Do autistics need more sleep?

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I need a lot of sleep, even nap during the day.

I was going to say that I think I tend to sleep a little less than other people... but then I realized that I slept 9 hours last night.

I suffer with poor sleep quality because of chronic pain (hypermobilty causing fibro type pain) and sometimes my brain can’t seitch off which keeps me up. Ideally I’d like 8 hours plus sleep. I can do 10 hours plus at the weekends.

^ That fits some hunches I have about myself. I've long felt that some of my memory problems, particularly with autobiographic memory, are not so much problems of recall, but of recording. The memories I do have include very little sense or time, place, or emotional content, and seem very prone to cross-talk between unrelated events. The only medication that ever seemed to benefit my sleep was Mirtazapine (an atypical anti-depressant), on which I experienced the well documented side-effect of exceptionally vivid dreams which were memorable upon waking; some of which I can still recall. That is an incredibly rare experience for me normally, and I often awoke feeling more refreshed than usual. It may just be coincidence, but Mirtazapine has also been the only anti-depressant which I found benefited my mental health, and I'm considering it again at the moment.

PS: And thankyou for the technology tips!

I need a minimum of 8 hours to function the next day. It sucks cause i dont have a lot of time after work before i go to bed.

I was just thinking not long ago about this and possibly something that may be a contributor to my sleep difficulties.
I find it very difficult to eat when I'm not hungry. Most of the time I usually don't eat until right before going to sleep.
I usually follow a ritual I guess you could say of eating something and watching some Star Trek from bed, then as soon
as I am finished eating, I work on falling asleep.

Trogluddite and srd, perhaps if you obtained a Fitbit with sleep monitoring capability, you might be able to experiment and improve your Deep Sleep and REM times. You might determine your baseline by averaging several days of sleep patterns together. Once you know your baseline, you can alter things (like not eating right before bedtime) and see what effect that has on your sleep pattern.

The Fitbit not only gives you your total sleep times in each category but also a very interesting graph of your nights sleep. This is one of mine from a few days ago.

Is a fitbit accurate, or just confident-looking? Can it be used without a 'phone? What's the low-cost option? According to my budget heart-rate meter, I'm dead.

I had a fitbit briefly. Irritated the hell out of my wrist, and gave me some anxiety of constantly tracking my heart rate. I no longer have a fit bit.

Dear_one, generally I think it is fairly accurate. But it seems to have one glitch. The way sleep tracking works is once the watch no longer detects movement, it will start recording a sleep log. When you wake up in the morning, get out of bed and take some steps is when it will recognize you are awake.

So when I get up in the middle of the night, sometimes it thinks I have stopped sleeping for the night and shows my sleep ending. But when I go back to bed, it starts a different log. This will show up as two separate sleeps logs for the same night. But it also takes the Fitbit time to establish the cycle. So there is total sleep time lost if you try manually to add the two sleep logs together. This happens rather rarely. I think it happened once in the last 3 months.

But the real problem is if you get up near the end of your sleep cycle. It just drops off this second sleep time. It disappears from your total. This happened 4 or 5 times over the past 3 months. So I have gotten in the habit of writing down the time that I wake up and making sure it matches.

[I was looking at a website which reported problems with the Versa when it first came out. Most of this occurred in early 2018. But it seems for the most part those early problems were fixed by the time my wife purchased the watch.]

Thanks. I sleep two or three times a day. (When I was 20, I'd sleep three or four times a week.) If this thing can't recognize a nap, I can't imagine that it is doing more than guessing at REM time.

I don't have a fitbit but an Apple Watch. I think I tracked my sleep some time ago with it although I can't
recall fully.