The women who thrive on just four hours' sleep

Add to My Stories Experts say fewer than seven hours' shut-eye can seriously harm your health ... unless you are one of the 'sleepless elite'.
For most of us, anything earlier than 5am is considered the middle of the night a time of day you see only when you have a newborn baby or take cheap flights.Yet every day at 4.30am, dentist Dr Uchenna Okoye gets up. Its not that she has to: she doesnt need to be at her practice until the far more civilised time of 8.30am. No, she rises this early out of choice. She gets up at this time even at weekends, or when shes on holiday.

No need for sleep: Margaret Thatcher and Madonna famously do not need much snooze-time to function on all cylinders
But if youd presumed Dr Okoye must be the kind who likes to go to bed early, then youd be wrong. Actually, she is rarely in bed before 1am.
And far from being overtired and grumpy, its a pattern she thrives on. She is happily married to a doctor, runs her successful London Smiling dental business, is a contributor to Channel 4s makeover programme 10 Years Younger, works for charity and even has time for piano lessons.People are often surprised when they get emails from me late at night, or early in the morning, but I have never needed much sleep and always felt good on it, says Uchenna, 41.I dont have to push myself to be this way its just the way I am.Uchenna is one of a small group of people that scientists have identified who are neither night owls nor early morning larks: in fact, they are both.
Known as short sleepers, for them any more than four or five hours sleep is unnecessary.
They need neither caffeine nor a catnap to get them through the day. And as if that werent annoying enough, they are generally slim, too.
It was by chance that scientist! s in Cal ifornia recently discovered a genetic link. They were studying the habits of early risers and noticed that one mother and daughter not only got up at 5am each day, but also went to sleep after midnight.

Rise and shine: Three per cent of the population need less than five hours' sleep - and most of them are thin, tooThe two women were found to share the same gene variation. When mice were genetically engineered to have this, they, too, needed less sleep.
The gene type is thought to be present in one to three per cent of the population and does more than reduce the need for sleep.
Short sleepers also tend to be energetic and motivated, which may explain why so many high achievers fall into this category. Margaret Thatcher famously survived on around four hours sleep a night, and Leonardo Da Vinci never slept for more than five.Yet the majority of us feel and, lets be honest, look less than our best if we dont get at least seven hours kip. So, what is the short sleepers secret?
Uchenna, from Beckenham in Kent, is a slim size 10 and despite her lack of beauty sleep does not look her age. She is convinced she inherited her sleeping habits from her parents.
My dad used to consider sleep a waste of time and said it was like practising being dead, she says. As a family, we would get up very early every day.These days I am always on the go, but I rarely feel tired. After work, I may have filming to do, or a red carpet event to attend, or some kind of professional event, so I rarely get home before 11pm.

'I don't lie in - I'm up at 4am even at weekends'Then I might start checking emails and doing some reports then Ill look at the clock and think Oh, its 1am, and often I have to force myself to go to bed.
However, the latest I have ever slept in my life is 7.30am and that was only because I didnt go to bed until about four in the morning.My husbands sleep patterns are ver! y differ ent to mine. Whereas I typically go to bed at about 12.30am, he goes at about the same time butcould happily sleep until 8am or later.We have been married ten years, and during the first three years of our marriage he did find it hard to adjust to my habits. I would pace around at 8am on a Sunday morning, thinking to myself: Why arent you up?
Now, I respect that we are different. So, on a Sunday, rather than stomping around waiting for him to be up, I will get up at 4.30am as normal and will occupy myself for a bit. Often, Ill go into the office for a few hours.Then Ill be back home at 10am, just as my husband is getting up.
Now, when we go away on holiday, we get a suite so that I can get up early and move into another room so as not to disturb him.I hope to have children one day, and my friends joke that I will be getting them up, and not the other way round.BusinessmanJonathan Gold, 40, whose company makes the Brother Max brand of toddlerand baby products, doubts he would have got where he is without his ability to survive on little sleep.
Each day, including Saturdays, he rises at 4am without the aid of an alarm clock and startscalling his manufacturers and distributors in China. Yet its often past midnight when he goes to bed.
He is no bachelor boy able to catch up on sleep. He is a hands-on dad to his two sons, nine-year-old Max and Sam, seven.

COULD YOU COPE WITH LESS?

These days, many of us are so busy that we describe ourselves as time poor so could we all try to increase our spare time by having less sleep?
We have done studies here at the Sleep Research Centre where we have got groups of people and reduced the amount they can sleep by 20 minutes a week, says expert Professor Jim Horne.
So rather than having eight hours sleep, they have seven hours and 40 minutes.
Then the next week we cut them down by another 20 minutes, and so on.What we ! found is that they actually felt
more and not less alert perhaps because the quality of their sleep was improving.
'However, these effects plateaued for most people at around six hours.
Any less than that and their concentration goes and their mood deteriorates. So unless you are genetically programmed to need only five hours sleep, then its not the lifestyle for you.I have always got by on little sleep, he says. When I was a teenager, I found it really frustrating because I would be up and out at6am and wanting to play football, while all my friends would snooze onuntil midday.These days, I get up at 4am and work until 7am, when I have breakfast with the boys. Then I leave for the office at 7.30.Iget home at about 8pm, and later in the evening I will call clients in America, as we have just started selling our products out there. Ill finally fall into bed at about 2am.
I never really have whatyou would call a lie-in. I still get up at 4am on a Saturday as its a normal working day in China, and even on Sunday I will normally be up atabout the same time.
I started the business from scratch in 2005, and now we sell 23 products in 21 countries.
Im also a husband and father. I try to be a good husband, and Max is autistic so he needs a lot of time and patience.I dont think I would have achieved all of this if I needed as much sleep as other people.I gave up drinking coffee 20 years ago because I realised I just didnt need the buzz. Im naturally full of energy.My wife Sharon is totally the opposite. She needs around eight hours sleep each night and feels awful if she doesnt get it.

But she just accepts that I have always been this way, and always will be. She says her girlfriends are quite jealous, because on Sundays and holidays Im always up early to deal with the boys, so she gets a lie-in.
When the boys were babies, I loved doing the night feeds. Sharon would express milk and I would give them a bottle at 10pm, 2am and 6am.Im really glad I was able to do that. Today, I have an in! credibly close relationship with my boys, and I think its partly because we had that time to bond early on.
Jonathan is also convinced that his lack of need for sleep is a family trait.
My mum, a psychotherapist, is driven just like me. She gets by on very little sleep as did her mum, and her mums mum.I think Max is already showing the same tendencies. Hes starting to wake up earlier and earlier closer to 6am than 7am.Cordelia Nevill-Spencer also gets by on four to five hours sleep a night. She was picked out as a possible candidate to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but decided to start work instead. The slow pace of student life, and the traditional long lie-ins, just didnt appeal to her.
At the age of 22, she started her own business, The London League, which specialises in publicising venues and alcohol brands. It means she will often be accompanying celebrities to nightspots until the early hours.
Yet most mornings she is awake by 7am to check over details of the house-letting business she oversees for her father. By 9.30am she is sitting at her desk in the office, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I dont need caffeine to wake me up in fact, I never touch it, she says. I just have a glass of water and Im good to go.Although just 26 years old, she is convinced that it is more than youth on her side.A friend of mine who is the same age as me came to stay recently for three days but after two nights she said she didnt have the stamina for another night out.
She found it so hard to deal with the late nights and she wasnt even getting up to go to work like I was!I definitely think my tendency is inherited. If I have to call my dad to discuss business, I will often call him at 6.30am as I know he is going to be awake.Dad is just like me. He always goes to bed late and gets up early. Even if Im on a summer holiday, Ill read until 3 or 4am and be up and about by around 8am.I just got back from a skiing holiday, and I was getting up at 6.30am having gone to bed after midnight most nights.!

Co rdelias husband Dudley, who is also her business partner, works similar hours but cannot cope with them as well as she does. He will often work until the early hours, too, but he finds his energy flags in the afternoon. He has to put his jumper over his head and catch an hours extra sleep. But I just dont find the need.Professor Jim Horne, of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, explains that the amount of sleep we need is largely determined by our genes. Your gene types affect how the 100 or so mechanisms within the brain that determine your sleeping patterns behave.These are things like when and how much of a hormone is produced.
It is this genetic affect that determines why some of us need around eight hours sleep a night while others get by on less, says the professor. The amount of sleep we need does not really vary. But as people get to old age, they lose the ability to sleep for long periods.So rather than having a long sleep at night, they will have snack sleeps through the day but the total number of hours they sleep will remain the same.
However, the ability to get by on as little as five hours sleep as so many short sleepers do flies in the face of other research that has found anything less than seven hours a night on a regular basis can lead to obesity, diabetes, cancer and even an early death.
Of course, youll know whether youre a natural short sleeper, or if you would struggle to get through the day on very little sleep. You might even feel a strong need to nap in the afternoon. If that was the case, then by cutting back your sleep to five hours a night you could be risking your health.
Professor Horne says: The gene variation in short sleepers means that they can easily survive on around five hours sleep a night and, crucially, will not feel tired and will not feel any ill-effects.More research needs to be done, but it could be that short sleepers dont need much sleep because the sleep they do have is very good quality.