Slashdot Mirror
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.
Anything less and I'll get increasingly tired until I need to sleep 12+ hours to compensate. ;)
Off course I can't really get more than 6-7 hours during the week so I'm always late for work (I don't hear my alarm clocks when too tired) and I'm not able to do much work until I've had a massive dose of caffeine (and even then
True warriors use the Klingon Google
This gives me 5 hours sleep and a lot of exercise on the dance floor
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
I just saw myself in the mirror in the lift (elevator) on the way into work this morning. All I can say is that however much sleep I need, I'm not getting enough :-(
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Sleep is very very very important. I learned that once during the final finals of my college career. I stayed up for over 112 hours (roughly 4.5 days) straight though a mixture of pluck, fear, and caffiene pills. By the end of this ordeal, I was literally barking mad.
I was seeing things that weren't there (like a staircase in my one-story flat, and various war heros standing over my shoulder giving me answers on the history test) and holding conversations with people which turned out to be completely unintelligible to both parties (with such zingers like: "Seven beer-teen and without even? You must be over. Totally joking over my and.").
Get your sleep. It's good for you.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
However, even with exercise I need a lot of sleep. I think it's just genetics. I've found that I really need 9 hours rather than the canonical 8. Guess I'll never be prez...and never have my own how-to-make-a-quilt-from-fallen-leaves show.
When you're asleep, the brain's level of consciousness (it's not that, but we'll call it that), swings up and down like a cross between a sine wave and a seismograph, something like so:
;>
When you first fall asleep, the brain goes into deep deep REM sleep, and you have your first dream. The brain's levels then swing back up towards non-REM sleep, but not necessarily leaving it, and then dip back down deeper into REM - but not as deep as the first time.
The brain undergoes several such swings, each time rising higher out of REM sleep (you're pretty much guaranteed to leave REM sleep the second time at least), and then not sinking as low. Eventually, it gets to the point where you're not even going into REM sleep, at which point you wake up.
Now, the trick is that if you wake up while in REM sleep, the body gets all mussed up. You feel like crap all day, you're tired, cranky, and whatnot. Effects may vary, but generally, this is the case.
If you wake up OUT of REM sleep, however, you will feel rested - perhaps not totally so, but you will be rested to some degree, and recharged.
The trick then is to catch yourself outside of these cycles. Ideally, you need to find a good time to go to sleep (for me, it's between 10 and 10:30 PM), and then see when you wake up. A few years ago, I found myself conscious enough to look at my clock and check the time every 2 hours - I would go to bed at 10-10:30, fall asleep at 11, and then wake up at 1, 3, 5, and 7 AM. At any of those times, I could have, if I'd wanted to, gotten up, gone to the bathroom, went online, gone to the store, or anything else - I was perfectly capable of doing whatever I wanted to do. My cycle is 2 hours then, and thus, I need sleep in 2-hour increments. I recall one time falling asleep at 2 AM, and waking up at 6 AM, and getting right back up and doing what I was doing before.
It has to be good sleep though - comfortable temperature, not sick, comfortable bed - and it has to be reliable (staying up until 1:30 AM screws me up big time for days to come), and you can't be malnourished - there are a few great ways to eat well, but that's a whole other Ask Slashdot.
Anyway, I suggest you experiment. Find a good time to sleep, and then see when you can wake up. Perhaps you'll need to get to sleep at 10 PM like I did, but perhaps you can wake up at 2 AM and study, prepare, mail letters, or code for the rest of the day afterwards.
Also, don't discount siestas. Lying down for half an hour in the middle of the day, even if you don't sleep, can be a great recharger. And don't touch sleeping pills, or anything, organic or not, to help you sleep better. The last thing you need is to get dependant on something for sleep, and then have it run out the night before your final.
--Dan
In case you haven't noticed all of the people mentioned in the story are at least 50ish. As people age they generally require less sleep. Sound like a good reason?
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
How much sleep do i need?? More than I'm currently getting! :)
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.
Normally, I need 8-9 hours sleep a night. I rarely get it, which sucks. But a unique sleep pattern, and one that can be maintained, is the watch system used when long distance sailing. Basically, it's equal, alternating periods of wake and sleep. The periods might be 2 or four hours (not usually more). It's hard to get used to but then surprisingly effective. You become able to sleep very quickly and wake completely refreshed. However, you then start to become tired again very fast, and are soon ready to sleep again 2 or 4 hours later.
As someone who can't well tolerate even a single 5 hour night and be functional the next day, I'm amazed that I can quite happily slip into the watch system. Odd.
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I have a very fast metabolism, and consequently need a lot of sleep. In fact I held a record at college for not getting out of bed for three days - spending the entire time asleep. God was I dehydrated though!
One thing I have found is that a high protein diet (loads of fish, chicken, etc) and daily exercise makes me sleep less rather than more. It certainly seems to make me concentrate better and not alternate between massive bursts of energy and normality.
It's just strange that I wasn't hyperactive as a child, only as an adult.
This is true. The symptoms are similar to dehydration. Granted it is estimated to happen after over +150hrs awake and somebody would have to sit there shocking you to keep you awake, but it is a possibility.
Another thought, try light therapy while sleeping. I've heard good things about its ability to make one feel more energized. Plus it is shown to be effective therapy for seasonal depression (which has been confirmed to be a honest to goodness mental disorder).
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.
Some interesting things I got out of that seminar, haven't had a chance to try most of these out for myself (so I can't personally testify to their value)...
1. You need 8 hours per day. Anything that deviates from 8 hours per day too much will come back to haunt you, the effect is cumulative.
2. If you nap, don't nap for more than 30 minutes. There's high-level and low-level sleep, and over 30 minutes takes you from high-level to low-level, at which point your body is preparing to shut itself down for a long time. Letting that happen outside of a normal sleep schedule will mess you up.
3. Coffee is bad bad bad. When eating, trying eating your proteins first in the morning, and your carbohydrates first in the evening. Whatever you eat first will affect your energy level, and proteins wake you up, while carbs mellow you down.
4. If you need anything to help you either fall asleep (pills) or wake up (alarm clock), you're not getting proper sleep. Good sleep patterns become habitual (apparently).
5. You need a perfectly dark room when you sleep. The only noise you have should be background stuff that drowns out random outbursts of noise.
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charlton heston is more of a man than yo
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'm not sure I can answer this yet, since I've only had since October 18th, 2001 for the clinical trial. Still, the experiment in 4am feedings while watching "Cops" and informercials continues....
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
Actually this is a good point - amphetamine sulphate is very good for this!
I went through a phase a few years ago at college holding two jobs and still trying to geek it in the middle.
After 16 hours hard work (factory work and kitchen porter in a hotel) and a few hours programming 6 days a week nothing would get me up in the morning like a small dab of speed, not a lot - just a wet finger dipped in some - and I was instantly up and ready for anything.
I dont do it any more, depending on stuff like that is bad news really...
What he's saying is that there's two factors; short term and long term. Waking up at the wrong point in your sleep cycle will fuck you up for the day; sleep 12 hours but wake up at the wrong time, you're going to feel like crap. Not getting enough sleep "per night" will fuck you up in the long term.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Is it just me, or did anyone else find themselves yawning while reading this thread?
Has anyone had any luck working out there need to sleep with their employeer. I mean buy this for example. I find that NO matter what time I go to bed, "naturally" I wake up at 8:00am, and I am ready to function for the day. Unfortunately, my employeer requires that I am sitting in my cube by 8:00am which generally means I need to be up by 6:45, which I find to be way way outside my sleep apttern, and I find I am unable to make any adjustment to put that into my sleep pattern. One would figure after 3+years if I was gonna adjust I would have by now. So has anyone been able to convince their boss that the "corprate" get to work by this time standard doesn't work for them, and they would be much more productive if they could sleep say an hour later, and get in at 9:00am. Never mind that the 8:30-9:00am commute to work, would have less traffic hassles as well. Making me much more relaxed and ready for the day when I got here.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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
Four hours.
5 AM to 7 AM is a two-hour period. 5 PM to 7 PM is a two-hour period. That's only four hours.
I know I'm getting enough when I wake up before the dog (my Greyhound whines when she is needing to be let outside in the morning)! Nowadays we hit the hay between 10 and 11 PM. I used to function just as well staying up to about 12.
Even when I was in school (Georgia Tech) I didn't stay up much past 12 AM. I didn't live on campus and had 8 or 9 AM classes. Furthermore, I never pulled an allnighter; rest and freshness was more benificial than an extra hour or two of frantic (and useless) study.
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
Give up on caffiene. If you do, it's more useful when you need it most. If you have a regular dose every day, stop.
In general, water is much more effective for keeping people awake. In fact, most people get tired around 1 or 2 in the afternoon not because they're sleep deprived, but rather because they're dehydrated. Carry a bottle of water around with you all day long, and you'll notice a difference.
Jeez, it's not like you can just turn it on and off... doesn't anyone else find that their productivity/alertness/smartness starts to fade gradually when you reach the end of a long day? What good is staying up for 24 hours if you spend the last half of that making stupid mistakes?
The point of keeping yourself well-slept is to be at peak form when you're awake.
Invest in a good mattress and a duvet -- maybe sleep will start looking like a more appealling activity! And you'll be better for it the next day.
Here is a story about a handspring powernapping module that will help you take cat-naps and pull you out at the exact time necessary to do the most good. It's supposed to be based on Nasa research.
If I go to sleep at 22.00 and wake up at 02.00, I will be somewhat recharged. I won't be 'up and at 'em', but if I need to do something I will be able to.
Ideally, I need at least four hours to be functional for the rest of the day, six to be recharged, and eight to be energetic and optimistic, but sleeping two hours will let me keep doing whatever I was doing for a few hours more.
--Dan
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 want to find your limit, your minimized sleep requirement, have a baby, preferrably two. I've been working on five a night for three years.
illegitimii non ingravare
There are a few things you could try:
Meditate. A half hour of meditation could reduce the need for sleep by several hours.
Or, more simply, rest throughout the day. Take a few 5 to 15 minute breaks were you do nothing but relax and breathe.
Brainwave syncronization devices also claim to reduce the need for sleep. You can spend hundreds of dollars on one, or you can get the free software BWGen. All you need are headphones.
I seem to be optimum at 8 hours a night, once I work off the sleep debt I'll even wake up without the alarm (otherwise I sleep through it).
From this and from reading this thread, it just seems that different people need different amounts of sleep and they have different schedules for going to sleep and waking up.
Bleh!
All,
I read 'The promise of sleep' by William C. Dement and it was interesting. It is all about sleep. He is probably the worlds foremost athority on the subject. He basicly says that sleep deprevation is one of the biggest health risks in the country.
The way he puts it is that people need aprox. 8 hours of sleep a day and anything below that is added up night after night (he calls it sleep debt) and until you 'make it up' you are not at 100%. It is full of interesting tid bits and backed up by studys he has done for many years.
E
>>the human brain does in fact GROW NEW NEURONS throughout life
I read about this study too, then read that no one has been able to reproduce the results and most scientists doubt it.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison