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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

“ If you're someone who likes your 7 hours of sleep a day, stay away.” how do people function long-term with so little sleep? I need at least 9 hours to not be a useless husk the next day.

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I knew someone who went years with 5 hours a night. He was notoriously quick to anger and tended to over react to everything. Toward the end of my knowing him he started to take better care of himself and suddenly he was the nicest man I'd ever met. Sleep matters.

This is me, in waves. When I become conscious of my crappy behavior, I take care to course correct. It's doesn't last though and I start to get burned out and stubborn and unpleasant. It's not a thing of pride. It's a known issue that I've only ever avoided while unemployed.

I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.

Some people have a weird tendency to talk up how little they sleep like it's some point of valor.

Some people can do 6 hours a sleep a night for a long time and be fine but I don't think there's much support for maintaining health on 5 or fewer for long periods of time.

Sleep is important and people need to find ways to get what they need. Even people with infants need outside support so they can get what they need. It's not something to be embarrassed about.

Companies should be very cognizant of the types of constraints they may be putting on a work-life balance. Those that don't obviously treat employees as inherently disposable.

Another unappreciated aspect of sleep is how much of it one needs depending on their age. As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I need far less sleep. I still try to get 8 hours if I can, but most of the time I get away with 6 or 7 just fine and I get up much earlier in the morning. I think adolescents need more like 9 hours of sleep, but for some reason we (in America anyway) make kids get up earlier than most adults and give them work to do at home so they have less time to get to bed early, giving them all the incentive to stay up later. Adults trivialize sleep, which is funny because in high school and college it seemed agreed upon by everyone that we actually needed that extra hour or two. Teachers and parents would tell us that we were merely "slacking off" if we slept for more than 8 hours and didn't get up at the buttcrack of dawn.

Millennial parents undoubtedly have their own set of problems distinct from past generations, but I hope they've learned by now that their parent's views on sleep don't need to be repeated just as they're not repeating the 9-to-5 butts-in-seats mentality that is no longer a universal.

Some people just don’t need much sleep.

Sure, and the short sleep gene people are brought up here in this thread a bunch.

But that's not < 4 hours a night without naps for long periods of time.

People have very different metabolisms and lifestyles. I know people who need less than 5h per night and are completely healthy. I myself feel like shit if I wake up before 9am.

Do they "only" need 5 hours of sleep or do they say they need it? Are they as productive as they could be when fully rested, or will they "sleep when they are dead".

Arianna Huffington also thought she was being greatly productive at no sleep, until her body told her to fuck off and she collapsed in her office from exhaustion.

They only need 5 hours of sleep. Why is it so difficult to understand that not everyone the same ? There are a lot of variability in human.

Why is it so difficult to understand that not everyone the same ?

Touchy. Perhaps you need some more sleep.

Because these people are exceedingly rare. I get 5 hours of sleep a night because I have some pretty bad lifestyle choices. The few weeks where I have a normal sleep schedule I am absolutely a different person.

I mean I can function on 5-hours, I'm able to hold a job and live a life; but my well being could be so much better if I got a normal nights sleep everyday.

How rare?

So you are not the one how can function with 5 hour sleep but doesn't mean other people can't.

Because this kind of reply gets posted every single time sleep deprivation is brought up.

Needing this little sleep is usually a lie or a self-delusion. Perpetuating it has negative consequences for the rest of us. Do some of these unicorns exist? Sure. But they are nowhere near as common as this type of comment suggests. Most of the people in question would be better off with more sleep.

Can they survive on 5 hours? Sure. Most of us can also survive on nothing but pizza. Doing this doesn't make you different, just unhealthy.

How are you sure its a lie ?

Not common? How do you know?

Eating nothing but pizza is not healthy? I disagree, Pizza has carbohydrates, protein, vegetables, vitamin, etc. Not always but it can be healthy.

How can you be sure it's not a lie? What I meant by "lie" is this: let's say you ask someone how much they sleep. Currently society tells us that working as much as possible is a virtue. So they tell you they sleep 4 hours every night. You have no way of verifying this information. For all you know they could be sleeping 8 or 9 hours. But it is very easy and tempting for them to lie for a small boost in social standing.

Just because its easy/tempting to lie doesn't mean they are lying.

Do you have data showing that it's "usually a lie or self-delusion"? Because there's a genetic explanation[1] for why folks need less sleep. The only way I can sleep 9 hours in a night is if I work up a sleep debt.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

It’s incredibly rare though.

That one mutation is rare, but it's an advantageous one in a society of workaholics, so there's probably a sampling bias: we're more likely to encounter folks with that mutation when selecting for high performers. It's also a single mutation -- there may be others that provide a similar, if more moderate, effect.

I personally don't need much more than five hours. As in, even when I'm completely on my own free time and I don't set an alarm I'll go to bed at 24:00 - 1:00 and wake up at about 5:30 - 6:30. My father is the same, he even often sleeps only four hours, I guess it's genetic.

I used to get by on about 5-6 hours. If I slept early, I'd wake up long before my alarm feeling well rested, alert, and ready to go. Something changed when I was around 30, and it took a few years to figure out that I wasn't getting enough sleep. But even so, it's rare that I sleep more than 7 hours.

I can get by on less sleep but I still won’t be much use to anyone working more than a usual hour load. There’s more to life than work and sleep.

I'm "one of those" that actually has the low sleep gene. 5hrs is typical, 6 makes me feel groggy all day. However, this only works without alcohol; add booze and I need 8 hrs. So, I rarely if ever drink any alcohol.

Do they take naps during day time? A half-hour nap can "reboot" one's body. But still, even if they do nap, I'm very jealous.

Having worked in an environment where there was a constant onslaught of customer issues. I can tell you that even though I was offered more than 7 hours of sleep, my days were absolutely terrible. Fire-fighting all day, and never getting to work on the features that we promised to deliver led to me lying in bed awake. My mental health was extremely fragile. My physical health was worse. The promise of "Work/Life Balance" needs to be clarified. Does the "work" part bleed into your "life" part? Does the job make it possible to truly disconnect? Some of that is based on personality (I aim to provide value, and am truly jazzed when I know people are pleased with my performance), but some of that is based on what your daily grind looks like. If you are constantly dealing with a nightmare for even 8 hours of your day, it doesn't matter what the rest of your day is like.

I'm a parent to two small children. Sleep is incredibly important but I think I probably have another year at least of seven hours interrupted at least once as my normal.

It sucks.

It was an amazing feeling when the interrupted nights stopped, after roughly 9 years over three kids.

Youngest is 2.5. Oldest quit interrupting on a regular basis when she was 3.5. Hoping youngest will follow trend but I have no expectations at this point.

Used to pull a lot of all-nighters coding in my teens and twenties. Being twice as old now I'll regularly clock 8 hours sleep and doing an all-nighter never crosses my mind.

I was the same then I had kids and now I probably get 6-7 hours per night, and they're fragmented. Your body adjusts. You use caffeine more effectively. One big learning for me is that i blamed a lot of being tired on lack of sleep, when in reality there are other causes (ie a big or greasy mid-day meal, sugar/caffeine crashes, etc).

That said, i'm sure it has long term health consequences though.

Me too. I need some 6-7 hours in week days and 8 hours in weekends. I'd trade a few years at the end of my life (hope I don't die soon) for 2-2.5 hour reduction of sleep plus still keeping my sanity and productivity. It would be a good trade.

I usually average 4.5 hours a night. I am still living, but it is not a happy life. I slept 8 hours one night, felt like a new person the next morning. But I fall back into the habit again.

Just doing mundane things like decluttering and dishes at night helps relax the brain and wire it into the sleeping habit loop.

Don't start anything major after 6, and definitely not "squeeze in" a movie or a show before midnight. That's how it happens.

It's surprising how fast the time lapses if you do nothing but muck around the house getting ready for bed.

Obviously everyones situation is different, but if you can manage more sleep you'll likely find the rest of your day is overall more productive despite being shorter.

I've been functioning on ~3.5 hours sleep per night for about 5 years now. You get used to it.

You might consider the concept of "Normalization of Deviance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

I agree people can get used to almost anything. We've all been living through a pandemic. Society made it through the black plague. But part of "functioning" through bad conditions is losing touch with the the possibility of something better.

Don't you have better days and feel smarter, when you have slept more? It's a night and day difference to me. With little sleep, work is a chore and spare time is unorganized, with enough sleep I handle both better.

Apparently [0] some people are genetically disposed to require much less sleep than most, but no, you can't train yourself to perform normally when sleep deprived.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471247

You may get used to it, but that doesn't mean the negative effects disappear. 3.5 hours of sleep is well into the territory of chronic sleep deprivation, regardless of your genetic makeup.

There is no known combination of genes that makes 3.5 hours of sleep acceptable. The "short sleep" genes don't shrink the sleep need window that much.

We obviously can't know your personal circumstances, but I would caution that according to everything we know you are likely to pay a price for this chronic sleep deprivation, especially if it continues.

I do 7 but 7.5 is my sweet spot. I pose the opposite: How do so many on this site need so much sleep?

Some of us have always been like this. Others have been doing it for so long that we don’t even know what it feels to be fully rested anymore either. The mental fog of being continuously sleep deprived is all they remember.

There's a lot of natural variance in this. There's no a priori reason that your 7.5 makes more sense than somebody else's 9. Or a house cat's 12-16. It's like asking whether 5' 8" or 6' 1" is the correct height. You roll the genetic dice and they land where they land.

I started today with 4.5 hours of sleep and I’ll do just great with that. Once a week my body grabs 10-14 hours in a single night to “catch up”.

The vast majority of people would be under performing without even noticing at 4.5 hrs. Yet somehow, everyone thinks they're part of the 1% that has some magic genetic fix for this. Sort of like how 80% of people think they're above average at driving.

The last sentence is brilliant! Sometimes, I feel I am the only person that I know who admits to being a terrible driver. I am so easily distracted by beautiful nature, construction sites, other car crashes, whatever... Thank goodness I never had an accident, but many close calls. As a result, I try to drive as little as possible.

Average is not the same as mode. 99.9% of people (at least) have more arms than the average for instance.

So yes, theoretically 80% may be better at driving than the average, it is just so that the other 20% are even worse at it.

Given the average driver, imagine how bad that other 20% must be.

Unless you're a genetic outlier it is likely that you're doing long-term damage to your health.

like?

High correlation between sleep deprivation and altzimers

Why are you downvoting this? I also know people like this, however I personally need at least 7-8.

The last weeks I have practised to not focus too much on if Ive had a sleep deprived night and that helps and works for a few days.

"Catching up" on sleep is a myth. If you're getting wildly different amounts of sleep night to night (even on a "schedule" like yours) it's a biological/physiological certainly that you're operating at a deficit. Maybe not cognitive, but there is a deficit there whether you realize it or not.

I am not sure about this, i had periods of 5h a sleep days for a week or two and then slept 12 hours for a day and felt very fresh and carried on with 5h a day. Sometimes it's 7-8 hours a day for couple weeks, sometimes it's 5. Feels about equal to me, maybe it has to do with volatile working hours for me, not sure. All I know the worst is hangover days and on holidays I stay in bed for 10hours only to feel unusually tired. Maybe environment is a bigger factor than genetics.

I was under the impression that the idea that one can just oversleep to "catch up" was debunked already, e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-c...

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