My mentor said to me 2 years ago “your body only needs 4 hours of sleep, anything beyond that is excessive”.

He is seriously neurotic but human behavior is one thing he is most certain about.

It was extremely difficult for me to accept that idea as fact because I physically felt like I needed 8 hours of sleep each day, sometimes more!

As credible as he was, I still thought to myself “that’s not possible”.

But my fear was stronger than my disbelief. What if he was right?

How different would my life be if I had an extra 4 hours in my day?

That question haunted me every night until I decided I’m going to figure this out.

Fast forward to today, I sleep on average 4 hours per day.

Here are my sleep logs in the past 11 months:

I use an app called “Sleep ++” to track the duration and quality of my sleep using my Apple Watch.

If you sleep 4 hours a day, how do you get enough rest?

The biggest misconception is that the number of hours you sleep determines to the quality of your sleep.

This is FALSE!

The truth is my body goes through the exact same process as it did when I slept 8 hours but now it only takes me 4 hours.

How is that even possible?

To understand, lets look into what sleep actually is…

Our mind has 3 major modes of consciousness: Waking, NREM, and REM.

• Waking is your conscious awareness. Basically your state of mind during (most) of your day.
• NREM (Non REM) consists of 3 phases of sleep.
  • NREM Stage 1 – At this stage, you are jumping in and out consciousness. You’re drifting into sleep but can be easily awaken. During this stage, your body:
    • Sleep twitches
    • Muscles are still active
    • Lose conscious of surroundings (sight, smell, sound, etc)
    • We spend roughly 10% of our sleep cycle in this stage
  • NREM Stage 2 – At this stage, you’re in a “light sleep”. During this stage:
    • Breathing and heart rate is regulated
    • Body temperature drops
    • Muscles are relaxed and inactive
    • Very short and occasional bursts of brainwave activity
    • We typically spend 40% of our sleep cycle in this stage
  • NREM Stage 3 – This is officially “deep sleep”. During this stage:
    • Your neocortex neurons are silent (the section of your brain that controls sensory perception, cognition, motor commands, logic & reasoning, and language)
    • Your body secretes somatotropin (growth hormone) to stimulate cell reproduction and cell regeneration.
    • Your metabolism is in it’s anabolic phase where it reconstructs molecules rather than deconstructing molecules while in the Waking state
    • Glial cells re-up on sugar to prepare for the next waking cycle. Their main job is to carry nutrients to the brain and central nervous system. If your day is feeling a bit “off”, it’s probably because of these guys.
    • Increased blood flow in the hippocampus. This is the memory department of your brain. The hippocampus stores memory during the Waking phase as short term memory. During this stage, the increased blood flow helps strengthen synaptic plasticity to store our short term memory into long term memory.
    • Waste in cerebral fluids are flushed out
    • We typically spend 25% of our sleep cycle in this stage
    • Unless it was leg day, then roughly 30%…

• REM (Rapid Eye Movement) is your subconscious awareness. During this stage:
  • Breathing, heart rate, and body temperature is irregular
  • Complete paralysis of the muscles
  • Cerebral neurons are active just as if in waking state
  • Areas of the brain that control emotion, fear, motivation, memory become active
  • Your brain goes into an “autopilot” type learning by subconsciously attaching meaning and associations of new memories to your subconscious. Sometimes we get a visualization of this process and that is what we call dreams.
  • We typically spend 25% of our sleep cycle in this stage

The average person that sleeps 8 hours a day roughly spend:

• 16 hours in Waking
• 6 hours in NREM
• 2 hours in REM

Now that I sleep 4 hours a day, I roughly spend:

• 20 hours in Waking
• 2 hours in NREM
• 2 hours in REM

When I did my research on the individual processes of the body during sleep, I discovered that the phases that REALLY contribute to a “full rest” is only NREM Stage 3 and REM.

It used to take me 50 minutes to get past NREM Stage 1, but now I’m able to reach NREM Stage 3 in 15 minutes.

So that is exactly how I was able to get the same quality of sleep in half the time.

The concept of it sounds super simple. But it took me 2 frustrating years of trial and error to finally reach consistent results.

There is no right/wrong way or secret hack that just works for everyone. Our bodies are all unique and it is the best feedback system if we play close enough attention.

So I literally measured EVERYTHING from…

• The difference between sleeping at 12am versus 1am
• Drinking coffee versus tea in the afternoon
• Watching TV versus reading before bed
• Prior day drug and alcohol intake
• Sleeping with eye mask versus no eye mask
• Sleeping with heavy covers versus light covers
• Sleeping with ambient music verus no music
• Blaring alarms versus soft alarms
• Drinking water before bed or morning after
• Difference in eating dinner at 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, or 9pm
• Having breakfast or no breakfast
• Recovery time when I train BJJ for 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours

(By the way, foam rolling before bed SIGNIFICANTLY helped with recovery time)

Literally anything that can affect my sleep, I measured and my body gave me feedback each time to let me know what works and what doesn’t work. I made note and kept optimizing.

Honestly every little thing you do in your day affects how you sleep that night, but I know measuring every little thing may or may not be worth it to you.

There are 3 things that I give tribute to that allowed me to CONSISTENTLY sleep 4 hours per day.

Here it is…

1. Have a purpose for your time

This is the MOST important yet most underestimated point.

There is no escaping Parkinson’s Law. This law is quite simple: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

If the only priority you have for the day is to pack clothes, it will take the entire day to pack your clothes. If you have 30 minutes to pack before missing your flight, you’ll pack the same clothes in 30 minutes.

Be careful though, if you have a day of uninspiring tasks, it will drain you and will actually result in the opposite. You’ll find that you have less energy, need stimuli, and more rest to get through your days.

Having purpose for your time isn’t just about having a list of tasks but rather actions that are intentional and congruent with your mission/purpose/goals.

If the first thing you do in the morning isn’t the most inspiring part of your day, no alarm will wake you up on time everyday. There’s nothing “wrong” with you. You just have a subconscious motive to NOT wake up although you may consciously say otherwise.

The moment I made the first thing I did each day the most inspiring part of my day, I began to wake up with urgency, skipped the snooze, I didn’t have a desire to sleep in, and I would often wake up before my alarm.

When I did this, I was still sleeping 7-8 hours per night. But what changed was my perspective of sleep. Sleep wasn’t the most exciting part of my day anymore. As a matter of fact, sleeping started to become annoying because I knew I had to do it but I would much rather be awake and doing things I was inspired about.

Even if you found a way to have 48 hours in a day, if there’s no purpose for your time then it’s just as useless as having no time.

2. Eliminate psychological waste

I learned from my mentor that when our minds carry psychological waste, our physical bodies literally react as if we have physical waste.

When your mind perceives stress (both real and imagined), your nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol). Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper.

These physical changes increase your strength and stamina, speed your reaction time, and enhance your focus to prepare you to fight for flight. In exchange, your body also pauses all other non-critical systems such as immune, digestive, reproductive, etc.

So imagine your body goes into this start-stop mode each time you stress over what to eat for lunch, your mom is calling you, you argue with your boyfriend, you lose your job, or a bear attacks you. It’s the same process but different levels of intensity.

You can imagine how much excess energy your body has to consume just to react to your thoughts. It’s no wonder you need more time to recover during your NREM Stage 3 sleep cycle.

The most taxing psychological waste I’ve noticed that affects your night sleep are

• anger
• fear
• depression
• insecurities
• guilt
• resentment
• regret

I used to think these things were just a part of life and we experience them because we’re human.

That’s bullshit. It’s perception and all perception is choice.

When you operate in a state of presence and gratitude, your body also operates the same way.

Your body will take more action to fulfill your mission and less reaction to survive.

When I was able to consistently sleep with less psychological waste, I was averaging 5-6 hours of sleep per night. I plateaued here for while until I discovered this last point…

3. Eliminate physical waste

I remember going out to eat one day with my family to a brazilian steak house. Unlimited cheese bread, top sirloin, garlic parmesan chicken, shrimp skewers, filet mignon and many more noms!

For the rest of the night, I struggled so hard to keep my eyes open, to breath, to walk, to talk, and it was even difficult to sit. All I wanted to do was lay there and think about how delicious it was. It was 1 hour of heaven that resulted in 4 hours of hell.

At that moment, I knew the types of meat I ate affected my energy levels. Slowly I stopped eating pork, red meat, chicken, fish, and eventually all meat. Just about a year ago I started to experiment with a plant based diet.

I also started to cut out other foods that I noticed affected my energy level such as refined sugar, complex carbs, salt, processed foods, and anything that sounds like it came from a laboratory.

I am fairly restrictive about my diet but not irrational. For special occasions, I’ll eat sushi or if you hand me an Oreo, best believe I’m going it eat it. But I can say I haven’t consumed any meat or poultry in a year.

I don’t think eating meat is a good or bad thing. It’s just not as efficient for my body as vegetables are.

Since I shifted to a plant based diet, I was able to truly sleep 4 hours a night without feeling deprived. So many times people cannot fathom the idea of not eating meat when I tell them I’m vegetarian. 

But if you ask me: would you rather have 4 extra hours per day or eat meat?

The answer is too obvious for me. I just get a higher payout in my life with an extra 4 hours than I would from eating meat.

If I can have both, SIGN ME UP. But I couldn’t have sustained 4 hours without this last step.

Conclusion

Do you sleep to escape your day or rejuvenate your day?

It really breaks my heart when I see people get more excited about sleep than being awake.

The only reason why sleep would be more appealing is if your waking life is so unfulfilling that doing nothing is actually a relief.

For most people, my actions would be a bit “extreme”. I couldn’t agree more.

It wasn’t until I created goals for after I die when I realized how scarce time really is to me.

My mission of sharing this with you isn’t to encourage you to go to these extremes, but rather to show you it’s possible.

Knowing it was possible was enough for me to push through the failures and figure it out myself.

Whatever your goals may be, I can guarantee you’ll have a higher probability achieving them being awake than asleep.

Make it a goal of yours starting today to sleep less and do more.