Who Needs Sleep? Apparently Nobody in Grad School.
Something that surprised me within my first few weeks of Portfolio Center was the insomniac tendencies of the staff. Instructors gave out their home phone numbers and gave enormous windows of time to call - we're talking only 3-5 hours of sleep a night. Yet everyone seemed to be functioning fine (without borrowing caffeine pills from Jesse Spano). I had always heard that "the experts" said while kids definitely need the most sleep, adults should average about 8 hours a night to be at full mental and physical capacity. So...while watching the heartbreaking Cubs loss, I did a little crazy wireless internet research. And although you can't trust everything online (except for message board responses written by PokemonFan847; that guy knows his stuff), I found studies from ABC News and BBC News that answered some questions.
No one has a clear, definitive answer on why we sleep and dream. Sleep needs vary from person to person, but a lot of people seem to agree about the body keeping track of a "sleep bank." If 8 hours is your usual sleeping pattern, 6 hours won't cut it - you will make those 2 hours up somewhere in the near future. But it turns out that anywhere from 6-8 hours of sleep a night is best, depending on the person. A 2002 University of California study showed that regularly sleeping too much or too little actually shortened life expectancy - the highest survival rate (out of 1.1 million people studied) was for people sleeping 7 hours. So it seems to all come down to a personal threshold - whatever you can handle, while being competent when awake, is best.
Anyway, no, I'm not sleeping three hours a night, but I'm on a 6-7 hour sleep pattern that seems to be working well. But I haven't had any of my usual dinosaur dreams lately...
Tuesday, October 14 at 10:00 PM
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