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Getting enough sleep is crucial for your health and wellbeing. When you lack sleep, your body can’t function properly. The severity of the negative effects of sleep deprivation spans from difficulty focusing the next morning and up to such long-term outcomes as higher risks of depression, diabetes, and stroke.

So, to stay healthy, you should make sure you get enough sleep every night. But how much sleep per night is enough for you personally?

Well, while we’re all different and our bodies have different needs, certain general guidelines do exist. In 2015, the National Sleep Foundation issued the following recommendations for sleep duration based on age:

• Newborns (0-3 months): 14 to 17 hours
• Infants (4-11 months): 12 to 15 hours
• Toddlers (1-2 years): 11 to 14 hours
• Preschoolers (3-5 years): 10 to 13 hours
• School-age children (6-13 years): 9 to 11 hours
• Teenagers (14-17 years): 8 to 10 hours
• Younger adults (18-25 years): 7 to 9 hours
• Adults (26-64 years): 7 to 9 hours
• Older adults (65+ years): 7 to 8 hours

Following these recommendations on a regular basis will help you meet your body’s needs to maintain proper levels of energy and overall health.

Now, we may not always be able to get the needed amount of sleep every single night, right? So, you may be wondering whether it is possible to sleep less and still be productive and healthy.

The short answer is yes.

But to answer in more detail, we need to take a look at how sleep actually works.

To start with, human sleep occurs in cycles. An average adult who sleeps 6 to 9 hours goes through 4 to 6 cycles during the night, meaning one cycle lasts about 90 minutes. And the tricky thing is that your waking up feeling groggy or well-rested depends not only on how much sleep you have had but also on what part of the cycle you woke up from.

A sleep cycle consists of five stages. The first four of them make up the non-REM (NREM) group and the fifth one is called REM sleep.

Sourse:

https://www.europeanbedding.sg/blogs/articles/103744774-learn-how-to-sleep-better-by-understanding-sleep-cycles-stages

During NREM sleep, our brain smoothly transitions from being awake to being deeply asleep while our body restores energy and repairs itself. If you wake up at the beginning of the cycle — that is, at stage 1 or 2 of NREM sleep — you are likely to feel fresh and rested rather than groggy and cloudy-headed, even if you have slept less than the recommended number of hours. Waking up from stage 3 may be more difficult, while stage 4 is considered the deepest stage of sleep, and waking up from it is hard and usually results in prolonged sleep‌ ‌inertia‌.

Sleep inertia is a state of incomplete awakening during which your cognitive performance is impaired. All people experience it right after waking up. When you wake up from light sleep, it may last about 15 minutes. But when you wake up from the deep sleep stage, you may feel sleepy, disoriented, and unable to perform even simple everyday tasks for several hours.

Now, the REM stage is interesting too. During REM sleep, your brain processes the information, restores, and clears out the byproducts of its activity during the day. As the brain activity in this stage is very high and resembles the activity of your brain when you’re awake, you can be easily awakened from REM sleep. However, if you wake up right in the middle of it, you may still experience prolonged sleep inertia. Still, it will likely be not as severe as when you are awakened from non-REM deep sleep.

With all of that being said, the best time to wake up to avoid prolonged sleep inertia is:

• either at the end of a sleep cycle, which also happens to be the end of REM sleep;
• or at the beginning of a new cycle, which means during stage 1 or 2 of NREM sleep.

And that’s what this sleep calculator can help you with. It allows you to find the perfect time to set an alarm at or go to sleep so that you wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the cycle and wouldn’t spend the day feeling drowsy and foggy.

And it’s not only about your productivity.

It’s also about your safety and the safety of those around you.

Sleep inertia comes with such symptoms as decreased ability to make decisions, reduced attentiveness, impaired memory, and slow reaction speed. If you drive a car or operate different kinds of equipment at work, sleep inertia might lead to accidents. So, feel free to use our calculator to make sure you wake up being at your best!