You May Not Need 8 Hours of Sleep

Opinion | Stop Stressing About Sleep - The New York Times

Opinion|You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep

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You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep

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By Ryan McCormick Dr. McCormick is a primary care physician.

July 5, 2026

Sleep is an incredible physical process. There is an early night surge of growth hormone to restore muscle and a slow drop in blood pressure that gives hearts and blood vessels a break. The recently discovered glymphatic system in the brain works like a washing machine while we sleep, flushing out potentially harmful metabolic debris. Perhaps that is why good sleep, or the lack thereof, is one of the most evergreen concerns I hear about as a primary care doctor. My patients track sleep hours and sleep scores, upgrade mattresses or turn to white noise machines and a shelf full of supplements. The stress is real: Orthosomnia is an emerging clinical concept in which anxiety about sleep metrics can degrade sleep quality. We could all benefit from chilling out about sleep. Many of us think we should be sleeping at least eight hours a night, but the evidence for that is shakier than we might assume. A consistent finding in sleep epidemiology studies is that there is not a magic number below which health suddenly falls off a cliff. Rather, studies that show an association between sleep duration and mortality often find that the lowest risk clusters around seven hours. Risk rises both with not enough sleep and with too much sleep. In fact, a meta-analysis of sleep studies published in the journal Scientific Reports found that the adults with the highest mortality rates were those who slept nine to 11 hours a night. Notably, while risk rose with short sleep, the study did not find much difference in all-cause mortality between six and seven hours a night. While the data is inconsistent and there are some exceptions, several other studies have reached similar conclusions.

Does that mean that getting nine hours of sleep is dangerous? No. The reason that sleeping for a long time is linked to higher mortality is that, on average, people who are sick sleep more. So do many people who are struggling with depression and its mixed influences upon sleep. Once we account for reverse causation, the risk of too much sleep almost disappears.

But that cuts the other way as well: The data show that getting less sleep is strongly correlated with living in poverty, working a job that requires night shifts, psychiatric conditions and chronic pain and illness. At least one study found that when researchers adjust aggressively for such variables, associations weakened substantially.

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You May Not Need 8 Hours of Sleep

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