Modi's sleeping habits bad for you, learn from Kumbhakarna
How long can you survive without food? Forty days max. And how long can you carry on without sleep? A meagre 11 days.
No wonder, the world loves its "sleepless elites". Prime Minister Narendra Modi sleeps for three and half hours a night. Former PM, Indira Gandhi slept for four hours. Her friend, the British PM, Margaret Thatcher, also got by with four. Napoleon Bonaparte, the 18th century French supremo who often took naps on horseback, apparently thought only fools needed eight hours of sleep.
Fast forward 300 years and Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo chief and one of the world's most prominent executives, sleeps a meagre four hours a night. If she slept more she would be a "basket case," she says. We are all in awe of them: people with fearsome reputations, who sleep little, work like maniacs, and have superhuman qualities and wield incredible power. In an age of 24x7 connectivity, early-to-bed and early-to-rise may make a man healthy, wealthy and wise but who wants to be all that?
Go to bed late, wake up early, strive to be a high-profile achiever and then brag about it. That pretty much sums up the current zeitgeist of success wannabes the world over, and in India.
Sleeping too much is a sign of weakness or makes you an object of humour. Think of Ramayana's Kumbhakarna: Ravana's brother, who slept for six months and woke up during the great war only after a thousand elephants walked all over him, has been a fond moniker for any loud snorer who sleeps too much. Former PM, HD Deve Gowda, known for sneaking forty winks anytime, became the butt of merciless jokes even in pre-social media days.
"Can we have special room in Parliament for power nap?" The twitterati goes wild every time MPs are caught dozing in Parliament. It's not funny, though, when flights plunge 5,000 ft (as a Mumbai-Brussels flight did this August) because both the pilots fall asleep.
In the last decade a range of surveys and studies have come out on what happens to us when we don't sleep enough. Scientists say: those who sleep for four hours a day have their hormonal and metabolic systems in disarray; sleep improves memory, ideas and concentration whereas those who suffer from sleep debt function at only 80 per cent of their capability, suffer from depression and anxiety; constant sleep deprivation enhances one's vulnerability to cardio-respiratory problems like high blood pressure, obesity, thickening of arteries, diabetes; sleeplessness can also lead to sexual problems.
Apart from fatigue, body and headaches, a mounting sleep debt means a weak immune system: you are more prone to infections and viral fevers.
Indians are working longer than ever, and sleeping less. There are at least 70 million Indians who suffer from inadequate sleeping patterns. In 2005, a Nielsen survey found 64 per cent of India's urban population got less than eight hours of sleep. In 2013, it's 93 per cent (Philips Sleep Survey).
About 11 per cent take leave from work because of lack of sleep, 58 per cent feel that their work suffers from lack of adequate sleep while 11 per cent fall asleep at work. Not just: 14 per cent Indians get breathing pauses during sleep at night, more than once a week.
It's time for the 'myth of sleepless productivity' to finally depart. Sleep researchers from Oxford University have come up with a clincher: sleeplessness shrinks your brain volume. Sleep is "the brain's housekeeper", serving to repair and restore the brain, mentions the study, conducted on 147 adults between ages 20 and 84.
MRI brain scans revealed that 35 per cent of the participants with poor sleep quality went into rapid decline in brain volume. The study was published last month in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
So tap into the hidden Kumbhakarna in you (he wasn't all that useless, more a victim of divine conspiracy because the gods were so afraid of him). It really doesn't matter how smart you are if you lose your brain power just because you tried to be smarter by sleeping less.