I know this is anecdotal but I feel it is worth sharing. I've had insomnia for several years. I've tried treating it with drugs, sticking to routines, exercise, meditation, diet, controlled lighting, and quite a few other methods. Eventually, I just stopped looking at it as a problem. I sleep about 5 to 6 hours a night now and I feel great. I just accepted I don't have the same sleep patterns as everyone else and moved on with my life. I've read about reaction times and how sleep affects cognition but I really don't believe it, for me. I've tested performance by going shooting and recording scores after various amounts of sleep and found that after more than 7 hours of sleep a night I get worse scores.

Science is averages, you might be average or you might not. Test your own performance and find out what you need. If you only need a few hours sleep and your performance is not affected, do that. Many people with insomnia worry about it or try to fix what might not be broken. You might be an outlier and not the average.

Doesn't just apply to adults: highschool students do not get anywhere near enough sleep [1]. Some schools have tried moving to a later opening, which has in some cases led to better academic performance from the students, but most schools still start god-awfully early.

[1] My own experience, may not apply to everyone, everywhere.

The fact that sleep is not really valued in the "start up" community is a disgusting reflection of stupid people. SLEEP MORE.

A great resource is a book called `Lights Out! Sleep, Sugar, and Survival` by T.S. Wiley. They book eventually gets into some controversial territory without much data to support the claims, but the first half or so is largely about sleep and invaluable. There's a ton of references for the sleep section.

Tl;dr - get the book I mention and sleep. Human sleep cycles change with the seasons and you shouldn't be up too much outside the realm of daylight if possible.

> People in executive positions should set behavioral expectations and develop corporate sleep policies (...) It’s important to have a policy limiting scheduled work:ideally to no more than 12 hours a day, and exceptionally to no more than 16 consecutive hours.

This sentence seems like having been taken straight out of Marx's "Das Kapital", volume 1. I know this is the Harvard Business Review, a bastion of capitalism if there ever was one, but I gathered that business owners had smarten up a little in the last 150 years.

If they don't want to do it for the benefit of their employees, they should do it for the benefit of their family and business friends, because at some point or another some guy like Lenin or Trotsky could come again and ride the wave of discontent and the consequences would not be pretty.

Sleep certainly is important but things like "Educational programs about sleep, health, and safety should be mandatory" and "Additionally, companies should provide annual screening for sleep disorders in order to identify those who might be at risk" sound like well-intentioned wastes of time.

99% had a great video from Tony Schwartz just last week:

http://the99percent.com/videos/7110/Tony-Schwartz-The-Myths-...

Basically, he believes that mental exercises is just like physical exercise. During rest periods is when your capacity to do the exercise expands, not during the exercise itself.

Be ready for this when you have kids. Your performance will drop right off for the first 12-18 months or so for each child. They disrupt your sleep and make your day physically and mentally longer and more demanding. The number of crazy things I have done in the car through chronic sleep deprivation is scary. I love my kids to bits by the way :-)

As I sit here at nearly 3 AM trying to finish something for Monday that we over-promised a client...

I have to say, this is one of the goals were wanted to achieve when I made SleepBot (Android). Sleep is such a big issue especially for us programmers. We often not aware of how much sleep we actually lose everyday and how much performance it kills.

Seth Roberts' sleep experiments: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xc2h866#page-1

In corporations this is a classic prisoner's dilemma: If EVERYONE agreed that they'd be sane and work optimal 40-50 hour weeks, it'd be great. But someone always 'defects', going to 80+ hours in an effort to show off. The result is actually lower efficiency, but since most corporations do very little track efficiency and results (they track effort, instead), it doesn't get caught.

I am a programmer.I make a blogs for programming language http://allprogramminglanguageblogs.blogspot.com/ this is my blogsite.

summary: get enough good sleep