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Is 5 Hours of Sleep Enough? It’s Highly Unlikely

Published
2021-06-02
Updated
2024-07-02
Written by
Jeff Kahn
Reviewed by
Dr. Jamie Zeitzer
Woman sleeping at desk in front of laptop after only five hours of sleep.

Key Takeaways 

  • Guidelines say adults need seven to nine hours of sleep. These numbers are just guidelines, though. The amount of sleep you need is unique to you. Our RISE data shows most of us need about eight hours of sleep.
  • Five hours of sleep most likely isn’t enough and may cause low energy, mood, and productivity in the short term and mental and physical health problems in the long run.
  • To find out exactly how much sleep you need, use the RISE app. RISE can also guide you through good sleep habits to help you get enough shut-eye each night. Reach out to a doctor if you’re still struggling to get enough sleep.

Whether you’re getting five hours of sleep because of a busy work schedule or a teething toddler, you’re — most likely — not getting enough sleep. 

You might feel fine after five hours of sleep, but really, your energy levels, health, and mental and physical performance will all take a hit. 

Below, we’ll dive into whether five hours of sleep is enough (spoiler: it’s not!) and what happens when you don’t get enough sleep. Plus, we’ll share how the RISE app can calculate how much sleep you really need and make getting enough shut-eye easier.

Is 5 Hours of Sleep Enough? 

The TL;DR: five hours of sleep isn’t enough for the vast majority of us. 

Guidelines state adults need seven to nine hours of sleep. But in reality, we all have an individual amount of sleep we need a night. It’s determined by genetics — just like height and eye color — and it’s set by early adulthood.

This is most likely more than five hours, though. 

When we looked at the sleep needs of 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and older, we found:

  • The median sleep need was eight hours 
  • Almost half of our users need eight hours or more sleep a night
  • Some even need a whopping 11 hours 30 minutes — a far cry from five hours
The RISE app can tell you how much sleep you need
How much sleep RISE users need.

While there are a few lucky people out there who can survive on only five hours of sleep, these short sleepers are very — very — few and far between. 

As Matthew Walker puts it in his book Why We Sleep, “It is far, far more likely that you will be struck by lightning (the lifetime odds being 1 in 12,000) than being truly capable of surviving on insufficient sleep thanks to a rare gene.” 

And even if you have one of these rare genes, you’re not guaranteed to be able to get by on a short amount of sleep. Learn more about so-called short sleep syndrome here.

For a sleep doctor’s opinion, we asked our medical reviewer, Dr. Chester Wu, who’s double board certified in psychiatry and sleep medicine.

“For most of the population, five hours of sleep isn’t enough. Most people need around eight hours. If you’re only getting five hours right now, try going to bed 15 minutes to 30 minutes earlier tonight and getting more sleep over the course of a couple of weeks. You might be surprised at how good you feel!”

What’s the Recommended Amount of Sleep? 

The National Sleep Foundation recommends healthy individuals with normal sleep get:

  • Newborns: 14 to 17 hours 
  • Infants: 12 to 15 hours 
  • Toddlers: 11 to 14 hours 
  • Preschoolers: 10 to 13 hours 
  • School-aged children: 9 to 11 hours 
  • Teenagers: 8 to 10 hours 
  • Adults: 7 to 9 hours 
  • Older adults: 7 to 8 hours 

As you can see, there’s a wide range in the recommendations for each age group. And as one paper states, “there is no “magic number” for the ideal duration of sleep.” 

These guidelines are exactly that: guidelines. They're based on surveys that look at how much sleep people get — not what they actually need. And even that can be misleading. 

Guidelines like these are often based on inaccurate self-reported data. And older adults may not actually need less sleep than younger adults, for example, sleep is just harder to come by. This is backed up by our RISE sleep data. 

Instead of relying on vague guidelines, work out how much sleep you personally need.

You can do this by waking up without an alarm for a week or two and keeping track of how much you slept, noting when they start to regularize (known as the sleep rebound method). 

Even if you have the luxury of waking up without an alarm for two weeks, this can be inaccurate for a few reasons:

  • Five hours in bed rarely equals five hours of sleep, so we may be getting much less sleep than we think
  • If you suddenly start getting nine hours of sleep without an alarm, it’s hard to tell if you’re getting nine hours because that’s your sleep need, or because your body’s taking the opportunity to catch up on lost sleep as you’ve been getting five hours sleep recently
  • You may also temporarily need more sleep when you’re ill or recovering from intense exercise or a muscle injury

Use the RISE App 

RISE works as a personal sleep calculator to tell you exactly how much sleep you need in hours and minutes. 

The app uses a year’s worth of phone use data and proprietary sleep-science-based models to calculate your sleep need.  

You can learn more about how much sleep you need here.

RISE also tells you how much sleep debt you have. This is the amount of sleep you need to catch up on. 

The higher your sleep debt, the worse you’re going to feel and function in the short term, and the worse your quality of life and overall health and well-being may be in the long run. 

Try catching up on sleep to lower your sleep debt and maximize your energy, health, and productivity.

RISE app screenshot showing your sleep need
RISE tells you how much sleep you need.

Understanding the Impact of Getting Just 5 Hours of Sleep 

Getting five hours of sleep — or four, or six, or seven, or fewer hours than the amount of sleep you need — has negative effects the next day and health problems in the long run.

Can you function on five hours of sleep? Just about, but you won’t be doing well. 

You may have: 

Heads-up: Getting five hours of sleep and topping it up with a nap? This is fine as a one-off, but it’s not recommended in the long run. Experts agree most of your sleep should happen in one continuous chunk at night for better health. 

If you feel fine after five hours of sleep, that doesn’t necessarily mean five hours of sleep is enough.

One study found when participants had the opportunity, they slept for an average of three hours more than usual, even though they thought they were getting enough sleep before. So they may have been sleep deprived and didn’t even know it. 

Plus, research suggests we are largely unaware of the increasing declines in cognitive performance we get from sleep loss. 

You may also feel fine if you’re self-medicating with caffeine to wake up and alcohol or sleeping pills to fall asleep.

And if you feel more alert on less sleep, you can blame a surge in the stress hormone cortisol for that (over time, high cortisol levels can lead to more sleep loss and health issues like weight gain and high blood pressure).

Even if we feel the effects of sleep deprivation, we may attribute them to other factors, like stress or health conditions, instead of the true culprit: not getting enough sleep.

We asked one of our sleep advisors, Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, who’s the co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Stanford University, for his opinion.

“It’s easy to feel like five hours is enough sleep, but our bodies are very good at tricking us. You’ll produce more cortisol when sleep deprived, so you’ll feel alert, and you may not even notice your performance taking a hit.”‍

We’ve covered why you feel energized on less sleep here. 

Heads-up: If you’re only getting five hours of sleep, you’re probably not getting good quality sleep. You may take a while to drift off, wake up multiple times throughout the night, sleep at irregular times, and not get enough deep sleep or REM sleep for you. All this can leave you feeling tired the next day. 

You can learn more about sleep quality here.

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Why Do I Only Sleep for 5 Hours? 

Only getting five hours of sleep a night, even when you try for more? Here’s what could be to blame. 

1. You Only Need Five Hours of Sleep 

There’s a small chance your sleep need is five hours. If this is the case, you may find it hard to sleep for longer as your body simply doesn’t need the extra shut-eye. 

As we said above, though: this is very, very rare. 

Check RISE to see if your sleep need is five hours. 

Heads-up: Even if you’re getting enough sleep, it’s normal to feel groggy when you first wake up and a little sleepy in the afternoon

2. You’ve Got Bad Sleep Habits  

Sleep hygiene is the set of daily habits that influence your sleep. If you’ve got bad sleep hygiene, you may struggle to fall asleep and wake up often throughout the night. It’ll therefore be much harder to get enough sleep each night. 

Poor sleep hygiene includes: 

  • Having a bedroom that’s too warm, noisy, or bright 
  • Not getting enough light exposure in the morning or daytime 
  • Getting too much bright light exposure close to bedtime 
  • Having caffeine, doing intense exercise, drinking alcohol, or eating large meals close to bedtime 
  • Not winding down and relaxing before bed (RISE users say their biggest barrier to a good night’s sleep is stress and anxiety)

3. You’ve Got an Irregular Sleep Schedule 

Going to bed and waking up at different times each day can throw off your circadian rhythm, which is the internal body clock that helps to control your sleep cycle.

If your sleep times are all over the place, you could find yourself only getting five hours of sleep. 

This can happen if: 

  • You work night shifts
  • You have social jetlag — or you have different sleep patterns on your work days and days off. 
  • You’re living at odds with your chronotype — like when a night owl tries to go to bed early or an early bird tries to sleep in later 

RISE can predict the timing of your circadian rhythm each day and show you when your body naturally wants to go to sleep and wake up. You can then see if you’re working against your body and this is causing you to sleep less than you’d like. 

4. You’ve Got a Sleep Disorder or Medical Condition 

A sleep disorder or medical condition may be stopping you from getting enough sleep. 

These include: 

  • Insomnia 
  • Sleep apnea
  • Restless leg syndrome  
  • Anxiety 
  • Depression 
  • High blood pressure 
  • Diabetes 
  • Chronic pain 
  • Side effects from medications 

Speak to your healthcare provider if you think a sleep disorder or health condition is causing a lack of sleep.

Hormone changes may also be to blame for chronic sleep deprivation. You may find it harder to sleep for more than five hours when you’re on your period, pregnant, or going through menopause

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How Can You Get Enough Sleep? 

Now you know that five hours of sleep isn’t enough for most of us, it’s time to start getting more shut-eye. 

To help get more sleep, focus on your sleep hygiene. These behaviors have been scientifically proven to help you get a good night’s sleep. 

Here’s what to do: 

  • Get bright light first thing: Light in the morning resets your circadian rhythm for the day, which helps you feel alert and sleepy at the right times. Aim for at least 10 minutes of light as soon as possible after waking up, and 15 to 20 minutes if it's overcast or you’re getting light through a window. 
  • Avoid bright light close to bedtime: Light suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin. Dim the lights and put on blue-light blocking glasses about 90 minutes before bed (we recommend these glasses).
  • Avoid caffeine, large meals, intense exercise, and alcohol too late in the day: You don’t need to give up these sleep disruptors, you just need to get the timing of them right. RISE can tell you when to avoid each one daily for better sleep.
  • Keep your bedroom dark, cool, and quiet: Aim for 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, use blackout curtains and an eye mask, and wear earplugs or use a white noise generator. RISE has white noise and other sleep sounds you can play from the app. 
  • Keep a regular sleep schedule: Aim to go to bed and wake up at similar times each day, even on weekends. Make sure this sleep schedule gives you enough time to get enough sleep for you each night. 
  • Avoid sleep aids: Sleep aids come with side effects and can cause sleep problems when you stop taking them.

To stay on top of your sleep hygiene, RISE can tell you when to do 20+ sleep habits each day and the ideal time to do each one to make them more effective.

RISE app screenshot showing sleep hygiene habit reminders
RISE helps you maintain good sleep hygiene.

Get More Sleep to Be at Your Best

Five hours of sleep isn’t enough for most of us — and you can’t hack your way into getting less sleep than you need.

How much sleep is enough? That number is different for each of us. 

Use the RISE app to find out how much sleep you need. Then, to help you get enough sleep, follow RISE’s personalized reminders for 20+ good sleep hygiene habits to help you fall faster and wake up less often throughout the night. 

It doesn’t take long: 80% of RISE users get more sleep within five days!

FAQs

5 Hours of Sleep FAQs

Is 5 hours of sleep OK?

For most of us, five hours of sleep is not OK. Guidelines say adults need seven to nine hours and our RISE data shows most of us need about eight hours of sleep. And while some people need five hours, it’s extremely rare. For most of us, five hours of sleep can lead to chronic sleep deprivation, low energy, poor focus, and long-term health issues.

How little sleep can you survive on?

You can survive on just a little sleep, but your energy, mood, focus, and mental and physical health will all suffer. We don’t know for sure how little sleep you can survive on. There aren’t many studies looking at sleep deprivation for longer than 72 hours as this is deemed unethical.

Can you get used to 5 hours of sleep?

Studies show we can trick ourselves to feeling like we’re fine on five hours of sleep, even though objective measures of our performance and alertness show declines. Over time, chronic sleep deprivation can lead to impaired cognitive function, emotional reactivity and long-term health issues, despite subjective perceptions of adequacy. This discrepancy suggests that while people may feel they have adapted to limited sleep, their bodies and brains continue to operate at a suboptimal level.

Is 5 hours of sleep enough once a week?

Getting five hours of sleep once a week may be alright, if you’re otherwise getting enough sleep and catching up on lost sleep when you can, although you’ll feel tired and irritable the next day. While an occasional short night won't likely cause long-term harm if you generally maintain good sleep habits, it’s crucial not to let these nights become a frequent pattern, as the cumulative effect of sleep loss can lead to significant health and performance issues. Getting five hours of sleep once a week may be alright, if you’re otherwise getting enough sleep and catching up on lost sleep when you can. While an occasional short night won't likely cause long-term harm if you generally maintain good sleep habits, for optimum energy levels, good health, and maximum performance, you need to get enough sleep for you each night — which is most likely more than five hours.

How to survive on 5 hours of sleep?

If you need to survive on five hours of sleep, try to keep a regular sleep schedule and get more sleep from naps, if possible, to minimize the effects of the sleep deprivation. Get bright light, drink coffee (not too close to bedtime), exercise, and take a cold shower to boost your energy levels.

I only sleep 4-5 hours a night

If you only sleep for four to five hours a night, you may have a sleep disorder like insomnia or sleep apnea. Bad sleep habits — like getting bright light, eating large meals, or drinking coffee or alcohol too late in the day — may also make it hard to fall and stay asleep.

About Our Editorial Team

Written by
Jeff Kahn
Medically Reviewed by
Dr. Jamie Zeitzer
Our Editorial Standards
We bring sleep research out of the lab and into your life. Every post begins with peer-reviewed studies — not third-party sources — to make sure we only share advice that can be defended to a room full of sleep scientists.
Updated Regularly
We regularly update our articles to explain the latest research and shifts in scientific consensus in a simple and actionable way.

References

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About Rise
Rise is the only app that unlocks the real-world benefits of better sleep.

Instead of just promising a better night, we use 100 years of sleep science to help you pay down sleep debt and take advantage of your circadian rhythm to be your best.

Over the past decade, we've helped professional athletes, startups, and Fortune 500s improve their sleep to measurably win more in the real-world scenarios that matter most.

Rise Science is backed by True Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and High Alpha; investors behind category winners Fitbit, Peloton, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

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