I emailed the researcher, whose address was at the end of the article with the appropriate gene data (BHLHE41 on Chromosome 12) to see if my DNA is a match. The article said its a mutation, but maybe those with the mutation exhibit a certain codon pair. Its an amazing time when you can read an article about such a thing, and then cross check your DNA in a matter of seconds. Articles will have to start posting the raw DNA for results.
I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits.<p>As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again.<p>Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nights but the results are that I feel worse in the morning, and each night I attempt to sleep 8 hours waking up gets harder and harder.<p>Over the years I've developed a few theories as to why I need less sleep than is recommended and someday when I get around to finishing my EEG project I'll gather some data to back them up, but for now I'm just making the most out of the extra time I have the same way someone with a different biological advantage might.<p>I will also mention that (as mentioned elsewhere here) there are definitely people at the other end of this curve who's performance is shockingly better if they get more than the "required" 8 hours of sleep per night, and I believe that we could all benefit by recognizing this fact and adjusting our cultural expectations to accommodate these patterns as well. I think with a little flexibility on both ends we'd see a significant increase in overall productivity and quality of life.<p>In other words "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep." - <a href="http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/whentired.html" rel="nofollow">http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/whentired.html</a>
This reminds me of the studies not too long about how some very <i>small</i> percentage of the population actually CAN multitask well. Then a very <i>large</i> percentage of the population used that as "evidence" to justify their existing habits. I see it here already.
I think it's obvious what we must do next. According to every science fiction film or book I've ever read, we must capture them, confine them and study them in an attempt to learn their secrets and duplicate it in everyone else.
It's a false dichotomy, on a lot of hard problems progress is a step function, and you often "get much done" <i>while</i> sleeping. I.e. when you wake up well rested you see things from a different angle. If it's something like chopping wood, sure, the less you sleep the more wood you chop, within reasonable limits, but I don't think that is what these articles aim for. I think it's wrong to look at sleep as a waste of time the same way time spent thinking about something is not wasted either.<p>Here's some information I mostly agree with:
<a href="http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm</a>
There has been a link to depression and too much sleep so much so that sleep deprivation is used as a treatment for depression where other treatments fail. It actually puts the patient into a manic episode.<p>It was peculiar to note that people who are short-sleepers also share a slight manic trait in their personality. While the article makes short-sleep cycles out to look like all sunshine and roses it is not all it is cracked up to be. I get between 2 and 4 hours sleep a night and on a good night I get 6. I have to monitor the sleep I am getting because if I allow myself to fall into a cycle of 2 hours for an extended time I start to have problems with my heart and abnormal rhythms. If the > 4 hours cycle goes on for more than a week I have to start taking medicine to sleep to ensure that my body is receiving an adequate amount of sleep. I see no negative effects if I get 4-6 a night, but it is probably safe to assume that short-sleep cycles rides the line between good and bad health. I never considered myself a short sleeper I just figured I have insomnia but never worried too much about it because I feel no different if I get 4 or 8 hours of sleep a night (if I can get 8) and the fact that my father and grandfather shares the trait and are healthy (grandfather is almost 90) . On the plus side, I experience more life and get more done which are really the only benefits to sleeping less.
"A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. 'These people talk fast. They never stop. They're always on the up side of life,' says Dr. Buysse."<p>Reduction in sleep is a known symptom of abnormally elevated mood, whether hypomania (elevated mood without psychotic symptoms) or mania (elevated mood with psychotic symptoms). For most normal subjects, as has been demonstrated by studies of unusual sleep patterns in armed forces personnel, reduced hours of sleep or disrupted daily sleep cycles seriously degrade performance of many tasks involving judgment or multitasking--without the subject of the experiment being aware of the degraded performance.<p><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+mania" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+mania</a><p>Note that controlled reduction of sleep has been shown experimentally to elevate the mood of depressed persons. In other words, if a person has had a prolonged period of depressed mood, and begins reducing hours of sleep (especially if a light box turns on to help the person wake up on time in the morning), that can bring the person closer to normal mood.<p><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+depression" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+depression</a><p>Following up on the interesting comment posted first by mechanical_fish, there surely is a range of variation of "natural" human need for sleep, with most people concentrated in a band of needing approximately seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and some few needing significantly less, and some few needing significantly more. But social pressure and environmental conditions for sleep induction (electric lights in the evening) in current society probably result in most people getting less sleep than what they need to perform at their best when awake and to maintain good health.
I've always wondered if this was mostly a psychological issue.<p>There are two circumstances in which I get less than 7 hours of sleep a night: if I'm really stressed about getting something done, or if I'm really excited about getting something done.<p>In the first place the lack of sleep exacerbates the stress and really starts to weigh on me. But in the second case it doesn't seem to have much negative effect.<p>Now if only I could continuously keep my motivation up...
Damn you, science! I’ve read so many studies saying there’s absolutely no way you can get by without at least 7 hours sleep and now you tell me that that completely doesn’t apply to 1-3% of the population?! That’s actually not that small of a percentage. How big were the sample sizes of all the other studies? Did nobody encounter at least one of these low-sleep requiring people? Maybe they were just eliminated as being an anomaly.<p>I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.<p>This is fantastic research, I just wish it had been around 10 years ago.
<i>Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says.</i><p>The article didn't mention this, but the ability to wake up regularly without an alarm clock is probably another commonality short sleepers have. Although < 7 hours isn't something I can do regularly, I can't stay in bed, even if I'm a little tired, much past 6 AM on any day of the week.<p>"People need less sleep as they get older" is something I've heard a lot, but don't know. Sleep patterns seem pretty ingrained, and people with weird sleeping patterns tend to be either hardcore early birds (me) or unapologetic night owls.
I am 46 now and I still need more than 8 hours a night.
I tried less, but that does not work: thinking is a torture then, sports too.<p>If I get enough sleep, I feel great, I get 3 times as much done and I run and swim like a champ (still).<p>I love to get enough sleep!!!! It simply feels great.
Is this few-hours sleep business feasible when you need to think deeply about abstract things during the day, eg. programming? I can see it working if your success is tied to being energetic, on the ball, constantly negotiating, acting on information or leading lots of people. But what if you need to do the analysis yourself?
I used to know one of these short sleepers. He had never felt the need to sleep more than about two hours per night, and did so for his whole life (which was respectably long, no noticeable side-effects from the exceptionally short sleep). He used a lot of the extra time to run a small local business, interact with customers during the day and do the administration during the night.
No sleep is a feat I could pull off regularly when I was younger. It was no problem to go 48-72 hours without more than just a catnap or two. That was a decade ago. In my early thirties, I struggle beyond the sixteenth hour, except for rare occasions.<p>Fortunately, I think it's a sort of bell curve. From what I understand, I'm only about fifteen or twenty years away only getting a couple hours of sleep per night. How productive sleepless nights full of trips to the bathroom will be, I have no idea. I guess I'll finally catch up on all that damn reading.
I sleep 2am to 7am most days and keep myself busy so much that I sometimes go to 3:30am before forcing myself to sleep. Sleep time happens within 3-5 mins after going to bed - according to my WakeMate.<p>I think alot of this is due to a busy lifestyle. I find myself doing multiple things at the same time in the evening and being very productive in getting stuff done. While on holidays where I actually disconnect from work I find I sleep long hours each day.<p>An afternoon 20 min powernap is an amazing recharge! Everyone should do it. Using Paul McKenna's audio helps with the powernap. There's something weird about the hypnotic audio. Instantly puts me to sleep.<p>Finally, supposedly the need to nap in the afternoon is normal and every animal in the kingdom does it. Humans has largely forgotten about this clock due to the "working culture". In the book Brain Rules, this is described in more detail: <a href="http://www.brainrules.net/sleep" rel="nofollow">http://www.brainrules.net/sleep</a><p>My 2c's worth.
Not saying that I'm one of the sleepless elite, but I seem to function best on 6 hours of sleep a day. Whenever I try to sleep more I just feel tired all day and when I sleep less ... well that depends on how much less.<p>For optimum energivity I find an hour of sleep is best, just enough to reset your cycle. But you can't do this more than once at a time, the next day the whole 6 hours are needed.<p>Don't have any idea why I'm like this, but I'm told that even as a baby I would often lie in bed for hours before finally falling asleep and as a toddler I would wake up at 5am because I was put to bed so early. Nowadays a healthy 4am to 10am schedule seems best.<p>Oh and anyone who doesn't want to sleep as much as they should, meditation is a great way of doing it. I managed to shave 2 hours off of my daily sleep need with 10 minutes of meditation ... so essentially I averaged 4 hours a day, for something like 5 years before I got out of the meditating habit for varying reasons.
I think the level of sleep I need depends on what I'm working on. When I was working on a business with my friends, I'd only sleep for 4 hours or so a day. Whereas when I was working a job I hated, I was exhausted unless I slept 9-10 hours a night. I think sleep requirements are a function of brain activity and engagement. It's just a theory but it seems to be true, at least in my case. Another theory I have relates to the sleep schedules of people. I'm nocturnal. I have been since I was 8 years old. And when I was working with my friends, it was at night. So I wonder if nite people need more sleep to function during the day like morning people need more to work nights?
Read the actual paper, take a look at the hypomania test: figure out things about yourself. <a href="http://cl.ly/313A0x2k011t400C3N3C" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/313A0x2k011t400C3N3C</a>
I question how much "work" someone that fits this really gets accomplished. I can run on limited sleep for weeks at a time and am more energized, but throw me at something mentally challenging like Quantum Physics or Solving some Linear Systems model, and it's like my brain says it needs time to process everything, so I end up sleeping absurd amounts. (I also find I make significant headway the next day after that kind of sleep)
I have to admit that I'm a bit confused here. 7-9 hours seems to be the "normal recommended" range, and under 6 hours puts you in the short sleepers category. What does 6-7 make you? Irrelevant to the research?<p>Many people make the mistake of oversleeping on the weekend and undersleeping on working days. I try to average 6.5hrs every night, weekend or no weekend. Just being consistent really helps in keeping the energy levels up imo.
Given that the trait is genetic and extremely advantageous, why doesn't a much larger portion of the population have it? Is there a significant downside?
The primary function of sleep is to permanently store the things learned during the day (long-term potentiation). Although different people need different amounts of sleep, those who need less usually find that they sleep longer if they learn challenging new material (e.g. a new language). That is the reason why babies sleep the most. Their brains are empty sponges constantly absorbing new information.
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> Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I think I could sleep 20 hours if given the chance, but I routinely will sleep until 7am regardless of when I go to bed. If its 10pm or 4am. I just wake up at 7am, I'm super sleepy still, but more hungry. So I have to wake up, make some cereal and then I'm up.<p>Not sure what that is, but I've never met anyone else who shares this trait.
Hmmm.. Something I would <i>think</i> I could relate to, but we all know (a) how easy it is to convince yourself/diagnose yourself with something, and (b) how we would <i>all</i> love to consider ourselves from this group. So I'll just let this make me smile a little and leave it that :)
My boss is exactly like this - sleeps a tiny bit, has ridiculous amounts of energy and enthusiasm, and loves to deal with the world in a flurry of stimuli and decisions.<p>Me, I'm just an insomniac.
I used to need very little sleep. Unfortunately, it was because my thyroid was overactive. As soon as I went to a doctor and got it taken care of, I became a normal sleeper.
This is a talk given at google about sleep <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1nMQq67VI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1nMQq67VI</a>