Sleepless elite couple hours of sleep full#

“We know almost nothing about how sleep is regulated,” Fu told Business Insider. That launched close to 20 years of studying these sleep behaviours to learn more about how people sleep and how genetics may play a role in that behaviour. Perhaps most importantly, she also learned that there were specific traits linked with all three types. Soon, she learned that there were three types of people: early risers, night owls, and people who are somewhere in between. Fu started investigating the traits relating to that family and others who came into the clinic. Ying-Hui Fu, a biologist and human genetics professor at the University of California, San Francisco started studying short sleepers in 1996, when a woman came into the lab asking them to investigate why her whole family woke up at extremely early hours every day. The Short Sleep ClinicĮven though it has no apparent negative health effects, short sleeping is considered a sleep disorder.Īnd although many people think they can get by with just four hours of sleep, for the most part they aren’t true short sleepers - they’re just chronically sleep deprived. Though not officially diagnosed, these sleep habits are consistent with those of a condition known as “short sleeping.” Short sleepers, a group the Wall Street Journal once named the “sleepless elite,” need only a short amount of sleep every night instead of the average 7-8 hours, and scientists estimate they make up only about 1% of the population.

Sleepless elite couple hours of sleep full#

His father, he says, was the same way, only taking a couple of naps but never sleeping a full eight hours.Ĭramer’s not the only one: Leaders such as Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and even ex-US President Barack Obama rarely - if ever - get what’s considered a full night of sleep. most weeknights, and rarely needs an alarm to rise. Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money and co-founder of, c laims to only need four hours of sleep each night to feel well-rested and alert.