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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.

Do you exercise most days? Do you at least a similar wake up\sleep time for a month? And another obvious about drink enough water\food?

All have a huge impact for me. I can go on much less sleep when I do hard exercise that day.

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.

I've done Starting Strength.

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)

Try radically changing your food intake (patterns and/or content). E.g., http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/12/interview-with... or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting ; When varying mine, I switch from periods of being a night owl to almost being a morning person, and from needing 8 hours to 6 hours (and also at different times - e.g. sometimes it's 2-9 am, sometimes it's 11pm to 6am)

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.

Is it similar to http://sleepyti.me/ ?

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 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'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!

Did you read the entire article?

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.

The following paragraph:

>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.

Do you use an alarm?