How Low Can You Go?

Sleep is great, but it sure would be nice to get the benefits more efficiently

BY KATHRYN SATTERFIELD

In our breakneck-paced world, most days can feel like The Great Race. We do our best to meet basic demands and avoid falling further behind on the rest. Yet at the same time we’re repeatedly told we must sleep soundly for seven to eight hours a night. It’s no wonder that when the going gets tough, the sleepy have a tough time getting going. “Twenty years ago you could barely get people to acknowledge or accept that sleep was an important part of their health or well-being,” says Chris Berka, a co-founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring (ABM), a neurodiagnostics device company. Still, knowing that we need more shut-eye and actually making time for it are two different things entirely.

And why, really, shouldn’t we want to take shortcuts? Whether it’s a college student pulling an all-nighter, a sleep-deprived new mom, a truck driver trying to stay alert for the long haul or a club kid on the party circuit, people have their own good reasons to want to stay awake. Stimulants, which come in a variety of forms, have long provided a temporary solution. Coffee, soda and energy drinks, which have the virtue of being fairly innocuous, usually wear off within a matter of hours. Amphetamine-like stimulants, which block dopamine reuptake or stimulate dopamine release or both, can have less-acceptable side effects; nights of disrupted sleep at the very least and more-serious health implications, including addiction.

In the early 2000s, eugeroics burst onto the sleepless scene. These drugs, marketed as Provigil and Nuvigil, seemed to promise the benefits of alertness and focus without making users feel wired or exposing them to the risk of addiction. But even as each new iteration of “wakefulness” medication tries to improve on the generation before, the risk of dependence and tolerance remains, as do the residual daytime side effects.

Still, no need to throw in the pillowcase just yet. “The good news is, it’s not necessarily the quantity of sleep,” says Berka. “It’s the quality of your sleep.” And when it comes to sleep, quality means deep sleep that comes quickly and without interruption. More good news, explains Berka, is that today “we know quite a bit more about how to help people get to sleep faster and stay asleep.”

To that end, working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the research arm of the U.S. military, because who needs to be alert more than soldiers in combat situations—ABM developed the Somneo sleep mask, which is designed to maximize shorter periods of sleep. Users program in the amount of time they have, and the mask employs a combination of methods—providing warmth around the eyes and screening out environmental noise and light, among other things—to induce sleep. “The goal is to get you into Stage 2 as quickly as possible, because that’s where you start to get your restorative sleep. And then you want to go quickly from Stage 2 into our deep sleep, delta sleep, which is so crucial for the brain,” Berka says. After the time allotted for sleep is up, the mask emits a blue light that gradually brightens; this suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin so the user awakens feeling refreshed, not groggy.

ABM also conducted a study with Marines at Camp Pendleton that looked at omega-3 fatty acids, such as those found in fish oils. The group that received omega-3 supplements performed better over 48 hours without sleep and saw gains in attention and learning. There’s absolutely no doubt, says Berka, that “omega-3 fatty acids supplements assist the brain and the body in mitigating the effect of sleep deprivation.”

The desire for more waking hours is hardly new, of course. Ben Franklin opined that “in the grave will be sleeping enough.” R. Buckminster Fuller, who was described by TIME magazine in 1943 as the “futurific inventor of the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car and the Dymaxion globe,” saw sleep as a waste. “Two hours of sleep a day,” said Fuller, “is plenty.”

Which may not be so far from the truth—at least for a select few. Ying-Hui Fu, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, first identified a genetic mutation responsible for an unusually abbreviated sleep schedule. She found that individuals with this “early-lark” behavior went to bed early and woke up in the wee hours feeling refreshed and alert despite getting a fraction of what’s considered a good night’s sleep. Since then, Fu has found hundreds of other families who exhibit this extreme early-lark behavior, as well as 50 families known as “natural short sleepers.”

Blame genetics, but very few of us can claim to be among the sleepless elite, able to function optimally after what amounts to a long nap. Yet, as scientists learn more about how and why we sleep, it’s hard not to fantasize about a future of boundless energy and incredible focus achieved through a shorter, more efficient night’s sleep.

One possibility would be to enhance deep sleep non-pharmacologically, by stimulating the brain with electrical currents or magnetic fields. “There are a couple of new devices that attempt to induce delta sleep by either electrical or magnetic stimulation. The verdict’s still out, but it’s potentially very interesting,” says Berka.

Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness, has investigated the role of transcranial magnetic stimulation and acoustic stimulation in enhancing sleep slow waves in humans, which play an essential role in memory consolidation. Again, however, though the technique could potentially be effective, the methods are currently impractical, and their safety is uncertain, especially for long-term exposure.

At the end of the day, what does this mean for the future of sleep, be it natural or enhanced? Do we rest easy knowing that researchers will continue to learn more about the complex neurobiological mechanisms that regulate transitions between sleep and wakefulness? Dare we dream of waking up refreshed after a few hours, feeling alert and energized for a longer day? At the very least, these are questions worth sleeping on.

ALERT AND READY Soldiers and police officers are among those who often need to get by on less-than-perfect sleep routines. Is it reasonable—or even possible—for science to attempt to achieve this goal?