What 'elite sleepers' can tell us all about the eight hour myth

The Telegraph

From Leonardo da Vinci to Margaret Thatcher, there were people who claimed to need only a few hours of sleep. It is changing the way we sleep, and offering clues for ways to treat diseases such as dementia.

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) reported on 10 years of research on the genomes of 3 per cent of the population. It is possible to sleep less without having negative health consequences.

Our biological make-up plays a key role in determining how long we need to sleep. Public health guidelines recommend eight hours of sleep per night, but some people may need more or less.

Russell Foster likes to compare individual sleep patterns to shoe size. The range for humans can be from six to ten hours.

The sleeping pattern of elite sleepers came with a number of personality characteristics, according to a study by the University of California, San Francisco. Too little sleep can cause a lot of us to have a bad mood, but elite sleepers seem to be the exact opposite.

The elite sleeper will usually wake up five or six hours later after going to bed. They won't feel tired during the day despite sleeping little at night.

Around 90-95 per cent of the elite sleepers are high in ambition and optimism, according to psychologists. Many had exceptional memories, higher pain thresholds, and a greater ability to cope with jet lag.

The theory explained how great minds such as Leonardo da Vinci needed a small amount of shut-eye. Tom Ford, the designer and director, is said to be able to manage on as little as three hours per night. Donald Trump claims to only need four or five, while Musk sleeps for no longer than six hours due to the demands of running his companies.

Sleep scientists want to point out that elite sleepers represent a small portion of the population.

It's almost irresponsible to make people feel guilty about their sleep or have this approach.

He points out that Albert Einstein slept for at least 10 hours a night. He says that a better way to assess our sleep patterns is to look at how long you sleep without an alarm clock, whether you struggle to wake up in the morning, or if you prefer a mid-afternoon nap.

A large body of evidence shows that getting enough sleep is important for health and can impair our memory and make us more prone to chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and metabolic problems.

A study of civil servants in the UK has shown that they have a higher risk of dementia if they don't get enough sleep. According to Foster, scientists have found that one night of no sleep increases the deposition of aamyloid in the brain by one or two percent.

If you get less than seven hours of sleep per night, even in your 50s and 60s, you have an increased risk of developing dementia in your 70s.

The quirks of elite sleepers may be able to help us with this. One of the most fascinating aspects of their biology is that while they sleep less, their genes seem to protect them against cognitive decline in later life. In other words, their sleep is high quality and low quantity, because they seem to be able to pack in all the recuperation and cleansing that the brain and body need to stay healthy in less time.

Untangling the biology behind the elite sleeper genes could provide new leads for developing future dementia treatments.

"This is an important avenue for future studies, but most of us won't have one of these efficient sleep."