On a typical night, President-elect Donald Trump only sleeps three to four hours — and sometimes as little as 90 minutes.
First thing after waking up — typically between 6 and 6:30 a.m. — Trump is then handed a stack of all the newspaper clippings about him, which serve to both keep him informed and boost his ego. According to Michael D'Antonio, author of "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success," most of the time, he doesn't even read the clips — he just looks at his name on the pages.
D'Antonio says that Trump's strange morning habit "gets him going and keeps him sustained" throughout the day.
By engineering his bedroom environment to replicate that of a high altitude, Phelps decreases the amount of oxygen available, which forces his body to work harder to produce more red blood cells and deliver oxygen to his muscles. It also helps Phelps increase his performance endurance and prepare himself for competitions at high elevations.
"Once I'm already in my room I still have to open a door to get into my bed," Phelps said on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in 2012. "It's just like a giant box. It's like 'boy and the bubble.'"
After collapsing from exhaustion in 2007 — and waking up in a pool of her own blood — Arianna Huffington became an advocate for getting a good night's sleep.
Huffington turned her bedroom into a "slumber palace," complete with a canopied bed and blackout curtains. Before bed, she turns off her phone and plugs all her electronics in to charge overnight — outside the bedroom, according to The Cut. She then takes a hot bath, filled with Epsom salt and lavender oil, to calm her mind and help her forget the stresses of the day.
What she wears matters as well, and Huffington sleeps only in garments meant for slumber; no old gym T-shirts allowed here. Finally, she dives into a book on poetry or philosophy and lets it lull her to sleep.
Every day at 5 p.m., the prime minister would drink a weak whiskey and soda before taking a two-hour nap. Churchill said this short "siesta" allowed him to get one and a half days' worth of work done every 24 hours.
Churchill would often work through the night and became known as quite the night owl. Because of his irregular sleep schedule, he was said to hold War Cabinet meetings in his bath.
Da Vinci followed an extreme form of a polyphasic sleep schedule called the Uberman sleep cycle, which consists of 20-minute naps every four hours.
This unconventional sleep cycle may have given the artist/inventor/scientist more awake time during his days, but it also could have made it difficult for him to work on long-term projects.
"I've got to sleep 15 hours to sing the way I want to," Carey told Interview magazine in 2007.
The singer also said she slept with 20 humidifiers around her bed, which soothe sore throats and add moisture to dry air. "Basically, it's like sleeping in a steam room," she said.
According to Lisa Rogak's book "Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King," the science-fiction writer has an odd nighttime ritual.
"I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don't know," he says. "And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don't know why."
Stewart's hard work is evident in her success, but other parts of her life have suffered, including her sleep schedule. She gets up hours before her crew arrives at 6:30 a.m. to cook breakfast for a host of pets — including horses, donkeys, and more than 200 chickens.
Stewart also stays up late reading or watching late-night TV. "It's an exhausting lifestyle, and I always say sleep can go," she told WebMD. "It's not important to me right now."
Dickens, who reportedly suffered from insomnia, reportedly always kept a navigation compass with him to ensure that he wrote and slept facing north.
The writer believed this quirky practice improved his creativity.
Yahoo's CEO is known to be a workaholic, sometimes clocking as many as 130 hours in a week, which doesn't leave her much time for sleep. To catch up, she recharges by taking week-long vacations every four months.
The former president split his day into two parts to get more done. He usually woke up at about 6:30 or 7 a.m. and worked until 2 p.m. After a quick bout of exercise, Johnson would crawl back into bed for a 30-minute nap, getting up around 4 p.m. and working into the early morning.
Johnson reportedly picked up his napping routine from his predecessor John F. Kennedy, who also broke up his day into shifts.
Tesla got more out of the day with his limited sleep schedule. Like Da Vinci, Telsa also followed the Uberman sleep cycle and claimed to never sleep for more than two hours a day. He once reportedly worked for 84 hours straight in a lab without any rest.
"I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success ... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything," he said.
Most people put dark shades on their windows to keep their rooms dark, but rapper Eminem takes it to another level by wrapping tinfoil around his windows to get better-quality sleep in hotel rooms.
He also reportedly listens to white noise throughout the night, which he says helps him sleep better when traveling between different time zones.
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