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

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

#91

Post by achompas »

nollidge wrote: post #73
achompas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a bit of a lesson from someone with HN experience to the new HNers downvoted below: your jokes are (a) bad, and (b) off-topic. Parent was off-topic as well, but he was funny. Just providing feedback for the newer posters beyond a downvote.

I think you're partly right, but I also suspect they may have been downvoted to quell any "piling on". Repeated jokes on the same theme have diminishing returns.

Well said. Not just diminishing returns either, but scrolling past a comment branch full of "It's just a flesh wound!" or some other oblique reference is irritating.

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

#92

Post by bconway »

jasongullickson wrote: post #22

I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits. As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again. Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nig…

Did you read the entire article?

Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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

#93

Post by Vivtek »

Sherlock wrote: post #64
Vivtek wrote: post #42

Candidate number two for gene surgery (my current #1 being that color vision y'all talk about so much).

Those are two genes that I'd love to have too, but in the reverse order.

Well, the only reason they're in this order is that the color vision thing will actually be going into clinical trials in the next couple of years.

THAT is the 21st century I signed up for!

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

#94

Post by megaman821 »

ghshephard wrote: post #71
de90 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you exercise most days? Do you at least a similar wake up\sleep time for a month? And another obvious about drink enough water\food? All have a huge impact for me. I can go on much less sleep when I do hard exercise that day.

Re: Hard Exercise - Bizarre. I work a mostly sedentary silicon valley lifestyle, with the addition of 2-3 miles walking a day, and typically get 5-6 hours of sleep a night, going to bed around 2:00 - 3:00 AM and getting up around 9:00 AM. Recently, though, I started a linear progress novice strength training program (Squats, Dead Lift, Bench Press, Overhead Press) - three times a week for 40 minutes. My sleep pattern…

I am a light sleeper but hard workouts really help me go into a deep sleep and not wake up at every little noise. They also make me want to sleep an extra hour.

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

#95

Post by naner »

cynicalkane wrote: post #56
jasongullickson wrote: post #22

I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits. As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again. Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nig…

For me, If I get all the sleep I want, I'm lethargic and unenergetic, but if I get less sleep I'm tired all day (but strangely more energetic). It's like there's no happy medium. I wonder if anyone else has this problem, and if there's a solution.

I've had a similar thing happen. Basically, if I stay off the caffeine enough to sleep all through the night without waking up, I'll wake up naturally after around 7 hours of sleep. At this point I'm still a little foggy and I can easily fall back asleep or lounge in bed for 20min or a few hours. If I do that, like you said, I'll be lethargic.

So basically I have to moderate caffeine (for me it is every other day at most and none after 3pm) and get up as soon as I first wake. When I'm very good about no caffeine, regular exercise, and near-perfect diet I require less sleep. Kind of hard to maintain that level of discipline, though. So it's usually 7 hours a night.

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

#96

Post by Groxx »

bconway wrote: post #92
jasongullickson wrote: post #22

I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits. As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again. Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nig…

Did you read the entire article? Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group. Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of…

The following paragraph:

>To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.

While I think it's over-diagnosed, ADD is an excellent example here. When it was first getting attention, people being diagnosed were rarities. That skyrocketed when more people were watching for it. Similarly, stress, nervous, and depression disorders once actual treatments appeared, and there was a reason to get diagnosed and treated.

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

#97

Post by sliverstorm »

ghshephard wrote: post #71
de90 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you exercise most days? Do you at least a similar wake up\sleep time for a month? And another obvious about drink enough water\food? All have a huge impact for me. I can go on much less sleep when I do hard exercise that day.

Re: Hard Exercise - Bizarre. I work a mostly sedentary silicon valley lifestyle, with the addition of 2-3 miles walking a day, and typically get 5-6 hours of sleep a night, going to bed around 2:00 - 3:00 AM and getting up around 9:00 AM. Recently, though, I started a linear progress novice strength training program (Squats, Dead Lift, Bench Press, Overhead Press) - three times a week for 40 minutes. My sleep pattern…

You need that sleep for your body to repair and build itself up. What you'll find though is as your growth slows down (or if you shift to endurance work) the amount of repair your body needs to recover at night drops, your fitness has shot up, and the more fit you are the less you need of everything.

(except potentially food. You are a little more efficient at processing food, but if you develop a large amount of muscle you need a lot of food to maintain it)

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

#98

Post by jerf »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #13
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…

I suspect the problem with studying "long sleepers" is that the number of people who need, say, 12 hours of sleep "legitimately" is dominated by the number of people who need 12 hours of sleep due to a health issue, making them hard to identify and study. I've done the 12+ hours of sleep thing when I was a teenager, and only much later did I learn the health issue it was trying to tell me about.

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

#99

Post by megaframe »

I question how much "work" someone that fits this really gets accomplished. I can run on limited sleep for weeks at a time and am more energized, but throw me at something mentally challenging like Quantum Physics or Solving some Linear Systems model, and it's like my brain says it needs time to process everything, so I end up sleeping absurd amounts. (I also find I make significant headway the next day after that kind of sleep)

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

#100

Post by liuliu »

jasongullickson wrote: post #22

I'm glad that I finally have something (albeit thin) to point people to when they feel the need to lecture me about my sleeping habits. As long as I can remember I've been happy with a mix of 4 and 6 hour sleeping sessions, two or three days of 4 followed by one night of more sleep (typically 6 hours) and then back to 4 hours again. Under the recommendation of my peers and physicians I have attempted to do 8 hour nig…

The problem of "when hungry, eat. When tired, sleep" is:

In modern societies, our inner evolutionary traits still work, but the environment changed. For example, some food are more satisfying than others, and we feel less full when we indeed have enough (sugar/fat for example). The same is true for "tiredness". With TVs, iPads and mattresses, we may well be tired but we just cannot feel it strong enough. The distortion may be the single biggest problem for modern people IMHO.

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