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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

3-4 hour a night people (all 4 of you(•)): what the heck? For how long have you slept this little? Is that natural, or are you pushing yourself (for some reason)? Do you feel awake right now, or has reality become some sort of weird half-awake, half-asleep fantasia?

(•)as of this writing

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I have what might be either terrible insomnia or just lesser need for sleep (totally undiagnosed). As long as I can remember I haven't been able to sleep for much more than 4 hours at a time, the odd times when I sleep ~6 I wake up feeling terrible and exhausted.

I sleep 5~9am typically, and function fine if this is the case. If something requires me to wake up earlier than 9 it kills me for a few days. It's aslo near impossible to sleep before ~4am and some nights I'm unable to sleep at all.

As long as I can remember. Even very young, I would just read at night rather than sleep. Sometimes I crash and sleep for 5-6, once or twice I've slept more after going a few days without sleep.

I have always seen sleep as one of the biggest problems with life. If we could cure it, our effective lifespans would increase. So it's possible my sleeping habits are partly psychosomatic.

By the way throughout highschool I only slept two hours, midnight to 2am. It seemed to me that if you wake up before reaching your REM cycle you do not feel tired.

Wow. My best-guess(/understanding, from popular media) is that, long-term, you need REM sleep. It's interesting that you (feel you) were able to short-circuit it, at least for a while.

Anyway, the take-away I'm getting from your reply is that you are deliberately "sleep deprived", i.e., that you are driven, philosophically, to keep sleep to a physiological minimum.

(Which tempts me, strongly, to view your sleep-deprivation (quote, unquote) as something akin to chronic drug use and/or anorexia.‡

((‡ I might be way off-base here, of course.))

I agree. That amount of sleep can't be healthy. I read a story about a startup founder who was pushing himself that hard for a long time. Even though he exercised regularly and had a great diet, he died young of cardiac arrest. I don't remember any mention of a prior condition, but remember that his sleep schedule was strongly suspected of causing his heart to weaken.

I agree that it's not enough for the majority of people (myself included), but I have a great aunt that has, for her entire life, slept four hours a night (midnight to 4am). She's a retired school teacher, no commitments that are keeping her awake, and that's still the schedule she keeps. She apparently just doesn't need as much sleep as most people do.

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