Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ PhotoReading, Memory Optimizer How many hours of sleep do we need?

Hi All.

I usually sleep 8 and more hours per night. Lately I've cut my sleeping hours to 6 - 7.15 hours and get sick quite often. I want to know how many hours do we actually need. If I persist and continue sleeping 6 hours a night. Will I eventually get used to it? Some sites on internet said that many people need more than 8 hours a night.. Maybe I'm one of those.

Interesting that no one knows why we sleep. It is a great mystery to those who are unfamiliar with the body's esoteric energies.

How much sleep you naturally need depends on strength and harmony of your subtle energy fields.

Skimping on the sleep, eating crap foods, breathing shallow do not allow you to replenish and harmonize your bioenergy. Sickness results.

If you eat normal american foods, you'll be in desperate need of more sleep. Running an energy deficit overtime, of course, results in dire sickness and early death.

If you meditate for even 30 minutes, you'll need a few hours less sleep. Nootropic drugs naturally and healthfully decrease the need for sleep by fascilitating energy flow. Likewise, if you do qigong, you'll find that you need less sleep.

And my favorite anecodte--in some Buddhist monasteries, sleep is optional. They are so subtly energetic with all of their meditation, diet, breathing, and energy cultivation/circultation that they just don't feel the need to sleep.

So, if you want to sleep less *and* remain healthy, you must attend to your bioenergy. Otherwise, it just isn't worth it.

I slept 10 or so hours a day my freshman year. This was before I got into any sort of diet/meditation stuff. I had a crap diet, partied often, and was quite energetically depressed. Fast forward three years. I naturally wake up after 7 hours. It just happens without effort. If I throw in some sort of cultivation that day, i.e. delta meditation, biocircuits, dash of ginseng, piracetam n'such, then I find myself waking up after about 5 hours.

My 'feel the power' posts chronicle a time when I went for TWO WEEKS on just 3 hours of delta meditation--WITH NO SLEEP. This was a great learning experience that solidified my own sleep theories, but ultimately unsustainable. Plus you have to find tons of stuff to take up all that extra time!

Wiliam Dennet wrote a great book on sleep called, "The Promise of Sleep". He's the guy who discovered REM sleep in the 50's and probably is the foremost sleep researcher in the world. He describes people that naturally, genetically almost, require 1 hour of sleep a day. He could find NO scientific reason for this, so he wrote it off to genetics. Whereas I would love to have these people analyzed by aura readers or chi measuring devices.

Interestingly, you'll also find that geniuses tend to have irregular sleeping patterns--which I feel may actually be RESPONSIBLE for their genius in the first place. Edison slept 4 hours and had 2 45 min theta meditations. Einstein slept 12 hours a day, probably had tons of brain-building REM sleep. Leonardo Da Vinci also had a really odd nap thing going.

Rise and shine.

Brian,

Interesting post. Very informative =)

Since I'm big on sleep deprivation and its major side effects (I've gone 5 days without sleep, naps, or any type of replenishing energy) I'll give the skinny on other stuff.

I think the meditation to replenish energy thing is very cool indeed, but I'm guessing you should still sleep until you're no longer tired - this will vary in between people, so it's good to go by feeling, no more, no less. It's like eating - eat until you're not hungry, no more, no less, and you'll be fine. Overeat or undernourishing is bad. I guess meditation would be like snacking on higher calorie foods (assuming good nutrition) because you can put off meals.

I'll mention what happens if you don't get enough sleep and it accumulates.

Last semester, I sleep deprived myself A LOT. Not for any good reason like studying (if you could even call that significant reasoning) but for no reason at all (read: sleep disorder). The most I'd get was 3 hours of sleep, and this would keep for weeks.

Finally, I started noticing things. I draw comics for a publication, and I started noticing my comics had a drastic difference in quality. Not just in the drawing skill, but in humor. The last comic I did almost made no sense at all, like my brain was the only one that could understand it because it was that jumbled up.

I also noticed that I wasn't reacting very much to anything. It was like I was repressing every emotion - jokes on TV or generally happy things didn't stir me. This sounds like depression, but it wasn't, because sadenning things didn't affect me either. I didn't even show anger anymore. I started mistaking this for some strange "enlightenment" and I was dead wrong.

My will power was incredibly weak. It was like my Basic Self rebelled and took over my Conscious and Higher Self. I followed every desire of mine (except sleep) and I wasn't even enjoying it anymore.

I failed two classes, and showed no emotion. I figured, "oh well." I should've realized something was wrong.

My mind and body had not received any rest for over 100 hours. I walked into my class, and my teacher said that despite my good grades, I would fail because of my poor attendance. I nodded, told her it was okay, I understood, and if you were there, you would have thought all she told me was the date or something. I showed that little care.

She told me if I liked I could stay (take the class for "fun") but I said no and got into my car.

As I exited the parking lot, I went nuts.

I broke out into tears, then starting laughing. These weren't little baby tears and giggling: this was all out "I just got shot in the chest" crying and screaming and "This is the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life" laughing. The hard laughing scared me, and I would cry and scream in fear. The crying and screaming seemed ridiculous to me so I would laugh.

All this time I was driving down the road. I didn't turn, I didn't pull over, nothing. I just kept going straight. The road I was on eventually emptied onto a highway, so I got onto it.

This laughing/screaming/driving straight lasted for almost an hour. I eventually pulled over to the side of the road because I was completely exhausted from all of it.

Not getting enough replenishing energy can drive you insane. I'm not kidding. I got one report on this weird brainwaves thing and it's actually true: you'll go insane (again, this doesn't cover meditation, so I would just sleep until you're no longer tired). Major accidents happen because of fatigue. Chernobyl was actually one of them.

To go back to theerapun, sleep until you're no longer tired, and yes, you're sickness can be because of not getting enough sleep. I heard of one DJ who died because he was trying to break some endurance record for longest continous play or something stupid like that. His body actually lost the ability to regulate his body tempurature after something like a week and a half and he just dropped dead. The coroner said that, as strange as it sounds, because it was a body temperature thing, it was actually hypothermia.

Basics:
Napping is FINE unless it interferes with your sleeping schedule.
Some people need more sleep. People with low blood pressure have problems getting out of bed in the morning, too.
Meditation sounds like a good idea to save time sleeping. But make sure you sleep until you feel rested.

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for the info, Brian!

-Ramon http://razor.ramon.com

[This message has been edited by razordu30 (edited March 12, 2002).]

okay
babies sleep around 20 hours a day
Kids somewhere around 10
Teenagers need 9 hours 15 min
Adults need about 8.25 hours
and the older folks need around 6-7

Wake up naturally if you can. On the weekends is when most people decide not to do this. You wake up at whatever time, but you know it's Saturday, so you go back to sleep. Then you wake up tired for the rest of the day. In psychology I learned why this works the way it does, your energy follows a circadian rhythm that naturally waxes and wanes throughout the day. If you wake up naturally, you come awake as your circadian rhythm is on it's up cycle, but if decide to sleep more, you most often awake when it's on a down cycle and your energy is going down.

Thanks for all replies.
Brian,
I've actually printed out your Feel the power posts. Very interesting. However , I'm afraid that meditation will give me the ability to remain concious while falling asleep which has annoyed me a lot lately.

I've tried 'Sleep Reduction' preset from bwgen.com serveral times so I don't know if it works for me or not. In www.supermemo.com 's article named Good Sleep Good Memory or something like this. They told that sleep reduction is a joke. The more theta brainwave we produced , the more sleep we need.... What is your opinion????? I'm confused. However , I don't want to play with those brainwave stuffs anymore. I'm afraid I will go crazy someday

P.S. I also wonder why Pete isn't crazy if he can do spontaneous activation at will. Tlingit should say something here since he's the one who claim to have frequent spontaneous activation. Don't you guys get damn annoyed if there're unconcious images 24 hours a day ???

I'm usually woke up by my dad. What should I do? If he doesn't wake me up, I'll sleep 10 or more hours...

Thanks.

Health is definitely something that will be affected with no sleep. Razor is right, it WILL drive you insane.

Whenever I stay up late lately, which I always used to do, I find that I start to get swollen glands in my neck, get a stuffed nose, and almost immediately feel like I've got some sort of sinus infection.

Razor kind of reminds me of Tyler Durden from Fight Club. He was a character that had insomnia, and because of it developed split personalities. "With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy."

When not getting enough sleep, you'll notice that things can seem more distant, and don't feel as real. If you're tired enough, you'll feel like you're almost constantly dreaming. You fingers may feel just a tad bit more numb, in fact.

GET SLEEP.

Side Note
Brain's post is quite interesting though. I'm still very new to all the things out here in the world. PR is the first step, then QiGong, the paranomal, life force, the spirit. Who knows?

Youngpr,

Definately =)

That movie is a favorite of mine because the guy has insomnia; I totally identify with him, as well as the masculine ideals in the movie.

I actually started getting worried because my girlfriend would talk to me about conversations I never recalled having with her. They were usually when I was really tired (either a wake up call or a call right before I passed out). Anyway, I would apparently have these conversations with her, and she would bring it up with me and I'd say, "I have no idea what you're talking about".

When you get enough sleep after depriving yourself of good sleep for a long time, you feel like you have super powers. "Where's my bookbag?" Hey, it's in my car! I left it there!

You feel like you're telepathic or something now that your brain is working.

-Ramon http://razor.ramon.com

To maintain original IQ (function correctly), you'll need around 8.30 hrs of sleep. Thats if you are between the ages of 20 to 55. Older people will need less sleep.

Personally, If i don't sleep at least 8.30, I feel like ****.

Brian, I'm still waiting for my Piracetam. I think its coming from South Africa. Its been 10 days since I order. Do you think that Customs might have taking it. We are allowed a 3 month supply, aren't we?

razordu30, What do you think about "Nootropic drugs"? Have you tried them. I've read two books about them already one of the is "brain Candy", and the other is "Smart Drugs". What they say about nootropics is very interesting.