My Support Forums - View Single Post - Confessions of little turtle with love #7

Rohag · Mar 28, 2023 at 02:35 PM

This got my attention quickly due to a long personal history of difficulties:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fuzzybear

I was told by an ''expert'' irl that I ''can function on 2 to 3 hours sleep''

Fuzzybear, was the "expert" referencing self or you? Did your "expert" offer you any supporting evidence for that assertion? "Function" - how well?

I did a simple search on "optimum sleep duration" in Pub Med Central and got 6133 results. Here's a 2018 article from the Nature and Science of Sleep journal: Sleeping hours: what is the ideal number and how does age impact this?

The authors use cautious language.

Quote:

However, the ideal amount of sleep required each night can vary between different individuals due to genetic factors and other reasons, and it is important to adapt our recommendations on a case-by-case basis. Sleep duration recommendations (public health approach) are well suited to provide guidance at the population-level standpoint, while advice at the individual level (eg, in clinic) should be individualized to the reality of each person.

That said, they observe in this "narrative review paper":

Quote:

Sleep duration recommendations have ranges, or zones of optimal sleep, suggesting that the relationship between sleep duration and adverse health outcomes is U-shaped, with both extremities, sleep durations that are too short or too long, associated with negative effects on health.47–51 There is a large body of evidence providing biological plausibility for short sleep as causally related to a wide range of adverse health outcomes; however, the role of long sleep is less clear. Aside from the elderly population, long sleep [≥ 9 hours - definition from other studies, Rohag] is generally associated with other health problems (eg, depression, chronic pain, low socioeconomic status) that can confound the associations.55,56 Reverse causation and residual confounding are thus better mechanisms to explain the associations between long sleep and adverse health outcomes.55,56 This may explain why the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommends a threshold value for adults (≥7 hours per night) rather than a range (eg, 7–9 hours per night) (Table 1). However, excessive long sleep duration may be informative as it can be indicative of poor sleep efficiency (ie, spending a lot of time in bed but of low quality).