An extra hour of sleep makes an abnormally HUGE difference

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For me, the difference between getting 6 vs 7 hours of sleep at night is like night and day (no pun intended).

On 6 hours of sleep, I'd be battling fatigue throughout the day struggling to keep my eyes open and my thoughts clear. I'd be much easier to irritate and my intellectual abilities are operating at a much diminished level (I'd estimate to be at maybe 50-60% of my IQ aftet a normal night of sleep.) Caffeine may give me some energy but it only has a limited effect on my alertness.

On 7 hours of sleep, my thinking is much clearer and I no longer need to fight to stay awake and I don't feel dizzy all day. I'm able to function like myself.

Of course, I feel better on 8 hours of sleep than 7 but only slightly. And I feel slightly worse on 5 hours of sleep than 6 but also only slightly.

On a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best, I feel like a 2 on 5 hours of sleep, 3 on 6 hours, 9 on 7 hours, and 10 on 8 hours.

So I try to err on the side of getting nore sleep than less due to my eccentric sleep needs and try for 8 hours a night but sometimes, due to odd reasons, I'm still unable to achieve 6.5-7 actual hours of sleep a night and end up going through the entire day like a zombie. It's more tolerable on the weekend than on the weekday when I have to work.

Anyone else observe this strange pattern in their sleep "needs"?

I don't have to get it all at once. I can get up in the middle of the night or morning and fall asleep again. After a brutal day at work I'll sleep when I get home.

I agree with your observations.

The average adult needs 7-9 hours of sleep at night. Once a person dips below 7 hours of sleep at night, they start to experience negative effects of their physical health and mental acuity. Source: How Much Deep And REM Sleep Should You Be Getting Each Night?

The other aspect of this observation is that in general REM sleep most often occurs in the latter half of the sleep. REM sleep is responsible for resetting the mind.

REM sleep begins in response to signals sent to and from different regions of the brain. Signals are sent to the brain's cerebral cortex, which is responsible for learning, thinking, and organizing information. Signals are also sent to the spinal cord to shut off movement, creating a temporary inability to move the muscles ("paralysis") in the arms and legs. The arms and legs become temporarily paralyzed during this stage to prevent a person from physically acting out their dreams and nightmares while sleeping. During REM sleep the eyes move around quickly behind your eyelids and your brainwaves look similar to those of someone who is awake. Breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure rise to near-waking levels. Electrical and chemical activity regulating this phase seems to originate in the brain stem and is characterized most notably by an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, combined with a nearly complete absence of monoamine neurotransmitters histamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.

REM sleep stimulates regions of the brain that are used for learning. Studies have shown that when people are deprived of REM sleep, they are not able to remember what they were taught before going to sleep. Sleep aids the process by which creativity forms associative elements into new combinations that are useful or meet some requirement. High levels of acetylcholine in the hippocampus suppress feedback from hippocampus to the neocortex, while lower levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine in the neocortex encourage the uncontrolled spread of associational activity within neocortical areas. This is in contrast to waking consciousness, where higher levels of norepinephrine and acetylcholine inhibit recurrent connections in the neocortex. REM sleep through this process adds creativity by allowing "neocortical structures to reorganize associative hierarchies, in which information from the hippocampus would be reinterpreted in relation to previous semantic representations or nodes." In other words, REM sleep aids in the reconfiguration of stored memories. This is probably why around 25% of the adult sleep cycle is REM while around 40% of an infants sleep cycle is REM.

Dreaming is most common during this stage and experts believe that dreaming helps you process emotions and solidify certain memories. By one estimate, 80% of dreams occur during REM.

Exactly


When I fail to sleep, it's like braindead

Sleep is something I need to be more aware of. I get carried away and before I know it, I have not left myself the sleeping time I need.
It also esculates. When I have had a stressful day, I spend more time unwinding before I get to sleep. The more unwinding time I need, the less sleep I have for the next day. The less sleep, the more likely I am to have a difficult day and so on!
So if I am not careful, things can snowball until I am in quite a mess. Is why I find that these days I don't think I could manage a full time job, as I need plenty of days out of work to catch up on my sleep that I missed on the days which I worked.

I need 9 hours of sleep to function properly.
If I sleep 7 or less, I will be in partial shutdown for the whole following day.
Coffee just makes me agitated, making my ability to focus on tasks even worse.

It seems to vary a lot with me. There are times I sleep for 5 or 6 hours for a few nights/days in a row & feel fine most of the day. Then I may sleep for like 9 hours & feel very tired when I wake up & I need to go back to bed after being up 6 hours cuz of how tired I'm feeling. However I then sleep for 4 hours but I then may stay up for over 24 hours after before I start feeling like I'm tired again.