The False Dream of Less Sleep

During a typical week in college, I slept four or five hours a night. Between evening classes, club meetings, and writing lab reports, I was lucky if I made it to bed by midnight before my 5  a.m. alarm wailed each morning for rowing practice.

I never actually felt too terribly tired, which was the strange part. Naturally, I likened myself to Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and other greats who claimed to need just a few hours of sleep each night. Little did I know, the damage was already being done.

It wasn’t until I started researching sleep for my PhD in neuroscience that I realized only a handful of people actually succeed at getting by on just a few hours of rest—and they’ve got genetics on their side.

Read the rest at PrimeMind here.