Ask HN: How many hours do you sleep? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many hours do you sleep?

6 pointsandreygrehov4 comments

My current schedule is 10pm-5:30/6am, which is approximately 7-8 hours of sleep. By 6:30am I usually do my workouts (@ gym). During the commute time (~45-50 mins) I tend to read. Sometimes I feel a bit tired, so just put the book aside, close my eyes and fall into a semi-sleep mode - 30 mins is enough to fully recover. This tiredness is most likely the result of daily workouts.

I'm trying to reduce the sleep time to 6 hours per night. Has anyone tried to achieve sleep time reduction?

P.S. I'm a smoker.

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I sleep around 10 hours a night.

Over 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My psychiatrist at the time recommended that I setup a rigid sleep schedule, to ensure that:

1) I regularly received a sufficient amount of sleep

2) My sleep schedule was consistent

For people with certain conditions (that probably don't apply to most HN readers), ensuring a sufficient but not excessive amount of sleep is very important. For bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder, inconsistent sleep can really throw you off.

I take medication, but I've noticed over the years that my condition is much better when I get a solid 10 hours of sleep.

It seems a bit silly to hipsters in SF that I'm in bed at 8pm, but it keeps me stable and functional.

Hey! I used to sleep 4/5 hours every 24 hours and then 14/15 hours during weekends back in university time. This was OK for the time being but in longer run I found it quite exhaustive and in the same time I did not like waste of weekend.

When I started working full time I was taking ~7 hours every day (including weekends) but until I gave up drinking coffee I could not do much in the evenings after work. At that time giving up coffee was great thing, I passed some certifications in the evenings and could also catch up with private life. I think also my diet at the time was contributing to this effect (eating a lot of green leafy food, salads, kale etc. and not so much of bread or processed sugars/fats)

Then I joined a startup and in the same time my beloved one gave birth to our beautiful boy - so no continuous sleep (1.5-2 hours straight at max) for more than a year made my head looking a bit grey. In the same time I switched back to drink coffee and had bad diet habits to strike back - so my level of tiredness grown so much I could do nothing productive after work. Then I switched regular coffee to bulletproof coffee and at least coffee crush was gone but generally I find 7 hours in bed is my minimum.

I currently sleep 11pm-5am on weekdays, with a further hour or so of broken "sleep" on a train. This leaves me quite seriously sleep deprived by the end of each week, and I do not recommend it if you can possibly avoid it.

My schedule:

- 10pm to 6pm with 2 wakeups, the second one is usually longer

- so between 7 to 8h

- during the week less but minimum 6,5 hours and on the weekend longer, ~8h

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