Whether you have insomnia or want to emulate a billionaire’s notorious sleeping schedule, here’s what you need to know about the risks. For those of us who worry about our sleep, every morning is a scramble of mental maths as we turn to our bedside clock and calculate whether or not we’ve had “enough”. The current National Sleep Foundation guidelines in the United Kingdom recommend that most adults sleep for between seven and nine hours per night.
This followed a 2022 paper from the University of Cambridge, itself an amalgam of hundreds of studies that followed people’s long-term experience of heart disease, diabetes and mental-health difficulties. “Having a consistent seven hours’ sleep each night, without too much fluctuation in duration, was also important to cognitive performance and good mental health and wellbeing,” say the authors of the paper. Those who slept between seven and nine hours reported a lower incidence of these chronic conditions.
But what if, for any reason, you consistently don’t sleep that much? If you have trouble sleeping, or if you just want to jump onto the latest 5am trend, get up with the lark and to find a couple more precious hours in your day? Does it have real implications – and does it even matter at all?.
