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Claudia Hammond
Margaret Thatcher did it. So did Salvador Dali. They survived the day with only
a few hours of sleep. The question is whether you can force yourself to do the
same.
We waste a third of our lives sleeping or that s how some people see it. 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.
There is a quite a range in the number of hours we like to sleep. 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. 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.
There is plenty of evidence that a lack of sleep has an adverse effect. 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. The long-term effects are
even more worrying. 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.
But 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?
Firstly, you can console yourself with the fact that there are plenty of myths
about people s bold claims. Napoleon allegedly said that sleep was only for
weaklings, but in fact he got plenty of shut-eye.
But there are a few very rare individuals who can manage with only five hours
sleep a night without experiencing deleterious effects. They are sometimes
known as the sleepless elite . 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. 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.
Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene
called hDEC2. 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. 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).
But 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. 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.
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.
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. In his book
Counting Sheep Paul Martin describes a method of working this out. 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. Every night for two weeks you go to bed at
the same time and see what time you wake up by yourself next morning. For the
first few nights you might well be catching up on missed sleep, but after that
the time you wake up gives an indication of the length of your ideal night s
sleep.
You might be disappointed to find you need more sleep than you d hoped, but don
t see it as a waste. This is time spent valuably allowing your body and mind
to function at their best during waking hours. It may use up a third of your
life, but it makes the other two thirds so much better. The politician whose
sleep patterns inspire me isn t Margaret Thatcher, but Winston Churchill. He
disliked getting out of bed so much that he stayed there working all morning,
even receiving visitors in his bedroom.