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The story
Streamer Hori Daisuke claims that “30 minutes of sleep is enough for anyone to become a short sleeper,” and has become a hot topic on 5ch after taking on a week-long livestream challenge to prove it. In the thread, users pointed out that he may just be faking it with baths and workouts, debates broke out over the actual definition of a “short sleeper,” and the discussion even touched on his clash with sleep experts.
What people said
Bath (aka sleep)
Or even "Darwin's Come!" (NHK's nature documentary show) would be fine.
No way, no way.
Didn't he try to livestream a full week without sleeping,
only to sleep 7 hours on day one?
Loving this kind of pointless, worthless stunt is such a Showa thing to do.
Total "Misawa from Hell" energy (a meme character famous for smug self-satisfaction)
Honestly, back in middle/high school I looked up to that — or really I just wanted more time to play, so I tried all kinds of things to cut down my sleep.
Gave it up after about six months when I realized it was impossible.
If he's got 23 extra hours to use, he must be accomplishing something impressive, right?
Working out and taking baths just to shake off drowsiness, that's it.
Bath (aka sleep)
Working out
That's basically his whole day right there.
If he's in that state after 8 hours, he probably needs more like 12.
If he did that, he'd get caught immediately.
"Short sleeper" doesn't just mean someone whose sleep time is short, you know.
According to Thomas Edison, who coined the term, a true "short sleeper" is
someone with an innate ability to function with little sleep, with no effect on their mental state.
Someone once said (forget who) that most self-proclaimed short sleepers are just sleep deprived.
Apparently it's flat-out impossible.
Even people who seem to sleep very little are usually napping or just not realizing they dozed off during "waking" periods — once you actually measure it, the real total converges to something higher than they think. So under perfect measurement, maybe a week is doable, but biologically it's impossible to sustain long-term.
What are the actual rules here?
If he actually pulled this off, it seems like it could be a Guinness World Record for livestreaming, so it'd be worth spending money to properly verify it.
Unfortunately, Guinness no longer registers records that pose a health risk.
For reference, the sleep-deprivation record that triggered that policy is Randy Gardner's 11 days, so a week of 30-minute sleep wouldn't be anywhere near record territory anyway.
He's sleeping in the bath.
Maybe the real reason is it'd be inconvenient if people actually could become short sleepers through training.
Isn't it just that his research concluded you can't become one through training?
It's not really odd.
Plenty of diseases the body can't heal on its own get solved with medicine.
So it makes sense that sleep could work the same way — impossible through natural human ability, but maybe possible with drugs.
There's basically zero upside for Dr. Yanagisawa to engage directly.
What's a guy whose only evidence is personal anecdote going to do against a Nobel Prize candidate? All he can do is come in swinging on momentum and emotion, like his feuds with Takasu (the plastic surgeon known for combative online spats).
Why are you still sleeping even a little?
Hori's theory is that if you massively boost sleep quality, you can cut down the time you need.
Might as well go for a delta function at this point (an instant of infinite intensity but zero duration — math joke).
But if he still needs a bath to wake himself up, doesn't that mean the quality isn't actually high enough for 30 minutes to suffice?
A person who never poops at all would be impressive, but if someone tells me they poop in 5 seconds, all I can say is "huh, guess that's different."
"Speed-pooping," lol.
Comparing it to one of the three basic human urges is a bit much though.
If you could genuinely poop in 5 seconds, honestly that'd be more enviable.
Not pooping at all just means you're constipated.
Nah, if there's an actual trick to pooping fast and clean, I'd genuinely want to know it.
Background and Key Points
Short sleepers are a real, narrow biological category, not just people who sleep little. The term was popularized by Thomas Edison, who framed it as an innate constitutional trait rather than a skill; modern research on genuine short sleepers has centered on figures like Masashi Yanagisawa, the University of Tsukuba orexin researcher named in the thread, whose lab studies drug-based ways to induce short-sleep physiology rather than behavioral “training.” Separately, geneticists elsewhere have identified rare mutations (in genes such as DEC2) in people who naturally thrive on four to six hours with no cognitive cost — a detail the thread never raises, even though it is the clearest scientific benchmark for what a “true” short sleeper looks like, and it’s vanishingly rare, not something achievable by willpower.
The thread’s actual disagreement isn’t about whether Hori is sleeping at all — most posters assume he is — but whether cutting total sleep time while relying on baths and exercise to stay conscious counts as being a “short sleeper” versus simply being chronically sleep-deprived with coping tricks. That distinction maps directly onto Edison’s original definition versus a layperson’s.
What readers may not know: Guinness World Records stopped certifying sleep-deprivation stunts after Randy Gardner’s 1964 eleven-day record, precisely because of the health risks involved — so even a flawless week-long stream would earn no formal record, making the “prove it” framing somewhat moot regardless of the outcome.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live Commentary board) thread “Hori Daisuke: “30-Minute Sleep, Anyone Can Become a Short Sleeper” — Experts: “Short Sleepers Are Just Sleep Deprived”.”
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