Sleep hacking

Today we are going to discuss sleep hacking. For some reasons I do not fully understand, many students think that sleep is a waste of time. There are two ways of sleep hacking: (1) healthy ways to benefit from healthy sleep and (2) controversial ways to reduce sleep time. Let us make some order in this mess.

Why do we sleep? Science does not have a full answer. We know that only ~2% of people can sleep much less than 6-7 hours per day without significant damage to their wellbeing.
The damage may include depression or other moods swings including temporary dementia. The damage is typically temporary and often can be treated by good sleep and simple pills. Some of our eating disorders may orignate from not getting enough sleep and looking for alternative sources of energy. So if you do not sleep 7 hours per night, suffer from eating disorders and have unexplainable mood swings, prepare to hack your sleep.

The most important part of the sleep cycle is apparently REM. By accurate timing of your short naps (from siesta to Uberman sleep hack) you can increase the amount of REM in your sleep. As a result, for the same amount of sleeping, you will get increased memory and creativity, problem-solving and visualization.

If you meditate twice a day for 15 min or more, you can further increase the benefit you get from your sleep. While you meditate you can learn and test several tricks that may later help you in sleep. You will be able to fight nightmares and recurring dreams, reduce sleep apnea and breath deeper when you sleep.

Some people try to remember their dreams by setting up an alarm clock or psychological alarm trigger during REM part of your sleep. If you really need to remember your dreams, it is better to keep a steady schedule and a habit of writing down your first thoughts when you wake up. From there you can try to reverse-engineer the dreams. The skill is hard to learn and the benefit of it is not clear. Morning and evening meditation definitely help. In any case, breaking REM sleep cycle will reduce the efficiency of your sleep and should be avoided if possible.

No that we know how to improve the efficiency of the sleep we take, it is reasonable to ask: do we need that much sleep at all? Some lucky 2% do not need to sleep more than two hours. But if you are not Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin (and probably you are not), you should get ~6 hours of night sleep and a short (~20 min) siesta nap or ~8 hours good night sleep – whatever works best for you. During years of teaching this course we had a lot of complaints from students who try to practice so-called Uberman sleep: they complained on reduced ability to memorize, drop in reading speed and other issues that can be attributed to the efficacy of working memory processes. If you ask me, we get much higher efficiency boost by learning to use our working memory effectively than we get by reducing sleep.

To summarize the text above: for maximal efficiency you should sleep 6 hours per day, have a small ~20 min siesta nap and ~15 min meditation before you go to sleep and after you wake up. If your memory drops or you get strange mood swings, try to sleep more.