How to know if you got a good night’s sleep

When someone asks how you slept, it’s a question that can be surprisingly difficult to answer.

Sure, you might say “not enough;” or perhaps, “I tossed and turned;” or if you’re lucky, “I was out;” but how good or bad was that night’s rest really?

And people want to know. That’s why there’s a big market for apps and devices that help evaluate sleep quality. But it seems like something we should be able to give a scientifically valid answer to without additional equipment.

Now, thanks to some recently published guidance from the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), that should be easier to do. A new report recently published in Sleep Health, the journal of the NSF, helps clarify exactly what “a good night’s sleep” means — for all ages.

The NSF recommends that adults sleep seven to nine hours a night and unsurprisingly, falling asleep quickly and sleeping through the night are pretty basic indicators that you slept well. But the report gets far more specific than that.

In order to come up with measures of quality sleep, the NSF assembled a group of experts from their own organisation and from other medical societies. After initially looking at 3,928 studies about sleep, they selected 277 that would provide useful guidance on what “a good night’s sleep” actually meant.

They came up with measures related to both “sleep continuity” — how much someone slept in a night — and “sleep architecture” — the way the night was divided into the different phases of sleep.