Fatigue, irritability and overall mental confusion are the dangers and symptoms of such deprivation.īut you may be able to adjust your schedule. Missing even two hours here, an hour there, then having a wildly different sleep pattern over the weekend, is the gateway drug to chronic sleep deprivation. “There are a handful of people who can function adequately on a shorter sleep duration than the average person, but it’s very, very rare,” Dr. “The reason is that our circadian rhythm tells our brain when to produce melatonin, our sleep hormone, so if you try to wake while your brain is still producing melatonin, you could feel excessive daytime sleepiness, low energy, decline in mood and cognitive impact,” said Lisa Medalie, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist at the University of Chicago Sleep Disorders Center. When we delay or speed up our internal body clock, it can have the same consequences as not getting enough sleep, a phenomenon known as advanced sleep-wake phase disorder. In March, researchers at the University of South Florida and Pennsylvania State University reported that losing out on as little as 16 minutes a night could have serious negative impacts on job performance. No matter how much sleep you get, if you’re not wired for rising at the hour of the wolf, and most of us aren’t, according to many sleep specialists, messing with that normal rhythm is still detrimental.Įven if you think missing out on just a few minutes - say, getting up just a half-hour earlier - isn’t significant, think again. Robert Stickgold, a Harvard professor and the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said missing just one night of sleep impairs memory.Įven worse, it “biases your behavior,” he said, referring to a recent study that monitored 65 healthy people between the ages of 18 and 30, which showed that an impaired mind focuses “on negative information when making decisions.” But would you still face these issues if you sleep for eight hours and wake up at 4 a.m.? Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, calls early rising a “performance killer,” because, he says, regularly getting four hours of sleep is the equivalent of the mental impairment of being up for 24 hours. That group quickly developed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, higher blood pressure and produced half the usual amount of antibodies to a flu vaccine.ĭr. In 1999, researchers at the University of Chicago monitored a group who slept only four hours a night - a common amount for those who wake up very early - for six days in a row. Those who slept less than six hours a night “produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation.” In the study, 48 healthy adults, aged 21 to 38, had their sleep chronically restricted. In a 2003 study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Medical School found that reaction times and performance on cognitive tasks plummet for those getting four hours of sleep and those getting six hours of sleep. What happens when we don’t get enough sleep? And while some people seem to need less sleep than others, we can’t game our body clocks. ![]() Kirsch said that this early-rising trend propagated by entertainers and entrepreneurs is deeply troubling. What he left out of the picture is he was a pretty prolific napper as well.”ĭr. ![]() “Thomas Edison used to say the same thing: Four hours are good enough for me. Kirsch, a neurologist and the president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “This trend goes back a fair bit further than our recent tech C.E.O.s,” said Douglas B. Is the key to success emulating high-profile achievers who are hacking their bodies to increase productivity? Even if capitalism favors early wake-up times, at least as a badge of honor, there is no data that shows that successful people get less sleep.Īmericans sleep, on average, less than seven hours a night, which means that many of us get less sleep than the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends. Recently, Steve Harvey declared: “Rich people don’t sleep eight hours a day.” And Jennifer Aniston wakes up at around 4:30 to meditate, as does Kris Jenner, the same time that Michelle Obama is hitting the gym. David Cush, the former Virgin America C.E.O., has said that he wakes up at 4:15. President Trump wrote in his 2004 book that he only needs four hours of sleep a night.
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