Here’s What A Five-Hour Grindset Sleep Schedule Does to Your Brain

Nowadays, it’s impossible to browse social media without being subject to a deluge of spurious information meant to increase your productivity. The most obnoxious outcropping of this is the “grindset” category. These posts are dominated by questionable entrepreneurs who seem to have only excelled in the business of telling people how to be good at business. 

One popular half-accusation, half-suggestion of theirs is that most people are sleeping too much. The reason you don’t own a Fortune 500 company is because you’re a weakling, trapped by the succor of a solid eight hours of sleep. Unsurprisingly for an industry that also thrives off of selling stuff that promises to lengthen, shorten or widen your telemeres, the health science here isn’t sound.

The reason the internet is rife with sleep hacks is the same reason that humans can never kick a good fad diet: Because the truth isn’t only obvious, but painfully boring. The amount of sleep that the human body needs is exactly as much as you'd think: somewhere between seven and nine hours. And yet, the magic number that a lot of hustle accounts seem to tout is five. Why five? Well, it’s enough to catch attention but not so short people will dismiss it out-of-hand. 

After all, five and seven are practically the same numbers, what's a little nudge one way or the other?

One of the most notable issues with all of this is that sleep is the time for your body to get to work on some necessary processes without the constant interference of the whole sad, panicked self-consciousness waking life provides. Most notably, sleep has specific purposes for memory and emotional control. According to the NIH and scientists and doctors from Berkeley and Harvard, sleep is when the hippocampus both sets in stone important memories from that day, as well as prepares to absorb new ones upon waking. In the example of an all-nighter, that second, sleepless day you’ll be operating at an up to 40 percent drop in cognitive ability when it comes to learning. 

Sleep restriction or deprivation can also lead to difficulty with things like concentration, reacting to problems and emotional stability. Per clinical psychologist Shelby Harris, a sleep-deprived person can be operating with the equivalent of a .08 percent blood alcohol content, minus the fun, alcohol part. A random trial showed that even cutting adults down on sleep 90 minutes a night from their usual benchmark of seven to nine hours resulted in noticeably worse performance on a cognitive test related to memory and response inhibition. 

And that’s backed up by an additional clinical trial, where adults were monitored in three groups, getting four, six and eight hours a sleep a night. Not just the four-hour sleepers, but the six-hour sleepers showed “significant” deficits in cognitive performance, too.

All of this science is combatted, of course, by that most beloved source of scoffing: anecdotal evidence. The people who are living off glorified naps claim they don’t see these deficiencies, or that they “adjust to it.” Both of these are, to use a medical term, bovine feces. 

Well, the first isn’t entirely true, because they don't notice a difference, but that’s because they’re too tired to notice the drop in their cognitive ability. That is, the subjects in the same clinical trial above were all convinced they were thinking just fine, while actively flunking their tests. Some also claim they’re the golden unicorn known as “short sleepers,” which is a real, but very rare genetic mutation. Which is to say, it’s unlikely that every guy named Carter has it.

As for adjusting to it? That’s the worst part of all when you’re looking at an actual, dedicated five-hour a night hustle. You will not only adjust, but that constant, relatively small sleep restriction is actually cumulative. And so, you’re not starting from zero every night, but instead adding another two missed hours to your running tab. That doesn’t necessarily manifest as you feeling sleepier and sleepier every day — you’ll feel tired, sure, and you'll get used to that, but under the hood, you’re quickly ushering yourself into the category of chronic sleep deprivation. Something that includes earlier symptoms like trouble concentrating and irritability, but adds new wrinkles like headaches, false memories, increased stress hormone levels and lack of attention span. 

Not to mention two symptoms you’d think these grindset alpha males would be more concerned about: lowered fertility and libido.

All in all, the message is: Get the hell off Instagram Reels and go to sleep. Two things that, luckily, go hand-in-hand.