He or she might start by checking your weight and height, as well as your blood pressure and maybe your temperature. 1  Blood pressure: This shows how hard your heart is pumping blood throughout your body. A cuff that gets tighter and tighter on your arm is used to measure this.
And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.
The average adult needs about seven to nine hours of sleep each night, according to the National Sleep Foundation, but most of us don't even get that much. But getting too little sleep -- generally understood to mean six hours or less a night -- can be serious -- enough to change your genes.