Trump may be playing with fire by only getting 4 to 5 hours sleep every night

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President Donald Trump doesn’t get much more than 40 winks.

“I am working long hours, long hours, and right up till 12 o’clock or 1 o’clock,” Trump told “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Tuesday night. He wakes up at 5 a.m. and is known to send tweets at 3 a.m. In his defense, Trump, 70, also told host Bill O’Reilly that he multi-tasks. “While I eat, I read the papers. I see what’s going on television.” (Fox News is owned by News Corp., the parent company of Dow Jones, which also owns MarketWatch.) The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously claimed to get four hours per night, bolstering her image as “The Iron Lady.”

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“Most people need between seven and nine-and-a-quarter hours to be on their A-game,” says James Maas, former chairman of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University who is widely credited with coining the term power nap. “Those who say they can get by on four hours are either extreme outliers or fooling themselves. I don’t know President Trump personally and I admire what he’s doing, but I am a bit concerned if he isn’t one of those very, very rare outliers who do well on three or four hours sleep. Typically, people who are sleep deprived don’t recognize it.”

Men need 7.8 hours per night and women need 7.6 hours, according to a study that tracked 3,760 people over seven years and published in the September 2014 issue of the journal Sleep. They cross-referenced data on work absence due to illness from Finland’s Social Insurance Institution with sleep disturbances and sickness absence of the study’s participants, who were examined by physicians. After adjusting for age, education, working conditions, health behaviors and mental health, the scientists calculated the “optimal sleep duration.”

Most people need between seven and nine hours to be on their A-game. Those who say they can get by on four hours are either extreme outliers or fooling themselves. Typically, people who are sleep deprived don’t recognize it.

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Another concern for Trump’s light sleep: Workplace performance deteriorates when sleep is restricted to six hours per night for a week and does not improve after two nights of recovery sleep, according to a paper presented to the 2013 meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies by Alexandros Vgontzas, professor of psychiatry and endowed chair in sleep disorders medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine. Despite Mayer’s recent mishap, that paper found that women may actually be less affected than men by this workweek pattern of sleep loss.

Most people need more than seven hours. Lack of sleep is a “public health epidemic” in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Unintentionally falling asleep, nodding off while driving, and having difficulty performing daily tasks because of sleepiness all may contribute to these hazardous outcomes, the report says. Those experiencing a prolonged lack of sleep are also more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, and obesity, and cancer, increased mortality, and reduced quality of life and productivity.

A prolonged lack of sleep are also more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, and obesity, and cancer, increased mortality.

Trump may not need more sleep. Experts say that each person has a unique sleep requirement and another 2014 study in the journal Sleep found that people with a gene variant p.Tyr362His — a variant of the BHLHE41 gene — can function on five hours sleep per night. The study revealed that those with that gene variant chose to sleep for less time than people who didn’t have that gene, and they were also far more resilient and sharper when faced with a series of mental tasks after sleep deprivation of 38 hours. (Of course, it’s not clear that Trump has any such gene.).

Still, CDC research shows that nearly one-third of U.S. adults get less than seven hours sleep and people overestimate the amount of time they sleep by around 45 minutes. People toss and turn before sleep or even pick up their smartphone. It’s hard to know accurately the quantity without measuring brain waves, Maas says, and nightmares don’t help: “Your blood pressure may go up. Nightmares can be exhausting, mentally and physically.” World leaders have long prided themselves on lack of sleep. When Napoleon Bonaparte was asked how many hours sleep people needed, he reportedly replied, “Six for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool.”