Hi, it's Mark Sisson from Marksdailyapple.com.

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Does sleep hacking work?

You can hack a lot of your health, diet, and lifestyle.

You can cook the entire week's meals ahead of time.

Buy high-quality, pre-packaged foods and ready-to-cook meals.

Cover your nutritional bases with smart

supplementation. You can condense your training time by choosing the right exercises and upping the

intensity to a sufficient level. You can fast-track your stamina in a fraction of the time with

sprints and intervals. But you can't hack sleep. There are no

shortcuts to sleep. You can't escape the need for seven to eight hours, perhaps four to five if you're

genetically gifted. The human body needs those hours. The human brain needs those hours to pick up trash and clean up around the cranium.

And it needs to arrive at them naturally.

Yet we try to hack it just the same, with terrible results.

Sleeping pills, they'll knock you out but throw off your sleep architecture

while inducing a ton of nasty side effects.

What about polyphasic sleep? Taking a bunch of micro-naps throughout the day in lieu of a single

block of sleep. Maybe during crunch time you could use it for a short period of time to meet

some serious deadlines and command a greater proportion of the day without

falling to pieces, but it's not a sustainable long-term strategy.

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