How Much Sleep Do You Get Each Night

How much sleep do you get each night?
Around 9 hours
Around 8 hours
Around 7 hours
Around 6 hours
Around 5 hours
Less than 5 hours


Current Results

Last night, I got only four hours of sleep. I'm a bit of a night owl, but catch up on sleep by sleeping a bit later if I'm up late, or partaking in a delicious power nap when I can't sleep in. But four hours...there's not much you can do to stretch four hours into eight. Or even six.
Predictably, I was impatient, fuzzy-headed (yes, that's a technical term), and generally stressed. (In fact, it was amazing that I was only in stress mode for an hour or two--the rest of the day it was more impatience and fuzzy-headedness.) But there is a marked difference between who I am when I've gotten 8 hours, and who I am when I've slept half that amount. And I have numerous stress management techniques up my sleeve!

I hadn't always connected the dots. On days when I didn't get the quality or quantity of sleep a healthy human body requires, I would wonder if life was always this stressful and I just hadn't noticed. I would wonder why people were so difficult to be around. It wasn't until I had kids of my own, who clearly show the difference between 'well-rested' and 'sleep-deprived' with kid behaviors that are hard to ignore.

Learning to take care of their sleep needs, I was careful to take care of my own as well.

For me, as with my kids, the challenge of getting enough sleep lies with our natural unwillingness to let all the fun stop long enough for us to go to sleep. But for other people, the sleep challenge may be a racing mind, remnants of caffeine in the system, or a variety of other causes, each with a different set of most-effective responses. But because many sleep saboteurs have a stress-related component, it's worth sharing them with you here.