![]() ![]() You probably need to do it while you’re on holiday because you need to wake up naturally, rather than rely on an alarm clock. In his book Counting Sheep Paul Martin describes a method of working this out. This does involve a lot of effort, so in general what you need to do is work out your personal sleep requirement and then try to stick to it. ![]() ![]() When they were subsequently deprived of sleep they didn’t suffer as much as the people who hadn’t had the chance to bank sleep in advance. At the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research they had people go to bed a couple of hours earlier than usual every night for a week. This demonstrates that genetics play at least some part in your need for sleep unfortunately the sleepless elites’ enviable state of affairs isn’t available to rest of us, because at the moment we are stuck with the genes we have (that’s my excuse anyway).īut while it might not be possible to train yourself to sleep less, researchers working with the military have found that you can bank sleep beforehand if you plan well in advance. When the researchers tweaked the same gene in mice and in flies, they found that they also began to sleep less – and when mice were deprived of sleep they didn’t seem to need as much sleep in order to catch up again. ![]() Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene called hDEC2. Even when they had the chance to have a lie-in at the weekend (a tell-tale sign that you are sleep-deprived) they didn’t take it. In 2009, a team led by geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California San Francisco discovered a mother and daughter who went to bed very late, yet were up bright and early every morning. They are sometimes known as the “ sleepless elite”. Napoleon allegedly said that sleep was only for weaklings, but in fact he got plenty of shut-eye.īut there are a few very rare individuals who can manage with only five hours sleep a night without experiencing deleterious effects. Repeatedly getting less sleep than you need over the course of decades is associated with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.īut what about those people who do happily appear to manage on fewer hours than the rest of us? Why does it not seem to make them ill?įirstly, you can console yourself with the fact that there are plenty of myths about people’s bold claims. The long-term effects are even more worrying. We do not simply adjust to it – in the short-term it reduces our concentration, and if it’s extreme it makes us confused and distressed, and turns us into such poor drivers that it’s the equivalent of being drunk. There is plenty of evidence that a lack of sleep has an adverse effect. But how easy is it to change your regular schedule? If you force yourself to get out of bed a couple of hours early every day will your body eventually become accustomed to it? Sadly not. As Jim Horne writes in Sleepfaring, 80% of us manage between six and nine hours a night the other 20% sleep more or less than this. There is a quite a range in the number of hours we like to sleep. When there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, you yearn to be like the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was said to get by on just four hours sleep a night, or the artist Salvador Dali who wasted as little time as possible slumbering. We waste a third of our lives sleeping – or that’s how some people see it. ![]()
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