Will getting up at 4 a.m. lead to success? Or just exhaustion?

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, rises a little before 4 a.m. every day. President Donald Trump wrote in his 2004 book that he only needs four hours of sleep a night. David Cush, the former Virgin America CEO, has said that he wakes up at 4:15. And Jennifer Aniston wakes up around 4:30 to meditate, as does Kris Jenner, the same time that Michelle Obama is hitting the gym. Recently, Steve Harvey declared: “Rich people don’t sleep eight hours a day.” Is the key to success emulating high-profile achievers who are hacking their bodies to increase productivity? Even if capitalism favors early wake-up times, at least as a badge of honor, there is no data that shows that successful people get less sleep. Americans sleep, on average, less than seven hours a night, which means that many of us get less sleep than the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends. “This trend goes back a fair bit further than our recent tech CEOs,” said Douglas B. Kirsch, a neurologist and the president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “Thomas Edison used to say the same thing: Four hours are good enough for me. What he left out of the picture is he was a pretty prolific napper as well.” Kirsch said that this early rising trend propagated by entertainers and entrepreneurs is deeply troubling. And while some people seem to need less sleep than others, we can’t game our body clocks. Advertising What happens when we don’t get enough sleep? In a 2003 study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Medical School found that reaction times and performance on cognitive tasks plummet for those getting four hours of sleep and those getting six hours of sleep. In the study, 48 healthy adults, aged 21 to […]

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