Quality vs. Quantity of Sleep

rudyzenreviews

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about sleep. Do you think the quality of sleep matters more than the number of hours?

Some nights I get 8+ hours but wake up groggy, and other times I only get 6–7 and feel way more refreshed. Makes me wonder if it’s less about the clock and more about the depth/restfulness of sleep.

What’s been your experience? Do you track your sleep at all or just go by how you feel in the morning?

nossmf

I feel there's a certain minimum needed, but after that min is met the focus slides to quality. For me, less than 6 hours becomes hard to awaken, but after that I am more rested from 6 uninterrupted hours than from 8 restless hours.

AnnPT77

Speaking as someone with longterm sleep problems, both matter. For me extra length seems to compensate slightly sometimes for poor quality.

My fitness tracker tracks sleep (supposedly), but it's wildly inaccurate. I say that from experience - it often thinks I'm asleep when awake, and sometimes vice versa . . . and from comparing it to an in-hospital sleep study in a conversation with the tech who'd monitored me with diverse devices all night while I also wore the tracker. We laughed and laughed about what it said.

One of my sleep issues is sleep apnea. The incidents per hour count from my CPAP seems to correlate better with my subjective sense of sleep quality. Low incidents per hour = feeling better rested, generally.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

The Oura ring is supposed to be the best of the fitness devices that also tracks sleep. But, like @AnnPT77 , I use Garmin, which is only passingly useful.

PS. Garmin gave me a 92/100 last night, saying my body battery achieved 100/100. That might be a record! I should be superman today! The truth is that I have a cold, so I'm actually pretty groggy. Also, it counted the 1.5h that I was watching TV as sleep. Finally, the dog was having a stomach issue and my wife got up to take him out in the middle of the night. This woke me up, but it didn't register as such.

Lietchi

I've also had shorter nights that felt more restful, but (in my case at least) I feel it's not strictly a matter of quality of sleep. I feel the timing of when I wake up plays a big part: if my alarm goes off on the middle of a deep sleep cycle, I will feel very groggy for hours after waking up, even if it's a reasonable amount of sleep. If for some reason I wake naturally less than an hour before my alarm, I will get up rather than go back to sleep and be woken up mid cycle.

stirbuzz

I have ME/CFS which is a condition that affects and is affected by sleep. There are nights when I get many hours of sleep but feel even worse when I wake up than when I went to bed. And there are nights when I wake up around 2am, can't get back to sleep until 4-5am only to have to get up at 6. It's totally unpredictable. And I might have a "good" day after one of those wee hour wakeups. I do feel the quality of my sleep matters more than quantity; I am not as symptomatic on a day following DEEP sleep (nights when I sleep a long time tend to be very light or "busy" with dreams). I do feel my sleep patterns contribute to my weight issues, on top of menopause, a chronic foot injury, and severe deconditioning. I worked night shift for over 30 years and I am sure I did some damage to myself. It is known that shift work can contribute to obesity however I have been on a "normal" schedule for 3 years now

SafariGalNYC

i think both quality and quantity of hours matter .. for me at least!

Sleep well all! 😴

BiLingo7641

There is a great article on sleep in the September issue of the Atlantic. It holds that the number of hours required decreases with age. I often wake up around 3 am and in order to ward off worrying about not getting back to sleep, I assure myself that resting also counts. That helps me relax till I find sleep again. Any repetitive task helps, like mentally redoing my garden or remodeling my house.