Those who sleep for just 4 hours daily

If you sleep for 8 hours per day, then you spend one-third of your life in sleep. This philosophy considers sleep as an enemy of human potential, as if we are wasting some time while sleeping. Believing this fact, some people try to glorify lesser sleep hours and tell that at most 4 hours are sufficient per day. They tell about various techniques to restrict your sleep without any research or medical evidence behind it. Most of such techniques evolve around their own belief that sleeping less saves a good amount of time that can be used for other causes. Here BetterHealthFacts.com will try to explain demerits of restricted sleep.

If you exercise regularly then you need more than advised 7-8 hours of sleep.

It is necessary to get your body enough time to recover from the fatigue. If you want to sleep less then you should not indulge in heavy exercises, but just light-exercises for fitness purpose. Extra fatigue always needs extra sleep to recover.

Lesser Sleep makes you Old

A study done in 2018 on 10000 participants found that if you are restricted to 4 hours of sleep per night than it adds 8 years to your brain's age. 

Some people are genetically evolved for lesser sleep

Yes you read it right ! Some people have got a gene mutation in ADRB1 gene, which let them sleep for less than 6.5 hours per day without any side effect on their health. If  a person talks to you to sleep less, telling about his own ability to do so, then you may tell him/her that it might be due to this gene mutation.

Taking 20 min naps multiple times per day

This technique is known as polyphasic sleep, where a person takes 20 minute naps multiple times in day for a total of 3 hours. No matter how much a person advocates for this technique, doctors say that it has got adverse side effects. However you may take short naps in daytime to compensate for lesser sleep in night, but any thing lesser than 7-8 hours per day is unhealthy.

During a good night sleep a healthy human being goes through sleep cycles. Each cycle is of around 90 minutes with 4 different stages inside it. One of these stages in REM, Rapid Eye Movement, where we see dreams. Duration of REM increases with every sleep cycle. Usually we complete 4 to 6 sleep cycles in a night.

As one sleep cycle lasts for 90 minutes, a 4-hour sleep can reduce count of our sleep cycle to just 2. If we talk about polyphasic sleep, then we can't even complete one sleep cycle in one 20-min nap. So it may disturb our whole sleep pattern.

We have discussed the importance of REM and how our dreams are a part of our memory management. You may read about it in one of our previous posts What makes us Forget . If we don't see dreams than it can badly affect our memory in our day-to-day life. Trying to sleep for lesser hours can directly affect the REM stage of your sleep and you will face memory problems.

Instead of saving your time from sleeping you should try to save time from other unnecessary activities in your daily life. Trying to sleep less may lead you to some adverse side effects for which you will waste further more time. So instead of sleeping less, you should work on making your sleep better to think better.