The people with this gene might sleep less but it doesn't really show what the long term health effects on the individuals are. 2 extra hours per day for life but dying 5 years earlier in your 80s might actually be a decent trade.
I recall reading an AMA on Reddit (take that with a grain of salt) about a very short sleeper and he mentioned that he slept very deeply. I wonder if short sleepers sleep less hours but need to do so more profoundly and it just so happens that from an evolutionary perspective it's negative (for obvious reasons).
Perhaps our evolutionary ancestors who evolved in high latitude areas developed this trait given that those areas see much more sunlight (and thus longer days) in the summers. Conversely, I’m left wondering if their sleep patterns differ by season. I.e. they need less sleep in the summer, and dramatically more in the winter.
Yeah, I live in Seattle and have spent time in Alaska. I'm noticeably more productive in the summers. So much so that I've started planning sprints on projects around them.
Interesting thought! My wife sleeps much lighter and much longer compared to me. I sleep pretty hard, and sans alarms, tend around 7hrs sleep or less. She sleeps light, and will go 9+ hrs without an alarm or kids waking her up.
How does one know whether they are a "light" or "heavy" sleeper? Is it your propensity to be awoken by external stimuli that governs that label? How else would one know?
> Fu, a geneticist, analyzed their DNA and found one particular mutation in a gene known to regulate circadian rhythms that seemed to separate them from their sleep-deprived counterparts. She then inserted that mutation into mice genomes.The effect was clear: the animals with the mutation not only began to sleep less than their counterparts but continued functioning well even after six hours of sleep deprivation (a long time for a mouse). Those without the mutation showed the usual signs of deprivation.
This is pretty cool as it means that at least some aspects of sleep deprivation are caused by dedicated circuitry. It's basically like pain, your body is doing it to yourself.
The pertinent gene in this article seems to be missing.
I've gathered a text file with interesting genes from random science articles. If/when full genome testing (emphasis on full) becomes affordable, I can hopefully CTRL+F (search) my personal source code whenever and check which variants I have.
This is your lucky day, half of what you want (Ctrl+F) is already there in the form of Promethease (https://promethease.com), and the other half, the data you stick into Promethease (full-genome sequencing), is about to drop below the $1000 barrier this year or the next.
As someone who used to be able to get away with 6 hours of sleep when I was young but now can't operate properly without 8 hours of sleep, does this mean my gene is somehow changing as I get older?
I'm not sure what you mean by "get away", but the people we are talking about in this article legitimately can't sleep more than 6 hours. They naturally wake up after that just like you do after 8 or 9.
I often wake up naturally at 6 hours. I'm just used to getting it, I think.
There have been a few rare occasions, though, particularly after continued strenuous activity, that I've slept for 12. Normally, though, 8 hours is way too much for me.
Since there's almost no chance I have this gene, I'm probably just shortchanging myself.
It’s the opposite for me. I typically wake after 5-6 hours, usually before an alarm if I set one. Whe I was young (until about 35 or so) I needed 8-9 hours every night to avoid grogginess. I do still sleep 8-9 hours on occasion.
It's sort of a long-running joke in my family that the males only need about 6 hours of sleep. I wake up naturally after about six hours, feeling refreshed, if I've had an otherwise uneventful day. However I'm also sort of a lifelong night owl -- "sort of" because I have weird sleep patterns with a bias tending toward nocturnal, which I call the 26-hour day, since it sorta shifts up a couple hours every day -- but my dad and my brother both are otherwise pretty normal and have always been the same way, needing less sleep. Another interesting tidbit: I come from a long line of farmers -- perhaps a bit of a tautology -- and the males among my ancestors were supposedly renowned for never needing an alarm clock. This is something which is true for the males in my immediate family to this day. Of course, I set an alarm if I need to, but I often wake up before it goes off. I've just recently paid for long-read WGS from Full Genomes, so I'm excited to look into this!
Without knowing you my question is how can we know that you won't benefit from 8 hours? The research suggests 8 hours is optimal. It also suggests that people who are sleep deprived have a new baseline and may not be aware that they once felt better and could again feel better with a lifestyle modification.
As to not needing the alarm clock, I experience that as well. I would think that is actually quite common with training.
I've been like this since the day I was born. I nearly destroyed my family because as a newborn I only slept 1 to 2 hours per day.
I've gone as long 11 days without sleep. At least once per week I go 48 hours without sleeping. I once did a trade show setup it was a huge booth with a ton of computers we worked round the clock for 6 days. Everyone else worked in shifts, I stayed the entire 6 days working, i didn't sleep for 3 more days, and then I only got 3 hours sleep. Then went another 5 days without sleeping.
The people I worked with always assumed that I was taking cat naps, or sleeping and not knowing it, but that during that show setup everyone realized that I actually don't' sleep, because there was someone with me at all times and I just kept working.
I don't get sleepy, I don't get tired, I'm just awake, and my performance isn't diminished.
The only time I sleep is if I'm really sick. I had a bad case of the flu one year and I slept for 4 days straight. I laid down Wednesday late afternoon and woke up Sunday morning. My wife said I never moved, and since I don't sleep she figured that it was probably really important that I stayed asleep.
That’s incredible! I have a hard cut off around 6.5-7 hours of sleep, anything less and I have noticeable performance decrease - inability to concentrate , needing to re read lines of code multiple times, etc.
You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!
Wow. I've heard of people needing as little as four hours but never something this extreme. So, what do you spend your time doing while the rest of us are dozing off? Are all your biological markers in line with that of someone who is otherwise healthy, blood pressure, the works?
Me, too. Diagnosed with chronic insomnia that I've had since I was born. Average about 4 hours of sleep a night. Longest I've been up is 4 days straight, and I also never feel sleepy. People are always surprised to hear that there's a difference between being "sleepy" and being "tired" and that even when you're absolutely drained sleepiness can escape you.
I'm still young and healthy so I feel "fine" most of the time, even when I'm extremely sleep deprived, but I am a little worried what the effects of my sleep deprivation will be on my body and mind in the long run. Without Zaleplon I can't sleep. I could lay in bed for days and never fall asleep.
Although it sounds great that you do not need sleep I think you are missing a big bonus of sleep, dreaming. Do you remember if you dreamt during that straight 4 days of sleep?
Almost all of my dreams were nightmares and so for over a decade, I couldn't sleep without the light on, at least once a month I couldn't fall asleep until sunrise.
I eventually decided that I would stop dreaming, and so I told myself every evening and every morning that "I do not dream" until one day it was true.
I need about 10 hours of sleep to feel refreshed and about a handful of times a year I still have a dream or nightmare. I wish I could get by on only a few hours of sleep a night.
I'm an otherwise healthy adult (22yo) I never dreamed in my life. Maybe a few nightmares, night terrors and visions of my crushes, but this happened maybe a few times in my life.
You've got to figure that some of us have ancestors who spent thousands of years where their genetics adapted to life in the Arctic where the sun doesn't go down every day anyhow.
Might not have that much remaining tolerance for pollen or fruits and vegetabes either.
When I go past three days without sleeping I start hallucinating and it becomes a psychedelic experience.
Throughout my 20s I would stay up for days writing code and studying things deep in a flow state, but after the third day I'd be useless. It was some of my most productive times, and I'm quite jealous of your natural ability.
Genuinely don’t understand how this is possible. Not doubting your story - I’m just confused how someone is actually capable of this.
In Ranger School, which is notorious for sleep deprivation, I would legitimately start hallucinating after being up for longer than 72 hours or so. Granted the physical demands are much higher, but I cannot for the life of me imagine purposely staying up for 11 days - even just doing nothing. At some point that’s going to throw your metabolic rates into a tantrum (at least, it would for a normal person) and you’d just pass out.
I'll confess I'm very skeptical of this account, as a former Marine who has also experienced mild hallucinations on deployment and a registered polysomnographic technologist. (I don't interpret sleep studies as a career anymore, but I'm familiar with the literature and have published some modest research. While it has been some years, I also did a bit over a thousand sleep studies.)
First off: sleep is highly, highly, highly evolutionarily conserved. Essentially every complex lifeform with an active metabolism either sleeps or it does something that resembles sleep. Sleep as a practice is never lost via mutation or other evolutionary change.
There are zero examples of a speciation causing an organism that sleeps to stop doing so, and zero examples of an organism that doesn't sleep that has a common ancestor who does. ("Sleep" is broadly interpreted.)
It's difficult to describe just iron this rule is. Sleep shares this with just a handful of other systems, largely consisting of fetal development genes and other systems in which a single genetic change kills the organism.
And, in our experience, that's because going without sleep also kills the organism. In humans, the one example we know of that causes total inability to sleep is Fatal Familial Insomnia, a genetic prion disorder with 100% mortality.
Second, people are very, very, very bad at assessing whether they have been asleep. I cannot tell you the number of people I have seen who were asleep-- verifiably asleep, because I was watching their brain waves in real-time-- who, when woken for some reason or another, report they never fell asleep. I've seen people sleep the entire night and claim they didn't sleep a wink.
Third, people who are sleep deprived cannot accurately assess their acute impairment, and this is worse with chronic deprivation, not only because of worsened cognitive function but because the person no longer has a healthy baseline in recent memory to compare to.
People assess whether they're functioning well by comparison to yesterday and last week and this month. If they were sleep deprived then as well, they report the differences between that time and now, if any, NOT the actual absolute value of their impairment.
Fourth, and finally, the causative correlations between sleep deprivation and impairment are super robust. The parent article is describing people who are less affected, but still experience profound impairment. It just happens that their impairment is small relative to others. While so-called "short sleepers"-- the actual technical term for the healthy 6 hours a nighters-- do in fact seem to do find with somewhat less sleep, they also experience impairment when getting less than their normal sleep time.
Obviously, I can't verify for certain that our parent comment is mistaken in their perception.
But what I can say quite comfortably is that if what they say is true, they are a walking Nobel Prize. What they describe is not considered unlikely, it's considered fundamentally impossible.
Mind, it wouldn't be the first time distinguished scientists advised us if was impossible, and turned out to be wrong, but this would really be closer to the scale of "general relativity is wrong" rather than "oops, eggs are good for you.
Parent commenter: if you read this, and if you genuinely believe your experience is as described, please contact William Dement, "Bill" Dement, at Stanford University...ASAP!
He is the grandfather of sleep medicine and conducted the first scientific sleep studies in the world. I can say with total confidence that if what you say is correct, he will either drop what he is researching and study you, or find a researcher who can. And if what you say is true you owe it to the world and posterity to be studied.
You have a good shot at breaking the world record for days awake...
What are your nutritional needs if you aren't sleeping? Are you eating extra throughout the night when your basal metabolic rate would otherwise be slowed down until morning when sleeping?
You should really see a sleep specialist and do a sleep study cause of beta-amyloid build up linked to Alzheimer's disease:
"A mouse study suggests that sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during waking hours. The results point to a potential new role for sleep in health and disease."
I had a sorority friend much like yourself from undergrad. She needed 3 hours max each night to feel completely refreshed, and simply could not sleep longer than that. In undergrad, she hated this because it left her with too much alone time as there were extended periods each day where no one else was awake to hangout.
We were jealous of her, but she wished things were different.
I've considered doing sleep studies for medical research before, but they're horribly inconvenient and I haven't been offered any compensation for them (not that I care about that). I just can't afford to spent weeks in a hospital with wires hooked up to my head.
Initially, I found your story a bit incredulous. But then again, there are significant outliers amongst humans. Is your situation any more extreme than adult humans who are 2 feet tall and some who are 8 feet tall?
I wonder if there is the other extreme. Are there people who need 20 hours of sleep to feel rested? I also agree with many of your respondents in hoping you'd have scientists study your condition.
You should consider a sleep study and brain scan. It's possible your brain may not be operating at total effectiveness, even if you don't realize it; you may just have a condition where you don't experience tiredness. This doesn't necessarily imply that lack of sleep isn't detrimental for you, just that the signaling isn't set up right for you. For example, you could be at increased risk for Alzheimer's.
Reading Why We Sleep has made me somewhat skeptical about people claiming to not need sleep. A quote from the book:
> We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III
> Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep.
Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
no, because the original clause was talking about the number of people. the joke was that it was identical to the percentage. Extremely circuitous, but meaningful!
Also I would have no confidence in estimates of the population that don't involve either a systematic search, or a symptom we're unavoidably certain we'd spot.
Humans who are 10 feet tall would stand out. Humans with XXX were unheard of until they found one by accident and then it turns out they weren't that rare but we'd never gone out of our way to look.
(Having the wrong number of copies of most chromosomes causes something obvious and often fatal, but humans necessarily have 1 or 2 copies of X anyway and cope so 3 isn't that astonishing)
> The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.
What a weird, pointless and almost information-less way to say < 0.5%.
56 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadPerhaps our evolutionary ancestors who evolved in high latitude areas developed this trait given that those areas see much more sunlight (and thus longer days) in the summers. Conversely, I’m left wondering if their sleep patterns differ by season. I.e. they need less sleep in the summer, and dramatically more in the winter.
This is pretty cool as it means that at least some aspects of sleep deprivation are caused by dedicated circuitry. It's basically like pain, your body is doing it to yourself.
I've gathered a text file with interesting genes from random science articles. If/when full genome testing (emphasis on full) becomes affordable, I can hopefully CTRL+F (search) my personal source code whenever and check which variants I have.
There have been a few rare occasions, though, particularly after continued strenuous activity, that I've slept for 12. Normally, though, 8 hours is way too much for me.
Since there's almost no chance I have this gene, I'm probably just shortchanging myself.
As to not needing the alarm clock, I experience that as well. I would think that is actually quite common with training.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/
I've been like this since the day I was born. I nearly destroyed my family because as a newborn I only slept 1 to 2 hours per day.
I've gone as long 11 days without sleep. At least once per week I go 48 hours without sleeping. I once did a trade show setup it was a huge booth with a ton of computers we worked round the clock for 6 days. Everyone else worked in shifts, I stayed the entire 6 days working, i didn't sleep for 3 more days, and then I only got 3 hours sleep. Then went another 5 days without sleeping.
The people I worked with always assumed that I was taking cat naps, or sleeping and not knowing it, but that during that show setup everyone realized that I actually don't' sleep, because there was someone with me at all times and I just kept working.
I don't get sleepy, I don't get tired, I'm just awake, and my performance isn't diminished.
The only time I sleep is if I'm really sick. I had a bad case of the flu one year and I slept for 4 days straight. I laid down Wednesday late afternoon and woke up Sunday morning. My wife said I never moved, and since I don't sleep she figured that it was probably really important that I stayed asleep.
You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!
I'm still young and healthy so I feel "fine" most of the time, even when I'm extremely sleep deprived, but I am a little worried what the effects of my sleep deprivation will be on my body and mind in the long run. Without Zaleplon I can't sleep. I could lay in bed for days and never fall asleep.
Almost all of my dreams were nightmares and so for over a decade, I couldn't sleep without the light on, at least once a month I couldn't fall asleep until sunrise. I eventually decided that I would stop dreaming, and so I told myself every evening and every morning that "I do not dream" until one day it was true.
I need about 10 hours of sleep to feel refreshed and about a handful of times a year I still have a dream or nightmare. I wish I could get by on only a few hours of sleep a night.
Sleeping on weed tho is ALWAYS without dreams for me, but tomorrow I am foggy entire day.
Might not have that much remaining tolerance for pollen or fruits and vegetabes either.
When I go past three days without sleeping I start hallucinating and it becomes a psychedelic experience.
Throughout my 20s I would stay up for days writing code and studying things deep in a flow state, but after the third day I'd be useless. It was some of my most productive times, and I'm quite jealous of your natural ability.
In Ranger School, which is notorious for sleep deprivation, I would legitimately start hallucinating after being up for longer than 72 hours or so. Granted the physical demands are much higher, but I cannot for the life of me imagine purposely staying up for 11 days - even just doing nothing. At some point that’s going to throw your metabolic rates into a tantrum (at least, it would for a normal person) and you’d just pass out.
Reminds me of an old episode of The X-Files.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepless_(The_X-Files)
First off: sleep is highly, highly, highly evolutionarily conserved. Essentially every complex lifeform with an active metabolism either sleeps or it does something that resembles sleep. Sleep as a practice is never lost via mutation or other evolutionary change.
There are zero examples of a speciation causing an organism that sleeps to stop doing so, and zero examples of an organism that doesn't sleep that has a common ancestor who does. ("Sleep" is broadly interpreted.)
It's difficult to describe just iron this rule is. Sleep shares this with just a handful of other systems, largely consisting of fetal development genes and other systems in which a single genetic change kills the organism.
And, in our experience, that's because going without sleep also kills the organism. In humans, the one example we know of that causes total inability to sleep is Fatal Familial Insomnia, a genetic prion disorder with 100% mortality.
Second, people are very, very, very bad at assessing whether they have been asleep. I cannot tell you the number of people I have seen who were asleep-- verifiably asleep, because I was watching their brain waves in real-time-- who, when woken for some reason or another, report they never fell asleep. I've seen people sleep the entire night and claim they didn't sleep a wink.
Third, people who are sleep deprived cannot accurately assess their acute impairment, and this is worse with chronic deprivation, not only because of worsened cognitive function but because the person no longer has a healthy baseline in recent memory to compare to.
People assess whether they're functioning well by comparison to yesterday and last week and this month. If they were sleep deprived then as well, they report the differences between that time and now, if any, NOT the actual absolute value of their impairment.
Fourth, and finally, the causative correlations between sleep deprivation and impairment are super robust. The parent article is describing people who are less affected, but still experience profound impairment. It just happens that their impairment is small relative to others. While so-called "short sleepers"-- the actual technical term for the healthy 6 hours a nighters-- do in fact seem to do find with somewhat less sleep, they also experience impairment when getting less than their normal sleep time.
Obviously, I can't verify for certain that our parent comment is mistaken in their perception.
But what I can say quite comfortably is that if what they say is true, they are a walking Nobel Prize. What they describe is not considered unlikely, it's considered fundamentally impossible.
Mind, it wouldn't be the first time distinguished scientists advised us if was impossible, and turned out to be wrong, but this would really be closer to the scale of "general relativity is wrong" rather than "oops, eggs are good for you.
Parent commenter: if you read this, and if you genuinely believe your experience is as described, please contact William Dement, "Bill" Dement, at Stanford University...ASAP!
He is the grandfather of sleep medicine and conducted the first scientific sleep studies in the world. I can say with total confidence that if what you say is correct, he will either drop what he is researching and study you, or find a researcher who can. And if what you say is true you owe it to the world and posterity to be studied.
What are your nutritional needs if you aren't sleeping? Are you eating extra throughout the night when your basal metabolic rate would otherwise be slowed down until morning when sleeping?
You should really see a sleep specialist and do a sleep study cause of beta-amyloid build up linked to Alzheimer's disease:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sle...
"A mouse study suggests that sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during waking hours. The results point to a potential new role for sleep in health and disease."
We were jealous of her, but she wished things were different.
I wonder if there is the other extreme. Are there people who need 20 hours of sleep to feel rested? I also agree with many of your respondents in hoping you'd have scientists study your condition.
> We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III
> Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep. Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
The gene described here is also called DEC2: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.
That just means 'less than one in two hundred'. Which is not that rare.
Humans who are 10 feet tall would stand out. Humans with XXX were unheard of until they found one by accident and then it turns out they weren't that rare but we'd never gone out of our way to look.
(Having the wrong number of copies of most chromosomes causes something obvious and often fatal, but humans necessarily have 1 or 2 copies of X anyway and cope so 3 isn't that astonishing)
What a weird, pointless and almost information-less way to say < 0.5%.
How does one find out if he has the genes?