There’s an article on Quora asking “How can I determine what my personal basal sleep requirement is?” The short answer is 7-9 hours of sleep.

However there was an interesting answer that warrants some further thought:

Scientists have found a gene that seems to allow some of us to get as much sleep as we need in as little time as 6 hours. But only 3% of us have that gene. Most likely you’re in the other 97%. And if you’re getting less than 6 hours, you are building up a big “sleep debt” in your body even if you have got the gene.

I tracked down the paper from the lab of Ying-Hui Fu at UCSF. The paper, titled The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals, identifies a single mutation (a C to G DNA point mutation) on a gene that gives its carriers the ability to naturally wake-up earlier,as they require less sleep. The paper goes on to recapitulate the effects of this mutation in mice, because we can easily modify their genomes. The only issue, is that mice don’t really sleep the same way humans do.

Anyways, it’s interesting, because there are now technologies that can be used to easily screen for this mutation, as well as potentially edit the gene in humans. But at the same time, I’ll continue to enjoy my sleep.