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.
How to figure out how much sleep you really need. In theory, sleep takes up about 8 out of every 24 hours, one-third of our lives. But many of us don't actually sleep that much and are tired all the time â more than a third of Americans don't get the seven to nine hours of sleep a night that the CDC recommends. Yet we spend additional time worrying about our sleep.