To determine whether or not you are a normal sleeper, you don’t need to (and can’t, except in a lab) measure your actual sleep. Rather, you want to know how you actually feel and function in your daily life. To simplify this process, you only need to focus on one concept: Energy!
Normal Sleep Uncensored
In each of the three scenarios below, notice how your perceptions of high or low energy reveal how good or bad your sleep is:
- How refreshed or unrefreshed do you feel from your sleep upon awakening in the morning?
- Is your morning routine filled with get up and go?
- How much sleepiness, tiredness, and fatigue do you notice in the afternoon or evening?
Normal Sleepers are Quite Fortunate
Normal sleepers’ responses to these three questions prove enlightening because they:
- find sleep very refreshing
- feel great upon awakening in the morning
- might spring out of bed, singing “Oh, what a beautiful morning!” and rarely start the day with caffeine
- have little or no daytime sleepiness, tiredness, or fatigue, and find themselves mentally sharp much of the time
- rarely use caffeine in the afternoon or evening
- do not make lifestyle choices to cover up or distract themselves from sleepiness, tiredness, or fatigue
- have relatively high and constant energy most of the time to meet the needs and demands of their lifestyles, including a rich capacity to be as physically active as they desire
- have a solid capacity to manage stressors at day’s end that might otherwise interfere with their ability to sleep soundly, all through the night.
Normal sleepers usually do not pay attention to how many hours of sleep they obtain each night. Because they are blessed with consistently outstanding sleep quality, the number of sleep hours needed each night is remarkably consistent. Yet, if they miss an occasional hour of sleep, it does not cause a problem.
So, are you a normal sleeper?
See the next article, “This is Not Normal .”