What Every Geek Ought to Know About Sleep Hacking
Posted on June 12th, 2007 in Healthy Lifestyle
Sleep Hacking is the practice of training you body to get by on less sleep by taking a series of short sleep breaks during any 24 hour period.
The theory is that you can train your body to get by on less sleep and therefore devote more time to work, geeking, whatever…
Oh, and one other thing you should know about Sleep Hacking:
It is very dumb.
The body is simply not designed to get by on this type of schedule. Sure you can train yourself to adapt to it, but there are several reasons that you should not.
1) Sleep Hacking Will Cause You to Get Fat – You need to get adequate sleep to regulate the hormones that affect your appetite. Basically that means that if you deprive yourself of sleep or train yourself to power nap, the body’s natural reaction is to force you to eat more. There is a strong correlation between sleep hackers and increase body mass index. That means you get fat.
2) Sleep Hacking Will Damage Your Health – There is medical evidence to suggest that sleep hacking messes with your physiology. Sleep deprivation can cause problems with the symphatic nervous system which regulates our responses to external stimuli. It in turn alters metabolism and blood pressure – not things you really want to mess up, if you can help it. Research indicates that there is a correlation between sleep deprivation and diabetes and heart disease.
3) Sleep Hacking Causes Shorter Life Span – Read it for yourself – shorter sleeping patterns have been associated with a shorter lifespan.
4) Sleep Hacking Reduces Your Capacity To Put in a Big Day – Normal sleeping patterns allow people a buffer so that the body can operate for more than the usual period of time if the need arises. This same buffer does not exist for people with polyphasic sleep patterns (sleep hackers). That means you hit a wall. The startling evidence for this is people suffering from Obstructive Sleep Apnia – a condition that produces a similar state of affairs to sleep hacking – being more than three times more likely to be in a car accident. This is simply because they are unable to operate effectively once their body has passed the threshold at which it requires more sleep.
The short of it is that Sleep Hacking is not something you should be doing if you are serious about your health.
A full 7-8 hours sleep per night will help your stress levels, your metabolism and your overall health and well-being.
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