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Comment by scubakid | Hacker News Reader

I've always marvelled at the huge discrepancy in sleep needs between people; many need 7-8 hrs per night, but some report 4-6 feeling optimal. Anyone care to guess if future technology/medicine might ever be able to improve rest/recovery efficiency to the point that people only need to spend 5-10% of their lifespan unconscious instead of ~30%? Or at least even the playing field so we can all rock 6 hrs and feel amazing?

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As far as I understand it you spend 4 hours sleeping, then your subconscious wakes up and spends 4 hours training itself based on new data acquired during the day, and then your consciousness wakes up and shuts down the training in order to execute for the next day. So I'm not sure that reducing sleep to just 4 hours would help, it is enough to survive and stay alert throughout the day but probably not optimal.

Edit: I also think that this is why you get tired when you sleep too much, your subconsciousness will run exhausting mental training when your consciousness is asleep so sleeping when your subconsciousness is alert makes you more tired.

Afaik, when they actually measure people performance, nobody works optimally on 4-6 hours of sleep a night. People may claim whatever or ignore the feeling, but sleep deprivation affects them still.

Those 7-8 hour people have their log4j configuration set on verbose.

I’m betting that improving measurement tools and understanding the subtler points of what sleep does and how to influence it will bring the ability for people generally to get higher quality sleep and ultimately need less.

to be honest, I think this is all solely due to caffeine. I sleep 5-6h if I'm on caffeine, I sleep 8-9h if I'm off caffeine. When I first started drinking caffeinated drinks at age ~23 (yes really), I had a short period where I could still sleep full nights but eventually I was always down to 6h. In my opinion most people don't attribute any of these sleep changes to caffeine because they've been on caffeine for a long time, never fully stop and when you are younger it doesn't have this effect yet or immediately.

I've had the same experience with sleeping more after my coffee runs out, but it's only temporary, lasting maximum one week.

I don't think this is likely. It's well known that caffeine disrupts sleep and that you therefore need to spend more rather than less time in bed to get the same rest.

I sleep 8-9h and drink however much caffeine is in about 8g of green tea leaves in the mornings.

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