So, This Senator Gets 10 Hours Of Sleep a Night...

Is sleep envy a real thing? Because we kind of have it right now.

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made a surprising revelation in a new interview published on Friday: She gets 10 hours of sleep a night.

“If I get to stay home and don’t have to work, I pretty much go to bed after the kids do, so I’m in bed by 9, 9:30,” she tells Lena Dunham’s Lenny newsletter. “Maybe I’ll read a book for half an hour then fall asleep. But that’s my day. I try to get a lot of sleep.”

The 48-year-old senator also says she wakes up at 7 a.m. giving her, on average, about 10 hours of sleep a night.

Gillibrand’s sleep schedule is surprising, given that the average American adult gets just 6.8 hours of sleep a night — less than the National Sleep Foundation’s recommendation of seven to nine hours per night. However, the foundation says that 10 hours “may be appropriate” for an adult Gillibrand’s age.

Gillibrand has had a successful political career and currently serves on several committees in the U.S. Senate. In 2014, the same year her memoir was published and landed on several best-seller lists, she was listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people.

Will getting 10 hours of sleep a night make us all that productive?

Related: Your Body After a Night of Not-Enough Sleep

Not exactly, board-certified sleep medicine doctor and neurologist W. Christopher Winter, MD, of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, tells Yahoo Health.

“That’s a lot of sleep,” he says. “Not everybody can even do it.” While some adults actually do function well on that amount of sleep, Winter says they’re outliers.

John W. Winkelman MD, PhD, chief, of the Sleep Disorders Clinical Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital tells Yahoo Health that there’s a large variation in how much sleep each individual needs, which also varies by age group.

And, he says, trying to get more sleep than you actually need can cause sleep problems.

“Some people feel that they need as much sleep as they did when they were younger, and consequently are trying to get too much sleep,” he says. “They can spend too much time in bed trying to get that much sleep and end up frustrated by their inability to maintain sleep for those long periods of time.” As a result, he says, they can develop anxiety about their sleep, which can evolve into insomnia.

Related: Grumpy Mess in the Morning? This Specific Sleep Pattern May Be to Blame

Both experts say you should gauge how much sleep you need based on how you feel the next day (provided you’re not suffering from a sleep disorder), as well as how long it takes for you to fall asleep.

“If it takes you 30 or 40 minutes to fall asleep, the last thing you should do is add on more sleep,” says Winter. “But if you get in bed and fall asleep in 30 seconds, that might indicate that you should get more sleep.”

While Gillibrand’s 10 hours sound like a dream, Winter stresses that it’s important to listen to your own body. If you wake up feeling well rested after a seven-hour snooze, you’re doing something right. Adds Winter: “You know if you need more sleep or not.”