Eight hours was never meant to be a universal prescription. It's a loose average drawn from a wide range factors. And treating it as a hard and fast rule to meet every single night can actually work against your sleep (no matter the amount) rather than for it…
…Hitting the bullseye for our personal best sleep amount is tough. If we wanted to be a bit cliche, we might say that it’s more of an art than a science. Not just because it’s necessarily difficult to pin point, but because it changes over time—both as we progress through life, but also from day to day based on activity, health, stress, and more.

We've been told, over and over, that a good night’s sleep is a single, solid, unbroken block of eight hours—from lights out to alarm clock, no interruptions. So when our body or mind doesn't do that, it feels like proof of a problem. We’ve failed, and we’re not good sleepers.

But here's the thing. That’s just not true.

Ultraprocessed time is the time you spend on something that feels compelling in the moment but leaves you with nothing real to show for it afterward, no rest, no connection, no growth, no learning, just a faint, sugar-crash-esque sort of emptiness. And much like ultraprocessed food, ultraprocessed time is everywhere.