This is something I still struggle with. Despite knowing the importance of sleep, I find it hard to go to bed at the same time each night and get a full night's sleep. I average about 5-6 hours of sleep a day.
Touche to everyone here. Sleep is very, very important to me. However, with my current schedule - 9 hours of work plus online gigs - it gets harder and harder to acquire more than five hours of sleep. I'd be lucky to secure five hours. If I don't, then I tend to feel awfully queasy and sluggish the next day (hence, the coffee). If I had it my way, I'd give up drinking coffee and just settle for hot choco everyday. Over the weekends, I try to make up for lost sleep by sleeping for more than 10 hours even if intermittently.
I really don't like to sleep, even though it is mandatory to the body. If there was some way that I could stay awake and not sleep (without doing drugs or something like that), I would do it. I feel like I have so much that I have to do, and so much that I want to do, that I really dislike when I start to feel sleepy.
I've heard of very busy businessmen who only sleep 2 hours a night. And as you've said here, although science disagrees, and says many hours of sleep are required, there are many very productive people who say that they don't require much sleep. Martha Stewart (I adore her) has said that she only sleeps four hours. There were all sorts of articles out once upon a time talking about the celebrities who claim they only need 4 hours of sleep at night. I've found that I can can totally get along just fine with 4 hours of sleep (even though sometimes I sleep longer), so I know it's do-able.
Sleep is extremely important for me. It is the time I get to rest my mind. It is important to "recharge" your body. This gives me more energy and I can accomplish more throughout the day. I suggest between 7-8 hours.
To me, sleeping is second only to eating in terms of importance. A lot of people don't really place importance on it. But the reality is you can die without it. You can even get sick without it since you need rem to revamp your immune system. It's why most of them time when something is wrong people put out that phrase "you need a good night's sleep". And a good amount of the time, that sleep time does a world of good.
Sleep is very important to me. The hours or minutes I spend sleeping are the only times I have to rest my over active brain. Everyone needs to rest and slow down.
I used to be able to function without sleeping but now looking back I don't think I could have ever functioned all that well anyway so now I just try and sleep as much as I can so that my productivity the next day as well as my efficiency is as good as it should be. Whenever I lack sleep I just find myself cranky the next day and it just takes way too much effort to do what I could be doing effortlessly since I still have to battle with keeping awake while I do my normal tasks so I just don't bother doing it that way anymore.
