I need nine hours of sleep

There are people who need sleep, and then there are people who NEED. SLEEP.

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson

I want to talk a little about sleep, and in particular, about those of us who really need it. Sure, we all need sleep, and I am delighted that sleep has become trendy in the last few years—that’s good for everyone! Once Jeff Bezos proclaimed that he sleeps eight hours a night, everyone was allowed to love sleep (thanks Jeff!). I recently heard sleep referred to as “the ultimate performance enhancing drug,” indicative of the full and complete sleep re-brand, whereby tech bros transformed sleep into something cool, the way they made SlimFast cool for men by calling it Soylent.

Bro-hating aside: in my experience, there are people who need sleep, and then there are people who need sleep. When the former people don’t sleep, they are tired. When those in the later group don’t sleep enough, our lives implode. We suddenly get a sinus headache and our brains behave like they are trying to run in a pool—pushing and pushing but never moving any faster. Our joints hurt and the sun burns our eyes and the only thought we can muster is how extraordinarily badly we want to get back into bed, how incredibly smooth the sheets would feel, how deeply lovely it would be to close those heavy eyelids again.

I am, as you probably guessed, I’m squarely in the really need sleep category. I have always been this way. My mom says that as a baby I “loved my crib.” I never pulled a single all-nighter in high school or college because the notion that I would go to class or, god forbid, take a test after a night of not sleeping was downright inconceivable. Back then I could stay out late on weekends with the rest of them, but I would place a large buffer around a late night. No work was getting done until maybe late afternoon the next day. The people around me who stayed out late and then got up early to cram all day and into the following night, well, they seemed to be a different breed than me. I viewed those people as cooler and more capable. But I had no thought to try it out, because that approach one hundred percent certainly would not work for me.

As I got older, the need for sleep took on an anxious tone. I began to associate a bad night’s sleep with getting sick. When I didn’t get my full eight hours, colds popped up more often, random sinus headaches flared. As I ascended into the professional stratosphere, jetting around the country as a consultant at McKinsey and then starting and running a startup, I fretted and left evening events early and calculated hours until morning. While colleagues took cross-country red eyes on Sunday to land Monday morning and head straight to the office, I opted to fly all day on Sunday so I could land and sleep. Very often I put myself in bed at 8:30 before an early morning meeting only to find myself tossing and turning in increasing states of panic as the potential sleep hours slipped away.

At some point, I began to apply an automatic sleep evaluation to all my plans. Even if a plan was days or weeks in the future, if it threatened to render a short night’s sleep, it weighed heavily on my mind. My internal life became a series of complex sleep-related calculations: if on Tuesday there’s that dinner, and Wednesday morning is that big meeting, and Saturday is the wedding I have been looking forward to for a long time, then I need to leave the Tuesday dinner early and have the meeting materials pre-prepped so that I can sleep enough on Tuesday night so that I don’t get sick for the Saturday event. Travel presented a whole matrix of these micro-optimization efforts, me trying to get 30 minutes more sleep here and an hour more sleep there to try and stave off the inevitable travel-induced cold.

Maybe this sounds crazy to you, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if this resonates, particularly if you are a woman in the chronic illness or illness-adjacent world (e.g. mostly fine? But sometimes you get migraines, and you have more colds than your partner, and your doctor recently told you you have subclinical hypothyroidism but said it wasn’t a big deal?—I see you). I used to think I was way, way out on the obsessive end of this sleep-needing spectrum. My husband Will has never displayed any of this preoccupation for the ten years we’ve been together, and he has always needed far less sleep.

But now I know that it’s not so uncommon. We sleep-needers are a strong cohort, and we have been under ground for a long time. Now that sleep is trendy we are beginning to show ourselves. But I still haven’t seen much writing that details the intense role sleep-needing can play in modern life. If your life is not set up for sleep, then sleep can become a consuming topic for those of us who really need it. So I wanted to chime in on the subject and a sleep-needer, loud and proud.

I’m writing about this now from a place of relative sleep-calm. This is not because I have become more chill about sleep or less in need of it, but because I have organized my life in a way that allows me to regularly get enough of it. With the exception of the earliest months of my children’s lives, my professional and family life is set up to accommodate my need for eight to nine hours in bed almost every night. Many years ago now I stopped accepting early morning work calls and meetings. do not go out late, other than a handful of special occasions per year. My husband and I divide kid labor in a way that maximizes my sleep hours. Kid sleep has been my number one parenting priority, and I have a phone call every nine months or so with a real, live child sleep consultant to assist me with best practices when my kids are going through tricky sleep transitions. I make time for naps when needed.

Sometimes when everything is going great I think all this is overkill, I stay out until eleven thirty (!) and don’t get enough sleep, and without exception I morph into an impatient, fog-headed, achey, grumpy monster, and Will and I agree that I should go take a nap immediately—he’ll take the kids. (Here I’ll pause to just appreciate Will. I love that man. I owe him a lot when it comes to safeguarding my sleep.)

I still feel a spark of shame writing that I often need nine hours in bed to feel great. But that shame is completely unproductive and doesn’t change my reality, which has been lifelong and is not going to change, ever. My life is much, much better when I sleep a lot, and that’s that. So, sleep on, my sleepy friends!

—Rachel