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How to Evaluate Your Sleep
There’s no magic formula to determine how many hours of sleep a person needs. The question is complex for
two reasons:
- Sleep loss adds up cumulatively over time, leading to a phenomenon known as sleep debt.
- Some people simply seem to need more or less sleep than others.
The best plan is to listen to your body and follow a few general, rule-of-thumb guidelines.
How to Assess Your Own Sleep Needs
To gauge how much sleep you should be getting, first think about your basal sleep need—the amount of sleep that you need regularly to function at an optimal level. Basal sleep need varies by age: infants require about 16 hours of sleep a day on average, teenagers about 9 hours, and healthy adults 7–9 hours. To determine how much sleep you need, ask yourself these questions:
- How many hours of sleep do you need to feel productive and healthy? Consider how you feel after about 6 hours compared with 8 hours.
- Do you suffer from health problems (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, stroke), or are you overweight? Poor health and obesity are linked to a greater incidence of sleep problems—if you suffer from either, you may need more sleep.
- Do you have a large sleep debt? Sleep loss is cumulative, so even if you’ve recently been meeting your basal sleep need, you may still suffer from excessive daytime sleepiness if you’re carrying a sleep debt. A sleep debt may cause you to feel especially sleepy during dips in your circadian rhythm—the day-night cycle of about 24 hours that helps signal to your body when it’s time to sleep. Dips generally occur every 12 hours—during the night and in the mid-afternoon. Fortunately, research suggests that you can often work down sleep debt with good, regular sleep.
How to Tell Whether You’re Sleep-Deprived
If you suspect that you’re not getting the amount of sleep you need, ask yourself the following questions:
- In the morning, do you feel groggy, need caffeine to function, or hit the “snooze” button repeatedly?
- Do you feel drowsy during the day? Do you ever doze off while driving, attending meetings, or watching TV?
- Do you need less than five minutes to fall asleep?
- Do you sleep extra hours on weekend mornings?
- Do you experience impaired memory or shortened attention span?
- Do you experience loss of temper and excessive irritability?
Though all of the above are signs of sleep deprivation, some experts say that if you so much as feel drowsy at all during the day, you’re lacking in sleep. There’s a difference, though, between just feeling tired and feeling likely to doze off.
Epworth Sleepiness Scale
Since 1991, the Epworth Sleepiness Scale has been a common method that sleep specialists use to gauge daytime sleepiness. It rates how likely you are to fall asleep during these daytime situations:
- Sitting and reading
- Watching TV
- Sitting inactive in a public place
- Riding in a car as a passenger for an hour or more
- Lying down in the afternoon
- Sitting and talking to someone
- Sitting quietly after lunch with no alcohol
- Stopped for a few minutes in traffic after driving
If you were using the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, you would rate your chance of dozing during each situation, answering with one of the following responses:
- Never (0 points)
- Slight (1 points)
- Moderate (2 points)
- High (3 points)
A score of 10 or higher is a possible indication of a sleep disorder.
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