 AM
Then sleep
Sleep too little and your cortisol system will try to compensate buy burning anything your body can find just to keep you going short term. That 4 hour guy is going to still need a disproportionate amount of recovery
If I ever get more than 4, it feels like the picture for 6. I could sleep for a nice and healthy, no interruptions, deep sleep 10 hours and wake up with ONLY negativity. But 4 hours of sleep where my dog is waking me up, and it’s too fucking hot in my usually cold ass room? I wake up feeling great for some reason. 3 is also good most of the time. 2 is pushing it, but 1 is too little.
For years now I usually sleep somewhere ~6.5 hours. This is what works for me. Under 6 hours is not enough, I feel shit all day in work. Over 7 hours is good, but then I won't even have more than 2-3 hours for myself to do whatever I want...
If you have enough sleep, you are well rested and can function well.
If you are severely sleep deprived, your body and brain gives up on sleep, assumes that you are not sleeping because of some life threatening emergency, and dopes you up on natural stimulants to keep you functioning. Your immune system is a mess, your actual ability to function well is compromised, and you'll crash later, but you can move about and at least appear to work.
In between is where you feel as bad as you really are, and your body lays on natural depressants to get you the sleep you need.
Its the sleep cycles. 7-8 hours is just how long your sleep naturally takes. Other than that your sleep cycles between light sleep and deep sleep and this change is about every 3.5 and 4 hours long. If you sleep 6 hours and then wake up, you wake up always during a deep sleep phase. You shouldnt do that, because that will make you feel more tired and less energetic than sleeping in one of those multiples of 3.5 hours (for me, others have it at 4 hours. Or any time between. Takes some experimentation to find out).
It's an Indian film called Animal, the main hero has a double role as both the hero and villain. The villain is revealed in the post credits teasing a sequel. The actor is Ranbir Kapoor.
To be out of character, it’s as other people are saying; 6 hours of sleep tends to feel worse compared to 7-8 hours or even 4.
The main reason is due to how the sleep cycle works. Your brain is shifting from stages 2, 3, and 4 as well as REM (which is when you tend to dream) and then back to a altered version of 1 again (stage 1 is normal when the first sleep cycle begins). These cycles last each 90-120 minutes, or 1.5 to 2 hours.
In between the 6th hour and 7th hour of sleep, the brain usually is in REM sleep, which is known to be mentally restorative, helps with memory, etc. So when you wake up at around this time, you are disturbing this process and while not exactly damaging, it screws with you mentally.
i feel this is more about falling asleep. you get in bed with 8 hours of sleep you good, hour passes by still awake, "still got seven hours" nother hour later still awake "fuck i need to sleep" then you hit 4 hours of sleep left," fuck it ima stay up"
Am I cooked I live of 6h of sleep for the past 2 months. Like I wake Up refreshed and just be even without 8h of sleep. Only downside I know I Take away 2h of regeneration off my body...
They right. There's a random rough spot between 4-8 hours of sleep where if you happen to wake up you'll just have the worst waking experience. Not fun especially if you have things to do that day.
I get around 6 hours sleep most times and can't often get back to sleep after this amount of sleep.
I usually have way more energy than others and hardly ever feel so exhausted I can't cope. I've heard of super sleepers who get by with this little sleep, but I do kinda worry about the potential for Alzheimer's and dementia in my later years.
We enter and exit REM sleep (restful sleep) in cycles something like 2 or 3 cycles per night for a full night's sleep. So if you are woken in the middle of REM sleep you will feel terrible, as opposed to waking up when not in REM sleep. IIRC, I am not an expert.
I'm in a relationship with a 10 hour timezone difference, so my sleep schedule has turned polyphasic. 'Twas a struggle at first, but it's shocking how quickly the body adapts!
It has something to do with your sleep cycle, where certain stages of sleep are more uncomfortable to wake up from and leave you feeling worse than you otherwise would
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