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How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? 133

Posted by Cliff from the nothing-beats-a-6-to-8-hour-shutdown dept.
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?
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How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? More

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

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  • Don't eat (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EnVisiCrypt ( 178985 )
    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
  • 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 ;)
    • Hey, that sound exactly like me! =)

    • Re:I need about 9-10 hours per day (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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!

    • You might be parasomnic. . . (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.
    • 10 hours a night. She can wake up early but then a day or two later she crashes on the couch hours before we normally go to sleep.

      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.

  • Its sad, but I only sleep around 4 hours a night. I have a nasty insomnia problem where I simply have no desire to crawl into bed. I dunno...i am a freak perhaps. But I find that if I don't eat breakfast I will have _no_ energy for the rest of the day. Also investing some money into mt. dew and/or (insert favorite redbull-like drink) tends to make dealing with idiots early in the morning bareable. Other than that, I just am busy stimulating my mind in one way or another and I find it _very_ difficult to stop thinking and so i just lay in bed thinking the night away (mind you just 4 hours) and it takes me a good 2 hours in the morning to fully become alive. Then the rest of the day i am just peachy. Anyhow. Its 3am...i need to get my 4 hours in before work and then class.
  • A few years ago I followed this patten for 6 nights a week for allmost a year.
    1. 8am wake up
    2. 9am work with lunch break
    3. 6pm back home and evining meal
    4. 7pm Club
    5. 2am leave Club
    6. 3am sleep

    This gives me 5 hours sleep and a lot of exercise on the dance floor

  • More! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dicky ( 1327 ) <slash3@vmlinuz.org> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:21AM (#2815414) Homepage
    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 :-(

  • Me think sleep good! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gnovos ( 447128 ) <gnovos@ c h i p p e d . net> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:23AM (#2815422) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Me think sleep good! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
      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

    • "I was literally barking mad."

      I stayed up for about 48 hours (the last bit driving 8 hours) at the end of the fall semester of my senior year of college. The next day, I began to exhibit signs of mania. And a day after that, my parents brought me to a mental hospital. I still haven't graduated.

      My first signs of mania came in November of that year when I stayed up all night watching election returns come in and hanging online.

      Obviously sleep deprivation won't make you bipolar, but if you are predisposed to it, it will most definitely "come out" if you don't sleep in a regular schedule.

      Now, with medicine (depakote) and proper rest, I am functioning at nearly 100%. During college, I had had many times when I stayed up just as long, but at that certain point, it drove me to the point of mania. Not to say you shouldn't experiment with sleep. Just saying you might not be happy with the results.

      Depression also has many effects on sleep patterns, from not sleeping to oversleeping.

      peace

      • That's very interesting. I hear a lot of stories of people who were previously normal, but sometime around college developed a mental disorder. I wonder if sleep deprivation is the cause in some of these cases?

        • I doubt that sleep deprivation is the root cause. It can make a dormant mental disorder become apparent, but afaik if you have a disorder you have it no matter what. What is known, is that, at least in the case of bipolar, symptoms usually begin to appear between the ages of ~18-22 or so, which coincide with when most people go to college. IANAP (I am not a psychologist (and can't even be sure of the spelling)).

    • My record is about 52 hours; During the last five hours myself and a few friends of mine went to go see Hannibal at the movies. Given the state I was in, I probably should have fallen asleep...but I ended up wide awake throughout the picture and the ending, screwed up as it was...caused me to burst out laughing hysterically. I didn't stop laughing until 15 minutes after the film was over and we were all at IHOP for a bite to eat.

      Yep. Lack of sleep will do very interesting things to you. However since then I've discovered certain supplements that will keep you functioning normally (a 300mg Caffiene+25mg ephradine supplement usually does a great job at keeping you awake and functioning without paranoia).
    • > 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.

      Wow, dude, you rock! (Are you sure you didn't get any sleep in the form of microsleeps or half-hour catnaps? Highest I heard of when I was in college was in the 80s.)

      My record was 72 hours, with hallucinations (basically, dreaming while "awake" during 5-10-second microsleeps, seeing color on a monochrome display) starting in the mid-50s, going away for another half-day, and then coming back in the late 60s.

      > "Seven beer-teen and without even? You must be over. Totally joking over my and."

      For laughs, I started writing stuff down around that point, and got similar results. Had to really double-check the paper I was trying to finish up around 45-48 hours. Caught all the really bad ones about stuff like green elves in the cable.

      > Get your sleep. It's good for you.

      That it is. But sleep deprivation is fun to play with, so long as you don't expect to be productive after a certain point. (The code was done around 36 hours, the paper got handed in around 50 hours, and I went to an all-night dance party and declared myself a designated driver to get enough free caffeinated drinks to keep myself awake for the wraparound to 72. Needless to say, I didn't have a car, and even if I had, I wouldn't have dreamt of driving past about hour 24. ;-)

  • I find that when I am getting lots of exercise, I need less sleep. I hypothesize that good health iis helpful. Of course, there's a tradeoff there, since the exercise takes time itself (but of course it has other benefits!).

    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.

    • Interesting. I find just the opposite. When I exercise I need more sleep. I hypothesize that I'm breaking down muscle and my body needs the time to rebuild. This is especially noticable when I have hard work outs.

      How hard do you excercise. Maybe the key is light exercise?

  • It's not how long you sleep, it's when you wake up (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:24AM (#2815424) Journal
    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
    • Good advice, but a bit of clarification if you please. Are you saying that I should wake up before or after I fall off of the cliff? Since I dont have a REM monitor, a distinct point in dream time would be helpful.
    • So you're saying that if you go to sleep at 22:00, and wake up at say 02:00, you can stay awake and productive for the rest of the day?

      That'd be great.. :)
      • So you're saying that if you go to sleep at 22:00, and wake up at say 02:00, you can stay
        awake and productive for the rest of the day?

        I can go to sleep at 3AM and wake at 6AM, and be productive and fully awake for the rest of the day. But I cannot do that for more than two days in a row, or my body's defenses start to weaken and I begin to become ill. I don't become noticeably tired, though.

        BTW, the type of "day" whereas I would go to sleep at 3AM and awake at 6AM consists of working from 7AM-4PM, and class from 6PM-9PM (with 30min-45 min drives between work and class, and class and home; I'm typically gone from home from 6:40AM-10:00PM on those days.) I'm a fulltime CS graduate student working fulltime to pay for it. And sometimes, I'm still working on those projects at 3AM ...

        During my undergraduate years, I worked out my sleep patterns as part of a psych class. I have a three-hour pattern, which actually sucks. That means I'm best if I can get 3, 6, or 9 hours of sleep. I feel absolutely horrid with either 7 or 8. For instance, I went to bed at 11PM last night, and woke at 5AM this morning. I felt fine at 5AM but gave into the temptation of the warm bed and went back to sleep until 6:30. Now my head hurts and I'm grumpy. I should have gotten up at 5 and I would be a much happier person today.

        But, my best is getting 9 hours of sleep. And that's hard for an adult to accomplish on weekdays, and still get work + the rest of life done.
      • 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.
      • 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

  • It's possibly all about age.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FLaMeBoY ( 177281 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:31AM (#2815444)
    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?
  • In college I held this 2 day schedule during the week
    1-school+homework/etc as needed
    2-play comp games all night (starcraft/quake/etc)
    3-school next day+homework/etc as needed
    4-sleep 12 hours
    5-repeat

    I held that for the m,t,w,th,f days.. heh, worked for me, it hurts your eyes being up in 36 hour shifts though.
  • I can get away with 3-4 hours sleep for maybe 2-3 weeks (not counting weekends) without being worn out. The trick is to not deprive yourself of sleep for too long, your body will tell you when enough is enough.

    I find it a bit funny sometimes, yet scary, that when I sleep for just a few hours and try to sleep more when I wake up after that, I find myself in a dreamlike state where there's a great big international plot against me (I had one just this morning).
  • 9 hours, on a good night.
    I go to bed aroun 9, and am up at 5:30.
    But, I'm fixing to get an afterschool Job, so it will be seriously cut back.
    I'll not be getting to bed till 11ish, so I won't get up till 6ish.
    Which gives me 7 hours of sleep, which is still plenty.
    Last month when I was taking driving school, and not getting home at night till 11, I started seeing strange shaped out of the corners of my eyes, and wierd gray bubbles floating in the air.
    But, I was still getting up early then, so I will be getting more sleep than that.
  • 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.
    • Read Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. She explores the idea of what happens to people who are geneticly altered to not need sleep.
    • I read an article in the paper a few days ago. No, I don't have a link and I can't remember the name but... It was about a new drug being tested on narcolepsy patients which practically negates the body's need for sleep. Of course this is a side-effect of the intended use, but it still worked.

      Imagine something like this becoming the new designer drug of choice?

  • Fooling mother nature (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rwaldin ( 318317 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @07:19AM (#2815537)

    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 [virginia.edu] that without light cues, people's circadian rhythms change by varying degrees. From the link above:

    Experimenters have found that subjects under isolated conditions slept sometimes for 19 hours at a time, seemingly unaware of the time that had elapsed. Similarly, subjects sometimes stayed awake for as long as 30 hours, underestimating the length of their days. These outwardly bizarre sleep-wake cycles went unnoticed by subjects and had no adverse effects.

    Kind of makes you wonder if our planet has always been spinning this fast, doesn't it?

    -Ray
    • I agree. I would personally wake up around 3pm on day one, work until 9am on day two, wake up 6pm on day two, then work until 10pm on day four. Problem is is that my employer wants me to work a 9 to 5 pattern- to do this I have to wake up at 5.30am to be able to get to work. Sometimes I can't get to sleep until 5am, 30 minutes sleep is a killer (you don't feel totally awake nor tired enough to go to sleep).
      • Do many companies still operate flexitime? I can usually cope with being awake for a couple of hours between 9AM and 5PM - so I can sbe there for meetings.

        With no time constraints (i.e. only boring lectures), I tend to drift from living a "normal life" for Moscow (GMT+4), then round the clock to Alaska (GMT-9), then up all night and back to moscow time (I live in the UK, GMT).

        Occasionally I find I can cope with

        awake: 4AM - 2PM [10 hours]
        Asleep 2PM - 5PM [5 hours]
        Awake 5PM - 12AM [7 hours]
        Asleep 12AM - 4AM [4 hours]

        My days always seem longer, but then I get a lot more work done when no one is around, and in a student environment, that means between 4AM and 8AM.

        I always feel rested too hvaing gone to bed at midnight.
    • When I was in college, for at least one semester, I had a 16 hour sleep with about 24+ hours awake. Felt quite natural. I was also lucky enough to have a class schedule that basically permitted this. Weekends, I just piled on more sleep.

    • I find that sleeping for 10 hours and then staying awake for 20 hours works best for me.

      Sounds like you might be interested in the 28-hour [dbeat.com] day [asu.edu].

      It seemed like an interesting proposition to me, but I never dared try it out, mostly because of the synchronisation problems I imagined this would cause (what you called "getting everyone else to work around your schedule").

  • As someone at college currently, I have quite varied sleep patterns. On a "normal" night, I aim for 8 hours sleep, and normally manage 7-7.5 hours, and with a few coffees during the day I'm fine. If I get any less I tend to fall asleep in lectures. That said, if I don't set my alarm, I'll normally sleep for 10 hours, after a night of heavy partying it can be more (but I suspect the alcohol plays an effect there...).

    Being the mad fool that I am, I also row from time to time, which involves getting up at 5:30am instead of my usual 8:15. On a day when I'm rowing, I normally get 5 hours sleep before the outing (i.e. the night before), go to only one or two of my usual three lectures, then go back to bed for an hour and a half. Follow that with a decent lunch, and I'm fine for the rest of the day.

  • Conidtioning (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ScroP ( 536977 )
    I 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.
  • In case you're not getting enough sleep, maybe you should get a Visor to help you make up for it by Power Napping. These people [jetlog24x7.com] have released a springboard module for the Visor that aids in taking a powernap. It works by monitoring your sleep patterns and waking you up before you enter deep sleep so you feel refreshed after a nap and not groggy. The only thing I'm not sure about is keeping your finger on the sensor while you're asleep.

    • 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 :-)

      • I used to do this when I worked 12 hour night shifts. I would use 10 minutes of my 30 minute break to eat, then goto my car and hold my keys in my hand and rest my hand on my knee. I'd sleep until I dropped the keys. I usually slept for 15 or 20 mins. That was enough to keep me alive the rest of the night.
      • Salvador Dali was known to practice a similar method as in the Winston Churchill story, but for a different purpose. There is a small boundary between drifting off to sleep and when sleep finally settles in, where the mind tends to hallucinate. These are called hypnogogic hallucinations.

        Dali would hold a spoon in one hand as he drifted off to sleep on his couch. When his body entered the hypnogogic state, he would drop the spoon and would awake. Much of the inspiration for his work came from the memories of his interrupted hypnogogic hallucinations.

  • not enough (Score:2, Funny)

    by tooth ( 111958 )
    How much sleep do i need?? More than I'm currently getting! :)

  • Who needs sleep (you're never gonna get it..) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AnalogBoy ( 51094 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @09:26AM (#2815832) Journal
    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.
    • I saw some info about modafinil (or Provigil) on 20/20 or one of the network mag shows recently and was quite impressed. Side affects appear minimal. I don't know if I'd care to use it over extended periods, but I'm interested.

      Some dubious links are here [modafinil.org] and here [modafinil.com]. More reliable stuff is here [harcourthealth.com] and here [rochester.edu].
      • I really want to try that as well - I hate going to bed and can never get to sleep; so I can never get up. I also have greatly fluctuation work patterns - sometimes I dont have to do a lot, other times its 18 hour days for a week.

        I would kill for some chemical help in giving me awake time when I need it! (obviously with the condition that I rest afterwards...)

        But, no bugger with ship to England....

        which brings me to the question I was going to ask - does anyone ship to England?
      • I found out some more about it - in the UK at least, it's prescription only - and by sleep disorder professionals only. (although this was in 1998)

        info here [keele.ac.uk]

        "Modafinil is only licensed for use in patients with a clear diagnosis of narcolepsy.* Accordingly modafinil treatment should only be initiated by a specialist with experience of managing sleep disorders. Under these circumstances it is appropriate for general practitioners to prescribe maintenance therapy, within the context of an effective shared care agreement."
    • Regardless of whether you get chemical help, if you get a good doctor (I mean one who sticks with the problem until its solved) s/he will give you good advice which will help you sleep more regularly. IANAD, but I suspect that s/he will tell you to go to bed at the same time every night, avoid caffeine after noon, yada yada yada. If you're really young, you can ignore that advice. But once you start getting older, you'll get sick if you don't get a handle on your sleeping problems. Best of luck!

    • 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 have to deal with the same thing myself, which is exacerbated by my being on a 5:30am wakeup schedule (I'm a night person by nature, but my company requires me to be at work by 10am and leave by 10pm, and since everyone else comes in at 10am and stays late, the only time I can get a quiet environment to work in is early morning). I often have trouble getting to sleep before 10:30-11pm unless I'm really exhausted, so I end up using an alarm clock to get myself up, but like you, I keep turning them off in my sleep.

      Then I had a clever idea: I wrote a little program that played a sound--and ignored all terminal signals, so the only way to get rid of it was kill -9 from a different terminal--and locked the terminal before going to sleep, so I'd have to enter my password in order to turn the alarm off. (Incidentally, at this particular point in time I was living in a one-room apartment with a loft, so I had to climb down a ladder to get to the computer.)

      Well, when I woke up the next day, there was no alarm going off, and plenty of sunlight streaming in the window. This was not a good sign, I thought, so I climbed down the ladder and looked at the screen. The terminal was unlocked, and "killall -9 alarm" was displayed on the console. Obviously, I must have been at least semi-conscious at the time, but I don't remember any of it.

      I've also on several occasions had dreams where the alarm manifests itself as something inside the dream; unfortunately, I can never recognize it for what it is. One time, I was trying to fix a radio that would only put out intermittent weak static, no matter what station I tuned it to; it turned out that my alarm sound (which consists of a series of beeps followed by about 2 seconds' worth of /vmlinux) had shaken the speaker on my notebook so much that its connection to the mainboard had gone bad. Maybe I should try an alarm that says "Wake up, idiot!"

      Well, that was a lot of offtopic rambling, but I guess I'm just pretty amazed at what one's brain can do while asleep...

  • Sleep or go mad (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Amiga ( 189951 )
    Have you read Macbeth?

    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.

  • ... On the one hand, I hate to sleep. It is an inconvenient break in time that prevents you from getting work/play/things done. On the other hand, when actually sleeping and waking up after a good sleep, I appreciate it. With regards to how much sleep is needed, it obviously varies from person to person. The post [slashdot.org] in this thread covers the empirically determined nature of sleep well. Like many others here, my biggest problem is getting a pattern and sticking to it. Right now, I am going to sleep between 8pm-12pm and waking up between 5am-7am. This is obviously weird. The sad and scary part, though, of my sleeping patterns is that less than a week ago I was going to sleep at 5am-ish and sleeping until 5pm-ish. With my complete lack of regimen I'm sure that within another few weeks I'll be on some other ridiculous pattern. Not having a genuinely stable pattern of sleep is what seems to hurt me the most. So if my own personal experience counts for anything when applied to other individuals arbitrarily (it doesn't, so let's just say that my experience is actually not my experience but just some arbitrary examplar of some possible experience) I would suggest that people just stick with a pattern. Reliability and stability, just like with operating systems, is really damn important with people too. So once you find a pattern that matches the activities that you need to do to live your life, stick with it.

    Thank you and goodnight

  • Watch patterns (Score:3)

    by Jon Peterson ( 1443 ) <jonNO@SPAMsnowdrift.org> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @09:49AM (#2815913) Homepage
    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.
  • I get by on 4-5 hours of sleep a night, but thats just the way my body works. I go to bed around midnight or 1 am and almost always am awake at 5 am. I don't use an alarm clock, though the couple of times I've had to screw around with my schedule and I have resorted to one, I've ended up feeling pretty messed up.

    If I sleep in purposely (close my eyes and go back to sleep) I wake up with a headache. If I naturally sleep in (like this morning, I just didn't wake up till 6:05 am) then I'm fine.

    I think you're more or less wired to require a certain amount of sleep. I used to need more sleep than I do now, but I've always been a pretty short sleeper. I've also gone through periods where I just couldn't sleep and resorted to pills (this coming from a guy who doesn't even own aspirin).

    I know that up to a point if I exercise more than I am less sleepy, but if I exercise excessively then I end up feeling worn down.

    If you try to fool your body it catches up for you, and often you put in negative time. I know that I've been amazed at some of the stuff I've written after 3-4 days of solid up time (no caffeine). After a certain point things are apt to just be done fundamentally wrong. I know there's a point where I start having problems with simple mental arithmetic because my memory can't handle keeping track of things like "carrying the ones". There's another point beyond that where I won't remember what I've done during this state. That seems to be when my work is most error prone. If I go beyond that point then I start to hallucinate.

    In engineering classes I had many classmates who resorted to a cocktail of caffeine and other products to keep them awake. All they seemed to be able to do was regurgitate for finals (which unfortunately was usually good enough) without any real comprehension.

  • 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.

    • 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.
  • Well, personally I can function on anywhere from 1.5 to 4 hours of sleep, depending on the previous day.

    Key things are: stay active, both in mind and body, if possible try to be in a cool temperature.. and if all else fails, it's time for a small snack.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @10:21AM (#2816050)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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
  • Much to my dismay, I'm discovering that as I age I need more sleep, not less. When I was in college, I can distinctly remember being able to go for three or four days without sleep and only minor hallucinations. In my (ahem) advanced years (turning 30 this year) and with children, I find that I need about 9 hours of sleep a night to deal with the vagarities of a 2.5 month old child and still function at work. My caffeine usage is all over the map from one 20oz coffee/day on the weekend to today's 1 US Mt.Dew + 20oz coffee before 9:30am. I find that keeping myself stressfree and cool (work has an ungodly 22'C temperature while home is more like 17'C) means that I'm more alert and able to get by on less. Breakfast also helps, even if it is of the "Instant powder mixed with milk" variety. I can still do the 36 hour awake days, once I get over the 'hump' at about the 20 hour mark, but I'm starting to prefer my cold bedroom with warm blankets :)

  • Took a sleep seminar once... (Score:3, Informative)

    by kitts ( 545683 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @10:59AM (#2816277) Homepage
    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.
    • 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.
      Like anything else related to animal physiology, there is a distribution curve. There are some people out there who truely need less sleep than the average - we probably all know one or two of them. However, based on my reading (popular press, not technical) over the last 20 years, sleep researchers are gradually coming to the conclusion that the average Western adult does not get enough sleep (average need being 8-10 hours) and in fact most Westerners suffer from chronic sleep depriviation.

      Don't know what can be done about it, though! Unless we somehow get everyone to go to a 6 hour work day - then the geeks would only be working 10 hours.

      sPh

  • 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.
  • 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....
    • avoid prolonged moderate sleep deprivation

      My freshman year in college (somewhat overwhelmed by the new social scene) I averaged about 4 hours per night. I fell asleep standing up, etc. It was bad. But the REALLY scary thing was how long it took to recover. That summer, I slept 10+ hours every night and still had trouble staying awake at the wheel on 10 minute trips at noon. It took me years to recover.

    • the productivity calculation is tricky

      Here's an extreme example: I can sleep 8 hours and put in a good day's work. I can alternatively sleep 4 hours and have an extra four hours! But do I get four hours more of work done? No way, probably less. This can be a tricky optimization, especially due to the long-term effects of your sleeping patterns.

      For me, I am most productive when getting 8 hours of sleep. With that amount, I NEVER drift toward sleep unintentionally. That's my rule. If I start to doze, I need more sleep.

  • Drugs (Score:1)

    by qurob ( 543434 )
    Speed, and lots of it. Stay up for 1 or 2 weeks! Then sleep for 1 or 2 days!

    After the first all nighter, Caffiene is rendered useless. Then ya gotta hit the hard stuff.

    You'll look like a saggy black eyed zombie tho.

    • Re:Drugs (Score:2, Insightful)

      by swright ( 202401 )
      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...

  • Interesting thing: your brain needs sleep to grow. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord_Hern ( 267532 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @11:58AM (#2816649) Homepage
    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 quit smoking at New Years Eve, and since then I have been able to cope with only 6-7 hours of sleep. Before I used to sleep about 10 hours, sometimes even more - it's the darkest time of year here in Finland..
    • I've found that smoking tends to keep me awake later at night -- just hitting one more cigarette seems to set me right for another hour of (insert activity here).

      Of course, I need to quit, but I haven't attempted quitting for about a year or so now. I do seem to recall feeling a lot better when I wasn't smoking, though.....
  • So can I get an REM sleep monitor that can wake me up at the right time?
  • When I was in school, there were a few of us that tried sleeping TWICE a day, but for shorter periods like two or three hours. We would sleep for two hours from say, 5am to 7am, and then go to class, do whatever. The second sleep would be from 5pm to 7pm, or something like that, and then have the whole night to do other work. The beauty of this was you didn't get many distractions between 12am and 5am, since everyone else was asleep! Took alot of getting used to it, but you still get up to 6 hours, just not all at once.

    ZZZZzzzz.....

    • 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.
  • I usually get right around 8 hours of sleep a night. It doesn't feel like enough when I am forced to get up by my alarm, but when I naturally wake up at the same time, I feel fine. My body wants me to wake up around the same time each day. That time is usually 8:30 am.

    Unfortunately that doesn't jive with the corporate working world. I think its unfortunate that many employers are unwilling to be flexible with their hours to allow for things such as difference in natural sleeping patterns. I am lucky that my employer finally let me move back my start time by an hour. My last employer was perfect, letting us come in anytime between 6 and 11 am as long as we got our work done. We were salaried, so what's the difference? Its understandable if you have to be there at certain times to work with others, but in cases where you work independently I don't see it as an issue.

    I'm interested in hearing others experiences. Do you have jobs with flexibilty enough to sleep as long as you want/need to?
  • a friend of mine tells a story that his father lived his whole life with 4 hours of sleep. this guy would just work the day away...

    the rest of the story goes that his dad died naturally at around 50. his theory is that dad used up all the life he would have had by not sleeping.

    does anyone else see sleep as a sort of spiritual rejuvination -- a battery recharge with the power supply in the sky? because of this belief i tend not to want to try sleep deprevation with any regularity. (then again, as a child, i would tell all the other kids not to play dead. what if god sees you and thinks you really are? -- he'd take your soul away!!! )
  • then there is a simple formula to determine how much sleep you need. Without getting into specifics, there is a positive correlation between your sleeping time and the capacity of your dog's bladder.

  • Just me? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DaveNay ( 532546 )
    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.
    • I too find myself in that same boat. My body will not function before 8:00am, and some days, 8:30am. I live fairly close to work, and I originally thought that 9:00am would be a bad time for me to show up every day, but strangely enough, no one says a word.

      I haven't been blunt about asking them if it's ok, and I've made attempts to change my sleep habits, but nothing seems to work. I always seem to get up at 8:00am, alarm clock or not. (of course, if I set the clock for 7:00am, I just sleep-walk, smack the snooze button and back to blissful slumber...)
    • That's sort of what my post was about. My body naturally wakes up at 8:30. Anything before that and I have very hard time. I turn off multiple alarms, etc. I also find that I get very little done until after about 10:00 anyway, no matter what time I come in. My employer at first insisted I be in by 8:00. After 6 months of me showing up late pretty frequently (but otherwise being a model employee and staying late to work on stuff since I really get a lot done in late afternoon to evening times), and finally a company wide policy that various offices can choose when they want their employees to work, I finally convinced him to make it 9:00. That still doesn't let me get up at my preferred time, but its a hell of a lot closer. I think though that if it weren't for that company wide policy, I'd still be having to come in at 8:00.

      The last employer I had let me pick my time to come in as long as it was before 11:00am. God I miss it.
    • I've not had to confront an employer about this explicitly, but having flexible hours is on my list of things I require when doing a job search. For the right incentives it might be negotiable, but in my area traffic is so bad that I need to leave the house at 8:00 to get to work by 9:00 but I can leave at 9:00 and be in by 9:20 easily. 40 minutes a day in traffic adds up, and for people who live further away it's even more important.

      The two other big items on my "must have" list before taking a job are 1) no cell phone/pager--when I leave work, I'm on _my_ time until I next come int--and 2) reasonable IP terms in the employee agreement so that software I develop on my own time without using company resources is mine and mine alone.

      Sumner
  • I find that I feel much, much more rested on less sleep if I sleep in a routine, smoething I haven't done much of since last summer.

    As a college math major with a lot of programming interest, find I have a lot of obstacles to getting sleep, though. For example, after winding up a long day of classes and what little homework I choose to put effort into and band rehearsals (yeah, I'm one of those marching band freaks that puts 12 hours a week away just to perform in front of 12,000 sober fans and 6,000 drunk fratties and sah-rahs every other Saturday) and cooking dinner with the fiancee (I know I'm asking for trolls, I don't care), I typically either have a lot of work left to do or the roomie pressures me into playing another 2-hour Age of Empires scenario he's cooked up. I get to bed around 4 and have to get up early to finish studying for that damn 10 o'clock class and I swear to myself for the third semester in a row NO MORE MORNING CLASSES. Yeah, the frat eats up a lot of time too but I love those guys (and gals). Yea Kappa Kappa Psi.

    Nights I do have less to do I am typically stricken with the ever-infectuous coding or deductive muses, and I compulsorily sit down and hack out some proof for a theorem I read about in a topology book or write some algorithm in Maple or even C. I can't afford Mathematica. I am trying to switch to Maxima, the GPL symbolic algebra system. Anyway, my point is this: sleep deprivation is an integral part of the college experience. I don't think I could live my life to its fullest if I spent more time in bed.

    But, try and develop some kind of routine. If you are in college, try to schedule classes so that you start the same time each morning. I tried this last semester, but one of the two morning classes was a dumbass discreet math class in the CS department I had weaseled my way out of until now. I never went to that class but on the first day, and it really threw me off for my TR class. BTW, I got a C+ just based on the exam. I forgot which symbol was and and which was or in a circuit diagram. Otherwise, I would have had an A. She took my exam as the whole grade.

  • 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 :-)

  • 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.

  • Quality not quantity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JMax ( 28101 )
    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 [palminfocenter.com] is a story about a handspring powernapping module [jetlog24x7.com] 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 [nasa.gov] research.

  • don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by markj02 ( 544487 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:33PM (#2818932)
    Clinton, Giuliani, Bloomberg, and even Martha Stewart are rumored to only get only 4 hours of sleep on a normal night.

    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 [stanford.edu] at Stanford (no, I'm not making up the name).

    He has a guide specifically for students [stanford.edu].

  • failed experiment at 4 hrs/night (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jnana ( 519059 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @05:43PM (#2819558) Journal
    While in high school, I resented the amount of time I 'wasted' every 24 hours on sleep, typically 8 hours, and having heard of people like Edison who survived (thrived?) on much less, decided to slowly wean myself off sleep, with the aim of getting down to 4 hours a night. This happened over the period of a couple of months, and then I spent a few weeks at about 4 hours a night. The experiment was a total disaster, apart from what it taught me about what my body and mind need to function well. From 8 hours down, there was a steady deterioration in my mood, physical coordination, and mental abilities (especially short-term memory, but any kind of mental work was much more difficult). I watched the IQ points disappear weekly, thinking that my body would adjust eventually. It never did. I remained clumsy, dumb, unhappy, and chronically tired (I'm usually quite high strung). Eventually I gave up.

    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.

  • New Age solutions (Score:3, Informative)

    by loosenut ( 116184 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @07:05PM (#2820163) Homepage Journal
    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 [bwgen.com]. All you need are headphones.
  • On weekdays i tend to sleep anywhere between 7 and 4 hours. On weekends ill stay up really late till about 3, 4 or 6 am.. then crash for 10 to 12 hours. The next day ill sleep for 8 hours and be rested. Only thing about sleeping 4 hours a night weekdays is, usually about wednesday I come home and fall asleep for an hour or 2 after work. I have missed joining a radio show-irc chat a few times because of that.

    Some things i have noticed about sleep is, if you seem to be oversleeping the alarm clock, or needing naps, or feeling the need to go to bed early, you probably are getting sick or are already sick. Back when i broke my leg in high school, i would get 8 hours of sleep a night and fall asleep during the first 2 classes and also come home and sleep 2 to 4 hours for a total of 10 to 12 hours a day.

    I have also noticed when my wisdom teeth are on the move i tend to sleep more. No, I dont have the time or the money to get them taken out, and I do have enough room. Bad headaches and migranes will put me into a long sleep as well.

    I have stayed up over a period of 3 days/2 nights. It's tough to do, but programming gets interesting sometimes when you are no longer thinking on a single track.

    DRACO-

  • Read this book (Score:2, Informative)

    by e_butler ( 63897 )
    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

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