You Can Get By with Less Sleep—but Should You?
People in deadline-driven, overtime-demanding jobs seem to manage when their days are long and their sleep time is limited. Then again, are these people really functioning at an optimal level? A lack of adequate sleep can lead to serious health consequences. It can also impair judgment, concentration, and reasoning and interfere with alertness and problem-solving. And it can make you grumpy, which is unlikely to thrill your coworkers.
Even minimal sleep loss can diminish your energy level, mood, mental sharpness, and ability to handle stress. Furthermore—and this is striking—there’s evidence that just one week of less than six hours of sleep a night results in changes to more than seven hundred genes due to sleep deprivation alone.
People who think they can get by with limited sleep are probably fooling themselves. Studies have found that it may be possible to bank sleep beforehand in anticipation of periods of limited sleep, but this works only if you plan well in advance. Research also suggests that genetics play some part in your need for sleep, which means tweaking the length of sleep may not work.
Still, even though you might not get enough sleep to start with, it may be possible to train yourself to get by on even less. First you have to prepare. Among other things, this includes eliminating alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, all of which interfere with sleep, and developing a sleep routine that (please note) includes avoiding electronic screens for a few hours before bedtime. After adequate preparation, start cutting back very gradually, such as by getting twenty minutes less sleep each week.
Opinions vary as to how little sleep is too little. Some gurus say don’t go below six hours a night. Others say five and a half hours. Still others say do what feels right to you. The key seems to be to monitor yourself.
If you start feeling sluggish, unfocused, overly emotional, or clumsy, or you have other reactions that are not typical for you, you may have cut back too far. And if coworkers start commenting on changes in your behavior—or worse, a negative impact on the work you’re doing—that might be an important clue that it’s time to start adding a little back to your snooze time.
