Recovery Last reviewed 12 August 2026
A sleep window is easier to keep than a sleep target
Aiming for a number of hours fails quietly. Aiming to be in bed inside a two-hour window does not.
Why hour-targets fail
"Get eight hours" is advice you cannot act on. Sleep is not a task you can complete by trying harder; the only part of it under your direct control is when you are in bed with the lights off.
So set the thing you control. A window - a two-hour band inside which you are in bed - is a commitment you can keep or visibly miss, which makes it useful.
The arithmetic, worked backwards
Start from the fixed point, which is your alarm, and count back.
> Alarm 06:30. > Subtract the sleep you are aiming for, say 7h30 → 23:00. > Subtract the time it takes you to fall asleep, say 20 minutes → 22:40. > Your window is 22:10 to 23:10 - an hour wide, centred on that.
Do it with your own three numbers. The output is a band, not a moment, and hitting anywhere inside it counts as a success. That is the whole trick: it is failable in a way you can see, and achievable in a way a target is not.
The three things that break it
In order of how often they are the culprit:
- The evening starts too late. The window is not the problem; the eight o'clock start on a two-hour task is.
- No landing sequence. Going from a screen to a pillow in ninety seconds asks a lot. Twenty minutes of something dull is not a luxury.
- Compensating. A late night followed by a long lie-in moves the whole window, and Sunday's lie-in is a common reason Monday's window is missed.
The night it breaks
It will. The rule that matters is what you do the next day: keep the alarm, keep the window, take the tired day. Chasing the lost sleep is what turns one bad night into a bad fortnight.
Where the actual guidance is
How much sleep an adult needs, what disrupts it, and when it is worth seeing someone are all covered by the CDC. We are not going to restate their hours in our own voice.
The limits of this piece
Settled enough to state
You can decide when to be in bed. You cannot decide when to fall asleep, which is why a window is a keepable commitment and an hours target is not.
Depends on you
How much sleep you need, and what time of day suits you. Both vary between people and across a life.
Not something a webpage can answer
Why you specifically are not sleeping. Persistent insomnia, snoring with daytime sleepiness, or waking unrefreshed for weeks are all reasons to see a doctor rather than to adjust a bedtime.
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