Anyone know one?
If you start at 20, thats around another 10 yrs of being awake just during your working life…
They must get sh*t handled.
I think they sleep as much, just spread out through the day. Which would be a real pain in the ass to get things done. There is a reason why its a disorder and not commonplace.
Didn’t Kramer try this?
The premise of this is pretty cool. When you think about most mammels, they do not sleep for 8 hours while remaining away for 16. Anyone who has kids knows that babies don’t abide by our social sleep cycle. There are different ways to slice the day between awake and sleep, but I read about those who sleep for 1 hour and remain awake for 3 to 5. Effectively you’d sleep 4 to 6 hours a day in intervals. Not sure how you’d really do it unless you worked for yourself and could get by at unconventional hours.
Context switching overhead will kill you.
The one I was thinking about was in “The Game” by Neil Strauss.
He was sleeping 20 min every 4 hours, which comes out to 2 hrs of sleep/day.
Our sleep cycle is governed by biology. No matter what these people try to claim when they reduce sleep to an addition problem, it doesn’t work that way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm
A circadian rhythm /sɜrˈkeɪdiən/ is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi, and cyanobacteria.
The classic phase markers for measuring the timing of a mammal’s circadian rhythm are:
- melatonin secretion by the pineal gland,[39]
- core body temperature minimum,[39] and
- plasma level of cortisol.[citation needed]
Melatonin is absent from the system or undetectably low during daytime.
Light resets the biological clock in accordance with the phase response curve (PRC). Depending on the timing, light can advance or delay the circadian rhythm.
Going against the cycle has some known consequences, health wise. I’m sure there are more we don’t know yet that require a long period of ineffective sleep to manifest.
I take sleep very seriously. It was one of the things I was actually interested in during my biology and neuroscience classes in undergraduate.
You have to get REM sleep. If you can get a good amount of it during these short periods, great. If not, you’ll probably be a sleepless traveling consultant dealing soap and starting a fight club.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Survival rate is one variable. Other is quality of life during surivival time
^Word.
I got a CPAP machine a few years ago, and it literally changed my life. You have no idea how important good sleep is until you start getting good sleep.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Then why are afternoon naps so pleasant?
Ah, here we go: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10666138
“Exposure to sleep and darkness in the morning resulted in phase delays, whereas exposure in the evening resulted in phase advances relative to controls. Afternoon naps did not change circadian phase.”
I seem to recall reading/hearing that Einstein slept 10-11 hours per night and threw in some naps as well.
How did you figure out that you had sleep apnea?
Did you do a sleep study?
I consistently wake up in the middle of the night, but never really considered getting checked out.
Try avoiding artificial light in the evenings for a month or so. It’s amazing (from what I hear, I’ve been doing it so long I just get friends to convert. And they all think I’m crazy)
Originally, I thought I had ADD, because I had extreme difficulty focusing on anything. (This is when I was attending my Top-1 MBA program, and it was extremely demanding, even for those of us with an IQ of 180.)
After going to the psychologist, he said that he didn’t think it was a cognitive problem. He referred me to the sleep specialist, because the symptoms of sleep apnea and ADD can be very similar. Basically, when you don’t get good sleep, your brain never “recovers”, and it’s harder to focus on stuff.
Yes, I did a sleep study.
And waking up in the middle of the night isn’t the real enemy. If you’re waking up because you woke out of REM or need to pee, that’s different. But if you’re choking on your soft palate, then you need to see a doctor. The problem gets exacerbated if you’re overweight (so I’ve heard–not that I’m fat or anything).
Waking in the middle of the night canactually a very good sign, if its for the right reasons. It used to be wayyy more common before Edison’s curse. It’s how we seem designed to sleep. From Jessa Gamble’s TED talk on sleep (a journalist that covers this topic):
So, what would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there’s a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they’re experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives.
All I know is that my 6.5 hours of sleep a night isn’t enough. I’m open to any new idea.
If you get >= 7 hours of sleep per night but are tired a lot, I would recommend the sleep study. It cost me about $400 with insurance that didn’t cover it and takes one night of staying at the sleep clinic. I had a mild case of sleep apnea, about 15 apneas an hour. Best money I ever spent was getting that fixed. I also have insomnia and difficulty getting to sleep and recommend intermezzo for that. I’ve tried every sleep drug on the market and that is hands down the best for me.