This is Daisuke Hori. He looks like a pretty ordinary chap, although with his shirt off, he is ripped, buffed, and tanned to the max – evidence of his hobby as a prizewinning bodybuilder.
The really unusual – not to say absolutely mind-boggling – thing about Hori, though, is that he sleeps for just 30 minutes a night.
He describes himself as a ‘short sleeper,’ but in actual fact, sleeping shortly isn’t something he was born with. Rather, it is something that he trained himself to do, in the same way that he also trained his body to look like a statue carved from a teak tree and polished to a shiny finish.
Like a lot of normal people (I won’t say most, as there are plenty out there who don’t sleep as much as they would like), Hori used to sleep for eight hours a night, but as a busy businessman who was also into surfing, climbing and various other hobbies, he realised that he really did, as the saying has it, need more hours in the day. Not being in possession of a time machine, he did the next best thing and decided to reallocate some spare ones from those that he normally spent in bed.
Cut to several years later and he has a daytime routine that is chock full and a bedtime routine that frankly beggars belief. As you can see about five minutes into the below YouTube video from Abema Prime, he goes to bed at 2 a.m. and wakes up again – without an alarm! – just 30 minutes later, seemingly refreshed and ready for the day ahead, even though the day before has only just ended.
Not only that, but Hori is now married with a young child – when he first began experimenting with reducing the amount of time that he slept, his wife was unaware of the fact, and relates how she found it odd that all the housework had been done when she woke up at a more civlised time of the morning. When her husband published a book about short sleeping, his secret was out, and she has now joined him in the quest to sleep less. Worryingly, when their son expressed a desire to emulate them, they didn’t necessarily discourage him, and even he gets by on four or five hours a night, rather than the eight or nine that any normal elementary school student ought to be enjoying.
Watching the studio/online discussion in the above video, which actually gets rather heated at times, while the mere thought of sleeping for half an hour a night makes my head spin, I suppose the difference between Hori and his 30 minutes and me when I was struggling to get two or three hours as an insomniac is that whereas I suffered horribly, depressed and delirious, he is very happy and fulfilled, and has somehow found a way of making the most of his life and avoiding the physical and mental health risks that sleep experts like Matthew Walker quite rightly keep telling us about.
On the TV show where I first heard about Hori, as well as an almost identical night-vision/time-lapse video of him going to sleep at 2 a.m. and sitting bolt upright in bed at 2.30, there was a sequence in which he opened one of his kitchen cupboards to reveal an array of supplements in white plastic containers that would put most drug stores to shame. In the Abema report, he takes a bath six times a day, which he says acts as a way of stimulating and reinvigorating him, and ironically, a lot of the techniques that he suggests are also similar to those that I utilised to get over my insomnia and sleep for more rather than fewer hours – for example, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, not having lie-ins, and keeping a sleep diary.
The Japan Shortsleeper Training Association website (Hori has gone so far as to trademark the Japanese word ‘shortsleeper’) makes for very interesting reading, and as well as describing three of his seven rules for becoming a short sleeper (you need to subscribe to his email newsletter to find out the rest), it does a quite skilfull and articulate job of busting what he describes a myths such as the fact that we should all get seven or eight hours of sleep a night.
He has developed a course called Nature Sleep that has ‘helped’ hundreds of people minimise their sleep hours and maximise their waking hours, and based on the media coverage he has been getting and the sales of his books, it would seem that more and more are likely to join both him and them.
Having spent the past nine years studying and working studiously to restore my sleep to its former glory – something in which I have largely succeeded – I will merely be observing from the sidelines with a mixture of interest and astonishment.
