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Most people need around 8. If you think you can get away with less on a long term basis, be careful as you may be causing permanent damage to your health. A DJ in the 60's tried no sleep for a week or two and ended up in a mental asylum.
Some people can do four hours a night plus power naps but they need to have the rare ability to get into the deep sleep regenerative theta state almost instantly, something most of us take an hour or more to do.
In a sleep lab test I read, where they put people in windowless rooms with no clocks, they seemed to stabilize after a few days and most automatically wake up after about 8-8.5 hours sleep.
Although it's hard to do this with most people's work/family schedule, an easy way to test is get the same amount of sleep every night for a week, say 6 hours. Then on Saturday morning or whatever your first "don't have to get up early" day is, sleep in with no alarm or phone or family/friends to wake you. If you wake up after more than 6 hours you will know that you have been robbing yourself and needed to catch up as Sagi mentioned.
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