Thursday, November 12, 2009

Thriving Off Two Hours of Sleep Per Day--For Life?

This guy makes some interesting points about sleep.

He says that we waste a whole lot of time with our traditional sleep method of 8 hours at night (or 4 or 5 for most of us...), because the most important part, in fact the only important part, of our sleep cycle is the REM cycle, which is when we have dreams. This is when our brain actually is rejuvenated.

He suggests breaking up our sleep, or "hacking into our brain" so that each time we fall asleep, our brain is expecting us to only get a 20-minute sleep session, so it sends us straight to REM, straight to rejuvenation. Do that enough throughout the day and you can trim out all the unneeded hours of unconsciousness.

It is true that my best, most vivid dreams always come from those little cat naps I take in between this or that activity, and I always wake up feeling refreshed from them.

Maybe I will experiment with this over Thanksgiving Break or something. That way if I screw up and don't "fit in all my naps", I won't end up crashing and sleeping through an exam. Or falling asleep on the metro and waking up in Silver Spring at midnight on a Tuesday night.

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