Eight hours of sleep is highly overrated

I'm tired of sleeping.

Recent research reports that the eight-hour sleep requirement is a myth, and is not based on scientific evidence. Besides, do the math. If you live to be 66 years old and get eight hours of sleep each night, you will have spent 22 years with your head on a pillow with your eyes closed. Your actual "life" has been reduced to 44 years. To be alive we need to be awake. Death will take care of making up for lost sleep.

Waking up in the middle of the night used to be troublesome for many of us. Now sleep experts say a brief period of awakening is perfectly healthy before finishing the night with more shut-eye. They call it first and second sleeps.

Jay Leno, Madonna, Florence Nightingale, Michelangelo, Napoleon and Thomas Edison have one thing in common other than their fame. They performed to the best of their abilities on a mere four hours of sleep each night. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer works 130 hours a week with the same four-hour sleep pattern.

It seems that high-energy people don't allow themselves to get tired. Tell that to the National Sleep Foundation. They still advocate seven to nine hours under the covers per night.

When Henry David Thoreau spent two years living in the woods at Walden Pond, he concluded that less sleep is needed when the mind activates often and the body remains still. If alive today, he might say that no idea to solve America's massive debt problem could ever come from a soccer mom hustling her kids off to practice, or from anyone while driving 70 mph down the turnpike. Likewise, no shopper while pushing a cart down the cereal aisle at Walmart will come up with a cure for cancer.

My personal reason for thinking less sleep is needed is that I have a condition called restless leg syndrome, an involuntary twitching of the legs that keeps me up many nights, The good news is I get to write these columns and work on my novel while the family sleeps and the house is quiet. As I write now, it's 5 a.m. That's late for me. Without RLS, I couldn't pursue my love affair with the written word.

Here's another twisted view I have about sleeping. Infants sleep a lot when they should be more awake to experience their new worlds. Teens sleep too much. Many have to be dragged from their beds at noon on weekends. They miss out seeing summer sunrises, or hearing singing from early morning songbirds. I know, what 16-year-old would care? Then there are the 70-somethings who you would think would sleep more than they do, but most are up and at 'em at the crack of dawn.

"I love sleep. My life tends to fall apart when I am awake." Ernest Hemingway said this with tongue in cheek, yet if you look up his life and how he died, you'll know he wasn't kidding. A sign of clinical depression is the desire to sleep in frequently, especially during the day. To be awake is to have to face this troublesome thing called life.

Now here's where I can agree with the National Sleep Foundation. Their researchers advocate that we take 20-minute power naps each day. This reduces stress, rebalances the body's circulatory system and makes us more alert for whatever it is that we must do for the rest of the day. Some countries are allowing their workers to take short naps in the afternoon to increase their productivity.

Wake up, America, and smell the coffee, but smell it again at 2 p.m.!

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "Each day is a little life: Every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning, a little youth, every going to rest and sleep - a little death."

How exhausting! I think I'm going back to bed now so I can rest up for my birth, my life and my death, which will happen all over again tomorrow.