I feel good. I’m about 3 years in now, and I still try to keep my sleep at around 6.5 hours/night (going between 6 hour [4 REM cycle] nights and 7.5 [5 REM cycle] nights). Going up to 7.5/night daily doesn’t feel like it produces noticeable benefits, and I plan to keep up this 6.5-hour level. It doesn’t feel forced at all. I haven’t woken up to an alarm in years. I will stock up on 7.5 two days in a row if I know there’s a risk of me only getting 4.5 hours (e.g., if I need to wake up for a flight).
However, despite me feeling good and I think performing well in my general life, I may have some tiredness in me. I fall asleep very quickly in the evening. After a 6 hour sleep, the next night, I can’t really read on my phone or watch a show when I’m in bed or I’ll fall asleep automatically. This isn’t the case if I have a 7.5-hour sleep the prior two nights in a row, especially if it’s also linked to me sleeping in rather than sleeping early. Falling asleep automatically could be seen as a downside, but alternatively, it also means I don’t struggle to sleep, so that’s even less time in bed.
I still advocate to my peers: “You’ve got many decades of life left. Explore sleeping less. Maybe your body can operate on 6 hours. Try intentionally getting less than 7.5 for a month, and see how you like it.”
(I am admittedly not a LW regular, so please excuse this slow reply)
I’m glad to help. Since my initial reply 20 days ago, I also started wearing a smart watch to do some sleep tracking, and the watch said that I had a good balance of all the sleep stages.
I figure that even just the present limited data/anecdata is enough to encourage people to try it. Gaining 1 hour or so every day for the rest of your life is such an enormous benefit, and I suspect the cost of exploring this is pretty low (committing to lowered sleep for a week or two). I didn’t need much of a “warm-up” period, and I responded well to lowering my sleep off the bat. I suspect this is because I was able to buy into Guzey’s claims that a lot of tiredness is psychological and people just feel tired after 6 hours because they think they should. Buying into that seems critical. I know before I made this change, I would’ve reported that 6-hour nights would make me tired.
The data/anecdata that I think would be particularly valuable would be if someone initially reacted badly to going sub-7.5-hour, but ended up responding well after several months.
Talking about this, it honestly is kinda surprising that there is less research on this topic or at least community efforts, given how big the benefits are. Something like the Slime Mold potato diet work would be valuable. There would be challenges with people just self-reporting tiredness, but I still figure there could be some cool findings possible. This would be simple to organize too and for participants would be much less of a commitment than the potato diet. Maybe just have people do some 10-question questionnaire once a day that tries to measure sleepiness and/or general attitudes about the schedule along with reporting how much they slept.