As a random anecdote, I followed something like the reasoning in the post for 3 years between 2013 and 2016, and slept 7.5 hours a day, followed by a half-hour nap in the midday. Without any alarms and with blackout curtains I sleep around 9 hours a day.
I mostly didn’t feel very sleep deprived from sleeping the 7.5 + 0.5 hours, but after I switched towards a 9-hour sleep schedule, I noticed a very large change in my emotional variability, and in-particular noticed that I was feeling substantially less anxious, and substantially less depressed, and also substantially less hypomanic at different times. I still notice that I feel much higher emotional variability if I don’t sleep full 9 hours.
I do think the change to my sleep schedule also came with a lot of other changes in my life, so this is far from even a single clear anecdote, but it did update me that at least for myself, I am quite hesitant to sleep less than 9 hours.
>I do think the change to my sleep schedule also came with a lot of other changes in my life, so this is far from even a single clear anecdote, but it did update me that at least for myself, I am quite hesitant to sleep less than 9 hours.
Do you mean that the change in sleep pattern came with the change in something like the job you had or the country where you lived?
As a random anecdote, I followed something like the reasoning in the post for 3 years between 2013 and 2016, and slept 7.5 hours a day, followed by a half-hour nap in the midday. Without any alarms and with blackout curtains I sleep around 9 hours a day.
I mostly didn’t feel very sleep deprived from sleeping the 7.5 + 0.5 hours, but after I switched towards a 9-hour sleep schedule, I noticed a very large change in my emotional variability, and in-particular noticed that I was feeling substantially less anxious, and substantially less depressed, and also substantially less hypomanic at different times. I still notice that I feel much higher emotional variability if I don’t sleep full 9 hours.
I do think the change to my sleep schedule also came with a lot of other changes in my life, so this is far from even a single clear anecdote, but it did update me that at least for myself, I am quite hesitant to sleep less than 9 hours.
>I do think the change to my sleep schedule also came with a lot of other changes in my life, so this is far from even a single clear anecdote, but it did update me that at least for myself, I am quite hesitant to sleep less than 9 hours.
Do you mean that the change in sleep pattern came with the change in something like the job you had or the country where you lived?
Yeah, a bunch of job and context changes, and it happened something like a year after I had moved to a new country.