సామాన్యుడి అస్త్రం Common Man’s Missile

Sleep

4 Hours Sleep

From Inter days, every one used the word hard work, at that time, I taught, hard work means just physical work. I often find this word confusing, every interview I read will find this word, more often, I sleep less 4 hours a day only. Is it possible to survive with that much sleep.

Researches say healthy human need 7-8 hours of sleep, at least strictly seven.

Lets investigate this using our Net.

Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. I’d previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadn’t come across practical schedules that people seem to be reporting interesting results with.

Under this sleep schedule, your sleep times might be at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm. And each time you’d sleep for only 20-30 minutes. This is nice because the times are the same whether AM or PM, and they’re consistent from day to day as well, so you can still maintain a regular daily schedule, albeit a very different one.

How can this sleep schedule work? Supposedly it takes about a week to adjust to it. A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and REM sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM is the most important phase of sleep, the one in which you experience dreams, and when deprived of REM for too long, you suffer serious negative consequences. Polyphasic sleep conditions your body to learn to enter REM sleep immediately when you begin sleeping instead of much later in the sleep cycle. So during the first week you experience sleep deprivation as your body learns to adapt to shorter sleep cycles, but after the adaptation you’ll feel fine, maybe even better than before.

It requires some discipline to successfully transition to this cycle, as well as a flexible schedule that allows it. While you’ll be sleeping a lot less, apparently it’s very important to sleep at the required times and not miss naps.

It was interesting to read some of the posts from people who’ve tried this sleep cycle. They reported higher alertness and energy, more vivid dreams and more lucid dreams, and of course lots of extra free time. I also read of failures, but in each case the person wasn’t strict about the nap schedule and overslept on occasion. A side effect of this sleep schedule is that you need to eat more, since you’re spending more time moving around. It appears that the long term health effects of this sleep pattern aren’t well known. That’s irrelevant to me though because I find that being a long-term vegan, I can’t rely much on long-term studies done on non-vegans anyway. Some say that hormones in animal products negatively affect sleep patterns, and more restful sleep is commonly reported after making dietary improvements. So long-term studies on people eating average diets wouldn’t be of much use to me personally.

The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. I’ve read that you can delay naps by an hour if necessary, but missing a nap can cause a rapid crash that takes a while to recover from. This means you only have about 3.5 hours of waking time between naps, 4.5 hours if you push it. So this can restrict your options a bit. Of course, you have to balance that sacrifice against the gain of many extra hours per day, every day. Interesting trade off…. It reminds me of something you’d find in The Book of Questions.

Plus it’s just plain weird. So naturally I want to try it. 🙂

Since I work from home and have control over my schedule, I’ve decided to test polyphasic sleep to see what it’s like. I’m already good at falling asleep fast (within a few minutes), and I often have dreams during 15-20 minute naps, so I wonder if I’ve partially conditioned myself to enter REM rapidly. This test obviously requires a bit of adjustment, but I’ve managed to work things out with my wife to make it practical enough. Since I’ve read that energy and alertness plummet during the first week, I’ve kept next week’s schedule very light mentally (no meetings, speeches, or major projects). Depending on how functional and coherent I am during the adjustment period, I’ll be doing mostly domestic projects like organizing the garage — nothing involving power tools. 🙂

I’m starting this polyphasic sleep schedule today, so last night was my last night of “normal” sleep for a while. I still got up at 5am this morning, and then I’ll begin doing the naps every 4 hours starting this afternoon. I’ll use a countdown timer alarm set for 30 minutes, so I won’t oversleep. I’ve decided that my sleep times will be 1am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, and 9pm. I aim to continue at least until Halloween… or death, whichever comes first. If it seems to be going well and I retain basic functionality, then I’ll decide whether I want to continue with it.

My main motivation for trying this is curiosity, and it seems like it would be a fun test of self-discipline. Plus it meshes nicely with my own general weirdness. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it should be an interesting learning experience.

Of course I’ll be sure to blog about this experience, but if I start making posts about seeing dead people, then you’ll know I’ve become delusional due to sleep deprivation. 😉

What would you do with an extra 30-40 hours of free time per week?

Source :: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

Famous 4-hour sleepers

 1. Jay Leno – four hours

“He subsists on four hours’ sleep per night. Out of fifty-two weeks, he gets four weeks off, during which time he is miserable. “I hate those weeks off,” he tells me. “To me, a week’s vacation just means you’re now a week behind.”

http://www.bergsoe.dtu.dk/~pbk2512/article1.htm

2. Madonna – four hours

“Madonna has revealed she only grabs four hours’ sleep a night because she constantly worries about everything that is going on her life.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/music/newsid_1420000/1420364.stm

3. Florence Nightingale – four hours

“Florence Nightingale only slept four hours a night”

http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/insomnia/insomnia.html

4. Anton Ballard – four hours

“Ballard keeps pushing himself to get better. He averages around four hours of sleep per night, and works about 12 hours each day between his meat counter and his studio.”

http://www.deep-end.com/bfacts.htm

5. Michelangelo – four hours

“Both aboriginal peoples and highly creative people (such as Thomas Edison and Michelangelo) rarely sleep for more than four hours at a time.”

http://www.susunweed.com/Article_Anthrax_Interview.htm

6. Napoleon Bonaparte – four hours

“Napoleon Bonaparte learned to live with the fact that he was only existing on three or four hours sleep a night and got on with his grand schemes.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A294031

7. Bill Clinton – five to six hours

“President Clinton grabs 5-6 hours”

http://www.powersleep.org/sleepmatters.htm

8. Winston Churchill – six hours

“It was claimed he only spent 6 hours in bed every night. However, he wrote that one needs to take a complete nap every afternoon, to get fully undressed and really go to bed. No “halfway measures”. He claimed the reward was to “get two days in one – well, at least one and a half, I’m sure.” He claimed this nap was absolutely necessary to cope with his responsibilities during the war. His naps were 1.5 to 2 hours long, for a total of about 8 hours a day!”

http://www.mysleepcenter.com/FamousSleepers.html

9. Nikola Tesla – two hours

“He is said, by some of his followers, to only have slept 2 hours a day. He was definitely a night owl. But his staff has told of him taking many naps during the day. And it seems he may have been narcoleptic, and able to sleep with his eyes open.”

http://www.mysleepcenter.com/FamousSleepers.html

10. Leonardo Da Vinci – 15 mins every four hours (ie. 1.5 hours)

“It was said that he would sleep just 15 minutes of every four hours.”

http://www.mysleepcenter.com/FamousSleepers.html

11. Margaret Thatcher – four hours

“Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister, was famous for getting by on only four hours a night.”

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/15-2-19102-0-37-6.html

12. Martha Stewart – four hours

““There’s not enough time in the day,” complains the woman who says she needs no more than four hours’ sleep a night.”

http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/marthastewart/

13. Thomas Edison – four hours

“Thomas Edison slept 3-4 hours at night, regarding sleep as a waste of time”

http://www.powersleep.org/sleepmatters.htm

Beauwebmaster-ga mentions some of the above in the Comments below and may provide additional information on these individuals.

As Googoogooa-ga noted in the Comments, there is cause of concern when not sleeping as much as the body needs. Several studies show that sleeping too little or sleeping too much can develop into medical disorders.

A study done at the University of Chicago states ” that healthy young adult males getting four hours of sleep for six consecutive nights showed medical disorders similar to those of senior citizens. ‘We know that sleep deprivation does two things: It shortens your life and it slows you down mentally.'”

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/12/sleep.deprived.idg/

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas notes in it’s

Health Watch:

“As long as people got more than four hours of sleep a night, they didn’t have an increased risk of dying. Oddly enough, people who slept more than eight hours a night had a slightly higher risk for death than those who got only seven hours of sleep a night. There was also an increased risk associated with using sleeping pills.”

http://www3.utsouthwestern.edu/library/consumer/nufSleep.htm

Also the McKinley Health Center has an article on “Insomnia and Other Related

Sleep Problems:

“Requirements for sleep vary widely. Most adults need the traditional seven or eight hours of sleep a night, but some adults are “short sleepers” and function well on only three or four hours. Many people overestimate the amount of sleep they need and underestimate the amount they actually get during a restless night. Generally there is no need for concern, even if an unbroken night’s sleep is rare. However if loss of sleep impairs a person’s ability to function well during the day, it might indicate a problem.”

http://www.mckinley.uiuc.edu/health-info/dis-cond/misc/insomnia.html

Additional information:

National Sleep Foundation

http://www.sleepfoundation.org/

Sleepnet.com: Resource for everything regarding sleep

http://www.sleepnet.com/

NIH: National Center on Sleep Disorders Research

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/ncsdr/

History of Insomnia

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A294031

Search terms used:

sleep four hours famous

sleep problems OR disorders

 

How Much Sleep Do I Need? 

The average human will spend about one third of their life sleeping. But this is just an average. Some people will spend more time sleeping, some people will spend less time sleeping. Sleep needs change as we age, and as we encounter different events in our life.

Most people probably need more than 8 hours a night sleep. One study showed that full rested adults sleep about 8 1/4 hours a night.

Determining the amount of sleep that an older person needs can be difficult. Often the various medications that an older person is taking affect the sleep cycle, and this makes the determination even more complicated. It is probably best to resort to some simple tests.

The goal of setting a sleep schedule is to lower your sleep debt to the point where the amount of sleep that you get at night keeps you awake all day. When you get to the point where you don’t yawn, you don’t nod off, your sleep debt is probably minimal. You will find a fantastic change in your life when you reach this point. Your energy will improve, your clarity of thought will improve. Many people report a giant improvement in their moods. Sleep deprivation can cause irritability and depression.

One starting point in curing your sleep debt, is to make a commitment to do something about it. Make a commitment to put sleep first in your life. You will feel better if you occasionally sleep longer, sometimes go to bed earlier. If you feel tired before switching on the TV at night, try going to bed instead.

Finally

Actually, all of these responses are inaccurate — they are *claims* to have
slept this length in time. Therefore, the results are misleading.

The first cycle of a human being’s sleep mode lasts 4 hours. To attempt to live
on less is unadvisable — human beings need sleep. Sleep deprivation leads to
mental unhealthiness and at its most extreme, death.

“…Even attempting to reduce sleep for short periods of time has been proven,
in carefully researched experiments, to reduce productivity and increase many
negative and physiological problems such as depression. The reason seems to be
that our biological clock is extremely resistant to attempts to change. Instead
of cutting down on sleep to spend more time working, or with family and
friends, work to improve your sleep hygiene. The pay off will be better
performance and cheerfulness, and a better overall quality of life. Remember:
If you are under stress, the last thing you want to do is to cheat yourself by
loosing sleep.”

From http://www.mysleepcenter.com/SleepMyths.html

To read the full details on claims, see:

http://www.mysleepcenter.com/FamousSleepers.html