Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

online.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 131 posts

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#12

Post by mbateman »

I've always wondered if this was mostly a psychological issue.

There are two circumstances in which I get less than 7 hours of sleep a night: if I'm really stressed about getting something done, or if I'm really excited about getting something done.

In the first place the lack of sleep exacerbates the stress and really starts to weigh on me. But in the second case it doesn't seem to have much negative effect.

Now if only I could continuously keep my motivation up...

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#13

Post by mechanical_fish »

olliesaunders wrote: post #2

Damn you, science! I’ve read so many studies saying there’s absolutely no way you can get by without at least 7 hours sleep and now you tell me that that completely doesn’t apply to 1-3% of the population?! That’s actually not that small of a percentage. How big were the sample sizes of all the other studies? Did nobody encounter at least one of these low-sleep requiring people? Maybe they were just eliminated as bei…

I’ve met some of these people who insisted they didn’t need much sleep before and now I seem like an idiot for telling them that it they would probably feel better if they got more.

Don't. If you insist on only giving advice that applies to 100% of the world you'll never say anything useful at all.

I'm sure the studies do encounter these people. But studies use statistics. These people are on the far edge of the bell curve. The mean [1] is probably around 7-9 hours. But just because the far edge of the bell curve has very few samples in it doesn't mean that those samples don't exist, nor that someone is "hiding" them.

Which reminds me: What this article does not talk about is the other side of the bell curve: The folks who need considerably more than 7-9 hours of sleep to attain peak performance and happiness. Or maybe those people don't exist, because the "bell curve" is actually a bimodal distribution, or cliff-shaped, or something. We could tell if there was any actual data here, or a link to the actual data and published science -- we could look at the shape of the distribution. But this is an article by a science journalist, so naturally it is nigh-useless.

I wonder why the article doesn't talk about the "long sleepers"? Probably because the sleep researcher quoted herein is correct: There are more people who like to believe that they only need four hours' sleep than there are actual people who thrive on less sleep. And I'm sure that no Wall Street Journal wants to learn that they might really need twelve hours sleep.

---

[1] I actually have no idea if the "7-9 hour" rule of thumb is based on a mean, a median, or a mode. Pity that nobody ever links to the original research.

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#15

Post by Tycho »

Is this few-hours sleep business feasible when you need to think deeply about abstract things during the day, eg. programming? I can see it working if your success is tied to being energetic, on the ball, constantly negotiating, acting on information or leading lots of people. But what if you need to do the analysis yourself?

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#16

Post by lkozma »

It's a false dichotomy, on a lot of hard problems progress is a step function, and you often "get much done" while sleeping. I.e. when you wake up well rested you see things from a different angle. If it's something like chopping wood, sure, the less you sleep the more wood you chop, within reasonable limits, but I don't think that is what these articles aim for. I think it's wrong to look at sleep as a waste of time the same way time spent thinking about something is not wasted either.

Here's some information I mostly agree with: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#17

Post by mzl »

I used to know one of these short sleepers. He had never felt the need to sleep more than about two hours per night, and did so for his whole life (which was respectably long, no noticeable side-effects from the exceptionally short sleep). He used a lot of the extra time to run a small local business, interact with customers during the day and do the administration during the night.

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#18

Post by mzl »

lkozma wrote: post #16

It's a false dichotomy, on a lot of hard problems progress is a step function, and you often "get much done" while sleeping. I.e. when you wake up well rested you see things from a different angle. If it's something like chopping wood, sure, the less you sleep the more wood you chop, within reasonable limits, but I don't think that is what these articles aim for. I think it's wrong to look at sleep as a waste of time…

I think that you are missing the fact that short-sleepers wake up well-rested, even though their sleep-time is much shorter and would not suffice to give us normals enough rest.

I'm not sure if there has been any actual studies that show that longer sleep-times given ad-libitum sleeping is more effective in helping the brain process more information during the sleep phase.

Re: Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

#20

Post by bound008 »

I emailed the researcher, whose address was at the end of the article with the appropriate gene data (BHLHE41 on Chromosome 12) to see if my DNA is a match. The article said its a mutation, but maybe those with the mutation exhibit a certain codon pair. Its an amazing time when you can read an article about such a thing, and then cross check your DNA in a matter of seconds. Articles will have to start posting the raw DNA for results.
Post reply on HN