Triage Method

Sleep Need Calculator

Evidence-based sleep recommendations personalised to your age, lifestyle, and habits. Based on AASM and NSF guidelines with PSQI and ESS-derived quality assessment.

Your Details
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Ageyears
Required
Activity Level
Stress Level
If known
Current Health
Weightkg
Heightcm
If known
Typical Bedtime
Typical Wake Time
Caffeine
Alcohol
If known

Quick 4-question check derived from PSQI and ESS validated instruments.

1
How long does it usually take you to fall asleep?
2
How often do you wake up during the night?
3
How rested do you feel in the morning?
4
How often do you feel sleepy during the day?
Your Results

Enter your details and click Calculate Sleep Need

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times: adults need eight hours of sleep. It’s become one of those health mantras that everyone repeats without thinking, right up there with “drink eight glasses of water” and “take ten thousand steps.” And like those other rules of thumb, it’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not particularly useful either, because it treats every human body as if it operates on the same firmware with identical requirements.

However, a 22-year-old university student doing part-time shifts at a restaurant while training for a marathon doesn’t have the same sleep requirements as a 55-year-old accountant with a desk job and a manageable schedule. A pregnant woman in her second trimester doesn’t need the same recovery time as her partner. Someone managing chronic stress or recovering from illness requires different sleep than someone in robust health with a calm lifestyle. These aren’t minor variations; they’re fundamental differences in physiological demand.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t that we lack information about sleep. We’re actually drowning in sleep advice, sleep tips, sleep hacks, and sleep optimisation strategies. What we lack is personalised information that accounts for your specific circumstances, your actual life, and your real physiology. That’s why I built this sleep need calculator. It is built on research rather than generic health advice, and allows you to takes your individual factors into account, and from that, it gives you a science-based target that’s actually relevant to your life.

 

What Makes Sleep Needs Individual

The foundation of personalised sleep recommendations starts with age. Your sleep architecture (the internal structure of how you cycle through sleep stages) changes across your lifespan in ways that affect both quality and duration needs. Adolescents and young adults genuinely require more sleep than the standard adult recommendation because their brains are still developing, and that development happens primarily during sleep. The pruning of neural connections, the consolidation of learning, and the hormonal changes of adolescence, all create legitimate sleep requirements that exceed what a 40-year-old needs.

Older adults often sleep less, and there’s a common assumption that this is just what happens, and you simply need less sleep as you get older. But that’s not quite right. What changes is sleep architecture: deep sleep decreases, periods of wakefulness during the night increase, and overall sleep becomes more fragmented. This means that while the total sleep need might be slightly lower, the time in bed requirement might actually stay similar because efficiency drops. A 70-year-old might spend eight hours in bed to get seven hours of actual sleep, whereas a 30-year-old might get seven and a half hours from the same time in bed. These are biological realities, not just individual variation.

Activity levels also create differences in sleep need that go well beyond “feeling more tired.” When you train hard, exercise intensely, or engage in significant physical labour, you’re creating actual damage at the cellular level that needs to be repaired. That repair happens during deep sleep, when growth hormone is released, and tissue restoration occurs. Research on athletes consistently shows that training volume correlates with sleep need, largely because their bodies have more recovery work to do. An athlete training twice daily might genuinely require 45 minutes to an hour more sleep than their sedentary counterpart, and that’s supported by studies on performance and recovery. This isn’t even about optimising for marginal gains; it’s about meeting basic recovery demands.

Stress operates similarly. Chronic stress actually creates physiological demands that increase actual sleep requirement. Elevated cortisol disrupts sleep quality, but it also means your body has more recovery work to do. High stress doesn’t just make sleep harder; it makes adequate sleep more necessary. The same principle applies to illness, pregnancy, shift work, and other major physiological stressors. 

This is precisely why generic sleep recommendations often fail you. When guidelines say “7-9 hours for adults,” they’re giving you a range so broad it’s almost meaningless for individual application. That’s a two-hour spread, which represents nearly 30% variation from the bottom to the top end. Imagine if someone asked how much food you should eat and the answer was “somewhere between 1,400 and 2,600 calories.” Technically true for the population, completely unhelpful for you specifically. Without accounting for your actual modifying factors like your age, your activity level, and your life circumstances, you’re essentially guessing. 

Our sleep need calculator incorporates these variables and gives you a personalised baseline based on research rather than population averages.

 

How the Sleep Need Calculator Works

The sleep need calculator takes a systematic approach to determining your individual sleep requirement, starting with basic biological factors and building outward to incorporate lifestyle and health variables. Understanding what goes into the calculation helps you interpret your results and, importantly, helps you recognise when your sleep needs might change as your circumstances change.

 

Basic Details: Age and Biological Sex

The calculator begins with age because sleep guidelines are fundamentally age-stratified in the research. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and National Sleep Foundation recommendations aren’t just “adults need 7-9 hours”; they’re more nuanced than that, with specific ranges for young adults (18-25), adults (26-64), and older adults (65+), plus distinct recommendations for adolescents. These age-based guidelines reflect genuine physiological differences in sleep architecture and recovery needs, which means your age isn’t just demographic information; it’s the foundation of your personalised calculation.

Biological sex matters, though perhaps less than you might expect. Research consistently shows that women average about 10-12 minutes more sleep than men, and this isn’t primarily about social factors or who’s waking up with children (though that happens too). There are genuine hormonal and metabolic differences that slightly increase sleep duration in women on average. It’s not a massive difference (we’re talking about roughly one percent of total sleep time), but when you’re trying to move from generic advice to personalised recommendations, these details matter. The calculator accounts for this modest but real sex difference.

 

Lifestyle Factors: Activity, Stress, and Schedule

Your activity level might be the single biggest modifiable factor in determining sleep need beyond age. When you select your activity level, be honest about your actual current training volume, not your aspirational plans or what you did six months ago. The difference between sedentary and moderately active is meaningful but relatively small in terms of sleep need. The real divergence happens at the higher end. Someone training intensely six or seven days a week, or an athlete putting in multiple training sessions daily, has genuinely increased sleep requirements that can add 30-60 minutes to their baseline need. This isn’t linear, either; the jump from “very active” to “athlete” represents a significant increase in recovery demands.

Stress assessment requires a similar honesty. The calculator asks about your stress level because chronic stress is a physiological state that affects sleep both qualitatively (making it harder to fall asleep, more fragmented, less restorative) and quantitatively (increasing the amount you need). When you’re assessing your stress level, think about your chronic baseline over the past few months, not whether you’ve had a particularly stressful week. High stress can add 20-40 minutes to your sleep requirement, and very high chronic stress can push that even higher.

Work schedule also matters more than you might expect, particularly if you’re dealing with variable shifts or night work. Standard schedules allow your circadian rhythm to stabilise and your sleep to be relatively consistent. Variable schedules create mild circadian disruption. You’re asking your body to sleep at different times, which means you never fully entrain to one schedule. Night shift work is an entirely different beast: it creates chronic circadian misalignment because you’re fighting against millions of years of evolution that designed humans to sleep when it’s dark. Shift work increases your sleep need because your sleep quality is inherently compromised by circadian misalignment. The calculator adds time to account for this reduced efficiency.

 

Health Factors: Pregnancy, Recovery, and Body Composition

If you’re female and pregnant, your sleep requirements increase substantially. This is not just because of physical discomfort or frequent urination, though those are real, but because of the massive physiological demands of growing another human. Guidelines during pregnancy typically recommend 8-10 hours, which represents a meaningful increase over non-pregnant baselines. The calculator accounts for this when pregnancy status is indicated.

Health status matters similarly. If you’re recovering from illness or injury, your sleep need increases because healing is metabolically expensive and happens predominantly during sleep. If you’re managing a chronic condition, you may have ongoing increased requirements depending on the condition’s nature and how it affects sleep quality. The calculator doesn’t try to account for every possible health condition, as that would be impossible, but it does provide an adjustment for general health status.

Body composition, measured here through BMI, correlates with sleep-related breathing disorders, particularly sleep apnea. Higher BMI increases the likelihood of obstructed breathing during sleep, which fragments sleep architecture and reduces efficiency. This doesn’t mean everyone with a higher BMI has sleep apnea, but it does mean that, on average, people with a BMI over 30 need slightly more time in bed to get adequate actual sleep because their sleep efficiency tends to be lower. If you’re experiencing symptoms of sleep apnea like loud snoring, gasping during sleep, or excessive daytime sleepiness despite adequate time in bed, that’s worth discussing with your doctor regardless of what this calculator tells you.

If you suspect sleep apnea, you can investigate further with our STOP-BANG Sleep Apnea Screening Tool.

 

Sleep Habits and Quality Assessment

Your current sleep habits give the calculator important context for understanding the gap between where you are and where you should be. When you enter your typical bedtime and wake time, the tool calculates your current sleep duration and compares it to your personalised target. Many people don’t actually know how much they’re sleeping; they have a rough sense, but they’ve never done the maths. Seeing “you’re currently getting 6.5 hours when you need 8.2” is different from vaguely feeling tired.

Caffeine and alcohol consumption affect both sleep quality and duration needs, though in different ways. Caffeine has a half-life of 5-7 hours, which means that afternoon coffee is still in your system at bedtime, potentially delaying sleep onset and reducing deep sleep. The calculator accounts for timing and quantity of caffeine because late or heavy caffeine consumption can effectively add time to your sleep requirement, because the sleep you’re getting is less efficient. Alcohol operates differently: it might help you fall asleep faster initially, but it severely disrupts sleep architecture in the second half of the night, particularly suppressing REM sleep. Heavy drinking or drinking close to bedtime creates a recovery deficit that increases your sleep need.

Chronotype (whether you’re naturally an early bird, night owl, or somewhere in between) doesn’t dramatically change how much sleep you need, but it does inform when you should be getting that sleep. The calculator uses your chronotype to generate a recommended schedule that works with your biology rather than against it. If you’re a night owl forced into an early schedule by work or family obligations, you might be experiencing “social jetlag” (this is a mismatch between your biological clock and social requirements that can create chronic sleep debt even when your total hours seem adequate).

The sleep quality questions are derived from validated research instruments (specifically the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS)), condensed to four key questions that capture the essential elements of sleep quality. How long it takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake during the night, how rested you feel in the morning, and how sleepy you are during the day collectively give a reasonable picture of whether your sleep is restorative or fragmented. This quality score interacts with your duration recommendation: if your quality is poor, even hitting your duration target might not be enough. Quality and quantity aren’t interchangeable; you need both.

 

What Your Results Actually Mean

When you receive your personalised sleep recommendation from the calculator, you’re getting several pieces of information that work together to create a complete picture of your sleep needs and current reality.

 

Your Recommended Sleep Target

The primary number, your recommended sleep target, isn’t generic or arbitrary. It starts with the age-based guideline from sleep research organisations, then applies the modifying factors you’ve entered, each of which is supported by research on how that factor affects sleep need. A 35-year-old with moderate activity, moderate stress, and a standard schedule might land at 7.8 hours. Add high stress and intense training, and that same person might need 8.5 hours. The calculation is transparent: you can see exactly which factors are adding time to your baseline and why.

The recommended range around your target gives you operational flexibility. Sleep need isn’t a precise number down to the minute; your body doesn’t know whether you got 7 hours and 52 minutes or 8 hours and 4 minutes. The range acknowledges natural variation and the reality that sleep duration fluctuates day to day. What matters is whether you’re consistently within that range, not whether you hit the exact midpoint every single night.

This target is about building capacity for your life, not hitting a number for its own sake. The goal of adequate sleep isn’t to optimise your “sleep score” or to win at sleeping; it’s to give your body the recovery time it needs to function well during your waking hours. Sleep is foundational. It’s what makes everything else possible. When you’re adequately slept, you have better emotional regulation, clearer thinking, more physical energy, stronger immune function, and improved metabolic health. When you’re chronically under-slept, everything becomes harder.

 

Time in Bed vs. Actual Sleep

One of the most important distinctions the calculator makes is between recommended sleep and recommended time in bed. These aren’t the same thing because sleep efficiency (the percentage of time in bed that you’re actually asleep) is rarely 100%. Healthy young adults might have 90-95% sleep efficiency, meaning they’re actually asleep for 90-95% of the time they’re in bed. Older adults, people under high stress, or those with certain health conditions might have sleep efficiency closer to 80-85%.

The calculator accounts for this by recommending slightly more time in bed than your actual sleep target. If you need 8 hours of sleep and your sleep efficiency is estimated at 88%, you need about 9 hours in bed to actually get 8 hours of sleep. This is why you can’t just set an alarm for exactly 8 hours after you go to bed and expect to wake up fully rested; you need to account for the time it takes to fall asleep and any brief awakenings during the night.

 

Sleep Architecture Breakdown

The sleep architecture information shows you what your sleep should look like internally. It shows how it divides between light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, and brief awakenings. These percentages are population averages for your age group; individual variation exists, but this gives you a useful framework for understanding what’s happening during the night.

Light sleep (stages N1 and N2) makes up roughly half your total sleep time. This isn’t “wasted” time or lower-quality sleep; it’s part of the normal sleep cycle and serves important functions in transitioning between wake and deeper sleep states. Deep sleep (stage N3) is where the most dramatic physical restoration occurs: tissue repair, immune system strengthening, and growth hormone release. This typically represents 15-25% of total sleep, though it decreases with age. REM sleep, where most dreaming occurs, is critical for memory consolidation, emotional processing, and cognitive function. It increases as the night progresses, which is why cutting your sleep short by an hour often means losing disproportionately more REM sleep.

Understanding this architecture helps you see why sleep quality matters as much as quantity. You could spend 8 hours in bed, but get very little deep sleep or REM sleep if your sleep is highly fragmented. Conversely, 7 hours of consolidated, high-quality sleep might be more restorative than 8 hours of fragmented, disrupted sleep. This is why the calculator includes both duration recommendations and quality assessment.

 

Your Current Sleep Debt

If you’ve entered your typical sleep times, the calculator shows you the nightly gap between what you’re currently getting and what you need. This is your sleep debt per night, and it accumulates. The weekly accumulation number helps you see the scale of the deficit: if you’re short 45 minutes per night, that’s more than 5 hours per week, which is nearly a full night’s sleep you’re missing over the course of seven days.

Sleep debt is real and has measurable cognitive and physiological effects. It’s not just about feeling tired either. Chronic sleep restriction impairs reaction time, decision-making, emotional regulation, immune function, and metabolic health. The effects are cumulative and often insidious because you adapt to feeling somewhat foggy and don’t necessarily recognise how much your function has declined.

Unfortunately, you can’t “bank” sleep in advance, and you can’t fully repay chronic sleep debt with weekend lie-ins. Your body doesn’t have a sleep bank account where you can store extra hours for later use. If you sleep 9 hours on Saturday and Sunday to “make up for” sleeping 6 hours Monday through Friday, you might feel somewhat better, but you’re not actually erasing the metabolic and cognitive consequences of those five short nights. What you can do, though, is gradually reduce sleep debt by consistently sleeping adequate amounts, which brings us to implementation.

 

Recommended Schedule

Based on your sleep target and chronotype, the calculator generates a recommended schedule: when to start winding down, when to aim for lights out, and when to wake up. This is designed to align with your natural tendencies (early bird vs. night owl) while giving you the time in bed you need.

The wind-down time is particularly important and often overlooked. You cannot go from full cognitive and physical arousal (bright lights, screens, stimulating activities) to sleep in a matter of minutes. Your brain needs a transition period where stimulation gradually decreases, and your body begins to prepare for sleep. This is when melatonin starts rising, core body temperature begins to drop, and your nervous system shifts from sympathetic (alert, active) to parasympathetic (rest, digest) dominance. Trying to sleep without this wind-down is like trying to stop a car that’s going 70 miles per hour by slamming directly into park. It’s physiologically jarring and often unsuccessful.

The schedule is a starting point, not a rigid prescription. Your actual optimal sleep and wake times might vary slightly from what the calculator suggests, and some people do better going to bed 30 minutes earlier or later than their chronotype would predict. Use the recommendation as a baseline and pay attention to how you feel. If you’re waking before your alarm feeling genuinely rested, you might need slightly less than calculated. If you’re struggling to wake up and feeling groggy throughout the day despite hitting your target, you might need more, or you might have a quality issue that needs addressing.

 

Practical Implementation: Moving from Data to Action

Having a personalised sleep target is useful, but only if you can actually implement it. The gap between knowing you need more sleep and actually getting more sleep is where most people get stuck, so let’s talk about practical strategies for different scenarios.

 

If You’re Undersleeping

The most common situation is discovering you’re getting significantly less sleep than you need. Perhaps you’re getting 6.5 hours when the calculator recommends 8.2. Your first instinct might be to try adding that full 1 hour and 42 minutes immediately. Don’t do that. Abrupt changes to sleep duration rarely stick because they require massive changes to your evening routine, and your body doesn’t adapt instantly to new sleep times.

Instead, extend your sleep gradually in 15-30 minute increments. Start by going to bed 15 minutes earlier for a week. Once that feels natural and you’re falling asleep at the new time without difficulty, add another 15 minutes. This gradual approach works with your circadian rhythm rather than against it. Your sleep drive and circadian timing adjust slowly; trying to force an immediate large change often means lying in bed unable to sleep, which then creates frustration and anxiety around sleep that makes the problem worse.

In nearly all cases, moving your bedtime earlier works better than trying to wake up later. Your wake time is often constrained by work, family, or other obligations, but your bedtime is more flexible. Even if you’re a night owl who doesn’t feel sleepy at 10 PM, you can train your body to sleep earlier through consistent practice and proper sleep hygiene. It won’t feel natural immediately, but circadian rhythms are malleable.

Consistency matters more than duration, particularly when you’re trying to establish a new pattern. Going to bed at the same time every night (including weekends) is more important than occasionally hitting your target duration. Your circadian rhythm thrives on predictability. If you go to bed at 10:30 PM on weekdays but 1 AM on Friday and Saturday, you’re essentially giving yourself jet lag every single weekend. This social jetlag makes it harder to fall asleep Sunday night, which starts your week in a deficit.

 

If Your Quality Is Poor

Sometimes the issue isn’t duration. Sometimes you’re spending 8 hours in bed, but your quality score is low, and you’re waking up unrefreshed. Duration alone won’t fix this; you need to address what’s fragmenting your sleep.

Start with the sleep environment. Your bedroom should be cool (16-19°C / 60-67°F), dark, and quiet. Temperature is particularly important and often overlooked: your core body temperature needs to drop for sleep onset and maintenance, and a hot bedroom prevents this. If you’re waking up hot in the middle of the night, your room is too warm. Darkness should be nearly complete; not just dim, but properly dark. Even small amounts of light can suppress melatonin production and fragment sleep. Blackout curtains or an eye mask can help with creating the conditions your biology needs for consolidated sleep.

Noise is trickier because you might not even be consciously aware of what’s waking you. Traffic, a snoring partner, household sounds, etc., can fragment your sleep without fully waking you, leaving you with no memory of the disturbances but measurable effects on sleep quality. White noise or earplugs can help by masking variable sounds that would otherwise trigger brief arousals.

Sleep hygiene (the behaviours and habits around sleep) isn’t optional if your quality is poor. This means consistent sleep and wake times, no caffeine after early afternoon, no alcohol within three hours of bed, no screens for 30-60 minutes before sleep, and no intense exercise within two hours of bedtime. These are the foundational behaviours that enable quality sleep. If your sleep quality is below 50% on the calculator and you’re still drinking coffee at 3 PM and scrolling your phone in bed, the solution isn’t complicated. You know what needs to change.

If you’ve addressed environment and behaviour and your quality remains poor, consider whether you need professional evaluation. Symptoms like loud snoring, gasping or choking during sleep, significant daytime sleepiness despite adequate time in bed, or an inability to fall asleep despite being tired might indicate disorders like sleep apnea, insomnia, or restless leg syndrome. These are medical conditions that won’t improve through willpower or optimised sleep hygiene; they require proper diagnosis and treatment.

The STOP-BANG Sleep Apnea Screening Tool can be helpful here.

 

If You’re Already Well-Aligned

Perhaps you’ve used the sleep need calculator and discovered you’re already getting roughly what you need, and your quality score is good. This is excellent, and the goal now is maintenance. Consistency is your primary tool here: maintain the same sleep and wake times even on weekends, continue the behaviours that support quality sleep, and recognise that small variations are fine but chronic inconsistency will undermine what you’ve built.

Your sleep needs aren’t fixed forever. They change with life circumstances. So if you start training harder, if you go through a stressful period, if your health changes, and as you get older, you may need to revisit the sleep need calculator. What worked at 25 with a desk job and weekend yoga won’t necessarily work at 35 when you’re training for a triathlon, and what works at 35 won’t necessarily work at 65.

Pay attention to how you actually feel, not just what the numbers say. If you’re consistently hitting your target duration, your quality is good, but you still feel chronically fatigued, that’s information worth investigating. It might mean your personal need is slightly higher than calculated, or it might point to a health issue that’s creating fatigue independent of sleep. The calculator is a tool, not a diagnosis.

 

Use This as a Baseline, Not a Straitjacket

Life happens. You’ll have occasional late nights for social events, you’ll travel across time zones, and you’ll have periods where sleep gets disrupted by external circumstances you can’t control. The goal isn’t perfect sleep every single night; it’s a sustainable average over time.

If you know you’re going to get less sleep one night, you can’t really “pre-sleep” by sleeping more the night before; that’s not how sleep biology works. But you can minimise the damage by getting back to your normal schedule quickly rather than letting one short night turn into a week of sleep disruption. If you’re short on sleep one night, don’t try to “make up” for it by sleeping drastically more the next night or weekend. Just return to your normal schedule. Your body recovers better from acute sleep loss through consistent adequate sleep than through erratic catch-up attempts.

The calculator gives you information. What you do with that information involves trade-offs and choices. Sometimes you’ll choose to stay up late for something that matters to you, accepting that you’ll be somewhat under-slept the next day. That’s fine; it’s a conscious choice rather than a pattern of neglect. The problems arise when short sleep becomes your chronic default state rather than an occasional exception.

 

When Generic Advice Actually Works (And When It Doesn’t)

It would be easy to conclude that population-level sleep recommendations are useless now that you have access to personalised calculation, but that’s not quite right. The guidelines (7-9 hours for most adults, 8-10 for young adults, 7-8 for older adults) genuinely do capture where most people land. If you’re a healthy adult with a moderate activity level, manageable stress, standard work schedule, and no significant health complications, you’ll very likely fall somewhere in that 7-9 hour range.

The calculator isn’t invalidating generic guidance; it’s just adding precision. For some people, that precision doesn’t matter much, as they’re already in the middle of the range, they feel fine, and knowing their specific target is 7.8 hours instead of “somewhere between 7 and 9” doesn’t meaningfully change their behaviour. For others, particularly those at the extremes or with multiple modifying factors, the precision is extremely useful.

If you’re an athlete training hard, under high stress, and recovering from illness, you might genuinely need 9.5 hours. That’s not within the standard adult range, and if you were trying to get by on the low end of “normal” at 7 hours, you’d be creating a significant chronic deficit. Similarly, if you’re sedentary, low stress, and older, you might genuinely thrive on 7 hours despite having been told for years that you “should” get 8. Understanding your actual requirement lets you stop feeling guilty about not hitting some arbitrary standard.

Ultimately, if you’re chronically tired, struggling with focus, getting sick frequently, or feeling emotionally fragile, and you’re also chronically under-sleeping relative to your actual needs, that’s actionable information. You might not be able to change all your life circumstances, but you can often change your sleep, and that might be the leverage point that makes everything else more manageable.

 

Sleep Need Calculator: Find Your Personalised Sleep Recommendation

Ultimately, you can’t optimise what you can’t measure, and for most of your life, your sleep need has been unmeasured. You’ve been operating on assumptions, population averages, and guesswork. This sleep need calculator gives you a personalised starting point based on research rather than on generic recommendations that may or may not apply to your situation.

Your sleep need isn’t fixed forever. It changes with your age, with your life circumstances, with your health status and activity level. Major life changes like starting intense training, going through a stressful period, becoming pregnant, ageing into a new decade, or developing a health condition all warrant revisiting the calculator because your requirements have likely shifted.

Understanding your actual sleep requirement, specific to your physiology and circumstances, lets you make informed decisions rather than operating on assumptions. You can recognise when you’re genuinely undersleeping versus when you’re just having a tired day. You can prioritise sleep appropriately relative to other demands on your time, knowing what you actually need rather than what someone told you that you should need.

The goal isn’t perfect sleep. The goal is adequate sleep that supports the life you want to live. It supports the physical capacity for your activities, the mental clarity for your work, the emotional stability for your relationships, and the immune function for your health. Sleep is foundational; it’s what makes everything else possible. When you’re adequately slept, life doesn’t necessarily become easy, but it becomes more manageable. You have more capacity, more resilience, more presence.

Use this tool to understand your sleep needs. Implement changes gradually and sustainably. Pay attention to how you feel, not just what the numbers say. Revisit your requirements when your life changes. And recognise that getting adequate sleep isn’t a luxury or a sign of weakness, it’s the foundation of everything else you’re trying to accomplish.

As with everything, there is always more to learn, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with all this stuff. However, if you are interested in staying up to date with all our content, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter and bookmarking our free content page. We do have a lot of content on sleep in our sleep hub.

If you would like more help with your training (or nutrition), we do also have online coaching spaces available.

We also recommend reading our foundational nutrition articles, along with our foundational articles on exercise and stress management, if you really want to learn more about how to optimise your lifestyle. If you want even more free information on sleep, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of exercise.

Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too, notably a sleep course. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

 

References and Further Reading

 

Paruthi S, Brooks LJ, D’Ambrosio C, et al. Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine on the Recommended Amount of Sleep for Healthy Children: Methodology and Discussion. J Clin Sleep Med. 2016;12(11):1549-1561. Published 2016 Nov 15. doi:10.5664/jcsm.6288 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27707447/

Hirshkowitz M, Whiton K, Albert SM, et al. National Sleep Foundation’s sleep time duration recommendations: methodology and results summary. Sleep Health. 2015;1(1):40-43. doi:10.1016/j.sleh.2014.12.010 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29073412/

Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al. Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: A Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep. 2015;38(6):843-844. Published 2015 Jun 1. doi:10.5665/sleep.4716 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26039963/

Hirshkowitz M, Whiton K, Albert SM, et al. National Sleep Foundation’s updated sleep duration recommendations: final report. Sleep Health. 2015;1(4):233-243. doi:10.1016/j.sleh.2015.10.004 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29073398/

Consensus Conference Panel, Watson NF, Badr MS, et al. Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society on the Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: Methodology and Discussion. Sleep. 2015;38(8):1161-1183. Published 2015 Aug 1. doi:10.5665/sleep.4886 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26194576/

Mong JA, Cusmano DM. Sex differences in sleep: impact of biological sex and sex steroids. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016;371(1688):20150110. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26833831/

Polo-Kantola P, Laine A, Kronholm E, et al. Gender differences in actual and preferred nocturnal sleep duration among Finnish employed population. Maturitas. 2016;94:77-83. doi:10.1016/j.maturitas.2016.09.002 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27823749/

Burgard SA, Ailshire JA. Gender and Time for Sleep among U.S. Adults. Am Sociol Rev. 2013;78(1):51-69. doi:10.1177/0003122412472048 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25237206/

Mallampalli MP, Carter CL. Exploring sex and gender differences in sleep health: a Society for Women’s Health Research Report. J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2014;23(7):553-562. doi:10.1089/jwh.2014.4816 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24956068/

Duffy JF, Cain SW, Chang AM, et al. Sex difference in the near-24-hour intrinsic period of the human circadian timing system. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011;108 Suppl 3(Suppl 3):15602-15608. doi:10.1073/pnas.1010666108 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21536890/

Chennaoui M, Vanneau T, Trignol A, et al. How does sleep help recovery from exercise-induced muscle injuries?. J Sci Med Sport. 2021;24(10):982-987. doi:10.1016/j.jsams.2021.05.007 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34074604/

Watson AM. Sleep and Athletic Performance. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2017;16(6):413-418. doi:10.1249/JSR.0000000000000418 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29135639/

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