This is how I successfully reduced sleep by 4 hours per night by going into the Super State

Adnan Sabanovic
6 min readJun 1, 2019

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Credits to Unsplash

UPDATE #1: June 5th 2019

We are not fasting anymore, so naturally on the first day back to your regular eating days, you loose a bit and call out the cheat day (which is really an announcement to yourself of guilt free food demolition).

I got my confirmation of how insulin affects your want to sleep more. The first day I started eating sugars such as cakes and coke and immediately noticed the inner roller coaster that was throwing me from one side of the bed to another.

Today is my second day of the test and I am already approaching sugar with more caution.

This was a quick update on the story below. Please keep reading if you are visiting this story for the first time.

To be honest, I wasn’t searching for this specific result, even though I think that sleep is overrated in certain aspects. This setup has been in the process for the last 10 days and I wanted to write about it while the impressions are still fresh and I haven’t lost valuable information due to sleep deprivation. (I have been waiting to use this joke for 10 days now)

To make this endeavor even more amazing, I will say that I am 30 years old and quite athletic. Some of you will probably look up the sleep table and see that my peers should be sleeping at least 8 hours a day. The truth is that no one knows and if I learned anything so far, it is that every body is different. What works for me, might not necessarily work for you.

Historical sleep data

10 years ago, I remember sleeping 8 hours a day and wouldn’t accept anything below that. During last 5 years that number comfortably decreased to 6 hours and that’s the number I am generally happy with.

I used to write down the hours of sleep for each day so these 6 hours are really my week’s average. I used to believe that you cannot make up for lost sleep but in my case it doesn’t turn out to be the complete truth. Sometimes I would only sleep for 3 hours and then the next day I would need to have 8 or 9 hours of sleep.

It definitely does not make sense to cut back on your sleep if you will waste your given hours doing nothing. You need to re-invest those hours into other types of personal growth such as learning a new skill, reading books and spending quality time with your loved ones.

This technique goes really nice with your morning routine which is really a whole new topic that I will write about, but in general, these “new hours” should come out of your early mornings.

Current setup

Now, I would like to explain how I actually ended up in this state. Muslims have this calendar month called Ramadan. It has 30 days and we are required to fast from dawn to sunset. This fast allows for no water or any food whatsoever to be consumed within these 17 hours of fasting.

Food and full stomach will generally make you sleep more so it is possible that fasting contributed to this result.

In order to explain how I function with 4 hours of sleep a day, I first need to give you some overview of my daily schedule.

Daily schedule

Ramadan has special schedule in my life because generally, you should be awake between 2AM and 3AM in order to get some food before you start fasting and then do the morning prayer.

I will ask you to be a little patient with the following paragraphs. I promise it will make sense later.

When the clock hits 3AM, I would then go to a local mosque to perform the prayer, which will generally take around 40 minutes before I am back home.

At this point I am back home around 3:40AM.

I then take about 20 minutes to prepare for bed, which is really irrelevant for this story.

This means that I go to bed at 4AM and now comes the crucial component, my 2.5 year-old daughter. We generally wake her up at 7:30AM and she has 20 minutes to put some clothes on and be taken to the daycare. She is another big piece of this puzzle and the conditioned environment I will mention later.

Now this is 3.5 hours of sleep that I have gotten so far (assuming she is not sleepwalking in the night :) )

15 days ago, I would have gone back to bed and made up for those extra 2.5 hours, but these days, for some reason I don’t feel sleepy at all, and I feel energized on top of it. I am not sure I have a definite explanation on why is that. So I just roll with it and push through the day. I was surprised myself that I was able to endure the day having only 4 hours of sleep.

Some of you might ask, “Why don’t you go to bed earlier”, and that would be a great question except that my daily schedule doesn’t allow me to do so.

In the evening, around 10:30PM we would usually perform another prayer at the local mosque which takes about an hour to finish. So it does not make sense to go to bed if I would need to get up at 2AM.

Why am I telling you all of this ?

Well I want you to understand that in order to endure this tempo, you have to condition your environment. In my case, if I hadn’t been motivated by religion reasons to stay up late, have the discipline to go to bed at 4AM, and to get up at 7:30AM, I would have had tough time waking up early. For most people this wont be a problem since a lot of them have jobs to get up to. So they are

You have to be motivated by something and count that that will help with your daily discipline.

Boredom

This is the number one enemy you can have throughout your day. For example, as a software engineer, I work from home, without specific work hours. When you occupy your thoughts with something you like doing, then there is a low probability that you would fall asleep in the middle of it.

Make sure to always have something going on, otherwise this wont work.

Days leading up to this SUPER STATE

I have to say that before I accidentally discovered this SUPER STATE, I had a lot of temptation to take a 2-hour nap in the middle of the day. Sometimes that would be so sloppy I wished I hadn’t gone to bed at all, considering that the quality of that sleep was poor and all it looked like was that I just wasted another 2 hours. (I will have another article on how to improve the quality of the sleep and will update this article once I write it)

Again, for some reason, it looks like I hit some ceiling and than blasted through that. As I have said, having my stomach empty and not worrying about the food during that, might have something to do with this.

Life is a big experiment and we all need to keep searching for what works for us in all aspects of life. Sleep is unbelievably important and I know that sleeping only 4 hours a day might not be good for you long term because sleep deprivation can damage your long term memory and ability to learn new things. However, it is good to know that you are built to adapt and that you can count on this super power in case you ever need it.

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Adnan Sabanovic
Adnan Sabanovic

Written by Adnan Sabanovic

Just a tech guy involved in mastering life using mental and physical discipline. Journaling about productivity, personal development and overall growth. #Life

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