He or she might start by checking your weight and height, as well as your blood pressure and maybe your temperature. 1  Blood pressure: This shows how hard your heart is pumping blood throughout your body. A cuff that gets tighter and tighter on your arm is used to measure this.
And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.
To determine how much sleep you need, it's important to assess not only where you fall on the sleep needs spectrum, but also to examine what lifestyle factors are affecting the quality and quantity of your sleep such as work schedules and stress. To get the sleep you need, you must look at the big picture. How Much Sleep Do We Really Need: Revisited . The National Sleep Foundation released the results of a world-class study that took more than two years of research to complete â an update to our most-cited guidelines on how much sleep you really need at each age. You can read the research paper published in Sleep Health .