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M3 and average sleep needs

Significantly corrected

This article used to forget about vital deepening. It was not plain wrong as a result, but needed to be updated to reflect the fact that M3 is in fact not mathematically impossible outright, but rather that it depends very heavily on the individual compression and vital deepening abilities.

This still makes it impossible for a very large chunk of people.

If you’re an average person, you need between 7-9 hours of monophasic sleep, which contains on average between 90-120 minutes of slow wave sleep, and 90-120 minutes of REM. Together this accounts for an average of 210m of vital sleep (vital meaning necessary), which is more than the base M3 core’s length.

The average person cannot easily reduce their light-sleep percentage below 50-20%, meaning that if you achieve the (highly unlikely) minimum of 20%, you’d need to fit 210m of vitals into the remaining 144m of core sleep, which is obviously not mathematically possible, even with extreme deepening.

With high quality naps containing vitals (which not everyone can even get), another 30-90% of 60min of total nap time can be achieved, which is about 20 to 55 minutes. This leaves you with 210min of vitals needing to fit in 100-144min of core plus 20-55min of naps, resulting in a total range of 120-200 minutes of vitals. This makes it still impossible numerically, but deepening can make the upper end (probably 180 ish and up) work.

In short: Requirements