It's not just lunch that's for wimps - admit to needing a wink more than five hours sleep a night and it can be perceived as a weakness. Shane Hegarty meets five very busy people who have different strategies to deal with their sleep requirements
We live in an age in which it's important to boast about how little sleep you need, to crow about how early you rise. When you read those day-in-the-life articles the subject never says: "Well, I sleep until noon, then stumble around the house in a manky dressing gown for a couple of hours." They are always up by six and have run five miles and read a book by the time the rest of us are still trying to decide between Frosties and Corn Pops.
In his new book, the businessman Bill Cullen insists that the dedicated entrepreneur should sleep no more than five hours a night. First thing every morning, Cullen looks in the mirror and tells himself that he's terrific. The rest of us glance blearily at our reflections and tell ourselves that we're terrifically tired. As the film says, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
It's nothing new. The Victorians believed that sleeping more than eight hours a night indicated a predilection for idleness. Napoleon Bonaparte recommended six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool. Although he might have conquered Europe had he only pressed the snooze button a couple of times on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo.
Today the successful continue to go out of their way to shame us from our slumber. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov never used an alarm, but he hopped from the bed at 5am each morning, after five hours' sleep. He couldn't wait any longer. "I hate sleeping," he once quipped. Bono, it has been said, rarely sleeps more than four hours a night, which makes the ever-present sunglasses somewhat more excusable. The restaurateur Marco Pierre White insists that he gets by on only three hours a night, hitting the hay at 10pm and jumping from the bed at 1am. We indulge them in their bedtime bravado. Margaret Thatcher's four hours a night is held up as an ideal; George W Bush's eight-hour snoozefest is considered proof of his indolence.
Perhaps they should spend that extra time sorting out their affairs, because, according to some research, short sleepers tend to die younger. But before dedicated bedheads get smug about that, the same studies show that people who spend too long in bed are at similar risk.
Last year the British think tank Demos reported that so many adults suffer from lack of sleep that bosses should let staff take afternoon naps. It's wonderful to hear the experts agree. Prof Jim Horne of the sleep research centre at Loughborough University says the brain is set up for a block of sleep at night and a nap in the afternoon. Nothing too major, just 15 minutes to recharge the batteries. It's hard-wired into our biology - and still obvious in the siesta cultures of some countries. "The minimum someone should have is six hours, although it's the quality that counts," he says. "You can judge whether someone has had a good night's sleep by how sleepy they are in the day, except for the dip everyone gets at about four in the afternoon."
The dip is an evolutionary phenomenon we now resist, although cultures cope in different ways. Until the 1950s the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland faced the long, tedious winter nights by sleeping 14 hours at a stretch. When summer came they'd sleep just six. The eight-hour difference didn't bother their biological clocks. Anyway, among several hunter-gatherer tribes the complaint is of too much sleep, not too little. They can't do a great deal when it's dark, and when darkness in equatorial regions fills up half the day for all of the year that's a big chunk of sitting around with a smouldering fire where a television should be.
In the West, some recent reports tell us that modern lifestyles are wrecking our sleep patterns and zombifying the workforce. Our biological clocks developed in a time before we tried to fill darkness with light. We woke with the sun and slept with the stars. Now we fill the dark hours with work and exercise. For most of us, our nights are invaded by artificial light. There is no true darkness in the night skies. Even when we pull the curtains at night, street lamps and the triggering of security lights creeps through.
Apparently, this artificial schedule is making us ill. We have been warned that a 24-hour lifestyle is against millions of years of evolution. That toying with our circadian rhythms can weaken our immune systems. That we are tampering with a delicate physiological timepiece for the sake of watching late-night MTV.
Even several years of working the night shift does not adjust biology, because night workers never truly get used to it and are more susceptible to ulcers, heart disease, constipation and cancer. Getting up on dark winter mornings is a reason why more than one in 50 of us suffers from seasonal affective disorder. Did cavemen suffer from it? We see no cave paintings of stone-age man lolling gloomily after woolly mammoths, half-heartedly throwing the spear in the knowledge that it isn't going to make winter go any quicker. All of which is nonsense, says Prof Horne. "There's been a lifestyle change, but when you look at the number of work hours you see they've gone down. A hundred years ago people worked 60 hours a week, over six days. They might get Sunday morning off, to go to church, and then would be back at work in the afternoon. Now we've many more leisure hours, and we're sleeping less because we decide to."
A century ago, he says, they slept pretty much the same hours as we do now, but they didn't bed down on duck-down pillows and pull up 13-tog duvets. They slept entire families to a bed; too cold in winter, too hot in summer. It just wasn't acceptable conversation in those days. Now people talk about their night's sleep like they discuss the day's weather.
Back to Bill Cullen. It's all well and good for him to tell us we need only five hours sleep, says Prof Horne, but "it's like saying that everyone should wear a size-five shoe". Besides, he doesn't always believe those stories of high-powered people getting by on minimum shut-eye. "I get suspicious when we attribute great things to our leaders. When you start looking at famous people you hear that they survive on little sleep, little food, no air and no water. They're superhuman."
CATHAL MAC COILLE
Presenter of Morning Ireland, on RTÉ Radio 1
When the rest of us are struggling with the duvet, Cathal Mac Coille needs to be sharp enough to tackle the wiliest of politicians. So he has become an expert napper. He will occasionally wake in the morning, have breakfast, wheel his bike to the door and then lie down on the couch for a few winks before heading to work. After broadcasting he'll often head for an RTÉ dressingroom and get 10 minutes' shut-eye. He takes a daily early-afternoon siesta. If he doesn't he's "a potential moron, a boor, with no sense of decency at all". At night he usually gets five or six hours' sleep before rising at 4.40am, assisted by two alarm clocks, and toys with the routine at his peril. "By about the third day you're absolutely flattened. The brain closes down involuntarily." He recently nodded off at the National Concert Hall ("It had nothing to do with the musicians.") He has never gone blank on air, though. "I can't plead tiredness as an excuse, because I have to be alert at an early hour. I'm just in a different time zone to everyone else. Eight for me is like 11 to you." Sleep is a regular topic of conversation among his colleagues. "Like others in Morning Ireland, on Sunday night a terror sets in. I'm afraid I won't get to sleep, and I'll be lying awake at 12.30 or 1am wondering why I'm not tired. And that, of course, keeps me awake."
GRÁINNE CUNNINGHAM
Mother of five-and-a-half-month-old triplets Jack, Harry and Luka
If one newborn leaves its parents in a psychedelic haze, Cunningham, a journalist, knows the effect thatthree can have. "It would take 45 minutes to feed one baby, so the whole thing might take two and half hours. And they were feeding every four hours. So I didn't get enough sleep at all. I don't know how I got through it - and I nearly didn't. I was close to cracking up and knew we must get someone in. I started to get irrational." She became drawn and shaky, and admits she wasn't easy to live with. "It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It was like running a marathon every day. Although it was rewarding as well." Her husband, Simon, moved to the spare room during the week, because "one of us had to work, and there was no point in both of us being exhausted." Now, as the triplets sleep longer each night, she says the joy is coming back. "You get used to less sleep. I know I'll never get a five-hour stretch, but I'm okay. I'm probably a little bit tired all the time, and I crave a little sugar. I know that's not good, as it gives you sugar highs and lows, but I still do it. And I'm gasping for a glass of wine in the evening."
PADRAIG O'CEIDIGH
Founder of Aer Arann and 2002 Entrepreneur of the Year
Here's an enlightened entrepreneur. Spotting that the post-lunch drowsiness hits both him and his staff, he'd love to have a room set aside for Aer Arann crew to recharge their batteries. "Quite honestly, if we had the facilities for it I'd love to have yoga during the day. I'd accept that anything to relax, even napping, is good. In an ideal world I'd love them to have 30 or 45 minutes of yoga, and they could roll back into work after that." As a fellow entrepreneur, does he not subscribe to Bill Cullen's belief that five hours' sleep a night is all the ambitious need? "No, I don't. It's a subjective thing. Some are fine with five, some need eight hours." He gets about seven hours a night, usually hitting the hay at 11pm and getting up at 6am, and he loves a morning jog to wake him up. How well does he sleep? "I sleep like a baby. I wake up every hour crying," he jokes.
TOM HODGKINSON
Editor of the Idler and author of How to Be Idle
"People who sleep less often enlist good morals, saying that it's morally good to sleep less and morally bad to sleep a lot," says Hodgkinson, who has written extensively on the previously overlooked subject of "bed guilt". "My attitude is that I don't mind if they want to punish themselves and not enjoy their lives by not sleeping, as long as they don't try to impose it on me." Having three children means that, despite making a living by helping others learn the ways of idleness, he rarely gets a satisfying lie-in these days. But he still won't buy an alarm clock. "They've only been around for about 200 years, yet somehow the world survived without them before that." He blames industrialisation for encouraging a belief that the early bird gets the worm, and he points out that some of the best ideas can pop into the mind in the sleepy state of a lie-in. He is also a great believer in a siesta. "I was in the office the other day and managed to take a good 20-minute nap. But it's taken me a while to get the stage where I can do that comfortably. It's my own magazine. I shouldn't really have to ask permission."
JIMMY ROBINSON
Irish Times night watchman
Robinson has spent most of his 23 years as a security guard working nights. He has been on his way to bed when the rest of us have been heading to work and getting up when we have been getting drowsy. "I sleep during the day no problem," he says, "but it's hard to sleep at night. If I have some time off I find it hard. Sometimes I'll be awake until all hours." He usually sleeps from 9am until mid afternoon, but that doesn't mean his meal times are reversed: he has breakfast in the morning, just like everyone else. If he was married, he says, it might have been different, but it was just the "luck of the draw" that he ended up working nights. "The body gets used to it. It can take a while to adjust, but after a while it's the way it's supposed to be."