I Tried Sleeping 5 Hours A Night For A Month

The result is NOT what I expected…

I don’t know why, but recently, I’ve been really stressing myself over how little time I’ve got in a day.

For some reason, it never seems like there are enough hours for me to do what I need to get done.

I tried limiting the number of tasks to only the important ones, I tried cutting out social time to focus on staying productive, but nothing so far has worked for me.

So about a month ago, I decided to make a list of all the activities that were taking up my time in an attempt to figure out if I can cut down on some of them to make more time for others.

Out of everything I looked through, the most time-consuming activity I found turned out to be sleeping.

Almost a third of my 24 hours are spent every day just lying in bed with my eyes closed, hallucinating about some non-existent fantasyland or whatever else happens to pop into my head at night.

As wrong as it might sound, I honestly felt like those hours could’ve been used in a more productive way — to write another article maybe, or do research on a new topic or even brainstorm creative ideas for my next project.

For better or for worse, I decided to try out an experiment.

For the next 4 weeks, I was going to cut down my sleep schedule from 8 hours to just 5 hours, and see how much of a difference it would have on my overall performance.

Being that I am still young, I thought it couldn’t be that bad.

Yes, we are all told that in order to have our brain function properly we must have at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night and if we don’t we will have all these negative side effects like lower immunity, high blood pressure, diabetes, blah, blah, blah.

But come on, what’s the absolute worst that can happen?

Let’s be realistic, it’s not like I was going to die from a stroke because my brain got turned into mush.

Besides, you only get to live once, right?

On the upside, if I did manage to make it through those 4 weeks alive, then stretching this out over a year, I’d gain an extra 45 and a half days worth of time to do whatever productive shit I want!

45 fucking days worth of time! Isn’t that crazy? That’s literally an extra month out of a whole year I would have gained compared to everyone else who sleeps for 8 hours!

Literally, do the maths yourself if you don’t believe me:

(3 hours a day gained) x (365 days in a year) = 1095 hours gained in a year

(1095 hours gained in a year) ÷ (24 hours in a day) = 45.625 days!

Anyways, here’s what happened in those 4 weeks:

Week 1

Ok, this was pure torture.

Honestly, I felt like I was under anaesthesia for the entire week and I was barely able to open my eyes.

Looking back, I definitely shouldn’t have cut back my sleep from 8 hours a night straight to 5 hours on the first day of the experiment.

Instead, what I probably should’ve done was gradually lower my sleep from 8 hours to 7 and then to 6 and then 5, OVER the course of the week. But hey, it is what it is.

Nevertheless, I persevered.

And by the end of this first week, I was completely battered and knocked out, unable to focus on anything.

Still, I kinda expected this to happen so even though my productivity decreased as a result of this sudden behavioural change, I decided to stick with it for another week, just to see if I’d get used to it.

Week 2

Guess what?

I did get used to it! Well…sort of…

Learning from my mistake back in the first week, I decided to give myself some room to recover by extending my sleep back to the usual 8 hours for the weekends.

This way, even if I am absolutely shattered by the end of this second week, I’d at least be able to take a small break from this experiment without wasting those two days entirely by turning into a complete bum.

As it turns out, this was a brilliant move on my end and although I was still more tired than when I had 8 hours of sleep, I was slowly getting myself accustomed to this new sleeping cycle.

In the daytime, I didn’t fall on my face as much and my eyes felt a little less droopy but my focus and productivity stayed relatively the same as the previous week.

The weekends were certainly a lot better than the weekdays and I was able to get more work done then but it’s still far from what I’d call ideal.

I’m starting to make some progress though…

Week 3

Sort of similar to the last week in terms of how tired I was feeling every day but I was now able to better ignore that sensation and just focus on getting the work done.

Those 3 extra hours a day turned out to be pretty useful so I decided to dedicate that time to reading books and finishing up uncompleted work.

I feel like my bouts of tiredness tend to be quite sporadic across the day so sometimes it would feel like I was still half asleep while other times, it would feel as if I was alert and wide awake.

This unpredictableness obviously isn't great when you’re someone who has their whole day packed to the brim with work and need to be constantly focused, i.e — me.

One more week and then I’m done…

Week 4

Ok, the tiredness bouts still didn’t go away so I extended my sleep schedule again.

Yes, it’s kinda cheating this experiment but since I’m looking for a positive result and I’m still not getting any, that’s the only thing I can do.

Anyways, this time I added an extra hour to the weekdays making it 6 hours instead of 5 but, since my weekends felt absolutely fine, I kept the hours on those days the same.

Honestly, after sleeping for 5 hours a day for 3 weeks, I have gotten so used to it that now having 6 hours is like a luxury!

After the change, I felt so much more refreshed for some weird reason that it’s just bonkers! I know it’s just a one hour difference but the sporadic tiredness bouts completely disappeared!

Calculating the amount of time I’d gain out of the whole year like before, for this new schedule, that’s 2 hours times by 5 days a week, times by 52 weeks in a year which is a total of 520 hours.

Converting that to days and that comes out to be over 21 and a half days!

I mean, it’s a little less than the 45 days that I started with but still, 3 extra weeks certainly is not bad — especially when I’m now functioning just as well as before this whole experiment!

Now I have to put a disclaimer here just in case you are also thinking of trying the same thing out:

These results are purely based on my OWN experiences. My experiences may not always be the same as your experiences.

Plus, I’m not saying I’m did this on the back of any definitive medical research either, this whole thing was just a personal experiment and for me, it worked out just fine.

Look, I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen to me 5 or 10 years down the line and I’m not going to make any predictions either. All I know is that I feel perfectly fine right now which is why I’m going to continue with this sleeping pattern.

Besides, Elon Musk has been functioning fine with that amount of sleep for years now, all whilst running like 4 different companies at the same time, so if it works out for him, what’s stopping it from working out for me?

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