Dr McDougall has an article ( https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2004nl ... somnia.htm ) about beating insomnia with sleep restriction.
I've struggled with sleep my whole life. I find sleep restriction works in balancing out the extremes. Instead of barely sleeping for two days and then sleeping 10 or 11 hours the next because I'm exhausted, I might sleep five or six hours a night for three nights in a row.
But while I feel better on those 5-6 hour days than I do on 3-4 hour days, I can't say I feel fully rested. I'm foggy. My appetite is increased. I have low physical energy. My mood isn't great. After sleeping for 10 hours I generally feel fantastic — full of physical energy, in a good mood, ability to concentrate, and with my appetite moderated....I just can't sleep the night after, which restarts the whole cycle.
So while sleep restriction might improve the horrible swings of insomnia, it doesn't allow you to function like a person who easily sleeps 8 hours a day...at least not in my experience.
But my question is...Is Dr. McDougall correct when he says: "Infants and children need more sleep than 8 hours, and so do pregnant women. When we are sick we need extra rest to recover. But normal healthy adults really need only 5 to 7 hours a night."
You can read the Wikipedia article on sleep debt. It's full of lines like, "In people aged 65 years and younger, a daily sleep duration of 5 hours or less (amounting to a sleep deficit of 2 hours per day) during weekends correlated with a 52% higher mortality rate compared to a control group who slept for 7 hours"
In recent years the news has been full of research about how sleep debt negatively affects all kinds of things. Is Dr. McDougall's statement still accurate?
