Sleep
The eight-hour myth, revisited
Total hours is the least useful number on your sleep report. What architecture, timing and consistency tell us that duration cannot.
Dr. Sofia Lindqvist
6 min read
Duration is the number everyone reports and the least useful one we receive. Eight hours of fragmented, badly timed sleep leaves a nervous system in worse repair than six hours taken at a consistent hour.
What we read instead
Architecture tells us how the night was spent: how much deep sleep arrived in the first half, whether REM was pushed late, how often the night broke. Timing tells us whether the body is sleeping against its own clock.
Consistency does more work than either. A sleep window that moves by two hours across a week produces measurable disruption even when total hours look ideal on paper.
We ask guests to hold a fixed wake time for three weeks before we change anything else. It is the cheapest intervention in the protocol and frequently the one that moves the most numbers.
Dr. Sofia Lindqvist
Physician, Neurology and Sleep
Sleep medicine and neurology. Based at Gstaad.
