From pressreader.com/ireland
If you’re not among the 1pc who can get by on five hours’ shuteye, here is how to get a better night’s rest
We all need sleep. It’s essential for our health and well-being. But it turns out we are all different when it comes to how much shuteye we need. Some get away with six hours a night, others need nine or 10. Science has recently turned attention to those who need a lot less sleep than average, meaning five hours or less. They are called short sleepers.
Most people who don’t get enough sleep, for example because of insomnia or shift work, can suffer all kinds of ill effects. The day after a bad night’s sleep can be a struggle. Your immune system doesn’t work as well and so you might catch a bug. You may find yourself unable to think straight. Those with chronic insomnia have a higher incidence of depression and heart disease. But scientists have noticed that some people, about 1pc of us, get away with five hours or less sleep at night with no ill effects. How can this be?
One family, the Osmonds from Pennsylvania, have been studied in detail. Joanne Osmond stays up late reading. Her sisters often spend hours in bed solving crossword puzzles. Her engineer father fixed television sets late into the night and early in the morning. Only her mother got a regular night’s sleep.
Joanne said: “Growing up, we didn’t realise that there was anything different about us.”
Then in 2011, she discovered she had a variant of a gene linked to short sleep that controls a brain chemical called glutamate. Her sisters were tested in 2019 and had the same variant. Joanne is now 27 and only needs four hours’ sleep a night. She has calculated that she has spent 13 years longer awake than the average person given that she is awake three to five hours longer a day than most.
She feels she has made great use of all that extra time. She got a degree in engineering, had five children, worked in jobs in technology and, having studied education policy into the wee small hours of many nights, became president of the Illinois Association of School Boards. “The world seems to need eight hours, and I don’t,” she said.
Ying-Hui Fu is a scientist who has studied about 100 short sleepers. Many of them have hobbies they take seriously, and work in demanding jobs. They are also inclined to have a higher tolerance for pain and don’t suffer so much from jet lag.
To understand how they get away with it, we need to know how sleep works and what it is for.
Most animals need sleep, but it’s difficult to say exactly why. One reason is when we sleep we slosh out from our brains the waste products that build up during the day because of all the brain activity going on. Another is that memories get fully laid down.
There are big differences between species, however. Bats need 20 hours a day, while elephants need only two.
We humans are clearly obsessed with it. Books about sleep often top bestseller lists. Many of us wear sleep trackers, giving rise to a new psychological condition called “orthosomnia’’, defined as the obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep metrics. Guess what all this obsession with sleep can lead to? Insomnia.
It’s important not to drink too much alcohol. Drink might help you sleep, but the sleep you get is ‘non-productive’
We all have a daily biological clock, called circadian rhythm, that dictates when we fall asleep and wake up. As evening comes on, we make our own natural sleeping pill called melatonin. And then we make something to wake us up, which is called cortisol.
Some people (who are called larks) get up early and others (who are called night owls) stay up late. Both still get an average of eight hours a night, however.
In the 1990s, scientists began studying people who only needed four or five hours’ sleep, but functioned normally during the day. They realised this trait ran in families and figured that it was probably genetic. And then in 2009 a particular gene called DEC2 was discovered in short sleepers. It produces a protein called orexin, which was already known to promote wakefulness. One of the causes of narcolepsy (a condition where people fall asleep spontaneously at any time of day) is a deficiency in orexin. To make sure it was involved, mice were engineered to have the DEC2 variant. Guess what? They slept a lot less than other mice.
Since 2009, six more genes have been found that are linked to wakefulness. The Osmonds have a gene variant that affects how a brain chemical called glutamate works.
How useful might this research be? Drugs to block orexin are in development, as a treatment for narcolepsy, which can be very debilitating. Targeting DEC2 could turn you into a short sleeper, should you want that. It could, however, be dangerous because not getting enough sleep increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
To get a good night’s sleep you should practise what’s called good sleep hygiene. This entails maintaining a good rhythm: going to bed and getting up at roughly the same time every day. Our bodies love routine. Having a comfortable bed with low lighting is important to help you relax. It’s important not to drink too much alcohol, though. Drink might help you sleep, but the sleep you get is called “non-productive”. Eating before bedtime can also disrupt sleep as your digesting juices flow and your tummy rumbles.
One way to find out how much sleep you need is to follow your sleep pattern when you’re on holiday. Sleep when you’re tired and get up when you wake. Do this over a few days and you’ll figure out the optimum number of hours sleep you need.
One benefit from this research is it can bring comfort. One short sleeper used to worry that there was something wrong with him. Once he found out his short sleeping was in his genes he calmed down. He has eight children. A lot of short sleepers seem to have lots of children. I suppose they have to fill those night time hours somehow. He runs a 200-member choir, volunteers in his church and reads voraciously.
If you are blessed with short sleep, use your time effectively. The Osmonds weren’t crazy horses after all. As for the rest of us, figure out if you’re a lark or an owl, and act accordingly.
https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/sunday-independent-ireland/20260503/281659671651245
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