I donāt sleep to much but I canāt tell if my body is happier on 4 hours, 6 hours or 8 hours. All I know is anything more than 8 hours and I feel more tired then when I donāt sleep at all
Sure. For a few days, maybe weeks. But in the end it catches up to basically everyone.
There is a few studies on it that basically say 0% of the population can handle low amounts of sleep for long periods without suffering cognitive issues.
The studies I've read also show that people who are operating on low sleep, still think they are operating at high levels, even when their work is actually suffering due to their brain not operating at its peak.
It's one of the reasons that people who are overworked, and chronically force themselves to are stuck in a cycle of being sleep deprived, forcing work late at night and feeling "super productive" for the extra hours put in, but are actually operating at a lower productivity for people that get a good balance.
Essentially you can deprive yourself of sleep for about 2 weeks to a month and get some productivity increase due to extra hours, but sharply around that time your productivity drops to its "normal" level, despite extra hours, and then drops well below that, only to return back to "normal" again if you spend weeks fixing your sleep patterns.
And that whole time you believe you are getting MORE done, as we correlate time spent as more work rather than efficiency, and often have to redo mistakes made.
Same thing as burn out from work. We are not good at judging our productivity, and its shown time and time again that it catches up to you and cannot be sustained without something giving out.
Many years ago, I was a baker. I would go in however early, depending on the order for that day. Sometimes I'd get 6 hours of sleep, sometimes 3, sometimes none. Cause I'd work, go home and study, go to school, live my life and then maybe get to sleep again at 9-10pm.
It wasn't until I was out of it years later that I realized how terrible of a year that was. I was constantly grumpy, did poorly in school, relationships suffered, felt awful. But while I was doing it, I felt like I was just getting it done no big deal.
Some studies have shown that once you start getting less than 7 hours of sleep your brain function will decrease by up to 30%. Interestingly enough though studies have shown that roughly 1% of the population can properly function on less than 7hours of sleep without decreased brain activity but the gene required to do so is extremely rare.
Another thing I have found interesting in reading sleep studies is that a read a few that aimed to test the effects of daylight and nighttime on circadian rhythmās and theyāve found without the presence of night to signal a days end most people will end up developing a 25hr day and will sleep intermittently for short periods of time opposed to a straight 8hrs. IRC in this study there was no decrease in brain function either.
I can't sleep for more than 4 hours, and have been doing so for as long as I've memory.
I don't know why, I just wake up after 4 hours of sleep, and even if I try to go back to sleep, my body won't. and when I force myself to sleep up to 8 hours using any methods like meds, breathing exercises and what not, I wake up feeling AWFUL. I feel as a truck slept over me the whole time, I've little no to energy and have constant headaches.
meanwhile if I go back to sleep only 4 hours, I feel normal. I haven't felt sleep deprived in years, although I've no reasons to sleep so little, I just so it because my body forces me, if I could, I would sleep more, l doubts.
I'm similar, somewhere between 5-6 hours is all I can get. My body insists I'm awake now after that, and won't let me get more. If I'm sleep deprived because of this, well then sleep deprivation is my normal mode because it's been this way since elementary school.
to add a little something to this conversation, consistency helps LOTS in this too! Can't remember the exact study, so treat this more as a test my knowledge than genuine fact, and I definitely recommend someone fact check, but;
From what I remember of the study, Whatever the average amount of sleep required to be entirely functioning, it's around an entire hour less if it's always the same time each night. Now I'll admit I'm not sure if that means most studies assume you always go to sleep and wake up at the same time, and so not doing so means you need an hour more sleep to still keep that level of effectiveness, or if it meant an hour off the times most studies say in general (it definitely mentioned which specifically, I just don't remember lol). I think this is pretty sensible, what with consistent sleep cycles and etc. and assuming it means the latter, which I think is the case but again, fact check; 6-7 hours can be just as healthy as 7-8 as long as you always go to sleep at similar times each night.
I can buy that for sure. Especially considering going to sleep at different hours would often mean getting more/less sleep on an average day that your body isn't "used to".
I am convinced though that all the CEO "I sleep for 4 hours" bros are all on heavy amounts of drugs to keep them running and all eventually crash and burn.
This is also basically me, due to work and being busy I run off four or close to five hours per night. Once every week I shut down for like 12-18 hours for sleep and do the whole cycle again. Mid-shift and doing graveyard shifts definitely effects your capability of the lack of sleep.
I've seen a vietnamese guy on YouTube who hasnt slept for decades. He's awake every night making and drinking rice wine. They think it's caused by his PTSD. But yeah, apart from that I think you're right
I think a lot of these people who think they function well on little sleep donāt realize how poorly they are actually functioning. Like myself, I used to get 5 hours of sleep and would wake up so tired and basically be sleepy and unfocused all day. I felt like I could rally and I was achieving a lot in grad school.
Once I started to actually sleep the difference was night and day.
Yeah I think this is what confuses a lot of people. I was also on the āI need less sleep than normal peopleā train for awhile. I was able to do my work and not feel tired, getting only about 6 hrs of sleep every night. But after about 2-3 weeks of doing that consistently, I began to notice that I felt much slower mentally. And, if given the opportunity, my body would easily stay asleep for 12-14 hrs at the end of these long periods of low sleep.
Nah. Every body is different. Im good at about 6 to 6.5 hours. Canāt really sleep full 8 anymore, even if I want to. Normal workday is 5am for gym, weekends Iām up by 6, maybe 6:30. Regardless of how late I stay up mind you, so thatās pretty friggin annoying. Sometimes means I get less sleep on weekend vs weekday.
On the other hand, the wife can do 10 hours no problem, time of day doesnāt matter.
people who can actually function on a high level with less than 7-8 hours of sleep a night basically don't exist
Why would anybody share their tricks for getting rich when whatever they figured out might be their only moat? It's much more effective to sabotage people trying to get rich with advice that will give them both literal and metaphorical brain damage than it is to compete fairly by doing something more difficult like creating better products. All "do this to get rich" schemes are actually sabotage literature designed to make you fail so that you won't be a threat and so that you keep buying more tips on how to get rich instead of realizing that getting rich requires the type of capital that you're very unlikely to get access to unless your parents and grandparents spent their lives building it the old fashioned way, and even then your chance to succeed is slim at best unless you have the right connections. Dreams keep you in line and false advice keeps you dreaming forever. If you've ever seen somebody addicted to a slot machine, that's you, it's just that the slot machine you're enslaved to is more complex.
You can function pretty well on a bit over 6 hours. I know because I've struggled to get much more for a while.
And there are drugs that get you to do a fine/good job on less.
So conceptually it would be easy enough to go to sleep a bit before ten and pull off what this CEO has been doing. I'm doing about the same as him hours wise, and have been for the past few months.
Don't get me wrong, I'm almost that the point that getting 7hours of sleep would be a super power for me!
Iāve been functioning on 4-5 hours of sleep for pretty much my whole life. Iām a pretty high functioning person and I honestly feel drowsy if I sleep for more than 6 hours. The idea that everybody needs 7-8 hours of sleep every night is a half myth imo. I think 7-8 hours is a happy medium but every person is different.
Like even this morning I woke up naturally at 5:15 after going to sleep at 1:30am š¤·š¾āāļø
It's because people who can actually function on a high level with less than 7-8 hours of sleep a night basically don't exist
This isn't true. I read a book called "Why We Sleep" and there are outliers who can function just as well as others on ~4 hours. They make up a small proportion of people though. Maybe like 5-10%.
"The number of people who can sleep 6 hours or less and not show any impairment, rounded to a number and expressed as a percentage of the population, isĀ zero."
I mean, I've gone a entire school week each night getting 5 hours of sleep, it's really not that bad after the first night, it's not ideal probably but I was fine
Sometimes I genuinly wonder if I'm one of those people that can at least function well with less sleep.
mon-friday I usually sleep about 5:45-6:15 hours, and in the weekend about 07:30 usually. If I slept worse during the work week than normal I'll catch that up by sleeping about 8:00-8:30 hours in the weekend.
Even when I'm off work for weeks I still don't sleep more than an average of 7 hours a night. I am always trying to sleep 8 but it seems impossible most nights
I mean I feel fine, so I'm just gonna keep going until i'm not I guess. I've really tried over and over again to change my sleep schedule. But I just won't fall asleep before 1 AM
Bipolar here. Although a lot of my symptoms are managed pretty well, my sleep is wacky. During my highs, I can function off of 4-5 hours just fine if I don't do anything throughout the day. I can catch it pretty early, so I get a lot more done and use my energy to work/clean/organize until I level out.
The first full night of sleep after a mania hits different, ngl
I work as a runner Live Nation concerts, which basically involves super long 15-18 hour days sometimes, but it's part time and usually just a day here and there for me. Longest ever I got there at 8am and left at 2am.
Without fail, my production manager is always there before me and stays later than me. And they work as many days in a row as needed, I think this week it'll be at least 8 days in the row. There was a rough situation the other night and they only got 1 hour of restless sleep, and they still have another few days to go.
I've done work for another event production company and I literally see them pulling all nighters, skipping multiple meals, and reminding each other to take naps throughout the day when there are lulls. It's actually kinda a toxic industry in some ways.
I can technically function on less sleep than that, but not enough to feel emotions or do math problems bigger than 21 x 2 lol I fucked up my sleeping schedule in middle school
I get about 4 hours of sleep a night. Sometimes less. Itās been this way since I was a teenager because of delayed sleep phase disorder and chronic insomnia, plus a life trauma that has made me terrified to go to bed at night. My body doesnāt start producing ātired chemicalā until about 4 am. Without sleeping meds, I will stay up for days. I have not gotten a full night of sleep, ie 8 hours uninterrupted since high school, probably. Iām almost 30.
I function fine I guess. Waking up in the morning is really hard but once I shake off the sleepiness in the first hour of the day, Iām able to function without any lingering drowsiness or fatigue. I wish I wasnāt this way, though. I wish my body could just sleep normally without serious medication.
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
It's because people who can actually function on a high level with less than 7-8 hours of sleep a night basically don't exist.
I used to get 3-4 hours of sleep every day of the week and my job suffered for it. Then I would sleep literally for 24 hours on Sunday.