Bilingual News 双语资讯 - 你能训练自己少睡觉吗？

Can You Train Yourself to Get by on Less Sleep? 
你能训练自己少睡觉吗？

There is a quite a range in the number of hours we like to sleep. Eighty percent of us manage between six and nine hours a night; the other twenty percent sleep more or less than this. But how easy is it to change your regular schedule? If you force yourself to get out of bed a couple of hours early every day will your body eventually become accustomed to it? Sadly not.
每天我们都要睡数小时。我们中间百分之八十的人每晚睡眠时间为六到九个小时；百分之二十的人睡眠时间多于或少于这个数字。但是，改变你的日常作息表容易吗？如果你强迫①自己每天提前两个小时起床，你身体能适应吗？很不幸，不行。

There is plenty of evidence that a lack of sleep has an adverse effect. In the short-term it reduces our concentration, and if it’s extreme it makes us confused and distressed, and turns us into such poor drivers that it’s the equivalent of being drunk. The long-term effects are even more worrying. Repeatedly getting less sleep than you need over the course of decades is associated with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
充分的证据表明睡眠不足有副作用。短期来看，它会降低你的注意力，严重时会让你感觉困惑②并且情绪低落。此时开车甚至会造成像酒驾一样的后果。长期来看，睡眠不足有更令人担忧的效果。几十年重复性的睡眠不足会致使人们患有肥胖症、糖尿病、高血压、心血管病的几率升高。

But what about those people who do happily appear to manage on fewer hours than the rest of us?  Why does it not seem to make them ill? 
有些人看上去虽然睡眠比我们少几个小时，但是他们也挺健康的③。那是为什么？

Firstly, you can console yourself with the fact that there are plenty of myths about people’s bold claims. Napoleon allegedly said that sleep was only for weaklings, but in fact he got plenty of shut-eye.
首先，你可以安慰自己说，事实上做出此类大胆声明的人们其本身有很多神秘的东西。据说拿破仑曾说只有软弱的人才睡觉，而事实上他本人却享有充足的睡眠时间。

But there are a few very rare individuals who can manage with only five hours sleep a night without experiencing deleterious effects. They are sometimes known as the “sleepless elite”. In 2009, a team led by geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California San Francisco discovered a mother and daughter who went to bed very late, yet were up bright and early every morning. Even when they had the chance to have a lie-in at the weekend they didn’t take it.  当然有少数人晚上只睡5个小时，这也不会给他们带来什么有害的④作用。此类人群也被称为“无眠精英”。2009年美国加州大学以遗传学家傅嫈惠为首的研究组发现一个母亲和她的女儿夜里很晚才入睡，但她们很早便起床。即便周末有机会多睡个懒觉，她们也不会这么做。

Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene called hDEC2. When the researchers tweaked the same gene in mice and in flies, they found that they also began to sleep less – and when mice were deprived of sleep they didn’t seem to need as much sleep in order to catch up again. This demonstrates that genetics play at least some part in your need for sleep; unfortunately the sleepless elites’ enviable state of affairs isn’t available to rest of us, because at the moment we are stuck with the genes we have.
试验结果显示，这母女俩身体内含有名为hDEC2的变异基因。研究者将相同基因稍微调整后加载在老鼠和苍蝇的体内，结果发现它们也开始不睡觉了，而且老鼠错过睡眠时间后也不会补觉。这表明基因对人们的睡眠部分地起了作用；可惜的是，那些不眠精英们令人羡慕的状态并不能为我们所用，因为目前我们身上的基因是动不了的。

But while it might not be possible to train yourself to sleep less, researchers working with the military have found that you can bank sleep beforehand if you plan well in advance. At the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research they had people go to bed a couple of hours earlier than usual every night for a week. When they were subsequently deprived of sleep they didn’t suffer as much as the people who hadn’t had the chance to bank sleep in advance.
然而，如果你不能训练自己使得睡眠减少的话，从事军事方面的研究者建议你可以提前计划性地储存一些睡眠。沃尔特-里德陆军研究所（Walter Reed Army Institute of Research）就曾让人们比平常提前几个小时上床睡觉。随后在他们没时间睡觉的时候，他们并不会像不曾储存⑤睡眠的人那样感觉很难受。

This does involve a lot of effort, so in general what you need to do is work out your personal sleep requirement and then try to stick to it. In his book Counting Sheep Paul Martin describes a method of working this out. You probably need to do it while you’re on holiday because you need to wake up naturally, rather than rely on an alarm clock. Every night for two weeks you go to bed at the same time and see what time you wake up by yourself next morning. For the first few nights you might well be catching up on missed sleep, but after that the time you wake up gives an indication of the length of your ideal night’s sleep.
这需要人们付出很多努力。因此，通常你需要计算出你的睡眠需求并尽量坚持下来。保罗.马丁在《计算睡眠》一书中描述了一个方法。在度假的时候你或许可以试试看，因为那时候你会自然醒来而不是依赖⑥闹钟。连续两周，每天晚上你都在同样的时间点上床睡觉，看一下第二天早晨你几点醒来。头几天晚上你可能会补上缺失的觉，但随后你醒来的时间可以被视为你的理想睡眠的时长。

词语解释 Notes to the Words：
① 强迫: v. to force
② 困惑: adj. confused
③ 健康的: adj. healthy
④ 有害的: adj. deleterious
④ 储存: v. to bank
⑥ 依赖: v. to rely on