For many Americans, sleeplessness is a matter of pride. Many is the hard-charging corporate climber who claims to thrive on four or five hours a night, while the rest of us weaklings wallow in our beauty sleep. But according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, most people who believe they're naturally "short sleepers" aren't really. They're merely sleep-deprived — regularly getting less than the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night — and possibly putting themselves at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems. That said, the elusive corps of sleepless elite does indeed exist, the Journal's Melinda Beck reports: they make up a scant 1% to 3% of the population. There isn't much data on these short sleepers, in part because they're hard to find; they don't typically seek treatment, since they don't think of their sleep habits as unusual or disordered.
What the few researchers studying the phenomenon have figured out to date is that naturally short sleepers routinely get six hours or less a night and function well, without being tired. They tend to be upbeat, optimistic and outgoing. They are high-energy multitaskers. Sometimes short sleeping begins in childhood and runs in families: Beck reports on the work of Dr. Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California, San Francisco, who discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a mother-daughter pair of short sleepers in 2009. When that genetic tweak was replicated in mice, they slept less too.
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