- I think that one of the most interesting things
is the realization that there are
so few short sleepers, and that people
who aren't short sleepers would like to be short sleepers.
You know what I mean?
It's really opened my eyes because,
I have to admit, I can definitely see where
other people who need their eight hours
are definitely handicapped in a way.
Jane Evans is a retired science teacher.
She lives in a former coal town
outside Scranton, Pennsylvania.
And she has an incredibly rare trait.
She only needs about five hours of sleep a night.
- I cannot make myself sleep longer
than my body wants to sleep.
I will lay there tossing and turning and tossing and turning.
And it's not where...
I don't have any real worries. I'm not..
I'm not depressed. I don't have anxiety issues.
I'm not stressed.
It's a condition called familial natural short sleep.
Researchers have spent the last decade studying people like Jane
to better understand how they can thrive on so little sleep,
because inside Jane's brain might be clues
to make us all better, shorter sleepers.
I'm meeting people whose minds
stretch the limits of human potential
and the researchers who are studying them to understand
how we can all be healthier and more productive.
This week, sleep.
I'm Michael Tabb. This is Exceptional Humans.
- I never set an alarm.
I've never slept in.
There's no such thing as sleeping in.
You know what I mean? Because I'm awake.
And once I'm awake,
I don't go back to sleep. It just doesn't happen.
- You get used to it. You know what I mean?
When you live with a person a long time,
like her and I have been together, you just get used to it.
That's Jane's husband. They've been married 50 years.
He's not a short sleeper.
- It allows us to get a lot of things done in the
morning that we have to do individually.
She gets some of the household chores done,
and then usually I get up around 9:00 am.
But there are others in Jane's family that are like her.
Her late father, her siblings, some of her nieces and nephews.
- They say it's normal to sleep 7 or 8. I want to know why I can't.
I want to be the person that goes to sleep
at 10:30 pm and does not wake up till 6:00 am.
You're supposed to be healthier.
Of course, I don't have any health issues.
A few months ago, Jane and Jackie were flown across the country
to a sleep clinic at the University of California, San Francisco,
where researchers are trying to understand
what makes natural short sleepers special.
- So if we study them and compare it with us,
we'll see where it's different,
what makes them more efficient.
Therefore, it can help us understand
how sleep the regulatory mechanism works, right?
- Goodnight sugar, sweet dreams. Don't let the bed bugs bite.
- From there, maybe we can come up
with ideas to help everybody sleep better.
That's Dr. Fu. She and her partner, Dr. Ptacek, are pioneers
in the world of short sleep research.
It started 20 years ago in Utah,
where they were working at a sleep clinic
studying so-called "morning larks."
- When we think of morning larks,
typically, they're people who go to sleep early
and wake up early.
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
You may know an extreme morning lark.
They naturally fall asleep around 8:00 pm,
and wake up around 4:00 in the morning.
Less than 1% of the population has this.
And for most of them, it's genetic.
- There were no changes in quality or quantity of sleep,
only that they were shifted
forward four to six hours earlier.
Ptacek started to notice some
morning larks weren't like the others.
They were waking up around 4 am,
but they were going to bed close to midnight.
These natural short sleepers aren't insomniacs
or people who forgo sleep to care
for family or work longer hours.
They don't need recovery days,
and they don't rely on caffeine or other stimulants.
They get less than six and a half hours of sleep a night,
without any visible drawbacks.
They generally seem like healthy, super-productive people.
- While I was in college, I got married.
Then I got pregnant and had a child.
So I'm raising a child, I'm going to school.
As soon as I graduated from school,
I got a job, which was teaching. But then I went to grad school
while I'm raising two more kids, you know what I mean?
And you're just busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.
Did I think anything of it at that point in time? Not really.
Ptacek began working with Dr. Fu to understand these people.
And they soon discovered, like morning larks, it was genetic.
They started with just two natural short sleepers,
a 69-year-old woman and her 44-year-old daughter.
After sequencing their DNA, they discovered a rare mutation
in a gene known to control circadian rhythms.
They recreated the mutation in mice and discovered
they slept an hour less than other mice in their litter.
Fu and Ptacek published their first results in 2009.
Since then, lots of people have reached out to them,
and the researchers have identified about 100 short sleepers
by studying them and their family members.
They've publicly announced the discovery of a second
genetic mutation that leads to natural short sleep.
And they're studying several more possible ones.
These mutations seem to be altering hormone
or neurotransmitter levels that affect wakefulness.
Which means that all the short sleepers' advantages
may boil down to some small chemical differences.
Ultimately, the researchers say that if we can pinpoint
the chemicals and the paths they act on,
we can make a pill that creates the same changes in the brain.
A sleeping pill that doesn't just make you tired,
but actually makes you sleep better and faster.
- Maybe we can come up with an idea (to) first
help people who have sleep problems, right?
We can help them increase their
sleep efficiency or help them sleep better.
And also, from there to help everybody sleep better.
Everybody has better sleep efficiency.
Therefore, everybody will function in a higher level and
also have less chance of getting all kinds of chronic diseases.
And so that's where we want to go.
But there's still a lot of work to do.
They need more subjects,
and tracking people down for the study is actually really hard.
We've all probably heard of someone
who says they don't need much sleep.
Margaret Thatcher, Thomas Edison, and even
Donald Trump have famously claimed to sleep 4 hours a night.
But that doesn't necessarily make them natural short sleepers.
- Our circadian behavior and our sleep behavior is dictated,
in part, by the genes we got from our parents.
But at the same time, we, like our parents,
we don't always listen to our genes.
And we drink compounds like coffee and alcohol,
maybe take medications that might affect
our drowsiness or wakefulness.
And so we have to strip away all of these environmental influences.
This is why families like Jane's are really important.
Jane doesn't drink coffee, and she doesn't take
any stimulants other than some tea
that she likes because it's warm.
And she says she's in excellent physical and mental health.
- On the occasions when I've slept longer than, say, 6:00 am,
I wake up with a pounding headache.
The same thing happens, generally, if I take a nap.
Too much sleep has a detrimental effect on me.
Not, not too little.
Most of us tend to have the opposite problem.
We don't sleep enough.
Sleep deprivation and sleep problems affect
hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Poor sleep makes you less productive,
raises your risk of obesity and heart disease,
and even shortens your life expectancy.
You may be able to function without a full night's rest,
but sleep deprivation tears your body apart.
And despite all the claims out there,
there's no scientifically proven way to cheat sleep.
New research shows that sleeping in on the weekend
can't make up for a week of insufficient rest.
And while some studies suggest that you can bank sleep hours
(oversleeping to prepare for night shifts),
a recent meta-analysis found the quality
of evidence very low, with serious risk of bias.
If short sleepers are actually sleeping more efficiently,
they could be a model for the rest of us.
- Is there a way that I can become a short sleeper?
- Right now, no.
A lot of people ask me that.
And I always say, "I have not found something
that I feel comfortable to try it on myself."
Therefore, I cannot advise anybody to do anything, right?
I just... I feel it's so important for us that I don't want
to mess with it until I know for sure it's safe.
For now, the researchers say you should just listen to your body.
For most people, that probably means
sleeping seven to nine hours a night.
- So I think the most critical question is:
If you were all alone on vacation
with no responsibilities, no one to worry about...
Under those circumstances, what time would you go to bed,
and what time would you wake up?
Our lives aren't necessarily set up like that,
which is why so many of us try to normalize
our schedules with pills, caffeine, or other drugs.
But if you sleep according to your body's needs,
you should be at your healthiest and most productive.
- Do you like to do something kind
of relaxing toward the end of the day?
- Well, yeah. That's basically what I do.
I won't go to sleep if I go straight to bed.
I have to get my mind to wind down.
This is relaxing because you really don't have to think
when you're working on puzzles. You just put the pieces in.
Thanks for watching this Quartz member exclusive.
This video is part of our series, Exceptional Humans.
Keep watching for more stories on people whose minds
stretch the limits of human potential,
in everything from sleep, to memory, to meditation.