While working on the 19th Ping, I looked into “short sleepers”,
and it turned out to be a little different from what I’d imagined.
First, there’s what researchers call a “natural short sleeper”.
It doesn’t simply mean “someone who sleeps less”.
It refers to someone who can sleep for a shorter time while showing a state different from ordinary sleep deprivation.
Typically, that seems to mean around four to six hours of sleep.
(Though it’s worth noting that this isn’t a strict numerical boundary.)
Apparently, there are also families in which short sleep runs in the family,
and in one such family, a particular variant was found in a gene called DEC2 — also known as BHLHE41.
Mice given that same variant also slept less than the control mice.
Pretty interesting, right?
But there’s another side to the story.
Apparently, there was a study published in PLOS Genetics in 2022,
using data from around 190,000 people to examine variants that had previously been linked to short sleep.
And the result was…
People carrying those variants were not necessarily short sleepers.
For example, 69 people carrying a variant in ADRB1 had an average sleep duration of 7.1 hours.
So, what current science seems to support is that:
- there are people who naturally live on shorter sleep while maintaining their function within the limits of what has been measured;
- and there is evidence supporting the involvement of genetic factors in those differences.
That said, it isn’t simple enough to say,
“If you have this gene variant, you’re a short sleeper.”
Nor does it mean that such people are free from every possible health risk throughout their entire lives.
It’s the sort of thing that gets really interesting once you start looking into it.
I didn’t use it in the actual Ping, though.
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