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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In general unhealthy people need more sleep than healthy people. Removing a factor of stress for your body can reduce sleep needs.
I suppose I should have been more explicit than just to use the wording "in the past it's always seemed"; I'm not comparing how much I sleep now to how much I slept while I was clearly less healthy, that wouldn't be a weird thing I'd need to ask about. I'm comparing to about a year ago, when my condition was about the same as it is now.
The effect seems to be [slightly unhealthy, sleeping 8-9 hours a night] -> [very unhealthy, sleeping 8-9 hours a night with frequent interruptions] -> [slightly unhealthy, sleeping 7-8 hours a night]. And I'm not sure what my priors should be for whether that's actually what's happened.
How old are you? If you are 18-25 years old, you are still physiologically completing the transition from adolescence to adulthood, which means at some point your circadian rhythm will "shorten" and you'll start tending towards early to bed / early to rise, with both a shorter natural sleep phase and a shorter natural awake phase.
I noticed it happening to me pretty suddenly - my sleep patterns noticeably changed sometime during college despite no major lifestyle change. I wouldn't be surprised if dramatic changes can happen within a year. As far as I know it's permanent!
The nasty downside is that, whereas the adolescent body would refuse to sleep on time but once asleep continued sleeping even until noon and I always woke up refreshed, the adult body has no problem sleeping early but will wake up at a set certain time and refuse to go back to sleep, regardless of whether I'm well rested or how late I went to sleep. So on adult-mode I actually have to go to sleep on time if I want a productive day tomorrow, which was never an issue for me in adolescent-mode. "Going to bed too late" becomes equivalent to "waking up too early".
So, if you buy the circadian explanation, then don't take "waking up naturally" as a sure sign that you've slept enough!
I'm 21, so I was considering something like that as the most likely alternative hypothesis, and the extra details about waking up are also consistent with what I've noticed, so yeah it's probably that.