Sleep Rules: Who Can Get by on 4 Hours a Day and How Great People of the Past Slept

Let's look at how to sleep properly and how famous figures managed it.

Scientists discovered a rare genetic trait that allows some people to sleep 4 to 6 hours a day without harm to their health.

But for most people, such an amount of sleep is, of course, not enough. The American National Sleep Foundation gives the average as 7-9 hours a day, with an acceptable range extended to 6-10 hours. Some people need less, and for others even 9 hours of sleep a day is not enough — it all depends on the individual. At the same time, the European Sleep Research Society notes that sleeping less than 6 hours a day is dangerous to health.

But constant sleep deficiency causes serious health problems. The American Heart Association has named lack of sleep as one of the causes of hypertension, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Therefore, it is important to repay the body’s “sleep debt.” But remember that if you slept 4-5 hours all week and then on Sunday slept 14 hours until lunchtime, this is unlikely to solve the problem. First, you are unlikely to fall asleep on time that day, so you will be short of sleep on Monday. Second, a one-time compensation does not fully make up for lost sleep — the body needs consistent, healthy sleep.

Daytime sleep also does not eliminate all the effects of sleep deprivation. After a daytime nap, it is harder to fall asleep at night, so doctors advise against sleeping after 3 p.m.

Long sleep is also harmful to the body. According to Sleep.org, people who sleep more than 11 hours are more likely to have diabetes, suffer from headaches and face cardiovascular disease.

How Great People of the Past Slept

• Winston Churchill woke up at about 8 a.m., worked in bed until 11, and at 5 p.m., after work and lunch, always slept another 1.5 hours. After the evening nap he freshened up, ate a hearty dinner and worked until late at night. The prime minister slept about 6 hours a day on average and claimed that this helped him save Britain during World War II.
•  Margaret Thatcher slept only 4 hours a day and did not allow herself daytime naps. The “Iron Lady” worked on holidays and weekends, when everyone had gone and no one had yet arrived. To some extent, this even put her successor John Major, who needed the classic 8 hours of sleep, in a difficult position.  
• Napoleon Bonaparte, among other things, is known for his answer to the question of how much sleep is needed: “A man needs 6 hours, a woman 7 hours, a fool 8 hours.” The emperor himself slept 2 hours at night and 2 hours during the day. There is a view that chronic sleep deprivation was the cause of his defeat at Waterloo. And in peacetime Napoleon slept 7 hours, like the woman in his quote.
  
• Leonardo da Vinci is legendarily considered the record holder for minimal sleep. The artist supposedly slept only 20 minutes every 4 hours — he needed 2 hours of sleep a day. It is believed that this is what helped him improve and create his masterpieces.

So how should you sleep properly, after all

Remember that the biographies of great people rarely mention the problems they faced with such sleep. And statistics show that most of us are quite ordinary people, not prime ministers and emperors in wartime conditions.

Do not neglect the full sleep your body requires if you want to stay healthy.

And TK Media will finish with two interesting sleep patterns:

• Biphasic sleep is considered the most optimal by most researchers. After lunch we feel natural drowsiness due to blood flowing from the nervous system to the digestive system. In Spain, Italy and Greece, the afternoon nap (siesta) has become a common tradition — everyone sleeps from 1 to 4 hours (roughly from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) and no one works.
• Polyphasic sleep is the sleep pattern attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Sleep is divided into a fast and a slow phase — supporters argue that the slow phase can be dropped without consequences. The slow phase takes a lot of time and is responsible for restoring the “system,” while the fast phase lasts only 10-15 minutes, during which the body prepares to wake up and processes the day’s information once more. A brain adapted to polyphasic sleep skips the slow phase and recovers successfully in 20 minutes. Judging by online reviews, such a regime is beyond most people. And researchers call such experiments rather harmful.