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How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?
not_you asks:
"Clinton, Giuliani, Bloomberg, and even Martha Stewart are rumored
to only get only 4 hours of sleep on a normal night. Being a student
without enough time for all the socializing (and studying) I'd like
to do and lacking the ability to dream lucidly, I'd like to get the
minimal amount of sleep necessary to function effectively. However,
I tend to make up for anything less than about 7 hours by dozing off
in class! Aside from taking espressos intravenously, how I can
function effectively with less sleep?" There are several factors
that affect how much sleep one can away with on a given day. Diet,
activity level, and other factors all will affect how long and how
well one rests. I've always heard that "nothing beats a full night
of rest" and to me, that always means close to 8 hours of sleep. Of
course, like most things Your Mileage May Vary, still, it would be
interesting to know how much sleep some of you can get by on, and
what conditions you have to maintain to keep it up. Comments?
I find that I can generally get by with 3-4 hours of sleep if I don't eat until much later the following day (between lunch and dinner), if I eat breakfast, I'm out like a light.
Moderate exercise just before you put the lights out for your 4 hour night seems to help more than exercising in the morning. Especially if you are a jogger.
Eventually, your body gets accustomed to little sleep and adjusts the length of REM sleep accordingly, so long as you stick to a routine sleep schedule (that's where most people go wrong); it's when you awake in the middle of REM sleep that you're worthless for the rest of the day.
Also, pouring McDonalds coffee down your pants on the way to work/school/sleep clinic will surely get the blood flowing. YMMV
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
On my last vacation, I had the priviledge of going to Jerusalem via Amsterdam - a total of 58 hours sleepless, since I cannot sleep on planes or in public areas, and I was kept active in Amsterdam by visiting with a friend.
While I didn't get to 112 for certain, and I didn't go barking mad, I definitely had some interesting experiences - I had a 2-hour nap at about 44-46 hours, and when I woke, I was more fucked up than I'd ever been. I'd had a dream about Hebrew having some weird grammatical rule, and it scared the bejeezus out of me; I ended up not being able to eat anything for a few hours, and I was pretty strung out (coffee helped).
I found that I sort of sine-waved my way through those last 33 hours or so - I would go from fully conscious, aware, everything I am when I get enough sleep, into drowsy, and then more-than-drowsy - I think I passed out for a few minutes on the flight to Tel Aviv, and I nearly passed out (and cracked my head open on the pretty stone floor) of the hallway of the apt/condo I was staying at. Either way, I have some large gaps in my memory.
Sleep is definitely good, though I'd be interested to hit 112 hours and see how it affects me. After 25-28 hours, it seems, sleep isn't a pressing issue if I can't afford to let it be, but still, it'd be fun.
--Dan
Develop a theory of how you could create a tablet that one could take each day that would replace the need for sleep. Imagine, you could have 8 extra hours to yourself every day! Provided they didn't cost too much everyone would buy them.
I find that sleeping for 10 hours and then staying awake for 20 hours works best for me. The problem is trying to get everyone else to work around my schedule! I've read that without light cues, people's circadian rhythms change by varying degrees. From the link above:
Kind of makes you wonder if our planet has always been spinning this fast, doesn't it?
-RayI had a job for a while where I had to wake up very early, like 5am earky. Now I'm conditioned to automatically wake up at 5am. I could go to bed at 2am, and wake up three hours later w/o a problem. Only every once in a while will I sleep past 5am until like 7 or 8am; and thats really rare. Only happens when I exhausted for whatever reason.
-- Eric
A buddy of mine in HS decided to try the 'five day' rule; damn near killed himself when he was riding his bike, and hallucinated, four days in. Me, I know that it's time to toddle off to bed when I get paranoid. Usually, this manifests as seeing my mouse move out of the corner of my eye. I swear the little bugger tries to crawl across me desk when I'm really really tired.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I've worked first, second, and third shift, and can honestly say that sleep is my least favorite activity. I feel as I'm being robbed of part of my life.
However, once im nice and asleep, it typically takes me 10-11 hours to wake back up naturally. If i have to wake up before that (Read: Work), it takes an act of G-d to get me up and out of bed. My body (and simiconcious mind) hate waking up so much that i can turn off an alarm (even my winamp alarm) without ever becoming completely lucid. I do it every night. I have to set 3 alarms to wake up. They recently all became ineffective. (Sometimes, i'll get up, turn the alarm off BEFORE it goes off!). Now I have a flesh-and-blood alarm that makes sure im awake in time to come to work.
Once i'm awake, and have had a good 8 hours, im fine after 30 minutes, but my brain doesnt enter init 3 until about 2 hours later.
I want to beg my doctor to prescribe me modafinil, the drug they use to treat narcolepsy. A recent study by doctors at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston showed the drug is effective in letting healthy people stay awake and completely in control of their mental facilities for up to 4 days at a time. This raises an interesting question, at least for me.. my personality changes dramatically from the morning to the night.. wonder what would happen after 4 days.
You need sleep - don't discount it! Like other posters, you can survive for a day or two on little sleep, but it will catch up with you. I remember on several occasions having partied hard the night before and only grabbing 3-4 hours sleep... the morning would be terrible. Coffee would get me through but I wouldn't be thinking properly. The afternoon would be like a marathon - my head would go down and I would doze off at the keyboard... after a minute or two I would wake up to see my emacs screen full of garbage! (My fingers would also be sleeping on the keys!)
Steve Fossett who hot-air ballooned his way around the world said that he took power-naps. 15-30 min naps every few hours. Worked for him, but I imagine sheer adrenalin carried him through most of the time. For you and me we can try caffeine pills, jolt cola, or good old vodka red bull.
Here's a quote from the Marvin Minsky article referenced in the Slashdot article _It's 2001, Where is HAL?
Recent discoveries in learning skills has revealed a very strange fact - suppose you work very hard on something and then you're tested later that day on the same thing. It's interesting, you won't be much better. If you're tested the next day, you may be a lot better. If you're tested the third day, you may be considerably better than you were on the second day without having done the thing in between. Guess what's the largest factor in influencing to what extent that's true? It's whether you got 8 hours of sleep or 6
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I am one of those people who tends to stay awake later and later, and sleep later and later as a consequence. I eventyally work my way around the clock, with few ill effects. (When left to my own devices, that is, work 9-5 kinda interferes with this.)
THings i have found that have helped wake me up more coherent in the morning:
1: Bright light on a timer, set to turn on 30-40 minutes before i actually wake up. If i am rested, this works instead of an alarm clock. If i still need the alram clsokc, i am somewhat more coherent getting out of the house.
I have also tried tis with an electric blanket to get my body temp up a bit in he mornings, with marginal results.
2: In the evenings, in my main office, i switched over to dimmer red light bulbs, as opposed to the glaringly bright lights i had in there before. I switch to the red light about 10-11 at night. Im not sure how well this will work, but I am getting tired earler than i was.
Betwee nte two of these, im hoping to keep myself programmed to a better sleep wake cycle. I know the light in the morning is very helpfull, im not sure about the dim lights in the evening, but it makes sense.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I recall recently reading an oncology (cancer) report that indicated that the human brain does in fact GROW NEW NEURONS throughout life (haven't seen an online version.) The report summary indicated that the brain loses the nerve connections during the day and re-grows them at night.
A seperate study also showed that the popular anti-depressent prozac makes changes to this neural re-growth.
Further to how this tie's into Ask Slashdot - Neural re-growth normally occurs ONLY DURING REM STAGES OF SLEEP.
This (likely) explains the many reports of people hallucinating after long periods of REM sleep deprivation - A waking brain loses connections in that section and when enough connections are lost - mental coherency is lost.
There you have it folks - a reason for WHY sleep is needed
Lord_Hern (at) h o t m a i l d o t c o m
P.S. - An interesting thing about modafinil (often given to sufferers of sleep apnea - It has demonstrated the ability to restore brain function similar to good REM sleep. I *STRONGLY* suspect that it acts on the brain stem the same way as REM sleep - promoting neural regrowth.
I had a great
me too. I'm a Phd student and average 9 or 10 hrs/day, usually from 3am-1pm. If I'm really tired I can sleep straight through upto 15 hours. I once heard Einstein slept an average of 12 hours a day so I'm in good company!
Regarding your tangent about hyperactivity. Typically, the more intelligent the subject, the later hyperactivity or attention deficit disorders show up. So dumb hyperactive kids get pegged with ADD/ADHD right away while smart kids often skate as "underachievers." Of course, you didn't say if you had an attention deficit. Regardless, sounds like you've got a handle on the problem.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Is it just me, or did anyone else find themselves yawning while reading this thread?
Winston Churchill did this without the aid of a Visor. His solution? Sit in a comfortable chair, hold your keys in one your hands and let that hand rest in such a way that when releasing the keys they'll fall to the floor. Then fall asleep - when you are about to enter deep sleep your muscles will loosen and your keys will hit the floor, making sufficient noice to wake you up. Simple, but very efficient :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
In my own personal experience, the exact number of hours I need to sleep can be considerably reduced with seemingly no ill effects. It went something like this: start out from your current level, say, 8 hours. Then sleep half an hour less for a month, no exceptions. No late sleeping on weekends, and go to bed at roughly the same time every night. After that month, your body will pretty much have compensated. Then take away another half hour for a month. Then another. Then ...
Sooner or later you'll hit the barrier where your body can't compensate any more - don't continue beyond that point, because you'll just wear yourself out. My personal low is about 6 hours - YMMV.
BTW, if you REALLY want to know how little sleep is actually necessary, just have kids :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Well, then they have to make up for it on the weekend, or they have some serious brain disorder, and not the kind you want to have. Almost everybody needs about 8h of sleep per night. Some people need more. If you sleep less than what you need, you incur a sleep debt which you will have to repay. If the debt gets too large, you'll just keep falling asleep briefly throughout the day and not even notice (which can be rather dangerous). And if you are living with a large sleep debt, it's bad for your health.
Most Americans are already chronically sleep-deprived and suffering numerous health problems as a consequence.
One research group that has done excellent work on this and published a lot is Prof. Dement at Stanford (no, I'm not making up the name).
He has a guide specifically for students.
Now, I get around 7-8 hours a night, sometimes a lot less (I'm a grad. student). I have experiment with getting more, and I noticed that I feel a lot better with 9 hours of sleep than with 8. As a student, though, I find it hard enough to get 7 or 8. I feel 'normal' on 8, but feel better than normal on 9.
If you always needed a lot more sleep than others and you wet your bed until much older than "normal" kids, if you kick your bed while asleep, if you talk asleep or have sudden breaks in your breathing. . .
you might be suffering from some form of parasomnia. I have it myself and was recently diagnosed with it. I was always like you describe. I actually had to be dressed in bed until I was in my late teens because it was so difficult for me to wake up. Noises and light were torture to me in the first 40 minutes after waking.
Consult a neurologist and he might prescribe a very small quantity of a tricyclic anti-depressant which will regulate your sleep (This is not to sleep, but to regulate it). The difference is like that between night and day. I take 10mgs of a drug that's prescribed with a minimum of 40mgs, so it takes very little to actually benefit from sleep.