1.5 Hour Sleep Cycles (Calculation Question)

[jlee55]

Hi all, as I'm sure everyone knows by now, the general rule of thumb to having a great rest is waking up at the end of 1.5 hour increments since that's typically how long REM cycles last (e.g. you feel refreshed after sleeping for 6 hours or 7.5 hours vs. 6.5 or 8 hours). Correct me if this premise is wrong.

So my question is, my fitbit shows that I am awake for around 1 hour every day. So if I go to bed by 11PM and wake up at 6:30AM, it shows that while I was "asleep" for 7.5 hours, I was only sleeping for 6.5 hours. Meaning I didn't take advantage of the sleep cycles.

In this case, now that I know I am always "awake" for 1 hour, I should aim to sleep for 8.5 hours, but in reality I would be sleeping for the perfect 7.5 hours?

Did this make any sense...haha. Thanks all in advance!

[WavyDavey]

I've never heard about the 1.5 increments. Do you have any links to that? My REM doesn't follow along 1.5 hour schedules. It looks more organic than that. I have a hard time imaging the human body working along such a tight schedule...?

The periods of wakefulness don't adhere to any logic I can see. Sometimes they are very brief and broken up. So I don't see any way you could time waking up around those.

I always aim for net sleep, that is, adding time to account for the wakeful periods.

[jlee55]

Sorry for the late reply! I actually just came across a lot of articles like (I did not actively search for these, I just read a lot of similar articles like these over the years):

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/90-minutes-sleep-cycle.html

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-rule-of-90-minutes-in-sleep-is-myth-or-true

So that's why I'm curious as to how much I'm actually sleeping given Fitbit's awake time.

[WavyDavey]

Not sure about that article, as the person says they are better off with 3 hours sleep and a nap than a full 8 hours. That wouldn't work for me!

The American Sleep Association says "A complete sleep cycle takes 90 to 110 minutes on average.  This would mean the cycle isn't totally fixed, so using a fixed time for cycles wouldn't work very well. The smartphone apps I've seen that do this measure where a person is in the cycle and wake based on that.

It's a very good question how awake time affects overall sleep and the cycles. Since the awake times on my fitbit sleep chart are usually very small, I wouldn't think they'd throw off the cycles too much.