What The Richest, Most Successful People Have In Common When It Comes To Sleep
Hint: It’s not logging 8 hours a night. (Photo: Corbis)
If there’s one thing you’ve probably learned from reading health articles on sleep, it’s to get your 8 hours — or at the very least 7. A solid night’s rest has been linked to everything from a healthy weight and appetite to a longer life and a better mood.
And since that’s the case, it must also be true that logging your zzz’s will help you succeed in your wakeful life. Research does show that shuteye lowers risk of accidents and boosts productivity. But if an 8-hour shift on your mattress is really the answer to a healthy, successful life then why is it that — more often than not — the richest, most successful sleep less than the rest of us?
(Image: Made To Measure Blinds)
Take the chart, above, from Made To Measure Blinds in the UK — it demonstrates that powerful people like Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Thomas Edison, Donald Trump, and Alexander Graham Bell all reported sleeping between 4 and 6 hours a night! While some tycoons — like Bill Gates and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos — reported 7 to 8 hours a night, most simply didn’t get that much. A New York Times article out Friday drew another interesting connection: On average, the more money you make, the less you sleep. That article reads:
“On average, adults earning the highest incomes — around $98,000 for a family of four — sleep 40 minutes less than people in the lowest-income families.”
And to some extent, that makes sense, W. Christopher Winter, MD, medical director of the Sleep Medicine Center at Martha Jefferson Hospital tells Yahoo Health. “When you become successful, you have more responsibility.”
Related: The Most Natural Bedtime In The World
But there are a few other factors to consider, he says. For one: “I think there’s some truth to idea that the ability to do well on not a lot of sleep sets you up to succeed in some things,” Winter says. In certain roles — like in the military or in medical settings, both jobs that require long nights or early mornings — being up, alert, and present provides you with opportunities long sleepers simply miss by sleeping, he says. Winter uses himself as an example: “I wasn’t the best or smartest medical school student, but I never had trouble running around at 3 a.m. The way I succeeded, in part, was that I was just kind of around when things happened.”
That’s not to say you should cut your shuteye down to 5 or 6 hours a night though, he says. “How much we need to sleep is to some degree genetic. Some people thrive on 6 hours.” But beyond that, be skeptical of what you read, he says. There are researchers who staunchly suggest nobody could average less than 5 hours of sleep every single night and succeed, Winter says. And in people who say they do? Winter says they’re likely misperceiving their sleep. Some research has found that those who report getting 5 hours a night of sleep actually may get more than that over a 24-hour period through naps or through miscounting their actual shutete, Winter says.
Related: Bedtime in America: Which Cities Stay Up The Latest?
“Historically, I have found that people who say they’re sleeping 1 or 2 or 3 hours a night and thriving — that’s simply not true. You can drink as much Starbucks or Red Bull as you want, but you’re going to crash and burn if you do that,” Winter says. Putting information out there like this gives people a false idea: that in order to be a CEO or be successful, you have to sacrifice sleep, he says.
Related: The Exact Time You Should Go To Bed
Take this quote from Charles Czeisler, a sleep specialist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston in a recent WSJ article: In round numbers, the percentage of adults who can really get by on five hours or less per night “is about zero.”
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