You don’t need 8 hours of sleep per day — You need 8 hours of rest

For the past 3 weeks or so I have been sore all over. I’m not sore in the same place every day, either. I just have general soreness in various random places. I’ve been unusually active lately, so in part I attribute my soreness to my increased activity. I’m also 43, so obviously, part of this is just aging (or is it?).

I am an active person by any measure. I am starting to think that my sleep and rest cycle is insufficient for my activity level. For instance, at least twice a week I walk 6 1/2 miles carrying 30 pounds on my back, sometimes in the sweltering Houston heat, and other days I exercise for an hour (usually intense yoga or an intense Crossfit-style functional full body workout).

I track my sleep using an app called “Sleep Cycle” which I like a lot because it wakes you up gradually, tells you how many hours of sleep you got along with the quality of that sleep, and the app lets you measure your waking heart rate, among other things.

By measuring my sleep regularly, I’ve learned that I don’t get nearly enough sleep. I sleep an average of about 6 hours a day. That’s two hours short of the recommended “dose” of 8 hours. This deficiency doesn’t sound like a problem but it adds up quickly over time.

Getting 8 hours of actual, real sleep is hard. Really hard. Especially as we grow older. I’ve come to think that the “8 hours of sleep per night” should mean “8 hours of sleep and rest” per night. Put another way, you don’t need 8 hours of actual sleep time as long as you get close to 8 hours of actual sleep time plus enough deep rest to take you to 8 hours or more of sleep/rest combination.

Over the past 3–4 days, I’ve intentionally gotten in bed an hour or so earlier than usual or stayed in bed in a sort of semi-asleep semi-resting semi-awake phase for an extra 3o minutes to an hour. My overall soreness disappeared immediately after I decided to lay around dozing on and off for an extra hour this Sunday. I also feel more rested than I’ve felt in a long time, even with only 6 or 6 1/2 hours of actual sleeping per night.

There’s a lot of research lately demonstrating that sleep is important not only for your physical recovery but also for brain recovery, that sleep is what triggers the body to clear out the waste products in your brain. The point of these studies is to show that when your body is in a state of actual sleep — as opposed to just deep rest — important functions take place like clearing out the brain’s waste products and solidifying memories and so forth.

But while I get the point of the studies, and I think 8 hours of actual sleeping time would be ideal, I think that sleep + deep rest are close enough to get the job done.

I’d be curious to know if any sleep experts out there have any thoughts or experiments to confirm (or refute) my experience with adding additional “rest” to the front and back end of my actual sleep and seeing essentially the same benefits as I would get with a full 8 hours of sleep?