Most people don't have a measurement that objective. After I stopped playing chess so much in college, I even caught myself trying to excuse my poor sleep habits by telling myself I wasn't falling asleep in lectures and I could still finish my homework.
300 ELO points between 2 players means that the higher rates one wins about 9 out of 10 games against the lower rates one. A huge difference in performance.
The people I know who sleep 5-6 hours a night consistently have been doing it for a very long time and describe the feeling of sleeping 8 hours the same way I would describe sleeping 13 hours. Just feeling slow and almost like being sleep deprived all day.
60-minute games made the same apparent to me. Instantaneous drops and rises, solely resulting from sleep (or the lack thereof).
Then when my sleep went back up as my son got older, I had that moment of, "holy crap I forgot what rested felt like. This is amazing. I actually want to go for a pointless walk!"
If anything, prepare with more exercise and getting your sleep habits as consistent as possible.
100% this. If you habitually get poor sleep it becomes your new normal and you forget what it's like to be well rested. I used to get between 3 and 6 hours per night for years and my cognitive skills plummeted. At one point I switched to getting 8 hours per night and problems which previously seemed extremely difficult became trivially easy almost immediately.
And this can be deceptive if the whole effect happens more than once. Suppose you really need 8 hours of sleep but have habitually been getting only 6 for a long time, and that has become your baseline for reference. Then something happens and you're only getting 4 or 5 hours instead for a while, and you feel obviously worse. After some time that effect reverts and you're back to getting 6 hours, and relatively speaking, you feel great! See what a difference it makes when you get enough sleep in a night! But in reality, you still aren't...
Except, people want to believe they are outliers. So no matter how rare you explain that it actually is- well, everybody else is delusional. But me, ME, I really am the outlier! I'm special!
Or you could look at them as people at the forefront of evolution, leading us to a future where we need less sleep.
Even if it is a positive evolutionary trait, that doesn't help anybody today. The 4 hour sleepers are still outliers, and the rest of us still need that sleep to operate at full capability.
>some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep.
Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Congratulations if you're one of them, but your genetic gift doesn't make the need for sleep any less real for the rest of us, and talk about these outliers is mostly a distraction.
>I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level?
>Right. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived.
To me that's a great analogy. Most people can grasp the concept of having a problem and dealing/coping/adapting so long that they don't realize they have the problem. It makes sense that this phenomenon can apply to sleep as well.
Intellectually, I know I need to consistently sleep longer. If only knowing that and then acting on it were an easier gap to bridge (as I write this just past midnight...).