How Much Sleep is Too Much Sleep?

So how much is too much sleep? Well, it depends. Your sleep needs will vary over your lifetime, your sleep chronotype, age, activity level, general health, and lifestyle. The AASM AMERICAN ACADEMY of SLEEP MEDICINE recommends the following sleep amounts based on age that you can use as a general baseline:

• Newborns: 16-18 hours of sleep per night
• Pre-schoolers: 11-12 hours of sleep per night
• School-aged and teens: Around 10 hours of sleep per night
• Adults and seniors: 7-9 hours of sleep per night

If you’ve always been someone who needs a little extra sleep, then that doesn’t necessarily point to an underlying problem. Often temporary causes of oversleeping will present, too, for example, if you’re sick, you’re more likely to require some extra sleep as your body tries to rest and build up the energy stores necessary to fight off an infection. Or, if you’ve run a marathon or experienced a high amount of acute stress, your body might naturally need more rest as a result to rebuild your nervous system and body. 

How to figure out your naturally required hours of sleep: 

Instead of stressing about getting eight hours of sleep, let your body drive your sleep number. Let your body naturally fall asleep and wake up and see where the number lands. At the end of 10 to 14 days of alarm-free sleep, you will know your natural sleep needs. 

Another way to track and discover your sleep number is by using a sleep diary. Or for a more automated approach, you could try a fitness app or a sleep tracker. 

Be aware of your current sleep debt, which can influence how much sleep you need at first as you catch up from sleep deprivation. 

Tips for better sleep: 

Try to align with the sunlight available: “As the light brightens, your sleep drive is repressed, and your wake drives are elevated.”

Turning off devices in the evening to avoid the stimulating effects of the blue spectrum light, can help significantly. 

You could also switch your light bulbs to emit warmer tones thereby supporting your natural sleep-wake cycle. 

Choose your bedtime based on your natural sleep-wake cycle. Knowing how many hours your body likes to sleep —  and around what time you start getting tired and want to relax, align your habits to honour this information about yourself. 

An easy tip: establish what time you need to wake up and work backwards from there to determine your bedtime. 

An ideal bedtime range for adults is between 8 p.m. and midnight, though it is important to also acknowledge your social and work responsibilities and inherent preferences, such as being a night owl versus a morning person. Discover more about this in our “Chronotype” blog post or podcast. 

Useful tip: 

Here is an example for you to help you set your sleep routine: 
Let’s say that you need to wake up by 6 a.m. and that you need 8 hours of sleep. Your bedtime, that is, the time you need to fall asleep by, would be 10 p.m. However, it’s unlikely that you’ll fall asleep right away, so you factor in the 20 to 30 minutes it takes to settle in bed, which means: If you need 8 hours of sleep and need to be up by 6 a.m., you want to be in bed by 9:30 p.m.