Everything I’ve read suggests that that is not a sufficient amount of sleep to achieve peak performance. I would think that, if you’re interested in learning as effectively as possible (especially such difficult material), it would be more effective to get more sleep. Is there some reason you decided that this was enough sleep?
EDIT: Looks like I may be wrong about this not being enough sleep, after doing some more searching.
I play it by feel. I tend to wake up feeling refreshed after 7.5h. If I grow tired during the day, I take a nap. In my experience, napping during the day leads to less need for sleep on the following night. I avoid alarms and I trust my body to know what it’s doing. Perhaps I will do more experimentation in the future.
after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
But, in that same study, the group that showed little or no cognitive decline slept for 8 hours, and I’m finding recommendations that say 7.5 hours is enough elsewhere, so I’m updating towards 7.5 hours of sleep and naps being all that’s needed (as long as you have good sleep hygeine).
Thanks for indirectly prompting me to re-evaluate my sleep habits. I’m doing the same thing as you, basically (learning on my own), so it makes me very happy to discover that I could get more done each day!
people are very bad at evaluating how they are affected by not getting enough sleep
Average people, maybe, but my sleep hours tend to vary and by now I have a pretty good idea how much sleep will leave me a zombie, how much will make me OK but not really in the top form, and how much is enough so that any more is just lazying in bed :-)
It’s easy to self-experiment with sleep.
By the way, keep in mind that there is seasonal variation and weather effects.
If you are sleep-deprived getting more sleep is very effective at raising your performance. If you already get enough sleep, sleeping more won’t help and might even decrease it.
I think you may have misread what I wrote. I pointed out in my original comment that, from what I’ve read, 7.5 hours seems to be not enough sleep. So it would follow that getting more sleep would increase performance. I know that excessive sleep also causes problems, but that’s clearly not relevant here.
7.5h, my sleep schedule is quite regular. I tend to wake up naturally, and use a wake up light in the winter to wake up to a well-lit room.
Everything I’ve read suggests that that is not a sufficient amount of sleep to achieve peak performance. I would think that, if you’re interested in learning as effectively as possible (especially such difficult material), it would be more effective to get more sleep. Is there some reason you decided that this was enough sleep?
EDIT: Looks like I may be wrong about this not being enough sleep, after doing some more searching.
I play it by feel. I tend to wake up feeling refreshed after 7.5h. If I grow tired during the day, I take a nap. In my experience, napping during the day leads to less need for sleep on the following night. I avoid alarms and I trust my body to know what it’s doing. Perhaps I will do more experimentation in the future.
You should be cautious of that sort of self-evaluation. There’s a sleep study that showed that people are very bad at evaluating how they are affected by not getting enough sleep.:
But, in that same study, the group that showed little or no cognitive decline slept for 8 hours, and I’m finding recommendations that say 7.5 hours is enough elsewhere, so I’m updating towards 7.5 hours of sleep and naps being all that’s needed (as long as you have good sleep hygeine).
Thanks for indirectly prompting me to re-evaluate my sleep habits. I’m doing the same thing as you, basically (learning on my own), so it makes me very happy to discover that I could get more done each day!
Average people, maybe, but my sleep hours tend to vary and by now I have a pretty good idea how much sleep will leave me a zombie, how much will make me OK but not really in the top form, and how much is enough so that any more is just lazying in bed :-)
It’s easy to self-experiment with sleep.
By the way, keep in mind that there is seasonal variation and weather effects.
If you are sleep-deprived getting more sleep is very effective at raising your performance. If you already get enough sleep, sleeping more won’t help and might even decrease it.
I think you may have misread what I wrote. I pointed out in my original comment that, from what I’ve read, 7.5 hours seems to be not enough sleep. So it would follow that getting more sleep would increase performance. I know that excessive sleep also causes problems, but that’s clearly not relevant here.
Sleep requirements are individual and vary widely. The 7.5 hours is just the mean of a fairly wide distribution.
As a data point, I live in a house with someone who requires about two hours of more sleep per night than I do.