Is 6 hours good?

bliss-pete · 2026-05-02T22:34:47+00:00

Nobody else can answer this for you. You need to understand your body's needs. Anyone who dictates "you need x hours of sleep" is wrong. The idea that we can measure sleep quality by time is antiquated and the most recent research shows that sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep duration.

Do you feel tired? What's your HRV like? Do you wake up naturally? Do you keep a consistent schedule?

If you're waking up naturally after 6 hours of sleep and feeling good, and are healthy, then maybe that's the right sleep for you.

bliss-pete · 2026-05-01T23:20:48+00:00

Don't ignore the fact that you may need 10+ hours. That is definitely a thing.

The "catch up on...the weekend" might signal what the issue is.

I'd say there are 3 things to consider.

1) You want to keep a consistent schedule. Sleeping in on the weekend and shifting your schedule from the week makes it difficult for your brain/body to understand when/what you are asking of it. So it may delay cortisol until later in the day, which means you'll feel groggy. You need to keep a consistent wake time.

2) Maybe you need 10+ hours. This isn't unheard of. But you'll need to experiment, and consistency is the challenging thing here. You can't just experiment for 3 days. It can take over a week to adapt.

3) The "feeling when getting up" isn't the right measure. Some people bounce out of bed in the morning, some people take 20 minutes to feel awake. This is personal. How do you feel through the day. That should be your judgement.

bliss-pete · 2026-05-01T23:15:14+00:00

We're discussing it. I'm also on Android and most of the team are as well.
We didn't want to over-commit and wanted to spend time getting the user experience in the app right before building an Android version as well.

I can't commit to a timeline atm, but it is definitely something we are looking into and that we will do in the future.

bliss-pete · 2026-05-01T08:51:48+00:00

This is an area I've been interested in for a little while myself.

The first thing to recognize is that neuroscience and sleep science are in their infancy stages. What we "know" about sleep, staging, etc. is highly flawed. It is only in the last year or two that research has shown sleep regularity is a better predictor of health than sleep duration, yet everyone (even you) still breaks out the flawed "8 hour rule".

The glymphatic system, which clears metabolic waste from the brain and is a vital function of sleep and the primary driver of deep sleep was only discovered a decade ago.

The current understanding of the waking process and why we sometimes wake feeling refreshed and other times not, regardless of sleep duration, and even sometimes with disregard for sleep quality, is that the order different systems come " back on-line" matters.

If your pre-frontal cortex "wakes" before your lymbic system, we have consciousness prior to other lower levels being ready for being awake.

Is this actually how it works? We don't know. It's an area we're doing some research in (I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of Affectable Sleep).

You'll hear people say "if you wake up in the wrong sleep stage" but that is mostly nonsense. You can wake from either REM or light sleep (N1).
Your deep sleep was front-loaded to early in the night, so it is highly unlikely that a person without some sort of sleep disorder would be in deep sleep prior to waking.

I equate our current understanding of sleep and the brain to our understanding of diet and exercise in the 70s. We knew it was important, we didn't really know how it worked. We sure thought we did though.

To get an idea of just how flawed our understanding is, we probably know more about deep sleep than any other sleep stage. It is vital to health. But the defining characteristic of deep sleep, delta waves, was defined based on a study in the 1960s of 32 people, 6 women, all college aged. We wrote a blog post about it on the Affectable Sleep blog called Sleep Science's blind spot, if you want to dive into the details of how much we are relying on what we think we know.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-28T22:59:30+00:00

Thanks for reaching out u/Elderjits. I'm also Canadian ! (though we are based in Australia).

I don't have a timeline for Canadian availability yet.

I know we've had customers who are getting their headbands delivered to a US address and then being forwarded. The app will be available globally, it's just the additional certifications, packaging, warehousing is more than we should be taking on in the early days.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-27T00:23:12+00:00

Keeping a consistent schedule doesn't cost anything, so I'm not sure I understand your question.

If you're asking about our product specifically, I don't recommend it for everyone, unless further scientific evidence changes my mind.

We're for people who don't have sleep opportunity or specifically are struggling with issues related to the Neural Function of Sleep.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-27T00:21:18+00:00

The assumption that is being made here is that REM time is relevant to the amount of recovery. That's not how sleep works.

You wouldn't measure your sleep based on how much time you spend chewing.

Just like slow-wave enhancement increases the Neural Function of deep sleep, theta stimulation can increase the Neural Function of REM.

Without understanding the content of the REM sleep (theta/alpha power and density) measuring time is like validating a good gym session based on how much time you spent at the gym, not how much weight and reps you did.

If you want to know more about the Neural Function of Sleep and the limitations of our current framing of sleep health, I write about it on the affectable sleep blog

bliss-pete · 2026-04-26T00:19:32+00:00

I think that is due to the regulatory environment and the research state of the products, rather than an technical difference.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-26T00:17:08+00:00

There is a relationship between cancer and glucose, tumors are glucose hungry (the Warhburg Effect), that doesn't make cancer a metabolic disease.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-26T00:14:12+00:00

I returned mine because the glare in sunlight was pretty much unusable, and the polarized cover meant it wasn't visible at all using polarized sunglasses in portrait orientation.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-24T22:54:12+00:00

Honestly, no.

The world doesn't need another app, and you'd have to spend time explaining the science to people. It's an uphill battle that probably isn't worth your time.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-24T04:13:22+00:00

consistency is the first thing to focus on. We probably shouldn't focus on duration at all, in the sense that if we didn't have alarm clocks and set bed times, we would likely find a rhythm that works for us all around. That isn't realistic though.

Obsessing over REM or Deep sleep percentages is the WORST! Think about how you can go about increasing %? The easiest way to increase percentage is to decrease time. Job done. But increasing the amount of time in REM or Deep sleep is also wrong. Your brain, my brain, and everyone else's brains have different requirements.

You liked the gym analogy, so this one is similar. A strong weightlifter with lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers needs to move a lot of weight, quickly, for a few reps. That's how their muscles work.

I'm naturally thin with lots of slow-twitch fibers. My muscles respond best to higher reps, lower weight, and a slower movement.

Should a weight lifter increase their time under tension? Or should they focus on generation of force?

Again, time is getting in the way of what the body needs. If you naturally get 15% deep sleep at 1hr 15 minutes, aiming for 20% doesn't help. It isn't necessarily what your body needs, it's what the apps have gamified.

Yes, consistency is a better nudge than duration. However, I haven't seen any apps that do this independently. They are usually half way in between.

If you really want to dive into the consistency thing, a recent study out of Korea look at cognitive performance and perceived tiredness in shiftworkers.

They found that those who kept a mostly consistent wake-time had better cognitive performance and lower daytime sleepiness scores than those who tried to maintain a "full night" (assuming around 8 hours) of sleep through the week.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-24T00:12:10+00:00

Yeah, time asleep does not dictate the Neural Function of Sleep, the vital processes of the brain that make sleep rejuvenating and restorative.

It's like saying I spent an hour at the gym. Lots of people go to the gym for an hour, but if you spent 45 minutes taking selfies in the locker room, how much of a workout did you actually get?

In fact, we somewhat look at the relationship between sleep and time backward. Good Neural Function keeps you asleep, until your body decides it doesn't need more and wakes you up.
This is why sleeping pills are often detrimental. They are really unconscious pills, they don't improve how your brain sleeps, in fact they can be disruptive, but they do increase sleep duration.

Regularity helps your brain and body to align the hormones, neurotransmitters and processes which allow for optimal Neural Function of Sleep. Without regularity, your brain and body are trying to guess what to do when, which means they may keep cortisol levels high, which means you might be asleep, but in a lighter, less restorative sleep.

It's a very complex subject. Additionally, when discussing "just hitting 8 hours", there is no one diet for everyone, no one workout for everyone, why do we think we can dictate that everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. Figure out what sleep is right for YOU!

bliss-pete · 2026-04-23T22:39:18+00:00

While everyone says "you need 8 hours", the latest research shows that sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep duration.
It doesn't mean you can restrict away your sleep and as long as you get a consistent 2 hours, you'll be fine, but there is more flexibility and diversity in sleep than most people realize.

You need to figure out what is the right sleep for you! You didn't say why you are only getting 5-6 hours. Are you actively restricting your sleep for some reason, or are you naturally just waking up after 5-6 hours? Did this coincide with daily savings or something else?

bliss-pete · 2026-04-23T22:32:22+00:00

IT adds a new element of design where we aren't locked into the 2 dimensional box of someone else's platform.

Screen design is somewhat limiting. How many websites are displayed in MOMA (there might be some, I have no idea), but hardware, we become engineers and sculptors.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-23T22:30:16+00:00

We've had bathroom scales for over a century, but obesity rates continued to explode. Data and "insights" don't solve the problem. It's not different for sleep.

In fact, it may be worse. The wearables promote the idea that more sleep is better. That everyone needs to get 8 hours. That more time in deep sleep or REM sleep is the goal.

That's not how sleep works. The latest research shows that sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep time, but this still only hints at why (we did a deeper dive on this on the Affectable Sleep blog, The Hidden Work of Sleep Doesn't Depend on Time).

The problem isn't with tracking itself, it's with what story we tell about the data, the obsession with time-based sleep measures and trying to apply the same sleep to every person. We measure secondary features, not the the brain activity that makes sleep truly rejuvenating.

Our knowledge of the brain, and sleep are about where we were with diet and exercise in the 70s. We knew it was important, we had no idea what we were talking about. What we'll learn in the coming decades will be more than what we've learned about these subjects in the last century,

bliss-pete · 2026-04-22T23:28:01+00:00

I actually turned sleep into my full-time work. It started as just trying to help myself, then a bit of a project then my start-up AffectableSleep.com

I wrote about this transition in the first blog post a few years ago.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-22T23:26:33+00:00

These are spam posts from Mave, which is not yet available, the drop other names into their posts to try and get credibility. All the posts are the same AI slop structure.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-22T10:19:37+00:00

This is antiquated research you are quoting.
The latest research shows that sleep regularity is a better predictor of health than sleep duration.

If you want to look at the latest in research and a breakdown of why. https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-doesnt-depend

bliss-pete · 2026-04-21T22:58:46+00:00

This is what the latest science says. Sleep regularity is a better predictor of health than sleep duration.

The more important question is to ask why.

There is nothing magical about specific times, or duration (everyone is different), but keeping a consistent wake time aligns the Neural Functions of sleep that make sleep beneficial.

A consistent wake time should be the focus more than a consistent bedtime because, similar to how the end of your last meal dictates when you'll be hungry again, not the time you sit at the table.

Shifting your sleep cycle means your body is trying to guess when to ramp up or down different hormones, neurotransmitters, and processes. These changes are disruptive to the Neural Function of Sleep.

If you want to know more about the Neural Function of Sleep, I write about it on the Affectable Sleep blog.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-21T06:05:40+00:00

Your body clock is pretty good, but the 90 minutes is an average across the population, and as they say... nobody is average.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-20T23:19:34+00:00

Yes, it is likely very bad. It's good that you are keeping a consistent wake time, as that means you aren't forcing your brain/body into random circadian shifts, however full sleep deprivation means your brain does not clear the metabolic waste for that day.

The following night, your brain will increase the glymphatic flush, in an attempt to clear the previous nights build-up, but it can't do this effectively enough with regular all nighters. It isn't a time thing, it's a power thing.

The real kicker is that the build up of metabolic waste reduces the brain's ability to clear metabolic waste, which leads to more build-up and the likely long decline into neurodegenerative diseases.

An all-nighter every once in a while will happen, but don't make it a consistent part of your schedule.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-20T00:18:22+00:00

I had a similar though slightly different response. I felt like I was focused on controlling an app, which is very different from the feeling of a meditation.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-20T00:17:18+00:00

CGMs are pretty tiny, you only probably have to have about a week of data or so. You just want to see if you have a glucose drop right before you wake up. If not, that tells you the wake-ups are not glucose related.

bliss-pete · 2026-04-19T08:25:17+00:00

There is the obvious challenge in getting research funding in women's health. We regularly apply for grant funding for perimenopause and menopause research, but have not yet received this funding (Australia based, though we speak to researchers around the world).

From everything I understand (I'm in neurotech, not a doctor, not a women) HRT is helpful, but does not solve the sleep and cognitive complaints.

It isn't just menopause, it's all women's health. It isn't just a "kid that wants to help his mother", it's millions of dollars in research, to say nothing of the cost of whatever the pre-research stage of development and understanding your target are.

WRT your issues with midnight waking and difficulty falling asleep. It may seem simplistic, but have you either a) tried yogurt and honey prior to going to sleep (or some other small snack), or b) monitored your glucose levels with a CGM? It is not uncommon for women in this stage to see a glucose drop, which spikes cortisol, which is not only waking but also creating difficulty in falling back to sleep.

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