Can people get by on four hours' sleep?
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I tend to put proud claims of little sleep in the same category as those of "working" long hours. We've all met people who are at work for long hours, but whether they are actually working, much less producing is another story.
In some cases, it does. My hobby, digital film preservation, requires work that's long, tedious, and relatively-unskilled.
I often clean dirt/dust using temporal fixes in PFClean and having an active well-rested mind doesn't help with this __at_all__, so sleeping an extra four hours won't improve my productivity.
For me, it's not about "get 25% more done". It's more about being able to still spend time with family when I need too and get work done while everyone else is still asleep. It's very much a work life balance tool for me. I can't go weeks on 4 hours though. If I do 4 hours consistently in about 10 days I crash and need a full 8 hours for a day or two.
But over any appreciable length of time, the sleep debt and stress accumulate, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, you run out of steam, and you burn out.
It's like sprinting. You can't sprint a marathon, it isn't possible. Some people can run a marathon faster than others, but no one can run at their top speed for such a long distance. If you try, you will quickly run out of gas and need to rest.
If you're in a game that resembles a 100m dash (like a tech startup or a Wall Street finance or making partner at a white shoe firm) then yes, you can sprint in the hopes of crossing the finish line and getting rich before you burn out. But for most career paths you need to pace yourself.
It certainly could be, but that's not what I take from the examples or experience.
I think this particularly game is more often about perception, not any actual measure or productivity. The banker quote demonstrates it even. It's about "getting respect" not necessarily getting more done.
^That answers the question quite well I believe. Yes, people CAN, but it is uncommon. And anything that is uncommon usually takes a considerable amount of practice. Ms. Thatcher most likely made it a concerted goal to train her self to be fully functional on just 4 hours of sleep over the weekdays. It is stated that she most likely slept longer on weekends, indicating that she was aware of her sleep schedule on weekdays vs. weekends.
Things like sleep are studied so much that it is a subject overly-saturated with studies, and that too, conflicting ones. This, more than anything, shows that one's need for sleep can be controlled by him/her. I had a friend in college, he was a junior when I was a freshman. He slept through most of his morning classes and would always tweet that he was napping in the evening. He had amazing grades, though, and good enough interview skills to land him a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and he would be working in their most demanding team. In fact, his boss to-be even emailed him saying something like "Make sleep an option, not a requirement". Mike (my friend) took it literally.
From the day he got that email in March, he chose to sleep 7 minutes less every 3 days with no naps. By the end of April, he was sleeping about 5.5 hours a night. For the next month, he got even crazier and took off minutes from his sleep on a daily basis. He succeeded and by the time he was at GS, he needed 2hrs 52minutes of sleep per night and was productive the rest. How do I know he was productive? Because after his internship, he was given a personalized offer letter...from the CEO. He had worked on more deals than not only all interns across the world, but more than 98% of current employees.
Training our body is something we can do and just like anything, if you work hard at it, you'll more than likely be successful at some point.
There were some bad effects though. If my immediate task wasn't engaging (a boring task or speech for example), I had to work really hard to stay awake. My typical daily cycle of alert and productive in the morning, and dull and sleepy in the afternoon became much deeper. I felt more creative and congenial during the high points and much more lethargic during the valleys.
After a few months, I began to realize another downside. Although I was able to function well tactically on moment-by-moment tasks that required constant attention, my ability to make good strategic decisions really began to suffer. It was as though the effort to deeply think things through long-term went totally down the drain. This began to scare me after a while.
Everything changed when I took a new job in a distant city and simultaneously decided to stop playing poker for a while. I lived by myself in a tiny room in the suburbs and rode my bike to work seven miles each way. The new environment, exercise and huge lessening of daily commitments caused me to take things a lot slower. I began reading a lot, reflecting about things, and started sleeping around seven hours a night.
I became less manic, definitely healthier, and more peaceful and introspective. I didn't instantly fall asleep when I was bored, but slept very soundly at night. Of course a lot of that could be the result of a simpler, more active life. But I think the increased sleep had a major influence too.
I started playing poker again, and I found that I was consistently doing better than before. I started reacquainting myself with math, and could think much more deeply about it.
I wonder how this applies to Thatcher? She obviously had a very engaging job, and she seemed able to keep up with the details of her work. But if she had slept more, would she had been less radical, perhaps more conciliatory? Would that have dulled her edge and reduced her achievements or helped her bring more people on board and be less polarizing? Would she had made better long-term decisions? Did the extra hours of wakefulness really help her get more done or was she just trading weekday hours awake for weekend hours asleep?
In my own life, I've decided to keep to a longer sleep schedule for now. I'm always tempted to go back to the exciting mania the previous schedule, but for me, the benefits are uncertain and the costs are pretty scary.
These days I almost regularly sleep only 4-5 hours a night and I "can take it" but sometimes during the day I practically almost pass out from the tiredness - that passes shortly though and just closing my eyes for a bit helps a lot. And I yawn a lot but then again I do that even if I sleep for 10 hours or what have you.
It's depressing, because I would love to use those hours for something more productive than sleep, but what can ya do? I think I should just start taking a nootropic of some sort to make up for it...
Good thing there's no PED test for entrepreneurs...
I decided maybe I should sleep more, and in the middle of the work day, I left at 2pm, and went home and slept 17 hrs straight. Now, I can't stay up later than 1030pm, and if I get less than 7 hrs sleep I feel horrible.
As far as I know, the underlying causes of dementia are not very well understood. Besides the fact that 6% is not very rare, there's an issue of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy): taking whatever problem exists and claiming that may be linked to whatever one disapprove of.
"She has Parkinson's, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
"She has Huntington's, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
"She has Alzheimer's, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
"She has MLS, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
"She has brain cancer, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
"She had a crippling stroke, which X in 100 have by age 70. Clearly there are some unusual things going on with those unlucky X..."
You see my point. There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong with a brain over time, the rate at which things go wrong goes up with time (we call it "aging"), and sooner or later something will go wrong (and you will "die"). It is inevitable that some short sleepers will suffer awful brain problems. Just like everyone else.
I saw another example yesterday in a discussion of famous drug chemist & inventor Shulgin; apparently, upon getting cancer at age 80 and asking for help, his friends had to deny to people that it was related to any of the drugs he took! I was like, "are you serious? A large minority or a majority of the entire population will have cancer at some point in their lifetime, many will not even make it to their 80s at all much less only develop cancer at that advanced age, and people seriously think that this might be more than-microscopically-small evidence that some of the drugs cause cancer, when if anything it may be evidence against?"
The first, a survey, seems to show that too little sleep increases all-cause mortality (i.e. that "aging" you mention), the second suggests that sleep disturbances (unknown, admittedly how that relates to sleep duration) may be linked (cause or effect unknown) with Alzheimer's.
I normally aim for a couple of nights a week of full sleep (no alarm clock), and the past week and a half I pushed this - 3-4 hours a night for 9 nights (with an exception of 7 hours once in the middle), which left me needing two really long nights the last couple of days.
But is it any better or worse this way? For example the difference between 6 hours a night over the whole week (42 hours total) or 4 hours a night for five days then 11 hours a night for the other two?
In the case of sleep, attentiveness isn't the only measure. Sleep deprivation weakens your immune system, lowers testosterone production, and so on.
I don't see how being a "functional insomniac" is any more admirable than being a functional alcoholic?
I too thought I need more sleep, or 7 hours at least. Then I had couple late nights when my sleep was in 5 hours bracket and it felt weird how good I feel, how wired I am during the day. So, I suggest you at least try sleep less (6 or 5) and see how you feel daily. Do it for one week at least to make sure you give your body space to get used to it and adjust.