Those people who need very little sleep | Hacker News Reader

Those people who need very little sleep

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I need very little sleep. I go to bed about 1am and wake up about 5-5:30am every day. I'm never tired.

I had a two day long migraine in 1995 and have been like it ever since. Never had a migraine after that one either. Had my nut stuffed in an MRI and nothing showed up. My neurologist said he's at a loss. No complaining though.

Hello from this other side of the spectrum! I need at least 8h/day of sleep to NOT have a migraine. If I don't set an alarm my mind/body will happily sleep 9 to 10 hours a day.

I was like that before the mega migraine. I think I'm broken and you're not :)

I don't get migraines from lack of sleep, but I "need" ~8.5-9 hours (on average) to feel at my best.

I can go on 5 hours once in a while and be okay, but I have to make it up later.

I would LOVE to be able to perform well on 4 hours.

I also get migraines if I don't sleep 8-ish hours! I didn't realize that was a thing that happened to other people, too.

> If I don't set an alarm my mind/body will happily sleep 9 to 10 hours a day.

Do you feel fully rested after 8 hours? The reason I ask is because some people simply need more than 8 hours, but have thetendency to think that 8 is the "correct" amount to sleep. I had a couple friends who were like this and when they started sleeping ~9 hours they had a marked improvement in all of the symptoms of sleep dep (energy, focus, etc etc).

I would say I need 9 ~ 10 hours to feel fully rested, 8h is not enough.

As someone whose body will also, without an alarm, sleep naturally for 9-10 hours or longer on a weekend no problem, I wonder if you've ever felt looked down upon for this trait by certain people?

I've definitely told people this in the past and had negative reactions ranging from the mild disbelief "You're serious, how can that be possible? I don't believe you" to the outright offended "What is wrong with you (as a person)? Why would you want to spend so much time sleeping? That's wrong and ridiculous behaviour".

I do find it curious how some people tend to get really uppity about this issue. As though one's sleeping habits are reflective of character and morals, or something, rather than just being a natural trait which differs person to person and which one has no choice in. Where does this come from?

Lack of sleep doesn't cause migraines for me, but I am and come from a family of long sleepers (9-14 hours a day it pretty typical).

I've been told point-blank that I just need to change my attitude because, according to this person, my inability to wake up refreshed with anything less than 9 hours of sleep is 100% because of my attitude.

Do you work out a lot? In college i needed 10hrs, i would run to campus and back, swim 800m a day, 1hr weights 5 times a week. Now i just need 6hrs.

I would assume it has something to do with how much you learn as well. Children sleep more because they're constantly learning. Then we gradually move on to executing on knowledge rather than learning - think reinforcement learning in CS. It's natural to sleep less as you get older.

I've had periods in my life when I exercised extensively (U.S. Marine Corps) and other times, including now, when I definitely don't get "enough" exercise. Regardless, I've needed 9-14 hours of sleep a day to feel awake during the day. So no, exercise has never had even a moderate correlation with my sleep cycle.

Curious - have you done a sleep study? You may just be getting very low quality sleep due to sleep apnea or the like.

I've had several GPs check me and they each said I just need more sleep than "average". They've given me the standard spiel, about going to bed and waking up at the same time, keeping the bedroom dark and quiet, only engaging in subdued activities for an hour before bed, etc - each of which I've done for substantial periods. As life interfered with each of these, I've learned that –within reason– none of them noticeably effect the amount of sleep I need or the quality of sleep I get within a period of time.

Wow, I've just stopped telling people. I think that folks who know my sleep patterns still look down on me for sleeping so much, but I've long since ceased to care about that.

Since my teenage years I have operated at a sleep deficit during the week and "made up" for it on the weekends. I'll get 5-6 hours per night during the week and 10 on the weekends.

I have relatives who are morning people who act like they're personally offended that I sleep 10 hours on Saturdays.

I've found that too and it annoys me a lot. I put it down to having more exciting dreams than them. I've spent plenty of late Saturday mornings gallivanting around my own mind.

EDIT: Also, people confuse sleeping late with sleeping too much. If you go to bed at 4AM, getting up at Midday isn't so crazy.

Please help me explain this to my roommates..

I sleep an avg of 10-11 hours where my longest sleep was 13 hours a week ago, and I could still continue sleeping for hours more.

> If I don't set an alarm my mind/body will happily sleep 9 to 10 hours a day.

This isn't normal? :P

But seriously, if I don't set my alarm, I usually sleep about 12-16 hours. When I do wake up, it's often because of my bladder / stomach / limb-falling-asleep, and not because I feel rested. Waking up is not enjoyable regardless of how much sleep I get, 2 hours, 12 hours... I'm always a zombie-like, groggy mess. But 30 minutes later I feel great and full of energy, again, no matter how long I slept.

This is day-after-day too, and not just when I'm sleep deprived. Over the Independence Day 3-day weekend, I definitely slept more than 12 hours each day.

You might consider researching vitamin deficiency. Being tired all of the time despite sleeping is often a sign that something is missing from your diet.

Same as you except I need my 9 hours of sleep. I'll feel bad if I don't sleep enough, like I want to throw up during the day... But I got better and better by just trying to force myself into sleeping less.

I never thought I'd be jealous of having a migraine (I've had my share already), but I'd gladly suffer another two day one if it meant I felt refreshed after only 4 hours of sleep daily from that point on!

How much do you work out? If you took up a powerlifting regimen, do you think you would start wanting more sleep?

It varies. I used to run a lot. It just hurt afterwards. No tiredness.

I know it is hard to tell, but would you say there are adverse effects? Or do you ever need more sleep, i.e. after having studied for a maths exam the whole day?

I for one notice that I "learn" a lot while sleeping. For example, when studying for an exam, difficult exercises often seem to get much easier over night.

Yes definitely adverse effects.

1. My bowel has no idea what is going on half of the time so no routine there.

2. Snoring when I do sleep. This has caused a number of problems with the wife and neighbours.

3. I can't drink alcohol at all. I end up with a 3 day long hangover even if I have a single beer.

Otherwise nothing else.

Edit: Just to add a big downside. I had to spend some time in hospital after a physical injury. There is nothing more psychologically damaging than near insomnia immobile in a hospital bed.

Do you drink any form of caffeine?

I do now but I didn't a few years ago. Someone bought me a Tassimo. I feel sick if I drink coffee too late when I wake up.

I was once like you! In high school, college, and medical school I slept at most 4 hours a night. I was even a Division I varsity athlete. Never tired. No problems studying, drinking, exercising.

Then something changed a few years ago...I'm 42 now, so I think it started when I was 38...I now sleep 6 hours a night, sometimes even 7! It has seriously cut into might reading-for-fun time. I really wish I could go back to 4 hours.

A curiosity: do you guys that need so little sleep perform a lot of creative activities? I feel when I don't have anything too creative (or extremely intelectually demanding) to perform I can go sleep deprived and do fine at everything, but I lose the ability to solve one of those problems you have to think for hours, or come up with good ideas.

If I'm in the process of learning something complex, I get the distinct feeling of absorbing "fully" the content when I sleep well; whereas if I don't sleep well it doesn't seem fully "processed" yet.

So my optimal sleep schedule varies by what kind of work I want to do. Do you just perform nominally at everything sleeping 4 hours?

Can you confirm your medical case?

While it's an interesting read, it doesn't really provide enough information to show that this is a good thing. What is the average lifespan of people with this mutation?

Even if Abby lives a normal lifespan we still have too little data we need some randomized samples.

I come from a family of short sleepers. I always go to bed later than my wife and wake up earlier with more energy, this is still the case now that I'm in my 30s, but I have severe health problems compared to the average person my age. Is this related to not getting enough sleep or just another example of confounding.

It would be good to see some real statistical evidence to show that her mutation is even positive.

Even if those with the mutation lived shorter lives, they might live longer "useful" lives (because they are awake more hours, in total, than someone without the mutation than lives years longer).

I need more sleep than anyone I have ever heard of other than sick people - that is I sleep a lot when otherwise healthy - however I sleep very irregularly, commonly staying awake for days at a time then sleeping for several days.

I have always been this way it was a problem in grade school, and is why I am self employed.

In 2010 I determined that I can stay awake for four days before I start to experience subtle visual hallucinations; stay awake any longer and they became quite severe.

I think this may have damaged my brain somehow. At one time when I stayed awake so long I could work productively, no I cannot, however I still have that same sleep cycle.

Four(!) days? Seems like a neurological problem, have you had a medical exam or sleep study about this?

A whole bunch of them.

I am seeing a psychiatrist tomorrow; I am hoping he will refer me to a neurologist who will order an MRI. I suspect I have a brain tumour however I have had several CT scans that turn up negative. They don't want to give me any more CT scans because of the X-ray dosage but MRIs don't have that problem.

I had surgery for obstructive sleep apnea in 2008; it worked really well. I was lucky, it has a high failure rate. Since then I can comfortably breathe through my nose, before that - for my entire life - I could not.

Turbinate cautery feels just like having a hot soldering iron shoved way up your nose.

I am also mentally ill. Some people think my mental illness is the result of sleep deprivation however there are numerous other contributing factors. When I was diagnosed with Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in 1985 the doctors were concerned my symptoms were the result of a brain tumour so they gave me an EEG, CAT scan and neurological tests.

I wanted to be a chemist at first, I was heavily into it. My parents encouraged it as Dad was once a chemist and my mother's father was a surgeon. Unfortunately Mom gave me a bottle of mercury. It is powerfully toxic but only when metabolized in certain ways; the actual liquid is mostly harmless.

But I spilled it on the carpet. I recovered most of it with an eyedropper however I spilled it several times - it's quite cool to hold it in the palm of your hand - so quite a lot of it got in the carpet.

Childhood mercury vapor inhalation poisoning might not kill you but it will screw you up in spectacular ways. Among other things my hairline is visibly receding in photographs starting from when I was fourteen years old. I was completely bald at 21.

I don't believe any harm has been identified yet, so any harm must be much more subtle than most genetic disorders one might be thinking of.

But if you're looking for an evolutionary rationale, the extra energy expenditure of 4+ hours additional wakefulness (either on its own or due to extra synaptic energy consumption if you accept Tononi's SHY theory of sleep) is a sufficient reproductive-fitness penalty in a pre-modern context to explain why it's rare.

> we need some randomized samples.

These pretty much are randomized samples. You can look at the siblings and relatives and now you've got Mendelian randomization, I think.

Further reading:

"A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?" http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/a-gene-make... ; HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8215872

"Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3413799/ Kuna et al 2012

"The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/ He et al 2010

"A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans" https://pdf.yt/d/i-sxyELBIBsir7uy Pellegrino et al 2014

N.B. The principle of TANSTAAFL in an evolutionary “pre-modern context” seems to pair well with the more recent theory of WGYHWGYT as a framework/mental model for modern dilemmas.

TANSTAAFL: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

WGYHWGYT: “What got you here won't get you there.”

the article claimed that the short sleepers (the ones with the genetic mod) didn't have any health disadvantages, though it didn't give many statistics

I wish I only needed 4 hours of sleep a night. I hate going to bed and wasting 1/3rd of the day passed out. Or getting less than that and feeling groggy and lethargic all day.

I always hear these stories of people who can live happily on 4 hours of sleep and am insanely jealous.

If you can't be sufficiently productive in 16 hours a day, I'm not sure having another 4 hours is going to help.

That assumes you get to spend all 16 as you choose.

If you have to spend 9-11 hours at work, more time helping with homework and housework, more time shuttling dependents around, etc., etc., you can end up with very little time left to spend how you choose. Adding 4 hours to that could be like multiplying your one free hour that's left by 5.

It really depends on the grogginess factor.

There have been times in my life where I was able to get about 14 hours of sleep a day. It would still take me a couple of hours to mentally 'spin-up' but once my brain was in gear the focus and acuity were amazingly productive!

There have been other times in my life when I've been forced to live on less than 5 hours a night and I was a complete zombie almost every 'waking' minute.

So, I'm with BillTheCat, I'd love to be able to sleep less but maintain the higher productivity level, that I can currently only get with many hours of sleep.

I find exercise and also deep learning, challenging mental tasks make me need 7-8 hours, but otherwise when I have a series of hum drum days with no exercise I'm fine with 6 hours.

Does anyone else find that?

Same for me.

6 hours seems to be the new magic number since I started doing 90m of ashtanga yoga daily. I get much better sustained energy output throughout the day, too.

Yoga has done so much for my energy, productivity, and happiness. I wish I'd taken it up years ago.

Can you expound a bit as to why it has helped you? How do you know it was yoga instead of healthier life habits in general? How did you get started?

Thanks!

For my experience, the increased physical activity kicked my body into a higher gear, I guess. My food preferences went toward denser energy and high protein, and my sleep needs shrank a little. I feel like the combined meditation and exercise is driving the healthier lifestyle; it's not an accidental related thing.

Yep. Six hours is the maximum I can sleep. I thought there was something wrong, but since I'm fully rested on that amount, I no longer worry about it.

I can relate to this article. I go to bed at 1am and get up at 5:45. I prefer to be at work by 6:30am and work solid 12+ hour days, with ideally a gym session mid-morning, a run at lunchtime, and 2-3 hours more sport in the evening. Dinner is often at 10:30pm. Basically, I can go all day at full speed and never get tired from mental or physical effort. I'd pack even more into each day if my partner would let me.

Sometimes I worry my body will break. That rarely stops me though, so long as I get 4.5 hours' sleep. Less than 4 and my concentration span is reduced, I get susceptible to colds and am more easily irritated.

Clearly there's a genetic difference here. I count myself very lucky for my extra productive hours.

Then there's the co-workers who say they need little sleep, when the truth is their productivity is suffering...

Or maybe they are spending it elsewhere? With, say, 4 hours of sleep, you have 20 waking hours. If 8 of those waking hours are at work, 12 aren't, right?

If only people spent as little as 8 hours at work.

My dad only needed 4 hours of sleep.

He worked 12-16 hour days, went to grad school at night, and still managed to run or hit the gym every day. He was never tired, and actively tried to cut back on his sleeping time.

Now he has diabetes, and the doctors are nearly 100% convinced it was due to a lifetime of lack of sleep.

Beware.

All I can conclude from that is the doctors don't seem like they understand epidemiological science.

Well, he had no other risk factors.

No family history, life-long Mediterranean diet, never drank more than just a couple glasses of wine a year, lots of physical activity, low body fat (like, pretty jacked actually), perfect blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.

Sure, there could be something genetic that never presented itself in any other family member, but the lack of sleep is what stuck out most to the doctors.

  “It’s wonderful to have so many hours in my day – I
  feel like I can live two lives,” she says.

  ...

  “There’s this social view that short sleeping is a good 
  thing and should be encouraged – we’re always hauling 
  out the example of Margaret Thatcher and top CEOs who 
  don’t need much sleep. In fact, the amount of sleep you 
  need is genetically determined as much as your height 
  or shoe size. Some people need very little sleep, 
  others need 11 or 12 hours to feel their best.”

I don't think sleeping less is only better from a social view - like this lady says, she sleeps 4 hours and she feels like she can live two lives. If I need to sleep 12 hours to feel rested, doesn't it stand to reason that I can only live half a life? Maybe sleeping less than you need to feel your best is a worthwhile trade if you can spend more time living...

Sleep is the cousin of death.

If you use the 12 hours wisely then you can live a very full life. My life is much more focused now that I get 10+ hours of sleep (of course some people are super focused and sleep 4 hours - but the average person "wastes" a lot of the day).

It's amazing how humans spend one third of their life asleep, but the science of sleep is still very exploratory and inconclusive.

Without an alarm, I tend to sleep 4 hours a day. But this is provided I dont exercise. If I go to workout at a gym / Martial arts, I find I have to sleep 7 hours. But both these cases, I do not need an alarm to wake me up. I wake up about 5 minutes before the alarm is going to ring and Stretch in my bed. When the alarm goes I jump off the bed. I actually feel more energized when I sleep for just 4 hours. But I need a 20m nap in the afternoon if this is the case. My schedule is

(without exercise) - 10:30 PM to 2:30 AM (with exercise) - 11 PM to 6 AM.

I would love to study more about the effects of sleep and how we can control it.

Are there any DNA analyses services that look for DEC2? I think I may have this..

23andme does, but it doesn't include it in the default report.

You can go to https://www.23andme.com/you/explorer/gene/?gene_name=BHLHE41 and check your raw data to see if you're heterozygotic.

Drat. rs4963955: TT; rs4963956: CC; rs1480037: CC. Of course, I already knew I was not a short-sleeper but one can always hope for a hidden superpower...

Hmm. I have TT, CC, and CT but I generally sleep terribly.

Does anyone know of more research on what would cause this to be expressed? Maybe I just need to be more consistent with my schedule.

More importantly, are there services that will 'give' DEC2 to people who want it? ;-)

I had a friend like this in college, a high-energy athletic dude. I don't remember the exact details, but I believe in his case it had to do with his body over-producing iron. He only needed 3-4 hours of sleep a night and his father needed even less (and would routinely work 24 hour shifts at the hospital).

I was a bit jealous of him. I'd love an extra four hours to my day.

>and would routinely work 24 hour shifts at the hospital

This is one of my fears, that we'll crack the sleep nut and then workers will be forced into double shifts gradually. Sure, it'll be done with a velvet glove as the prices of goods and real estate will go up as everyone around you works 16 hour days and their wages reflect that (or dont get fired for not doing it). The same way an affordable middle class life went from only having one breadwinner to two as women entered the workforce.

I sincerely hope we have some kind of robot/automation labor revolution well before that. I'd rather build a better robot than a better human.

Parkinson's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

You could technically use the extra time for leisure. But you know that for some people the time would be just be filled with more work. I think it will greatly depend on the status quo of the field and one's personality.

>Short-sleepers like Ross never feel lethargic, nor do they ever sleep in.

I'd be curious to know what her IQ is, how good her memory is, how good her puzzle solving ability is, how creative she is, and other metrics. I'm always a little surprised when I read interviews with people I admire at how much sleep they need. Seems to me, that people who are thought/analytic/creative heavy just rough up their brains more and that might mean a need for longer sleep schedules to recuperate.

>A positive outlook is common among all of the short-sleepers that Fu has studied.

Smart people are almost always fairly negative if not outright depressed. There's a lot of study in this area. This is an interesting result.

I wonder if being a low sleep person comes at the cost of smarts and creativity. Maybe DEC2 comes along with other things we're not looking at and that package may be unappealing once we get the whole picture.

Would the DEC2 mutation be amenable to being given to adults via a gene therapy?

I don't think anybody here is capable of answering that. We simply haven't tried anything like that on humans. We have the technology called CRISPR/Cas, which was used (successfully) to cure adult mice of genetic liver disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

Anecdotally, I've found that the method in the article about having a fixed wake-up time worked for me. In college I used to sleep 8-9 hours a night and would feel awful if I got less than 7. I have trouble sleeping early even when I'm tired so when I started working I was only sleeping 5-6 hours and could barely make it through the work day even loaded up with caffeine. After half a year or so I noticed I could skip the caffeine and still felt alert. Now even if I try I can't sleep more than 8 hours.

I used to be one of those. Then I got the interest bill and since then I seem to be able to sleep through whole days if I let myself (I don't). My productivity took a pretty good hit but when I have to I can still go at a good clip for about a month or two (high intensity jobs, ship on fire kind of stuff). Then after that I run out of steam and need to recover for a while.

People who need little sleep are often in position of power or great responsibility. Did they achieved great things and became successful also because of this trait, or is it a trait they developed because of success and the need to do a huge number of things during a longer day?

I have seen if you go to bed by 12 or 12:30 am and wake up by 6 or 6:30 am then you are fine and might feel fresh also but the more you delay..the more harder time you will have getting up in the morning even if you slept for the same number of hours.

I have no medical knowledge, but intuitively this makes sense to me. If you stay up longer, you need longer to refresh. It's not like you can stay up for 24 hours and then just get a regular sleep.

I have a similar pattern, but I need around 7-8 hours of sleep, so mine starts at 11 pm and waking up between 6 or 6:30 am.

my dad fractured his skull when he was a kid, and ever since gets by on ~4 hours of sleep.

I had a colleague and have a friend of a friend, both of whom were in car accidents as adults. In both cases, their need for sleep dropped to about 4 hours a night and their intellectual abilities skyrocketed.

There are so many extremes here that I just want to mention that I actually sleep 7-8 hours.

Something that is apparently only normal if you aren't talking on HN. :)

(Less causes problems, more is not needed... so pretty average)

I am able to sleep at 4 AM and wake up at 5:30 AM fully rested, each day. No naps, with exercise.

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