There are people who boast of sleeping only four or five hours a day and claim to wake up fresh as a lettuce, something that can generate a lot of envy, but also skepticism, since it seems hardly credible being able to sleep little and be so active. And science has not stopped saying that sleeping little it is very bad for your healthalthough there is an exception to the rule (as we are used to seeing).
What we knew. For decades, the unwavering recommendation of the World Health Organization and sleep medicine experts they have been clear: a healthy adult needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep night so that your immune system, your metabolism and your mental health function properly. Getting out of there, below, is buying tickets for diseases such as, for example, Alzheimer’s to appear.
The exception. Given this rule, there is 1% of the world’s population that has a true genetic superpower that allows them to bypass this rule without any consequences. And the culprit has been detected by researcher Ying-Hui Fu, who after tracking down these people has seen that it has an important genetic component.
How it looked. To do this, the researcher decided to analyze entire families where several of their members ‘functioned’ perfectly with just six hours of sleep, without showing daytime sleepiness or cognitive deterioration, while the rest of their family members needed more than eight hours of sleep. And from here, the culprit had a first and last name: the mutation of the DEC2 gene, known as BHLHE41.
Although this finding has been the tip of the iceberg, because subsequent studies in animal models and entire families of humans have found a real cocktail of mutations in other genes that seem to optimize sleep so that four hours is more than enough. And it even gave them a ‘protective shield’ against cognitive decline when they faced even shorter nights. In the end they are all benefits.
Because you don’t have to try. Reading about these mutations can be tempting, since, after all, different very relevant figures have sold us the myth that we should sleep little because it is a waste of time, and we should get up early at five in the morning. But the truth is that it is vital to separate these people who have an alteration in their genetics from people who sleep little because they want to.
If this is not the 1% of the population (which is most likely), science suggests that chronically sleeping six hours or less during middle age increases the risk of suffer from dementia by 30%and even the chances of suffering from diabetes or hypertension also increase. This means that the body should not be deprived of sleep when it is ‘asking for’ it. Something that is noticeable as soon as you wake up.
Future views. The interest of the scientific community aims to perfectly understand how these genes can make sleep much more efficient, and above all how they protect against different diseases related to sleep deprivation. In this way, the long-term goal is not necessarily to create pills so that we all sleep four hours and work more, but rather to develop therapies for sleep disorders or prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
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