Retrain body to be happy with less sleep? (Page 2)

I think that you have to work it out for yourself as everyone is different.  This sounds very obvious, but the more I train the more sleep I need. 

RE: cooking, get yourself a steamer, like the George Foreman one's with three tiers.  I use a similar one and all I have to do is cut up the vegies etc and the steamer does the rest in no time.  All I have to to do is add the different vegies at different times and don't need to stand over it all the time.  I have cooked all sorts with it.  Believe it or not the food tastes great and not as bland as some people might think.  You can also use your imagination and use different spices etc...

As usual, a very interesting read!

My cooking takes a lot of prep time and clean-up time (and yes, I bought a food processor, too).  It's basically organic vegetarian foods, light cooking, low sodium, lots of variety.  Fennel to Quinoa to mung beans.  It's a lot of new recipes, so I'm trying to get the hang of them and tweak them to our tastes.  The amount of time this takes should improve with practice.

I think I will try cooking larger amounts to have leftovers more often.

Don't want to give up yoga. I love the flexibility and strength it is adding.  (The type of yoga I do moves through poses quite rapidly.)

And I believe you are all right -- you can't "reprogram" your need for sleep.  I think I am already sleep deprived based on that article someone provided.  Clearly this is an important topic for triathletes -- I saw two related blogs pop up.  :-)

This means that once your head hits the pillow and you close your eyes, it should take you 7-15 minutes to fall asleep. If you fall asleep quicker then that YOU ARE SLEEP DEPRIVED. If you can put your head down during the day and fall right to sleep, you are sleep deprived.

7-15, that seems long, but I guess I really need to time this because I am a champion sleeper. It takes me no time to fall asleep.  And, I'm the text book power napper.  I can put my head down, fall asleep and without any prompting wake up 15 minutes later.  I'd hardly call myself sleep deprived, I always get 7-9 hours a night, most nights it's 8.  I wake up "naturally," in other words, I need no prompting from an alarm clock.  I've been doing this for at least three years.

So I'm a bit dubious at calling me sleep deprived because I can fall asleep within 3 minutes of hitting the pillow. That said, I do lay down on the pillow and read for 30-45 minutes so maybe i"ve already trained  my brain to shut off.

BUT I do agree with other posters, OF COURSE there will be exceptions to the rule, but the idea you can "train" to live on 5 or 6 hours a night is just setting oneself up for disaster, IMHO.