It’s no secret that sleep significantly affects our mood and performance the next day. But how many hours of sleep is the sweet spot? Jawbone’s study offers concrete recommendations.
The company analysed the sleep and recorded moods of its hundreds of thousands of UP wearers (over 80 million nights of sleep, and 5.6 million self-reported mood entries) and found that the “right” amount of sleep for the best mood is between eight and 9.5 hours at night. Those who get that amount woke up happier than those who slept fewer or more hours.
Other interesting findings:
- When people got an extra hour of sleep compared to normal, they woke up 5 per cent happier
- Losing two hours of sleep had a bigger effect on mood than gaining two hours of sleep
Everyone’s different, of course, and we might differ in how much sleep we require. However, if you’re like the average person in this study, you might want to aim for a consistent 8-9.5 hours of sweet sleep every night.
Check out Jawbone’s blog post for more details, such as the happiness boost people get at 5pm on weekdays (can you guess why?).
What Makes People Happy? We Have the Data [Jawbone via Sree Sreenivasan]
Comments
6 responses to “The Amount Of Sleep You Should Get At Night To Be Happiest The Next Day”
I always have a chuckle when reading stories about sleep. “You MUST get 8 hours or you’ll die of heart failure”, “Too much sleep makes you fat”, “You’ll be 5% happier after 9.5hrs sleep”. Everyone is different to the point of making these statements a bit silly. I sleep between 6.5 and 7.5hrs most nights. I can’t even remember the last time I slept for 9+ hours but I don’t have an issue with feeling happy, alert or whatever.
You could be right, or you could be like the chain smokers in the 70s who insisted smoking cigarettes made them healthier and had no adverse health effects at all. Are you confident enough in your own medical knowledge to dismiss the results of these studies out of hand? The data is taken over thousands of data points, it has a little more weight than unqualified guessing.
Stop, pause, think. Look at the data for yourself, rather than reading a badly worded write up.
The study was looking at mood, not health. The difference between 7 hours, 8-9.5 hours and 10 hours is practically negligible. Sure, it’s a noticeable difference on that big a data set, but when you ask an individual an abstract question like “how happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10?” then you can get people in identical circumstances giving widely different numbers.
Really, the difference between 6.4 out of 10 – 7 hours; 6.7 out of 10 for 8-9.5 hours; and 6.6 out of 10 for 10 hours is really nothing at all.
Please don’t be overwhelmed by graphs and swallow everything you are told. Stop and think for yourselves.
If you get 7 hours of sleep and are happy with that, good for you. The same for someone who sleeps 10 hours. This is about how people feel, not about long term health effects. That’s a whole different argument and data set. :-S
Maybe you should apply your first sentence to the comment thread you’re replying to. wmoore referenced health issues from other related studies, I replied to him.
This graph doesn’t tell us enough to draw any real conclusions from the data. For example, there is no indication of the distributions of data in the graph: if the variability is very low, then the result is much more consequential than if it is very high.
only time im peeved about losing sleep is if theres a hot mamacita next to me ready to give me morning glory when i wake up or cook me a mean breakfast followed by some r&R