
Why Six Hours of Sleep Is as Bad as None at All - randomname2
https://www.fastcompany.com/3057465/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/why-six-hours-of-sleep-is-as-bad-as-none-at-all
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hyperpape
Interesting study, bad title. The claim is that getting 6 hours per night is
as bad as not sleeping for two nights.

The other interesting aspect is that the people who got six hours night after
night underreported their fatigue. That fits with my experience. Several years
ago, I started missing out on a lot of sleep (young kids, trying to learn
programming while working a full time job). When I finally started sleeping
enough, I felt like I was fully awake for the first time in years. Before, I
would notice I was truly exhausted, and sleep more for a day or two, but I was
never actually catching up, just taking the worst of the edge off.

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mbcrower
I agree the title is misleading. I sleep 6-7 hours most nights, but I never go
2 weeks straight on that because I inevitably end up "catching up" at some
point.

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snsn2828
What about people that naturally only need 6 hours of sleep? Are they tricking
themselves to believing that?

Can you condition yourself to only need 6 hours of sleep and get a full nights
rest?

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Grishnakh
Yes, you can be fully rested with much less than that actually, according to
polyphasic sleep theory.

The problem is that you have to sleep multiple times in a 24-hour cycle. The
simplest version is the biphasic pattern or "siesta", where you take a nap in
the middle of the day, as was traditionally done in Spanish cultures. The more
extreme versions involve brief sleep periods evenly spaced out during the
24-hour cycle.

As should be obvious, the problem with this is that our culture doesn't permit
it. Good luck finding a job that'll let you take a 1-hour nap in the middle of
the workday (in addition to your lunchtime).

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effie
It depends on the kind of work you do and on your boss. I think people working
in software companies have great freedom in their time management and can
easily extend the lunchtime to get a nap after lunch.

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elsherbini
The study [1] is from 2003 and has been cited over 1600 times. It had errata
in 2004 published in the same journal (Sleep), but I haven't been able to find
them.

[1]
[http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/VanDongen_etal_S...](http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/VanDongen_etal_Sleep_26_2_2003.pdf)

