Sleep and the Tired Traveler: How Much Do You Really Need?

Sleep and the Tired Traveler: How Much Do You Really Need?

by Ryan Vagabundo

I've had some trouble with sleep since I was a teenager, so the science of it is something I've read up on a little more than most.

I used to have serious insomnia, but it's sort of worked itself out over time. One of the keys to getting regular healthy sleep for me was identifying and getting in tune with my natural sleep pattern.

As it turns out, it's a biphasic pattern - usually 4.5 to 6 hours overnight, starting around 11 somewhere, and then a second sleep of 1.5 to 2 hours in the late morning or afternoon somewhere.

If you're looking at a long-term travel lifestyle, it's really important to identify and plan around your sleep needs in this way. That is, unless you want to be a zombie all the time and maybe develop a stimulant habit to compensate for it.

As the former club kids will tell you, it's easier to just scrimp on sleep when you're young. Somewhere into your 30s, you start paying a much higher price for not getting enough. It's more than just feeling bad, though; chronic sleep deprivation puts you at higher risk for all-cause mortality in the long run of life, and also usually causes you to put on weight as you develop an increased taste for sweets and calorie-dense foods when you're tired. It's also thought to be a major contributor to the development of dementia; that's due to proteins collecting in the brain that are usually cleaned out by cerebro-spinal fluid while you're in deep sleep, which can turn into neural plaque over time.

So how much sleep do you really need, and what sleep patterns are valid for meeting your needs?

Sleep Strategies That Work For Travelers

I'm no scientist, but I do know how to find and screen their work.

Here are the most important fundamentals of sleep research that has had human subjects hooked up to electrocardiograms and such in controlled environments:

• People tend to sleep either about 7-8 hours overnight, or they sleep at least 4.5 hours and then supplement anywhere from 4-10 hours later with a long nap of 1.5 to 3 hours. Anything other than this is probably doing damage to you.

• Though most people want one long 7+ hour sleep overnight, it is natural for even people who do this to get drowsy in the middle of the day and possibly want a short nap.

• You can force yourself to stay awake for about 48 hours without an extended stretch of deep sleep if you have to, past that point you're at great risk of just passing out on your feet at some point.

• There are people with sleep disorders who survive outside of these patterns, but without medical intervention are likely taking long-term health damage from it and are likely to live a shorter-than-usual life. None of these disorder patterns are something to try to emulate just to gain more waking time or make a personal schedule work.

It's important to keep in mind that "overnight" is indeed subjective. Lots of shift workers are able to transition to "night" being in the middle of the day, and still get a healthy amount of sleep. If you do that you really want to stick with it long-term though. Switching back and forth every couple of weeks is apparently about as bad for you as having a sleep disorder.

The Occasional Sleepless Night?

I'm at a point now where I manage to schedule my travels to dovetail with my sleep needs. I make enough money to sleep indoors and not have to do crazy hobo stealth camping shit to get by anymore.

However, once in a while, I have an overnight trip somewhere on a bus / train / plane. While you can sometimes get some sleep on the vehicle and/or at the station, these are always dicey and it's pretty much assured you'll get less sleep than you need.

You've probably heard of the concept of "sleep debt" at some point, which appears to be a proven phenomenon. If you get too little sleep one night, you'll need to make it up later. As the sleep debt mounts you feel worse, you get less alert and the health risks mount.

But does just missing one night of good sleep here and there really hurt you? Right now, medical science doesn't really know. There isn't enough good data on length of sleep deprivation and direct effects in humans, but in rat testing it generally takes a couple of weeks of inadequate sleep before markers of serious health problems start showing up.

Some limited studies have shown that people deprived of full sleep for a week had measurably weaker immune systems and had trouble producing insulin. However, after catching up on their sleep debt, the indicators were all reversed and everything went back to normal.

This is far from settled science at this point, and the wisest course of action is to always get as much sleep as you need. However, just based on what we know, the occasional night of iffy sleep doesn't appear to be particularly damaging - especially if you can "catch up" immediately the next day.

When I travel overnight I might get lucky and sleep five or six hours if I have two comfy Amtrak seats all to myself or something, but realistically I might get like two hours at best. Around 6 AM I reliably start feeling like doodoo for the rest of the day, but I usually plan things so I can check in to wherever I'm staying a little early (1 PM or so is usually fine at a lot of places as it's late enough that housekeeping has some rooms ready, especially if it's a hotel chain where you have high rewards program status). I immediately take about a three hour nap, go on about the rest of my evening, get to sleep somewhere around my normal 11 PM or so and usually have a longer-than-usual sleep to catch up. No sweat.

Just try to keep it to one night at a time. Multiple nights in a row is where you'll probably start getting yourself into trouble, with alertness issues / irritability / bad decision-making if nothing else.

Terrible Sleep Advice From Terrible Travelers

Talk to other long-term travelers about sleep needs, and you'll inevitably hear a lot of crappy advice.

The absolute worst one I've ever heard? "If you eat enough food, it makes up for a lack of sleep." This is from a kid who was in a STEM program in college too. Yikes.

The most common bad advice you'll run into is easily the Uberman Sleep Schedule. This is based on the mythology that Leonardo Da Vinci only slept for like 20 minutes every three hours or something along those lines.

You may be familiar with it from Seinfeld, which is a pretty accurate representation of what will happen to you if you try it:

It just doesn't work. People want to believe in it anyway, because it promises to give them a couple of extra decades of cumulative waking time. What will probably happen is that you'll lose even more time on the back end thanks to developing some sort of serious health condition, particularly if this chronic sleep deprivation is combined with the party lifestyle that people are often looking to support.

The other factor people don't consider is muscle strain. Your muscles can only repair themselves when you're deeply asleep for an extended stretch. You'll start getting tears and pulls from even modest physical exertion (like a lot of walking or standing) after as little as 24 hours or so of not sleeping.

People will dig up all sorts of historical genius characters like Da Vinci and Thomas Edison who thought they didn't need anything but morsels of sleep. Regardless of their other great accomplishments, trusting the medical and physiological observations of a bunch of dudes from the outhouse era really isn't a good idea next to even basic modern medical research done with EEGs and blood tests.