If you ask most people how much sleep we should get, the common answer will be eight hours. This is a generally established paradigm accepted by most people, but the ‘eight hours a night’ was established relatively recently in our society, mostly in response to the industrial revolution and workers’ needs for regulation.

In other cultures, sleep patterns vary. The traditional Mediterranean sleep profile is five hours a night with an hour’s nap in the middle of the day. The Masai tribe in Africa only sleep three to four hours a night. Many ancient societies had two sleeping ‘shifts’ during the night, separated by several hours of wakefulness.

A study recently suggested that insomnia may be a result of the sufferers’ bodies being attuned to our ancient sleeping habit of four hours’ sleep, followed by a couple of hours of wakefulness and then another four hours’ sleep.

In addition, people have experimented with other sleeping patterns, such as extreme napping habits, known as polyphasic sleep – sleeping 20–30 minutes every four to six hours. This demonstrates that it is possible to live on two to six hours of sleep per day over an extended period.

In Western society many successful people have lived on less than eight hours’ sleep – Margaret Thatcher only slept five hours each night; Napoleon slept only four hours. More interestingly, people have done temporary stints of polyphasic sleeping which involve replacing a nighttime sleep with naps of 20–30 minutes in a set pattern. Proponents of this include Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The Scientist Buckminster Fuller followed a polyphasic sleeping pattern, sleeping 20–30 minutes every six hours, which he continued for two years. Steve Pavlina writes an interesting blog on polyphasic sleep, which is worth a read: check out www.stevepavlina.com.

There is a lot of conflicting research about what constitutes the ‘best’ length of sleep. For example a six-year study (Archives of General Psychiatry, February 2002, Vol. 59, No. 2) conducted by Kripke of more than a million adults from the ages of 30 to 102 revealed that people who get only six to seven hours of sleep at night have a lower death rate than those who get eight hours’ sleep or more. This suggests that six to seven hours of sleep is a more ideal time span.

But, for our purposes right now, we are interested in getting the right sleep to enable you to have maximum energy to achieve more in your waking hours.