Dude not sleeping is not cool. Sure I can get by for a day or two with hardly any sleep if I have to, but the harm of long-term deprivation WAY outweighs the benefits of a few extra hours of wakefulness each day.
When you are trying to learn mountains of information, you have to have a little more faith in your grey matter. Adequate sleep (6+ hours at least 5 nights a week, preferably more) is essential for transferring the stuff you crammed into brain all day into your "long-term" memory. Your brain also is an extremely efficient organizer when you sleep and will connect freshly learned information to other areas of thought you may not even consider as related to that info. In short, sleeping makes you a much more critical thinker.
Obviously doctors, especially residents, are extremely busy and it is easy to sacrifice sleep for other things. But if you make it a priority, even the busiest of residents will be able to afford a solid 45 hours of sleep/week. They might not get 7 hours each night, but they almost always have some recuperation time, relatively speaking, after a day or two with no sleep. Yeah there are 36 hour shifts, which are hardcore and intense, but its not like they work 36, have 12 off, and then are back for another 36.
Yes it is important to have the ability to think clearly when you get paged 15 minutes after falling asleep and are suddenly forced to be awake for another 8 hours, but it is foolish and excepting way to much of yourself to think you have to function like that ALL the time.
Hardcore people who seem to be excellent at everything they do, do EVERYTHING hardcore and 100%. They work hardcore, they play hardcore, and when they need to they sleep hardcore!
Plus you don't wanna end up like my friend's dad when I was a teenager. He was a orthopaedic surgeon and he seriously hardly ever slept. He averaged 3 hours or so a night. He was not forced to sleep so little, but he just had way too much on his plate that he had chosen to bite off. If he had made it a priority, who could have slept, but he made other things priorities instead. Everybody thought he was like a god for being so intense, until he had a massive coronary in his 40s from a life so packed full of stress and sleep deprivation. He had to have a quadruple bypass, and barely survived. Now he's slowed down and even though he still works a lot and is very successful, he takes time for himself and is much happier too.
