Most people are wrong about how little sleep they can get away with

Nearly every human on the planet functions best by sleeping around 7 to 9 hours per night. Yes, there are some people who have genetic anomalies who may be able to get away with less than 7, as little as 5, but that's pretty rare. And there are some professional athletes who are hard-charging high achievers who need sometimes, in some cases, more than 10 hours of sleep per night. Something in your body when you're short on sleep is going to be going wrong. Inflammation can run rampant somewhere in a muscle or brain cell. Regeneration is not occurring, and this is the kind of biological damage you invite when you don't sleep enough or when you don't sleep consistently. Most people who believe they can thrive on less sleep are wrong. Even highly driven, successful individuals often operate under this assumption, but they don't actually have the gene that allows for short sleep, which is pretty rare. Some well-known figures like Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Martha Stewart have been cited as functioning on very little sleep, but in most cases, performance is still being sacrificed somewhere, whether in cognitive function or the appearance of the face and skin or recovery or overall long-term health and immune system status. Consistently getting too little sleep leads to measurable decline, including impaired memory, reduced creativity, increased inflammation, and incomplete physical and neurological recovery, not to mention the inability of your brain to clean itself out at night. Operating on low sleep while also pushing hard physically or mentally accelerates damage, and the combination of stress and sleep deprivation compounds these negative effects.