Slumber like lumber: is your busy schedule sawing your sleep time in half? Here's how to snooze better, grow more and feel great

Muscle & Fitness, May, 2004 by Chris Cander

We see it in nearly every general health story. It mocks us with its simplicity: "Get eight hours of sleep a night." We feel like we get it. Then we brush our teeth at 2 a.m., hit the sack and, five or six hours later, slam the snooze button to start a new day. Sure, we'd like to sleep more, but for many of us, it just isn't happening. Can we get by with less, and how will that affect our muscle-building goals? Wake up--you're about to find out.

THE 8-HOUR MYTH

So how much sleep do you really need? Wilse B. Webb, PhD, a sleep researcher for more than 40 years and author of Sleep, the Gentle Tyrant (Anker Publishing, 1992) says that "need" sleep is the amount after which you wake up naturally and feel rested. "To determine your own 'need' sleep, you should simply go to bed, wake yourself up 2.5 hours later and see how you feel all day," he says. "That will obviously not be enough sleep. A week later, try a night with four hours. That will likely not be enough, either. Repeat the process until it's easy to awaken and feel rested throughout the day."

Webb finds the notion that we all need eight hours ridiculous. "It's equivalent to the suggestion that we all should have a 32-inch waist," he says. Like most other biological traits, sleep needs are highly individual. The average natural length of sleep is 7 1/2 hours, with about 60% of people needing within an hour of that--6 1/2 to 8 1/2 hours. At the extreme ends of the bell curve are the lucky few who get by with 4 1/2 hours and those poor souls who require as much as 10 1/2.

Whatever our individual needs, most of us aren't meeting them. Can we get by with less? "We're already doing it," says Webb. "We're getting less than we need, and we know that because we make it up. Study after study says that sleep on weekends is one hour longer than sleep on weekdays."

Some scientists think we should sleep even less. Henry Olders, MD, FRCPC, a psychiatrist at the SMBD-Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, says the mythical eight hours might actually be detrimental. "Too little sleep isn't great, but excessive sleep is much more dangerous," he notes. "At least two large-scale studies have shown that on average, seven hours per night is associated with the lowest mortality risk compared with longer sleep." Sleeping too much may cause us to overload on dream-drenched rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, which has been shown to contribute to depression and fatigue. Olders' advice: Get up early and be consistent about it. If you wake up at 6 a.m. every day, for example, you'll decrease your REM phase and your risk of the blues.

CUT YOUR QUOTA

According to Claudio Stampi, MD, PhD, founder and director of the Chronobiology Research Institute in Boston, there's flexibility within our normal need. Through his work with "polyphasic ultrashort" napping techniques, Stampi has found you can reduce your normal "need" sleep by 10%-25% for the long term and as much as 50% for the short term by trimming the nighttime sleep cycle and adding several short naps throughout the day. (See "Night Moves" below.) "The longer, uninterrupted sleep that humans have developed is rare," he says. "Eighty-five percent of species follow a multiple-napping pattern. For NASA, we conducted research to determine if we could become more efficient sleepers by dividing our sleep into nap episodes."

The rationale was twofold. First, the most efficient part of our sleep occurs in the beginning--the deep, slow-wave sleep called delta. (While all stages are important, delta sleep appears to be the most restorative.) Interestingly, when we reduce our total sleep, we still get 90% of our typical delta sleep. Stampi theorizes that if we get more frequent beginnings of sleep in the form of naps, we'll increase the efficiency of our sleep time by obtaining more of this restorative phase. Second, taking multiple naps means we recharge our batteries more often, allowing us to stay alert even when we're sleep-deprived.

This sleep-reduction technique has proven effective in extremely demanding conditions like executing emergency operations in space, solo-sailing around the world in 94 days or parenting a newborn baby. However, Stampi doesn't envision it as a permanent alternative to regular sleep. Just as we can force our bodies to maintain a lower weight than natural, we can force ourselves to get by on less sleep. But we'll always be hungry for food, and we'll always be starved for slumber. We can't cheat it forever.

Jonathan El-Bizri, 30, a high-tech professional by day and musician by night, used the multiple-nap strategy to whittle his total sleep need to four hours. "For someone used to sleeping nine hours a night, this was a miracle, especially since I was so productive throughout the day," the San Francisco resident says. El-Bizri says he felt more alert and focused than usual, but he was able to maintain this sleep schedule for only six months. His overall health and immune system weakened, in part, he believes, because he spent too much time in the studio and not enough in the gym. "I'd have been more successful if I'd been in better shape, because it's physically very demanding. I ate a healthy diet, and I ate no sweets, caffeine or alcohol. Even so, it began to wear me down."