Skip to Main Content

The Amount of Sleep You Should Get at Night to Be Happiest the Next Day


It’s no secret that sleep significantly affects our mood and performance the next day. How many hours of sleep is the sweet spot, though? Jawbone’s study offers concrete recommendations.

The company analyzed the sleep and recorded moods of its hundreds of thousands of UP wearers (over 80 million nights of sleep! 5.6 million self-reported mood entries) and found that the “right” amount of sleep for the best mood is between 8 and 9.5 hours at night. Those who get that amount woke up happier than those who slept fewer or more hours.

Other interesting findings:

  • When people got an extra hour of sleep compared to normal, they woke up 5% happier

  • Losing two hours of sleep had a bigger effect on mood than gaining 2 hours of sleep

Everyone’s different, of course, and we might differ in how much sleep we require. However, if you’re like the average person in this study, you might want to aim for a consistent 8-9.5 hours of sweet sleep every night.

Check out Jawbone’s blog post for more details, such as the happiness boost people get at 5pm on weekdays (can you guess why?).

What Makes People Happy? We Have the Data | Jawbone via Sree Sreenivasan