Question about 7-8 hour sleep recommendation

[BigjaE90]

I know 7-8 hours is the recommended amount of sleep per night. Does that include awake time?

If I sleep 7-8 hours, I feel good. If I get 7-8 hours of sleep minus awake time (about 8-9 hours in bed) then I feel tired all day.

I feel best with about 6-6.5 hours of sleep and .5-1 hours awake for a total of 7-7.5 hours in bed.

[WavyDavey]

Hi @BigjaE90,

That's a good question. Once it detects sleep, Fitbit does count awake time as part of the sleep period. This makes sense to me, because there are many small awake periods during the night that are part of natural sleep.

You've done exactly the right thing--compare your experience against the recommended numbers, and arrived at the amount of sleep you know you're body is wanting.

Personally, I subtract all the awake time and call that "net sleep" )light sleep + REM + deep sleep). It appears my body enjoys about 6.5-7.5 hours of this net sleep. So my total sleep target as Fitbit tracks it is more like 8-9 total hours sleep.

[BigjaE90]

Thanks for the insight, that helps and makes sense.

My app subtracts awake time. I went to bed at 9:56pm, woke up at 3:40am and had 35 min awake time. The Fitbit app recorded my sleep as 5hr, 9 min.

Is that a setting I can change?

I’ve changed my daily sleep goal to 6hr 15 min. Figure about 15% awake time so that will put me around 7 hrs total time in bed.

[WavyDavey]

Hi you're correct it does subtract awake from total sleep time. There's not a setting for it. I just do it as a manual adjustment in the goal, to try and counterbalance however much awake time I usually get.

[BigjaE90]

Understood. Thanks!

[LyssSSUsername]

So sleep experts would confirm that “awake time” for fitbit counts towards the 7-8 hour goal? All these months since i had my Fitbit  my average hours asleep has been 6 hours and 20 minutes (not counting the awake time)? I wasn’t, no matter how hard I tried, able to average more than 6.5 hours for a week even during my weeklong vacation in December. whenever i finally get more than 7 hours (not counting awake time) in a night, then i am not tired on time the next night and can’t fall asleep end up sleeping only 4-5 hours the next night. I thought something was wrong with me. But maybe I could be meeting guidelines?