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Common questions
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How many hours should I sleep?
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Seven or more, if you want the short answer. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society put fifteen experts on this for twelve months, had them review thousands of studies, and settled on adults aged eighteen to sixty sleeping seven or more hours a night, with six or fewer judged inadequate to sustain health. The National Sleep Foundation gives the range as seven to nine.
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Two things about that number are worth knowing, though, and neither gets repeated as often as the number does.
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The panel deliberately set no upper limit, so seven or more is a floor rather than a target, and there is no version of this where you are failing at eight and a half.
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And the panel itself allowed that some people need more and some need less. If you have spent years feeling fine on six and a half, the consensus is not a diagnosis. It is a population level starting point, which is a different kind of thing.
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Which is why this piece is about the hour rather than the hours. The duration question has a defensible answer and almost no room to act on it, since nobody chooses to have less time. The steadiness question has a slightly softer answer and something you can actually do on a Tuesday.
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How can I restore my sleeping habits?
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Slower than you want, and from one end rather than both.
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Pick the hour you get up, choose one you could keep on a Sunday as well as a weekday, and then hold only that for a fortnight while changing nothing else. Not the bedtime, not the phone, not the room temperature. One thing at a time, long enough to see it.
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Expect the first week to feel worse rather than better, because you are pulling your waking time against wherever it had drifted, and the tiredness that produces is the mechanism working rather than a sign it is failing. The second week is usually where the bedtime starts moving on its own.
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Two things worth saying plainly. Anyone on shift work, or up in the night with a baby or someone ill, is not choosing an uneven schedule and none of this is addressed to them. And if you have been sleeping badly most nights for months rather than going through a rough patch, that is persistent insomnia rather than a habits problem. There is a specific treatment for it, usually a course of structured sessions rather than tablets, and a doctor is the route to it.
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