I emailed the researcher, whose address was at the end of the article with the appropriate gene data (BHLHE41 on Chromosome 12) to see if my DNA is a match. The article said its a mutation, but maybe those with the mutation exhibit a certain codon pair. Its an amazing time when you can read an article about such a thing, and then cross check your DNA in a matter of seconds. Articles will have to start posting the raw DNA for results.
Adding to this, what are the potential ramifications of having accessed this data in terms of seeking health/life/other insurance? It seems a range of these services give insight into risk factors that I imagine insurers might not look favourably upon (given they're typically not able to do such screening themselves)...
I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits.
As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again.
Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nights but the results are that I feel worse in the morning, and each night I attempt to sleep 8 hours waking up gets harder and harder.
Over the years I've developed a few theories as to why I need less sleep than is recommended and someday when I get around to finishing my EEG project I'll gather some data to back them up, but for now I'm just making the most out of the extra time I have the same way someone with a different biological advantage might.
I will also mention that (as mentioned elsewhere here) there are definitely people at the other end of this curve who's performance is shockingly better if they get more than the "required" 8 hours of sleep per night, and I believe that we could all benefit by recognizing this fact and adjusting our cultural expectations to accommodate these patterns as well. I think with a little flexibility on both ends we'd see a significant increase in overall productivity and quality of life.
For me, If I get all the sleep I want, I'm lethargic and unenergetic, but if I get less sleep I'm tired all day (but strangely more energetic). It's like there's no happy medium. I wonder if anyone else has this problem, and if there's a solution.
Re: Hard Exercise - Bizarre. I work a mostly sedentary silicon valley lifestyle, with the addition of 2-3 miles walking a day, and typically get 5-6 hours of sleep a night, going to bed around 2:00 - 3:00 AM and getting up around 9:00 AM.
Recently, though, I started a linear progress novice strength training program (Squats, Dead Lift, Bench Press, Overhead Press) - three times a week for 40 minutes. My sleep patterns immediately shifted, and I am incapable of waking up without at least 8 hours of sleep on off days, and 10 hours of sleep on the days that I lift heavy.
For the first time in my life, ever, I'm finding myself going to bed at 10:00 PM at night so that I can get up by 8:00 AM the next morning.
Starting Strength is raw lifts involving the entire muscle toolchain until you can't do anymore. It works your body in a total, basic way that most Americans haven't ever done.
So you'll be sleeping alot as your body gets used to it. You'll notice incredible increases in everyday strength--as if the entire world, including you, lost a significant fraction of its mass over the course of a few months--and the desire for sleep will subside.
Of course, I still have my original sleep problem...
You need that sleep for your body to repair and build itself up. What you'll find though is as your growth slows down (or if you shift to endurance work) the amount of repair your body needs to recover at night drops, your fitness has shot up, and the more fit you are the less you need of everything.
(except potentially food. You are a little more efficient at processing food, but if you develop a large amount of muscle you need a lot of food to maintain it)
Experimenting with yourself is cheap, interesting and rewarding. Not always easy, but definitely worth trying.
Also, read Seth Roberts at http://sethroberts.net/self-experiment/ - he (and his reader) report about a lot of experiments regarding sleep and mood; among those I remember: - eating lots of animal fat (bacon and/or butter) improves sleep. Standing on one leg for extended periods of time improves sleep (probably the easiest way to fatigue yourself into sleeping).
I am a light sleeper but hard workouts really help me go into a deep sleep and not wake up at every little noise. They also make me want to sleep an extra hour.
We're actually working on this problem over at WakeMate.
Basically the solution is to sleep just enough to accumulate the number of sleep cycles you need to feel rested. We're building a tool to tell our users what that length of time is. I'll write up a post on the thought process/science behind it and put it up tomorrow.
I'm just like that. I can sleep for 10 hours but I wake up feeling rested but lethargic.
There seems to be a sweet spot where I'm rested enough (but not lethargic) and with a good energy level. The sweet spot seems to be between 7 and 7.5 hours.
I've had a similar thing happen. Basically, if I stay off the caffeine enough to sleep all through the night without waking up, I'll wake up naturally after around 7 hours of sleep. At this point I'm still a little foggy and I can easily fall back asleep or lounge in bed for 20min or a few hours. If I do that, like you said, I'll be lethargic.
So basically I have to moderate caffeine (for me it is every other day at most and none after 3pm) and get up as soon as I first wake. When I'm very good about no caffeine, regular exercise, and near-perfect diet I require less sleep. Kind of hard to maintain that level of discipline, though. So it's usually 7 hours a night.
I'm in a similar situation, but I haven't always been like that. I linked it to stress (in the broadest sense) - very occasionally I get a great night's sleep if I'm completely relaxed and happy. However, eliminating stress to this degree just doesn't seem feasible. My optimum amount of sleep is 8 hours, and even a half hour either way has a very noticeable (negative) effect. However, a lot of the time even sleeping exactly 8 hours doesn't work well. I really wish I could find a solution!
Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.
Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
>To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.
While I think it's over-diagnosed, ADD is an excellent example here. When it was first getting attention, people being diagnosed were rarities. That skyrocketed when more people were watching for it. Similarly, stress, nervous, and depression disorders once actual treatments appeared, and there was a reason to get diagnosed and treated.
I've had a similar experience, since I hit my teenage years I rarely sleep more than just a few hours a night. At that time I would typically sleep 3-4 hours a night, and then really crash on the weekends. But as I got older I needed less and less weekend sleep. Whenever I try to go to bed earlier or sleep in to get close to 8 hours (even for extended periods of time) I find that I'm just as tired, if not more so than if I had gotten less sleep.
The only thing that I've found does make a difference is a short nap in the middle of the day, I find 1/2 hour in the day can easily make up for several hours at night. But that's where the cultural problem is, I've had office jobs where I could get away with taking a nap, but it would still be frowned upon, which is always a bit sad since it make it clear that many offices cultures would prefer the illusion of busy-ness over actual increased production.
Absolutely, if I can go "lights out" for 30 minutes during the day (between 1:00pm and 2:00pm works best for me) I can eliminate the need for the "catch-up" sleep.
I've tried this but I am unable to fall asleep unless I'm extremely tired (and I do mean very tired, one night without sleep is not enough). How do you fall asleep within half an hour?
I remove myself from my "work" situation (when I worked a rigidly scheduled job, I'd take a drive to a nearby park) and just lay back and relax. If the weather is cooperative having the car windows down and some nature sounds to listen to seem to help but I imagine listening to anything that you don't have direct control over (as opposed to music, other forms of entertainment, etc.) would work.
Also a large lunch at a Mexican restaurant never hurts...
You may not actually need to sleep. I find that just lying down for 30-60 minutes in a dark, quiet room provides ~80% of the 'recovery' value of a real nap.
The problem of "when hungry, eat. When tired, sleep" is:
In modern societies, our inner evolutionary traits still work, but the environment changed. For example, some food are more satisfying than others, and we feel less full when we indeed have enough (sugar/fat for example). The same is true for "tiredness". With TVs, iPads and mattresses, we may well be tired but we just cannot feel it strong enough. The distortion may be the single biggest problem for modern people IMHO.
Yes you make a good point (one I have experienced myself). I spent a lot of time as a teenager learning to become aware of the subtle signs your body gives you to indicate what it needs to remain balanced (I got these exercises from a Marine hand-to-hand combat booklet if you can imagine). It takes practice and discipline (and it's easy to overlook when you're busy) but it is possible to "tune-in" to these subtle signals.
It also helps to remove yourself from "modern society" now and again. A few days in the woods away from artificial stimulus goes a long way in this regard.
The problem with "when hungry, eat", is that hunger is not really a good indicator for sustenance needs for humans. Living in western countries, we are surrounded by easily obtainable and addictive foods and nutrients. If we let hunger control our eating, especially in this kind of environment, most people tend to over-eat. Combined with recent results that caloric restriction and potentially intermittent fasting may be very healthy choices, I think it might be likely that hunger is really a maladaptation in modern society.
I do fully agree with the part "When tired, sleep". Unfortunately it is very hard to apply if I also want to maintain a working home-life with a significant other that has a different sleep-pattern.
This reminds me of the studies not too long about how some very small percentage of the population actually CAN multitask well. Then a very large percentage of the population used that as "evidence" to justify their existing habits. I see it here already.
It may be that the subject peaks the interest of those of us that experience a shorter sleep cycle and therefore it draws more comments from that minority. I have what I call insomnia but what I experience parallels the article. I don't know that I am a short-sleeper but I sleep 2-4 a night and if I get 4 I seem to be fine. It is hard for me to sleep. That being said, I suck at multitasking so if and article comes up about multitasking it does not raise my interest.
I think it's obvious what we must do next. According to every science fiction film or book I've ever read, we must capture them, confine them and study them in an attempt to learn their secrets and duplicate it in everyone else.
As a bit of a lesson from someone with HN experience to the new HNers downvoted below: your jokes are (a) bad, and (b) off-topic. Parent was off-topic as well, but he was funny.
Just providing feedback for the newer posters beyond a downvote.
I think you're partly right, but I also suspect they may have been downvoted to quell any "piling on". Repeated jokes on the same theme have diminishing returns.
Well said. Not just diminishing returns either, but scrolling past a comment branch full of "It's just a flesh wound!" or some other oblique reference is irritating.
Even a small differential in reproductive rates would lead to a rapid increase in the prevalence of the trait. Just look at the example of blue eyes -- 15000 years ago nobody had them and now nearly 7% if the world's population do.
Do people with blue eyes reproduce more? I've not heard that before. I thought the ratio of blue to not blue eyes was due to the whole dominant/recessive gene thing (do I mean gene, or maybe allele? a long time since I learned this stuff at school).
Of course the trait was advantageous either in terms of natural selection, or more likely sexual selection. All the blue eyed people on earth can be traced back to a single ancestor living in the black sea region about 10,000 years ago. It is a recessive trait, but allele frequencies don't magically increase just because a trait is recessive. Without selection pressure, the ratio of blue eyed people would not have kept increasing after the emergence of the mutation.
If not requiring a lot of sleep has an advantage in our society (which presumably it does) then all else being equal, a non-sleeper will produce more offspring. This is just evolution 101.
That's only true for women. And it doesn't mean that there aren't still evolutionary incentives for women. If they are successful because they don't need to sleep, they can probably find a better mate (which will lead to an evolutionary advantage of the no-sleep gene long term).
It's a false dichotomy, on a lot of hard problems progress is a step function, and you often "get much done" while sleeping. I.e. when you wake up well rested you see things from a different angle. If it's something like chopping wood, sure, the less you sleep the more wood you chop, within reasonable limits, but I don't think that is what these articles aim for. I think it's wrong to look at sleep as a waste of time the same way time spent thinking about something is not wasted either.
I think that you are missing the fact that short-sleepers wake up well-rested, even though their sleep-time is much shorter and would not suffice to give us normals enough rest.
I'm not sure if there has been any actual studies that show that longer sleep-times given ad-libitum sleeping is more effective in helping the brain process more information during the sleep phase.
You are right, I'm not aware of any such study either. What I meant is just that there is no need to feel guilty for whatever amount of sleep feels right, regardless of what society says in the name of efficiency and productivity. It's ok to enjoy sleeping.
There has been a link to depression and too much sleep so much so that sleep deprivation is used as a treatment for depression where other treatments fail. It actually puts the patient into a manic episode.
It was peculiar to note that people who are short-sleepers also share a slight manic trait in their personality. While the article makes short-sleep cycles out to look like all sunshine and roses it is not all it is cracked up to be. I get between 2 and 4 hours sleep a night and on a good night I get 6. I have to monitor the sleep I am getting because if I allow myself to fall into a cycle of 2 hours for an extended time I start to have problems with my heart and abnormal rhythms. If the > 4 hours cycle goes on for more than a week I have to start taking medicine to sleep to ensure that my body is receiving an adequate amount of sleep. I see no negative effects if I get 4-6 a night, but it is probably safe to assume that short-sleep cycles rides the line between good and bad health. I never considered myself a short sleeper I just figured I have insomnia but never worried too much about it because I feel no different if I get 4 or 8 hours of sleep a night (if I can get 8) and the fact that my father and grandfather shares the trait and are healthy (grandfather is almost 90) . On the plus side, I experience more life and get more done which are really the only benefits to sleeping less.
I'm very curious about this, because I know that if I don't have something regularly scheduled for morning or early afternoon I tend to sink into depression, and now I'm wondering if I could perhaps be getting too much sleep. I had thought it was either a) getting sleep at the wrong times (I'll tend to stay awake later each night) and thus missing out on sunlight, or b) that regularity itself prevented my depression. This would also explain it, though.
I don't ordinarily sleep a lot, so I doubt that I could be getting too much sleep on a regular basis. And my mood doesn't ordinarily seem to be affected by how much I sleep or when I go to sleep.
The best way I can describe the effect is that for me it's like hitting a "reset" button in my brain. At first there's the tiredness and irritability that always go with not sleeping, but eventually I get a "second wind" and I feel normal, calm, and content. This generally lasts the whole rest of the day, until I fall asleep again.
The sleep deprivation treatment for depression used by some doctors in the '70s involved either total deprivation or waking the patients up around midnight, so that they slept only a few hours. I think I read that both worked equally well, but I have only tried the former. And as far as I know, nobody has figured out why it works for so many people.
I sometimes do it too. If I consistently sleep for about 4 hours max for 3 or 4 days, my mood will start improving. If I then take a mild stimulant like caffeine (or music with a high BPM) I reach a state that is close to euphoria, lasting several hours. My guess is that there is some genetics involved.It's never been hard for me to become manic for a short period of time.
"A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. 'These people talk fast. They never stop. They're always on the up side of life,' says Dr. Buysse."
Reduction in sleep is a known symptom of abnormally elevated mood, whether hypomania (elevated mood without psychotic symptoms) or mania (elevated mood with psychotic symptoms). For most normal subjects, as has been demonstrated by studies of unusual sleep patterns in armed forces personnel, reduced hours of sleep or disrupted daily sleep cycles seriously degrade performance of many tasks involving judgment or multitasking--without the subject of the experiment being aware of the degraded performance.
Note that controlled reduction of sleep has been shown experimentally to elevate the mood of depressed persons. In other words, if a person has had a prolonged period of depressed mood, and begins reducing hours of sleep (especially if a light box turns on to help the person wake up on time in the morning), that can bring the person closer to normal mood.
Following up on the interesting comment posted first by mechanical_fish, there surely is a range of variation of "natural" human need for sleep, with most people concentrated in a band of needing approximately seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and some few needing significantly less, and some few needing significantly more. But social pressure and environmental conditions for sleep induction (electric lights in the evening) in current society probably result in most people getting less sleep than what they need to perform at their best when awake and to maintain good health.
If you don't feel rested after 7 hours you probably should make an effort to sleep an extra hours. You will be more productive and happy in 16 hours after a good sleep, than in 17 sleep-deprived hours.
I've always wondered if this was mostly a psychological issue.
There are two circumstances in which I get less than 7 hours of sleep a night: if I'm really stressed about getting something done, or if I'm really excited about getting something done.
In the first place the lack of sleep exacerbates the stress and really starts to weigh on me. But in the second case it doesn't seem to have much negative effect.
Now if only I could continuously keep my motivation up...
Damn you, science! I’ve read so many studies saying there’s absolutely no way you can get by without at least 7 hours sleep and now you tell me that that completely doesn’t apply to 1-3% of the population?! That’s actually not that small of a percentage. How big were the sample sizes of all the other studies? Did nobody encounter at least one of these low-sleep requiring people? Maybe they were just eliminated as being an anomaly.
I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.
This is fantastic research, I just wish it had been around 10 years ago.
I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.
Don't. If you insist on only giving advice that applies to 100% of the world you'll never say anything useful at all.
I'm sure the studies do encounter these people. But studies use statistics. These people are on the far edge of the bell curve. The mean [1] is probably around 7-9 hours. But just because the far edge of the bell curve has very few samples in it doesn't mean that those samples don't exist, nor that someone is "hiding" them.
Which reminds me: What this article does not talk about is the other side of the bell curve: The folks who need considerably more than 7-9 hours of sleep to attain peak performance and happiness. Or maybe those people don't exist, because the "bell curve" is actually a bimodal distribution, or cliff-shaped, or something. We could tell if there was any actual data here, or a link to the actual data and published science -- we could look at the shape of the distribution. But this is an article by a science journalist, so naturally it is nigh-useless.
I wonder why the article doesn't talk about the "long sleepers"? Probably because the sleep researcher quoted herein is correct: There are more people who like to believe that they only need four hours' sleep than there are actual people who thrive on less sleep. And I'm sure that no Wall Street Journal wants to learn that they might really need twelve hours sleep.
---
[1] I actually have no idea if the "7-9 hour" rule of thumb is based on a mean, a median, or a mode. Pity that nobody ever links to the original research.
I suspect the problem with studying "long sleepers" is that the number of people who need, say, 12 hours of sleep "legitimately" is dominated by the number of people who need 12 hours of sleep due to a health issue, making them hard to identify and study. I've done the 12+ hours of sleep thing when I was a teenager, and only much later did I learn the health issue it was trying to tell me about.
I'd say you're probably right. I usually only need 8 hrs sleep, but when I'm sick, for example, I often find myself easily sleeping for 12+ hours (like this morning, oops! :).
The 1-3% at the top of the article doesn't actually tally up with the rest of what is said:
Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do
So just 5% of people who believe they're short sleepers. Do 50% of people believe they're short sleepers, as I've not met many.
To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers
So that 5% was based on just 20 people...
That sounds a lot less than 1-3% to me. And then when you apply that context of such a small test group the article then also sounds like a lot of wild speculation. Will they burn out? Does it last forever?
I did 4-hour nights of sleep for a year, mainly because I didn't like my job, so was trying to maximise my time outside of work. It's possible, but you lose the ability to think properly without realising it, and in my case, every few months I got intense headaches that only stopped when I was in darkness - presumably a migraine? Anyway, I really don't recommend it.
Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says.
The article didn't mention this, but the ability to wake up regularly without an alarm clock is probably another commonality short sleepers have. Although < 7 hours isn't something I can do regularly, I can't stay in bed, even if I'm a little tired, much past 6 AM on any day of the week.
"People need less sleep as they get older" is something I've heard a lot, but don't know. Sleep patterns seem pretty ingrained, and people with weird sleeping patterns tend to be either hardcore early birds (me) or unapologetic night owls.
Could you maybe get some kind of approximation of color by holding up different colored filters in front of your eyes to filter out all but that color? It works for space probes :)
Is this few-hours sleep business feasible when you need to think deeply about abstract things during the day, eg. programming? I can see it working if your success is tied to being energetic, on the ball, constantly negotiating, acting on information or leading lots of people. But what if you need to do the analysis yourself?
In my case I've had this issue (advantage?) since childhood, where I vacillate between both states in 2 week blocks - 2 weeks at a time where I'll get 7-8 hours, and 2 weeks where I get approx half as much. In the latter case I simply don't get naturally tired. But it does eventually catch up to me, and then all of a sudden - bam!, I'm tired one night and naturally fall asleep say at 10pm every night.
What I've found is with the poor sleep cycles I tend to be more energetic and get to solutions quicker. If the problem requires deep thinking, I can focus on the problem at hand much better, but at the same time I can make many superficial mistakes. The best I can say is it's a bit like being in a minor psychedelic state all the time, where the creative pathways of my mind are more open with a manic desire to latch onto something interesting. It also exacerbates my Asperger's-like condition. OTOH, if I am in the design process and building a piece a software that requires high conceptual integrity getting more sleep is certainly beneficial.
I've been writing code for over 10 years and have been functioning on between 4 and 6 hours of sleep a night and have been quite successful. Not saying I'm one of the 'elite' either just my personal experience.
To me, it gives the following data: that there are a significant number of people who can sleep short hours, that there's at least one identifiable genetic factor that might possibly cause it in a couple of cases, and that there are researchers working on this (and soliciting information from "short sleepers"). It fails to deliver on its subtitle: "Why".
I used to know one of these short sleepers. He had never felt the need to sleep more than about two hours per night, and did so for his whole life (which was respectably long, no noticeable side-effects from the exceptionally short sleep). He used a lot of the extra time to run a small local business, interact with customers during the day and do the administration during the night.
No sleep is a feat I could pull off regularly when I was younger. It was no problem to go 48-72 hours without more than just a catnap or two. That was a decade ago. In my early thirties, I struggle beyond the sixteenth hour, except for rare occasions.
Fortunately, I think it's a sort of bell curve. From what I understand, I'm only about fifteen or twenty years away only getting a couple hours of sleep per night. How productive sleepless nights full of trips to the bathroom will be, I have no idea. I guess I'll finally catch up on all that damn reading.
I sleep 2am to 7am most days and keep myself busy so much that I sometimes go to 3:30am before forcing myself to sleep. Sleep time happens within 3-5 mins after going to bed - according to my WakeMate.
I think alot of this is due to a busy lifestyle. I find myself doing multiple things at the same time in the evening and being very productive in getting stuff done. While on holidays where I actually disconnect from work I find I sleep long hours each day.
An afternoon 20 min powernap is an amazing recharge! Everyone should do it. Using Paul McKenna's audio helps with the powernap. There's something weird about the hypnotic audio. Instantly puts me to sleep.
Finally, supposedly the need to nap in the afternoon is normal and every animal in the kingdom does it. Humans has largely forgotten about this clock due to the "working culture". In the book Brain Rules, this is described in more detail: http://www.brainrules.net/sleep
Not saying that I'm one of the sleepless elite, but I seem to function best on 6 hours of sleep a day. Whenever I try to sleep more I just feel tired all day and when I sleep less ... well that depends on how much less.
For optimum energivity I find an hour of sleep is best, just enough to reset your cycle. But you can't do this more than once at a time, the next day the whole 6 hours are needed.
Don't have any idea why I'm like this, but I'm told that even as a baby I would often lie in bed for hours before finally falling asleep and as a toddler I would wake up at 5am because I was put to bed so early. Nowadays a healthy 4am to 10am schedule seems best.
Oh and anyone who doesn't want to sleep as much as they should, meditation is a great way of doing it. I managed to shave 2 hours off of my daily sleep need with 10 minutes of meditation ... so essentially I averaged 4 hours a day, for something like 5 years before I got out of the meditating habit for varying reasons.
Oh and anyone who doesn't want to sleep as much as they should, meditation is a great way of doing it. I managed to shave 2 hours off of my daily sleep need with 10 minutes of meditation ... so essentially I averaged 4 hours a day, for something like 5 years before I got out of the meditating habit for varying reasons.
OK, I'll match your anecdote with one of my own. I meditate 40 minutes per day, and it hasn't shaved a minute off of my sleep time. I average 8 hours of sleep per night, substantially more on the weekends when I can get it.
This is likely due to different meditation techniques, mine is particular in that it is essentially lucid dreaming. When I actively practiced it took me 30 seconds to go into REM stage and stay in there for as much time as I felt like it.
The end effect is that I smashed a sleep cycle into a meditating session and essentially got polyphasic sleep.
When I stayed in a zen monastery a while back, I averaged 6 hours of sleep a night, and always felt refreshed, but out in the regular world, even with daily meditation, I need about 8 hours of sleep. So I think that the environment and meditation techniques must play a part.
Mostly just falling out of the habit. Getting a girlfriend meant that I could no longer meditate every night (it feels weird with people watching) and as holes appeared in my schedule they eventually grew until I stopped completely.
I think the level of sleep I need depends on what I'm working on. When I was working on a business with my friends, I'd only sleep for 4 hours or so a day. Whereas when I was working a job I hated, I was exhausted unless I slept 9-10 hours a night. I think sleep requirements are a function of brain activity and engagement. It's just a theory but it seems to be true, at least in my case. Another theory I have relates to the sleep schedules of people. I'm nocturnal. I have been since I was 8 years old. And when I was working with my friends, it was at night. So I wonder if nite people need more sleep to function during the day like morning people need more to work nights?
I question how much "work" someone that fits this really gets accomplished. I can run on limited sleep for weeks at a time and am more energized, but throw me at something mentally challenging like Quantum Physics or Solving some Linear Systems model, and it's like my brain says it needs time to process everything, so I end up sleeping absurd amounts. (I also find I make significant headway the next day after that kind of sleep)
I have to admit that I'm a bit confused here. 7-9 hours seems to be the "normal recommended" range, and under 6 hours puts you in the short sleepers category. What does 6-7 make you? Irrelevant to the research?
Many people make the mistake of oversleeping on the weekend and undersleeping on working days. I try to average 6.5hrs every night, weekend or no weekend. Just being consistent really helps in keeping the energy levels up imo.
Given that the trait is genetic and extremely advantageous, why doesn't a much larger portion of the population have it? Is there a significant downside?
Maybe no downside in these modern times but perhaps back when we still lived in caves and only had fire and a full moon now and then to light our ways I can imagine them short sleepers to be quite bored out of their skulls.
The primary function of sleep is to permanently store the things learned during the day (long-term potentiation). Although different people need different amounts of sleep, those who need less usually find that they sleep longer if they learn challenging new material (e.g. a new language). That is the reason why babies sleep the most. Their brains are empty sponges constantly absorbing new information.
Check out my new app coming to the App Store. It's called MultiSnooze. It's the ultimate alarm clock app. It allows you to press the snooze button multiple times as soon as you determine that you are going to be pressing it more than once anyway. Now you don't have to keep waking up. Roll over and sleep peacefully with MultiSnooze. multisnooze.com for details. Thanks for looking.
> Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I think I could sleep 20 hours if given the chance, but I routinely will sleep until 7am regardless of when I go to bed. If its 10pm or 4am. I just wake up at 7am, I'm super sleepy still, but more hungry. So I have to wake up, make some cereal and then I'm up.
Not sure what that is, but I've never met anyone else who shares this trait.
Hmmm.. Something I would think I could relate to, but we all know (a) how easy it is to convince yourself/diagnose yourself with something, and (b) how we would all love to consider ourselves from this group. So I'll just let this make me smile a little and leave it that :)
My boss is exactly like this - sleeps a tiny bit, has ridiculous amounts of energy and enthusiasm, and loves to deal with the world in a flurry of stimuli and decisions.
I used to need very little sleep. Unfortunately, it was because my thyroid was overactive. As soon as I went to a doctor and got it taken care of, I became a normal sleeper.
