Short sleepers cruise by on four to six hours a night and don’t seem to suffer ill effects. Turns out they’re genetically built to require less sleep than the rest of us Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term — memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened immune system. Natural short sleepers, as they are called, are genetically wired to need only four to six hours of sleep a night. These outliers suggest that quality, not quantity, is what matters. If scientists could figure out what these people do differently it might, they hope, provide insight into sleep’s very nature. Scientists once thought sleep was little more than a rest period, like powering down a computer in preparation for the next day’s work. Thomas Edison called sleep a waste of time — “a heritage from our cave days” — and claimed never to sleep more than four hours a night. His invention of the incandescent lightbulb encouraged shorter sleep times in others. Today, a historically high number of US adults are sleeping less than five hours a night. But in recent years, scientists have discovered a rare breed who consistently get little shut-eye and are no worse for wear.
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Monday, January 20, 2025