“How Much Sleep Do You Actually Require (and Why)?”

I’ve always wondered about people who only sleep a few hours a day. I’ve found that I need at least seven and a half hours a day to feel rested (which usually means an afternoon nap since I can rarely stay asleep more than six hours at night). But it seems that a single brain chemical is responsible for it all, leading me to hope that there will eventually be a pill to reduce the time I need to sleep.

2 Comments

  1. Reduce?

    I’d rather have a pill that allows me to get a full night’s sleep rather than reduce the amount of sleep I need. It may sound like a great idea at first but I believe that eventually a pill that reduces the amount of sleep you need will result in unforeseen and unfortunate repercussions, eventually mother nature will demand her dues and they will have to be paid.

    Also, the font sizes field labels above need to be increased, they are so small that they do not render properly.

  2. Are the potential “unfortunate repercussions” of a four-hour-sleep pill as bad as the unfortunate repercussions of requiring eight hours of sleep and only getting four? It remains to be seen.

    As for Mother Nature, she plays favorites. There’s a good chance that the hard-coded human default of eight hours a day is nothing more than an evolution-derived answer to a multiple-choice question, one which we can modify.

    As evidence: Steve Pavlina, a prominent blogger, did a successful polyphasic sleep experiment a few years ago, where he reduced his sleep to six twenty-minute naps every twenty-four hours — a grand total of two hours of sleep a day. Follow the link to read the details, if interested.

    I’m not sure what you’re seeing on the fonts, but they all render just fine here in Firefox and Google Chrome under Linux, Firefox and Internet Explorer under Windows 7, and Safari under Mac OS X.

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