Hopefully the results of good sleep are enough of a motivator for you to maintain these good habits and protect one of you most valuable health assets of all: your sleep.  Sleep is a holistic, passive process and so we were reluctant to set out specific goals for fear that you may get too focused on them and create anxiety that could be disruptive to your sleep.  This being said, our main goal should be to eliminate or substantially reduce daytime drowsiness.  Remember, we are not using overall energy level here.  Lack of energy or fatigue is a complex symptom that has a great many causes and is well beyond the scope of this book.  We do sometimes see imnprovements in energy level when our patients start sleeping better, but this is not the goal.  Instead the goal is to ensure adequate sleep by looking specifically at feeling sleepy.  If that improvement in sleepiness during the day is associated with a solid 8 hours of high quality sleep then all the better.  This amount is ideal and getting it is most closely associated with metabolic improvement, but it is not necessary to get this amount to get much of the benefit of sleep. Goals Epworth Score Less than 10:  If the score started out at less than 10, you could target a score several points lower than your starting score and use that as your goal. 8 Hours of Sleep Nightly:  Most people at any age, need about 8 hours of sleep.  We often see people who claim they simply need less, but often those are the same people who feel much better when they get the proper amounts.  Less than 6 hours of sleep nightly is strongly associated with heart disease and poor metabolism. ​ High Quality Sleep Nightly:  The Oura ring uses a sleep score that has a pretty good correlation with overall sleep quality and mental clarity the next day.  We find that most patients that score above the 70s feel pretty good after that night of sleep.