Sleeping 3 Hours

Sleeping 3 Hours a day, everyday, for all his whole life, made him watch 21 television shows, reads 30 to 40 Marvel and DC comic books, 1 to 2 novels, 2 bachelor degrees, and now he has PhD in computer science.

Sleeping 7-9 hours is the ideal and needed time for sleep in order our body to function normally and effectively. Many of us are sleep-deprived and we sometimes feel less productive the next day because of lack of sleep.

But there are a selected few who are  sleeping 3 hours but normally works well the next day, and they’ve been called the “sleepless elite“.

Sleeping 3 hours a day is like being a zombie, but not for all.

They have become the center of focus and curious how they are able to do that. In  study in 2009, by a professor from University of California San Francisco, PhD Ying Hui Fu and his team discovered  genetic mutation, explaining why some few people look, act, and work normally with a few hours of sleep.

One living example is Hank Driskill, and here is an interview, and sleeping 3 hours a day is a normal thing for him:

Sleeping schedule: “Typically, I [go to] sleep after midnight or at 1 a.m., and I wake up around 4 or 4:30 a.m. I’ve been like this my whole life. Last night, I went to bed around 11 p.m. because my wife was tired, so I woke up at 2:45 a.m.”

Activities with all the extra time. “The most common thing I do is read. I read every comic Marvel and DC put out each week, so 30 to 40 comics a week; I have around 50,000 comic books. And I love to deep-dive into whatever topic is fascinating me at the moment, so I might be reading medical papers at 2 a.m. I read a book or two in a good week, and I’m currently watching 21 television shows, which I buy on iTunes. Before the internet, it was a lot of books and comic books, or finding out whatever was on the TV really late at night. I remember I saw The Exorcist on TV when I was eight and scared myself to death.”

If having a seven-hour sleep. “I definitely wouldn’t have taken as many cl(–foul word(s) removed–) in school — I wouldn’t have studied as many things or been as aggressive in graduate school. I ended up with two Bachelor’s degrees (in computer science and astronomy), and in grad school I took all three of the entry-level graduate tracks as a first-year student, because I had the cycles to do all the work. I now have a MS/PhD in computer science.”

Longest time without sleep. “In grad school, I went five straight days without sleep. By that time, I was feeling pretty tired. I still only slept eight hours to catch up on the five missed days. But I can skip nights of sleep pretty regularly; I’ve done three to four days without sleep many times. A couple of weeks ago, Daredevil came out on Netflix, and I was so excited, I stayed up all night to watch it.”

“When I sleep, I sleep super deeply. It takes me 30 seconds to sleep, like, Okay it’s time for sleep. Click, and I’m out. It used to drive my wife crazy. You can shake me, and I won’t wake up.

“When I was a little kid, we had a storm that blew out all the windows in the north end of my house, including my bedroom, and my parents came in and saw the rain pouring down on me. They cleaned me, changed my pyjamas, put me in the living room, and I woke up a couple hours later, wondering how I ended up on the couch in the living room. I slept through the entire thing.