I’ve heard people claim that they only sleep 2-3 hours a night, without exception, and that they don’t nap or feel tired during the day. Is this possible?
Are there any documented cases of people who consistently sleep just a couple of hours a night? Are these people alert and productive during their wakeful hours, or do they just sit around all day??
Thanks.
I had a teacher who slept from 10pm-2am, every night. BIG out of shape guy, too – IOW, not the kind of person you’d think would only need 4 hours.
He’d get up, go do an early morning radio show and then go to school. From what I saw, he was all systems go all day.
My schedule from ages 22-28:
Monday - Friday – up at 8am, go to work until 5pm, screw around on computer until about 9pm, go out drinking and partying until 2-3am, come home and screw around on computer until about 5am, go to sleep, repeat.
Saturday/Sunday – same as above, except “up at 8am” becomes “sleep until 5pm”.
So, yeah, as long as I could catch up on weekends, I had no problem with three hours of sleep per night.
Didn’t Leonardo Da Vinci used to only take a nap for 15 minutes every 4 hours, without having any extended sleeping period?
Yeah, I’ve heard that Elizabeth I and Winston Churchill used to do that too. (But not together). And didn’t Maggie Thatcher go on and on about how she only needed 4 hours’ sleep per night when she was British PM?
I’m a big, slightly out-of-shape guy. I believe in the sleep-bank principle. I can go on virtually NO sleep for a couple of days, or limited sleep for a few days longer, but that’s like an overdraft, and after at most five days of this, I will need a big fourteen hour sleep marathon. In general, I need my eight hours a night.
I remember reading something about people who, from birth, only need 2-3 hours of sleep a night…it was in a Carl Sagan book, possible Dragons of Eden (if anyone has a copy).
I read that Martha Stewart sleeps four hours a night—I don’t know if her recent sentence affected this. So did Thomas Edison.
Oh, to have that ability.
I remember reading (in the 1984 Guinness book of world records) that there was an Israeli man who received a brain injury in a grenade attack, and as a result he never slept after that… not at all. He rested when he was tired but never acheived sleep. I can’t find it on the web now so I have no idea if my juvenile recollection might be playing a trick on me.
I typically take four hours a night (bed at 3 AM, up at 7), occasionally five. More if I’m ill or excessively physically tired (such as recently when I had to barrow a few tons of manure into my garden); I expect I could cut it down to three if I tried/needed to.
I haven’t done this all my life though - I just eased into it gradually, but It’s been my regular pattern for a couple of years now.
I typically get about 4-5 hours of sleep per night, and then crash for 12-14 hours on the weekend.
Ideally I’d like to get at least 6 hours of sleep a night, but my willpower is weak. 
I rountinely sleep only 3-5 hours a night (depends) and frequently don’t sleep at all. I wish I could say that this doesn’t effect me, and if I’m up and moving I’m pretty near functional, but if I’m sitting at a desk dreading my work, or stuck in an endless meeting, I have a tendency to drift off (though I try not to fall asleep.)
This isn’t intentional; I’m a light sleeper (sort of) and just can’t sleep for longer stretches, though if I were able to take cat-naps during the day I’d probably average out to more like 6-7 hours. When I was married, this really bugged the wife, who was insistant that she couldn’t fall asleep without me in the bed. I’d lie there, waiting for her to start snoring, then get up and work/read/stare at the wall and wonder where my life was going, and wait for fatigue to come on. These days, I can’t sleep with anyone in bed at all; not like that’s been a problem recently or anything, but still.
Here’s Urberman’s Sleep Schedule from everything2.net (sorry mods if this is an inappropriate link) in which he describes a method of creating a sleep rhythm of 20 minutes ever 4 hours. I’ve done something similar back when I was in school, but the thing is that you must adhere to the schedule without deviation, which tends to interfere with little things like work, relationships, et cetera. It might be a good thing to try if you are a 24 hour sysadmin/trogodyte or stranded on a desert island, but then, i n the latter case you are just better off making palm wine and spending your remaining years in a state of permenent intoxication. (What was Tom Hanks thinking, anyway?)
Stranger
I think Kramer tried this, but eventually fell asleep in his hot tub. Of course, catastrophe ensued.
Yes, catastrophe.
Are there people who actually don’t need to sleep? Or is that an urban myth?
I’ve been lead to believe that if you go long enough without sleep you will start to suffer from severe mental disturbances as well as some major physical problems.
Everybody needs to sleep a little. If you don’t, you’ll die. (Fortunately, most people pass out before this occurs.) Experiments on rats show that they die after about two weeks of sleep deprivation.
My neighbor in my last apartment was a scientist who conducted sleep deprivation experiments. For example, at around 3:00AM, he would suddenly blast obnoxious rap music on his stereo, depriving me of sleep. His experiment backfired, though, when I showed up at his door, half-naked holding an aluminum bat. He persued other avenues of research thereafter.
I read an article about Carlos Delgado in the NY Times this past winter. For those that aren’t familiar, Delgado is a first baseman for the Florida Marlins. Apparently he’s very well-read, and is one of those people that only needs four or five hours of sleep a night.
As for the existence of people who don’t need to sleep, I would bet it’s a UL. If I recall, the record for longest without sleep a human has gone was something like 8 days. The guy that did it was really psyched up that he would prove people could go without sleep, which would revolutionize the world and increase efficiency of humans. It didn’t work. People need to sleep. Some more or less than others, but you have to sleep or eventually you’ll die.
I had a roommate in college who dated a guy who needed only 2-3 hours of sleep a night.
What I don’t get is, what is he missing? What’s the catch? This guy would read the extra hours he had available every night when everyone else was sleeping. It was a little unsettling to my roommate.
I’ve heard of this phenomenon elsewhere. These lucky individuals can’t sleep more than 2 1/2 - 3 hours a night. This isn’t 4 or 5 hours; I’m talking about 3 hours max, no variation, no catching up on weekends. They are not “sleep-deprived”.
I’ve looked for some kind of study of this type of person on the internet but can find nothing, only the typical sleep deprivation studies. Wouldn’t scientists be interested in this type of person?
My mother in law only sleeps about four hours a night, but I believe she naps on her carpool unless she is driving.
I think you might not be remembering the article correctly. I remember reading an article in the newspaper in 1984 about an Israeli man who sought treatment for a sleep disorder. They gave him a CAT scan, and discovered that he had a piece of shrapnel in his locus coeruleus, which prevented him from dreaming, not sleeping. I remember this article because I clipped it out and showed it to my physiological psych professor, and a quick check of my records reveals that I indeed took that class in ’84. So it’s probably the same guy.