Okay, you aren't getting right to sleep at night. You are twisting and turning. You look at the clock every five minutes. Do you have insomnia? Maybe you do, but maybe you don't.

Sleep is relative. Every person does not require the same number of hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. Just like we don't all require the same amount of food or water, we don't all require the same amount of sleep either.

Albert Einstein slept four hours each night. That was simply all of the sleep that he required. He didn't want or need more than four hours of sleep out of each 24-hour day. There are those, however, who require 12 hours of sleep in order to function at their top level. Actually, the average number of hours of sleep required for peak physical and mental performance has been estimated at 7.75 hours. That's pretty close to the recognized eight hours of sleep that most people believe that they need.

The true test of how much sleep a person actually needs is whether they get sleepy during the day or not. If you get five hours of sleep and don't feel sleepy during the day, then you do not have insomnia. You are getting all of the sleep that your body requires to function well. The simple solution is just to schedule five hours of sleep and quit thinking you aren't sleeping well those other three hours that you've been told that you need, because you really don't need them. Do something constructive instead of tossing and turning and trying to get sleep that your body doesn't require. Go with the flow, so to speak.

We all have internal chemical clocks that dictate when we are awake and when we are asleep. These clocks determine the amount of sleep that each of us requires in order to operate efficiently during our waking hours, and all of our clocks are not set the same way.