Sleeping unusually little during the night and still feeling rested the next morning

[Laurelindo]

Has this ever happened to you? Last night I was quite sleep deprived, but I still fell asleep at 3:30 AM or something (I tend to stay awake for very long for some reason ), and I was sure that I would wake up at like 1 PM or something like that - however, I woke up about an hour ago, at 10 AM, and I actually felt kind of rested - maybe not super-rested, but enough to be able to get out of bed without problem. How is this possible? Do you sleep "extra efficiently" certain nights?

[Zoth]

6.5 hours isn't that much of a low amount of hours. In these cases, sleep quality matters more, and it's probably what happened to you here: you woke up at the end of a sleep cycle, experienced low/no sleep inertia. Also, remember that your cortisol levels rise a lot when you wake up, and are probably the biggest factor when sometimes you wake up with a jolt of energy even when you had few hours of sleep.

[Cubellius]

Yup, had this happen a few times. When school is in session, I wake up at 6AM every morning, and go to sleep anywhere from 11 to 4AM. Most of the time I feel like utter crap when I don't get at least 6 hours of sleep, but there were definitely a few times (it seemed to usually happen right after I've been getting a lot of sleep for a period of time) when I slept 2-3 hours and felt better than if I slept 8 hours.

[Verre]

Has this ever happened to you? Last night I was quite sleep deprived, but I still fell asleep at 3:30 AM or something (I tend to stay awake for very long for some reason ), and I was sure that I would wake up at like 1 PM or something like that - however, I woke up about an hour ago, at 10 AM, and I actually felt kind of rested - maybe not super-rested, but enough to be able to get out of bed without problem. How is this possible? Do you sleep "extra efficiently" certain nights? Heh, 3:30 to 10am is pretty much my normal sleep schedule, and I doubt there is anything especially efficient about my sleep quality, given that I wake up 4-5 times a night. So it's definitely sustainable for some people. There's a lot of prescriptions out there for how much sleep you should get, but I think people vary in this respect as in so many others. When I was using a fitness tracker to monitor my sleep recently, I discovered that I averaged 5.5 to 6.5 hours a night, and almost never broke 7 (even if I was in bed for much longer). The one time my tracker said I had actually slept 8 hours, I woke up with one of those awful "oversleeping" headaches and felt terrible all day! So if 3:30 to 10am works for you, go for it!