Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Where did you get the gene number from? I don't see it mentioned in the article.
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.
In other words "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep." - http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/whentired.html
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.
Also a large lunch at a Mexican restaurant never hurts...
All have a huge impact for me. I can go on much less sleep when I do hard exercise that day.
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...
(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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-resear...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-one-ancestor-h...
Just providing feedback for the newer posters beyond a downvote.
Here's some information I mostly agree with: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
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.
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.
Not a method to use too often, of course.
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.
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.
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.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+mania
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.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+depression
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.
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...
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.
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.
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[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.
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?
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.
If I get enough sleep, I feel great, I get 3 times as much done and I run and swim like a champ (still).
I love to get enough sleep!!!! It simply feels great.
THAT is the 21st century I signed up for!
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.
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.
Staying up longer just increases the time you spent spending money and consuming stuff. Sleep is a cheap entertainment.
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
My 2c's worth.
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.
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.
The end effect is that I smashed a sleep cycle into a meditating session and essentially got polyphasic sleep.
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.
Not sure what that is, but I've never met anyone else who shares this trait.
http://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_g...
Me, I'm just an insomniac.