Getting 7-9 Hours a Night is the Guideline, But Not Everyone's Reality
BLACK IRON RADIO EP. 327: Getting 7-9 Hours a Night is the Guideline, But Not Everyone's Reality
For some people, six hours of sleep is a huge win despite the 7-9 hour guideline.
Krissy, Sabrina, and Ryann dig into why sleep duration guidelines exist in the first place, what chronic low sleep is linked to (from mood and performance to long-term cognitive health), and why "I've always slept bad" isn't the same as "this isn't affecting me."
Then they get practical.
How do you work with six hours instead of obsessing over eight? What if you're a shift worker, training hard, under-eating, stressed about work, or wired the second your head hits the pillow? What if you're doing "all the right things" and it's still not improving?
They cover auditing your sleep environment, small bedtime shifts instead of dramatic overhauls, why quality often matters more than quantity, how nutrition and training quietly impact sleep, and when it's time to escalate beyond habit tweaks and involve a sleep study or medical support.
No shame or sleep virtue signaling. Just a nuanced conversation about protecting your health when perfect sleep isn't on the table.
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If you've already done everything right: the consistent bedtime, the wind-down routine, the no-screens-before-bed rule, and you're still not hitting that seven to nine hour mark, this post is for you. Krissy, Sabrina, and Ryann break down what to do when the standard advice isn't cutting it.
Why 7-9 Hours Isn't Just an Arbitrary Number
Unlike some health guidelines that get thrown around without much backing (looking at you, 10,000 steps a day), the seven to nine hour recommendation actually has solid data behind it. Sleep is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your body: muscle repair, memory consolidation, mood regulation, immune function, and more.
But here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: people who have been sleeping five or six hours a night for years often say they feel fine. And honestly, that's part of the problem. You get used to it. You don't know what better feels like. Give yourself three weeks of consistently getting seven to nine hours and your body will very quickly let you know what you've been missing.
Long-term, chronic poor sleep is linked to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, weakened immune function, and cognitive decline. The dementia connection, specifically related to not getting enough REM sleep, is one that Krissy thinks about a lot and it's worth taking seriously.
Real Life Gets in the Way
The three of them were quick to point out that sleep struggles are personal, varied, and often genuinely complicated. Krissy has dealt with insomnia since childhood, restless leg syndrome, and chronic night terrors that happen during deep sleep, meaning she often doesn't even wake up from them. They've caused years of jaw clenching, dental issues, and oral surgery. She and her husband sleep in separate beds because of it. For her, seven hours is a genuinely good night and something she's proud of.
Sabrina has shifted from competing days when she was getting a minimum of ten hours to now sharing a bed with her partner and seeing her deep sleep take a hit. Ryann sleeps well herself but has watched her husband struggle with chronic poor sleep that triggers his anxiety, despite sleep studies and medication.
The point: sleep challenges show up differently for everyone, and there's no shame in having them.
What's Actually Getting in the Way of Your Sleep
Before jumping to solutions, it helps to audit what's contributing to poor sleep. Some common culprits:
Training timing can be a big one. Working out right before bed can leave some people too wired or too hot to fall asleep easily. Overtraining and serious muscle soreness can also disrupt sleep throughout the night.
Nutrition plays a role too, in both directions. Eating too close to bed and feeling overly full can keep you awake, but so can not eating enough carbohydrates before bed, which can cause blood sugar dips that wake you up in the middle of the night.
Stress and mental load are huge. Lying down and suddenly thinking of everything you forgot to do, worrying about money, health, family, or just the general state of the world, these are incredibly common reasons people can't fall asleep or stay asleep.
Hormonal shifts, like perimenopause or pregnancy, can completely upend sleep patterns that used to be stable. And sharing a bed with a partner, however much you love them, has real effects, especially for women, since research suggests men tend to sleep better with a partner while women tend to sleep better alone.
Shifting From a Quantity Mindset to a Quality Mindset
One of the most important reframes in this conversation: if you can't get seven to nine hours, stop fixating on the number and start protecting the sleep you can get.
Six hours of genuinely high-quality sleep is better than eight hours of broken, restless sleep where you're waking up constantly throughout the night. If six is your consistent ceiling right now, the goal is to make those six hours count.
That said, averages matter. One rough night doesn't necessarily mean a rough week. If you're looking at your nightly totals and panicking, zoom out. One or two bad nights balanced by a solid night can still land you in a decent weekly average. You can make up some sleep debt in the short term, though you can't recover from months or years of it by sleeping in on Saturday.
Weekend sleep is still valuable. If you can get an extra hour or two on a weekend morning, that's legitimately useful. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the day when you've had a short night can also help, if your schedule allows for it. If it doesn't, that's fine too. A good coach isn't going to push you to nap when it's just not an option in your life.
What Actually Helps When You've Already Tried the Basics
Rather than telling clients to just go to bed earlier, Sabrina recommends a more gradual approach: moving bedtime back by just 10 to 30 minutes at a time. Ten minutes sounds like nothing. It isn't. Small, consistent shifts add up, and they're a lot more sustainable than trying to overhaul your entire schedule overnight.
Setting a reminder 30 minutes before you plan to start winding down can also make a real difference, particularly for people with ADHD who are resistant to stopping what they're doing. It creates a buffer instead of a hard stop, which tends to feel less jarring.
If you wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, you don't necessarily have to lie there spiraling. Some people do well getting out of bed for about 20 minutes, doing something low-stimulation, and then returning. Others, Krissy included, do better just staying in bed and resting, not sleeping, just resting. Both approaches can work. It depends on the person.
Stress management is also worth taking seriously as a sleep strategy, not just a general wellness suggestion. If what's keeping you up is a consistently overloaded mental to-do list, that's a signal to look at your actual schedule and workload, not just your bedtime routine.
And when it comes to nutrition during periods of poor sleep: eat enough. This is not the time to be in a calorie deficit. Your body needs adequate fuel to function when it's not getting the recovery it needs.
When to Seek Professional Support
If poor sleep has become chronic, lasting several months or longer, it's worth talking to a medical professional, not a wellness influencer, an actual sleep specialist or physician. Sleep studies are more accessible than they used to be and can now often be done from home with simple devices. In some cases, temporary medication makes sense while you work on the root cause.
Therapy is also worth mentioning here. Not as a throwaway suggestion, but because many of the things that disrupt sleep most persistently, anxiety, stress, overthinking, rumination, are things that therapy is actually designed to address.
No Shame in Where You're Starting
One thing Krissy, Sabrina, and Ryann were consistent about throughout this conversation: there's no morality attached to how much you sleep. You're not a bad client, a lazy person, or a failure because you're struggling with sleep. Most people who aren't getting enough sleep already know it and wish they could fix it. The goal is to approach it with curiosity instead of shame, try things, see what works, and give yourself credit for the progress you do make.
If you haven't listened to the previous episode, "So You Want to Start Sleeping 8 Hours a Night," check it out as a companion to this one. It covers a lot of the foundational habits that set you up for better sleep, and it's a good starting point before getting into the more nuanced territory we covered here.
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If you enjoyed this conversation, check out more episodes of Black Iron Radio, where we cut through the noise and give you real, no-BS advice on feeling, performing, and looking your best. Each week we share practical nutrition, training, and wellness strategies and tips to help you succeed.
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