Is X hours of sleep enough?

No. If you have to ask such a question, the answer is no.

6 hours is not enough, if you have to ask.

(192,000 people a year, google “is 6 hours of sleep enough”, just in the US)

7 hours is not enough if you have to ask the question.

(144,000 people a year, google “is 7 hours of sleep enough”, just in the US)

At 5 hours or less, you become as likely to cause a car accident as a drunk driver.

(82,800 people a year, google “is 5 hours of sleep enough”, just in the US. I bet many of them drive.)

The web is full of advice on how to sleep, when to sleep, where to sleep, and of course, with whom to sleep 🙂

But most people ignore the most important rule – just sleep enough!

Which means sleep until you wake up without any alarms!¹ This may be 7, 8, or 9 hours, depending on your genes and the quality of the sleep itself.² Here is a 15-hour deep dive from a real expert.

But what do you want to do, listen to 15 hours of science to just learn to do what nature intended? Which is never wake up using a fucking alarm!

1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day. Probably a lot more don’t get enough rest on many days. This is so unacceptable! What can you do?

It’s important to remember that this is a fight we’re all in together. No one ever benefits from consistently not getting enough sleep and no one ever benefits from preventing anyone else to consistently get enough either.

If you’re a kid or teenager in school and have to wake up every morning at 6:30³ to be educated by the worst education system, protest using whatever limited means you have available. You’re being abused by a system that doesn’t care for your health. Fight back!

If you study at a university where you have to wake up early, skip those lectures if your sleep is on the line. If you’re underslept, you’ll not learn anything anyway.⁴ Or potentially quit altogether.

If you regularly get 6-7 hours of sleep or less because your job or boss demands too much, just quit. No respectable job or decent boss should ask this of you. You’ll be doing better work if you work fewer hours well rested.⁵ Only idiotic managers would not recognize this. Also, consider becoming an entrepreneur for better long-term freedom in your life, one that should definitely include sleep with no alarms.

And if by any chance you’re one of those grinders who think that sleeping less will somehow give them an advantage in life, I have news for you. Your approach is dumb as fuck. Here is why.

Suppose you sleep 8 hours a day like a normal person, then you can work 10-12 hours in the rest of the day if you’re really motivated.

What happens if you sleep, say, 6 hours? You can now work 12-14 hours.

Now let’s compare the 2 scenarios. Do you prefer to:

• Work 10-12 hours feeling rested, energetic, happy, creative, and with your brain working at normal speed?
• Work 12-14 hours feeling drowsy, low on energy, easily irritated, with your autopilot brain in self-preserving mode, avoiding all deep work (the one that brings real progress), working at 70% the speed and with 30% of your creative potential?

I am the biggest fan of quantity-over-quality out there as quantity is often underrated and quality is often subjective. But in this case you’re not maximizing quantity, you’re maximizing stupidity.

Sleeping 5, 6, 7 hours or any amount not enough for you is… not good enough.

A few times a year, in the name of a great challenge or even greater fun… or when you have a newborn baby, you can afford to sleep less.

Otherwise…

Just fucking sleep.

If something in your life consistently needs an alarm and it’s not your family or saving people’s lives, kick this thing out of your life and the alarm with it!

Share the fuck out of this post! The world needs to wake up.