How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Surely eye patches can not replace melatonin for all cases where melatonin is used as a treatment.
I recently went camping in the Lake District, and as the camp sites were very dark at 10pm I went to bed, and as the tent starting getting hot at 8am I got up.
I felt great for it.
For me, I think my body needs a routine. Shame I can't get into that routine at home, despite trying.
Part of the reason I spend more time in my own basement than any other room of the house is that it's dark down here (I've covered up the windows with blackout fabric) and it's very quiet. I don't hear the neighbor cleaning his RV or someone mowing their yard or loud cars going past.
I know it's unhealthy, but I don't really know of another solution (and from what I understand, it isn't enough to have a schedule - but you need to have a schedule where you're awake during the day and getting sunlight).
It was really strange to spend four hours writing, say from 6am, then sleep 10-2pm, get up for another four hours, sleep 6-10pm etc. Not sustainable, but was an interesting experience to have. Gave me an insight into how screwed up shift workers can get, too.
That experience taught me something very important, sleep is crucial. When you are tired you get tunnel vision and all you want to do is complete your task. The long term effects of this on your start up is that you loose the edge to be innovative while trying to solve problems.
One thing we learned the hard way is that following a method from a book is not enough -- you need a professional to guide you through this. There are many pitfalls you don't know about that will lead to failure, and you wont even realize what it is you're doing wrong. Good luck!
One important observation is that children who depend on external aids for falling asleep -- like cradling, or falling asleep while drinking from a bottle -- can become resistant to these aids after some time. When this happens it suddenly becomes much harder to get them to sleep, because they never had proper sleep habits to begin with. When a child can go to sleep on their own, they can also go back to sleep by themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night (we're actually seeing this happening). And this independence also has other benefits, like boosting self-confidence.
Then there are a lot of little rules about how to actually accomplish this goal. For example, if the child falls asleep but wakes up just 10-20 minutes later, you must insist that they go back to sleep, because otherwise they didn't really fall asleep properly. And the parent who does this must be the same parent who put them in bed in the first place -- you can't switch. Then there are instructions on how to deal with crying (basically never let a child cry without addressing them, but also don't give up on going to sleep), etc.
As I said there are a lot of details, and it's also quite different for every child. And of course this is all specific to the program we're in; I'm sure there are other good programs out there. My main point is that there are methods that work and have a proven track record -- you just have to find them.
I would much rather sleep well, have less hours in the day to work with and operate at 80-100% mental capacity rather than get less sleep, drink gallons of coffee or other stimulants and struggle with being able to think clearly.
Ironically enough, it's exam season now and I may have found a solution - forcing myself to go to bed at midnight, and up at 8-9am (no matter how bad I feel) and taking one caffeine tablet in the morning and one at at lunch, I now have something like regular alertness for the first time consistently in years. It's only a few days into this phase however so who knows how it will pan out. Many a false dawn (pun intended) was had before with solving insomnia!
Recently I've bought a Kindle DX (used along with a relatively dim overhead freestanding lamp[1]), and I read that till I feel really sleepy. This satisfies my craving for reading instead of staring at a computer screen. The lack of a backlit screen shining into your retinas really helps!
[1] http://p.mdcd.net/product_images/full/2b3c568350aa9759eaa00a...
I've also "tried" everything and also feel the same when I get 2-3 days of very solid sleep in. A different person :) Strangely, I have had VERY good experiences with GABA, ZMA (both supplements, GNC etc.)Holy Basil extract (herbal pill). This combo really helps me fall and stay asleep more on Average versus most of anything else (including melatonin).
It helps as an assistant, not a knock-out Ambien like sleep aid, which I can't use if I want to be alert for work :)
I've adapted myself to sleeping when the clock says I should and not based on how well lit it is.
I don't use an alarm as I believe in waking up when your body wants you to, after its natural cycles end. Or at least, thats what usually works for me.
I tend to embrace those dreams, however, and seek them out. I feel like a good portion of my creativity comes from waking up relaxed after a vivid dream. Even if I don't remember the dream itself, I feel like it puts me into a mental state where I'm more open to new and strange ideas.
Since then, I always set my alarm clock to sleep a multiple of 90 minutes: 6h, 7h30min, 9h... (6 hours more often than not, but I might change this, having read this article...)
I used to dream all the time. I haven't dreamt since I started doing this. I guess I still have dreams, but I never remember them. I think you only remember dreams when you are woken up in the middle of REM sleep (in the middle of a cycle).
A nice benefit of my current sleep pattern, is that I fall asleep very fast, instead of waiting in bed for up to 1 hour like I used to. I hope it's not because I'm sleep deprived, though...
I've actually tried the Uberman sleep schedule for three weeks. This is where you sleep 20 minutes for each 4 hours, totalling in a whopping 2 hours sleep each day.
The time gain was insane, and the transition period aswell (between day 3-5 I actually hallucinated due to sleep deprevation). But around 1.5 weeks something strange happened. The 20 minute period that you are allowed to sleep seemed like hours each time, and I would wake up like clockwork on the 20 minute mark.
The whole routine is not just a sleep routine, it affects your entire lifestyle. No stimulants, including sugar, high degrees of fat, caffeine. No sedatives, alcohol, drugs (!). And the fact that you are awake during the night when the whole world seems dead is one of the hardest social aspects to handle. What do you do with 6 extra hours each day?
Of course there's the aspect of finding somewhere to sleep every 4 hours (was at school at the time), and if you ever missed out, you would have hell to pay.
I eventually buckled on a skiing trip with an open bar, had a nice weekend and decided to going back to normal sleeping patterns. Partly because it was not socially acceptable to sleep 2 hours a day (my father threatened to beat some sense into me). But also that there was very little foundation that this kind of sleep pattern was even safe. A couple of million years of evolution had other idea's of when and how long it is necessary to sleep.
Other than that, the foundations that I gathered up from this was that when changing your sleeping pattern. The body frantically tries to adapt. By sleeping extremely short periods the body would effectively increase the amount of REM sleep (and yes, I dreamed a lot during these sleeping periods), however, it has not been proven that you don't need the other types of sleep.
This is probably a lot of rumours, and a lot of wishful thinking. I personally wish there was some solid backing behind this kind of reasoning (more time awake is awesome!), There are a lot of buzz out there (check google and youtube), but I've been unable to find anything reasonably solid.
I received some 500 pieces of mail and got in personal
touch with many polyphasic adepts. Of those attempts that
I was given a chance to monitor, all were unsuccessful.
Some of the critics of the original article claimed that
they do sleep polyphasically, but I received no data that
could serve as the basis for verification.
I think to make the ubermann cycle work, you need 1) to have a job that allows such a schedule 2) not have kids 3) have a bunch of your friends do it too so that your schedule isn't too different from the people you interact with the most.
IMHO, its unlikely that people will will meet all three of those points though. The "solution" would perhaps be a less severe and strict schedule. For example, I tried a 28-hour day schedule (the one from xkcd.. am I crazy trying a sleep cycle I saw in a comic?) and it worked really well: stay up 20 hours then sleep for 8, repeat. Monday to thursday fit around my uni schedule (at the time) perfectly, Friday (which I had off) through Sunday I was basically awake at night and asleep during the day. I ended up with 6 28 hour days. Worked really well! ...until the day I had an appointment in the middle of my "I'm supposed to be asleep" time on a Friday, got knocked off course and didn't bother going back to it.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650
"First off, let me say that I didn’t decide to stop for health reasons. To my recollection I didn’t get sick even once while sleeping polyphasically, not even a cold. My energy and alertness were excellent once I made it through the adaptation period. A lot of people asked me about weight training and exercise — I didn’t have any problems there either. My recovery after workouts was just fine. Perhaps the post-workout nap had a positive effect."
and
"The #1 reason I decided to call it quits is simply that the rest of the world is monophasic. If most of the world was polyphasic, I probably would have stuck with it. Obviously when you go polyphasic, you fall out of sync with the way other people live. ..."
See also http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...
I haven't read a huge amount of accounts, but I've read one or two others besides Steve Pavlinas and they seemed to match up. I am no expert though and certainly don't want to claim that its a good idea, just because I've read three or four accounts online that said so. Especially since I cannot prove for sure that they are true.
"they are soul-crushingly tired all the time"
I have only heard people who haven't tried it say this. But I won't argue the case, because I haven't tried it either.
I've read some reports from people who are tired all the time because they haven't "adjusted" - and the punchline is they never will. I think Pavlina's and others are in denial; while the social aspect is obviously negative, it gives them a convenient excuse. If there the only downside was not having a schedule that worked with the rest of society, there would be someone, somewhere who would not have done it, but would being doing it. But there isn't, because that's not how sleep, for us, works.
I don't know though. I certainly appreciate what you're saying, I guess I want to believe you're wrong, but I have no evidence either way. Maybe I should try it myself to see if it works haha.
Uberman is too extreme to keep up, no one has done it for long periods yet. The Everyman with a core sleep of 3-4.5 hrs a day with 2-3 15 minute naps is much more interesting.
I can't say how true that is when you're doing a ton of email all day or research, and its more a function of the sum total of small delays in re-reading that build up over the course of an entire day. Contrasted with a day when your mind is so clear that you require no re-reading, it feels like you are so much more productive.
Additional sleep links:
1. Sleep: How to hack your brain (http://www.dustincurtis.com/sleep.html)
2. The 4-Hour Body: Engineering better sleep (http://techcocktail.com/book-preview-the-4-hour-body-enginee...)
When I was in high school, I could pull an all nighter with ease to take care of an assignment (or to finish a Legend of Zelda game in one straight playing session).
Now, in grad school, I needed to pull an all nighter recently and found that I just couldn't do it anymore. I hadn't pulled an all nighter in years and it just seemed to be vastly harder than it used to be.
It is too bad the study didn't attempt to see how much sleep was necessary to recover. Would have been nice to know how long the residual effects from decreased sleep lasts. It is now a full week since the end of my semester and I still feel abnormally tired.
The report makes it seem like even if people don't realize it, their performance suffers. I've always been jealous of those that could seemingly sleep for however much time was convenient but not anymore!
The thing I've noticed is that I have way more free time than I thought I did, because I wasn't explicitly thinking about things in terms of "hmm, I have five hours before bed, I should probably do X".
Also, melatonin supplements are my friend. :)
This is very useful if you're someone whose bedtime tends to be pushed gradually back because you're not ready to sleep yet -- the easy act of taking a pill can make it less difficult to go to sleep at a consistent time. It can also be useful in periodically resetting your bedtime, by going to bed a few hours earlier.
This may or may not help you, though. You have a pretty high rate of bedtime drift. Could you elaborate on how it happens? Do you just not feel tired when you should? If that's the case, then melatonin might help. Other things you could try include:
1. Use something like f.lux to make your monitor use lower-energy colors at night. Melatonin production is photosensitive, so artificial lights with a lot of blue (such as LCD backlights) can throw that out of whack if they hit your retinas.
2. Exercise vigorously every day, in the evenings. Even if this doesn't help with sleep, it's a good idea, so why not?
And in general, when trying to figure something like this out, it can help to keep logs so you have some data you can analyze later, to see what's working and what isn't. Good luck.
When I have a 9-5 job though I end up tired one day and fine the next. I end up getting up at 8 or so and going to sleep at either 11 or so because I was really tired or 3-4 am because I wasn't.
f.lux actually did help a lot. I was much worse when I didn't use it (I could never get to sleep early so I was always tired.)
Anyway, I'll do some research into melatonin supplements, thanks for the lead.
That is a lie.
There is no reason to assume he is lying about this.
My personal experience is that 15 minutes in the horizontal position improves my awareness and performance. An additional hack is to drink an espresso the moment before you take your power nap - the effect of the caffeine will kick in in about 15 minutes after consumption.
I'm one that needs at least 8 hours a night; 9 is better.
I used to get a little heart weirdness (a weird beat once in a while), but I've cut down smoking to 1 or 2 cigarettes per day and started drinking more water and the heart weirdness has stopped happening.
It never occurred to me that one can measure whether the amount of sleep received is right. I just downloaded PEBL (http://pebl.sourceforge.net/), an open source software that includes the P.V.T. test (mentioned in the article) in its battery -- an you can adjust lots of test parameters simply by editing ppbt.pbl. Seems to be working fine (though the test itself is boring and tedious). I'll measure few times a day and try whether 8 vs 10 hours makes a difference in my case.
I'd be more interested in understanding the long-term effects of insufficient sleep.
Is the cognitive deficit a temporary problem that goes away after a few days (or more of) sufficient sleep OR will sustained lack of sleep (over a long period) result in a long-term problem that persists even after the subject begins to sleep sufficiently.
Grey hair: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/foas-nla02230...
In reality, you (and me) are looking for long-term effects of sleep deprivation, where deprivation = 5-6 hours regularly, 4 or less occasionally. Unfortunately, you can't just Google that. Anyone know of any articles that target this bracket of sleep deprivation (and not something more extreme)?
I will confidently guess it involves more infections/sick-days. More zits, and general inflammation. Higher cortisol/stress/angst. Higher rates of gastro-intestinal complaints (IBS, heart-burn).
If I skimmed the article correctly it measured ability to concentrate for a short time exclusively and ignored these others metrics.
I do like the idea of testing where your sweet spot is, though. I've never done anything like the PVT, but I've found (through Steve Pavlina's advice) that if you wake up at the same time each day, every day, and simply fall asleep when you're tired at the end of the day, you discover pretty quickly where that sweet spot is. More here: http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/how-to-get-back-9-weeks-of-your...
Assuming your assumption about the distribution of "needing x hours of sleep to do well" is correct and if we assume that 5% need only 5 hours or less and the mean is at 8 hours (the article is even unclear about what those 8 hours represent so it's a wild guess at best), how large is the percentage of people needing 7.5 hours or less? (Roughly 40% if it's a normal distribution). So what the article says about "most of us" is technically correct the interesting answers for the many of us that presumably need between 5 and 8 hours of sleep is left out.
Does it make a difference in what sleep phase people are woken up (after the n hours of sleep their group gets)? I wish more money would be available for this area of research so longer and more detailed studies could be done. And better handouts for journalists.