For years we’ve been given a number.
Eight hours.
Get your eight hours of sleep.
And sleep absolutely matters. I don’t question that for a second.
What I’ve started questioning is the idea that everybody needs exactly the same amount.
I don’t.
I’ve paid attention to this for years, and somewhere around six and a half to seven hours seems to work pretty darn well for me.
More isn’t automatically better.
Less isn’t automatically a disaster.
What matters is whether I wake up feeling restored.
Sleep is when an enormous amount of maintenance happens. Your brain and body aren’t sitting around doing nothing while you’re unconscious. They’re busy recovering from whatever you did to them yesterday.
That’s one reason I’ve stopped treating sleep like wasted time.
But I’ve also stopped treating it like another wellness score I need to perfect.
I don’t need a gold star because I slept eight hours.
I need to wake up feeling like Dave.
That’s a considerably better measurement.
So instead of obsessing over somebody …
