What others post on social media about sleep (and whether it’s accurate)

There is no shortage of compelling sleep stories on social media, but factually speaking, there is plenty of room for improvement

Sleep education is an important part of my work as a sleep coach. Sometimes I literally see relief appear on someone’s face when I explain that there is no country in the world where eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is the norm, that it is normal to wake up a few times during the night, and that lying awake for a couple of hours is not necessarily a problem. Some people simply sleep that way — and this is also well explained from an evolutionary perspective.

I often think that with psycho education about sleep I am opening doors that are already wide open. That everyone already knows sleep is not a uniform process. Until I scroll through social media again and see how persistent certain sleep myths still are, even among people who are highly skilled in their own fields, but not necessarily in sleep science. I’ve listed four common ones.

The business elite needs less sleep

The idea that 4 hours of sleep equals business success (because it leaves more time to work) remains surprisingly popular in some entrepreneurial circles (thanks, Elon Musk). However, research mainly shows that leaders sleep less because of workload, responsibility, and stress — not because their bodies require less sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance and more impulsive decision-making. So when a CEO sleeps too little, it is more of a business risk than a competitive advantage.

If you sleep poorly, you don’t recover

Even with fragmented or shortened sleep, recovery processes still take place in the body and brain. What changes is that the distribution of sleep stages becomes disrupted, leading to less efficient cognitive processing and emotional regulation. Recovery is therefore not absent, but less complete and less well coordinated. Importantly, much of what we know about sleep deprivation and recovery does not come from people with chronic insomnia, but from studies in which healthy participants were temporarily sleep-deprived or had their sleep artificially restricted. As a result, we know quite a lot about the effects of acute sleep loss, but less about the long-term impact of chronic insomnia on the body and brain.

You are not your sleep score

Often, you don’t feel tired because you slept poorly, but because you think you slept poorly. Especially when a sleep tracker repeatedly confirms this with a negative sleep score. This can lead to a so-called digital nocebo effect: a mismatch between how you feel and what the data tells you. Research and clinical experience suggest that this can increase sleep-related anxiety, which may actually worsen sleep over time. A simple check can help: rate your energy level in the morning on a scale from 1 to 10 before looking at your sleep data.

And my personal favourite of the week…

You’re better off sleeping 6 hours than 8, because sleep occurs in 90-minute cycles

It sounds mathematically neat, but it is overly simplistic. The duration of a sleep cycle is not fixed: on average it ranges from about 80 to 120 minutes, and it varies both between individuals and within a single night. Sleep is not a rigid, clock-like process, but a dynamic system that continuously adapts. So don’t let that kind of mental arithmetic guide you — your body does a better job.

Sleep well.