It’s probably a myth that we’re sleeping less than we used to
qz.com
qz.com
The experimental design seems to be pretty solid, and once these findings are replicated, this is pretty strong evidence that "we're not getting enough sleep."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/short-sleepers-may-...
I did not read your link.
So getting less sleep than you need is definitely harmful, the questions become: a) how much do we really need, b) how much are people actually getting, and the jury still seems to be out on both of these.
The twentieth century saw a lot of poorly-informed scientists second-guessing human body mechanims that have been keeping us alive for millions upon millions of years, on the basis of "studies" that constituted tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny samplings of a horrifically n-dimensional parameter space. I don't think the twentieth century scientists came out of it looking too good even now in 2015 and I expect them to continue to look worse as we learn more. This seems as likely a place as any for them to end up having been wrong.
If you look at the studies most people are sleeping between seven and nine hours, which is what the little research we have done on sleep says we need. The "myth" is that, as opposed to what the CDC says, the number of people sleeping less than the recommended hours hasn't increased. Thus the myth that most of us are not sleeping enough.
In addition, when we go to sleep matters, and this can vary, depending on the person.
Finally, the amount of light, noise, the mattress, pillow, etc. all matter. Don't cheap out, but the most expensive mattress is not guaranteed to be the best. Don't sleep on a couch or an uncomfortable mattress.
Anymore, I'm of the opinion that your body knows how much sleep you need. That being on a schedule is almost more important than the specific hourly amount.
Some are convinced that this was our sleep pattern before electric lighting was a thing:
This happens to me 100% of the time when I "go to bed early" and it ruins my day unless I seriously force myself to fall back asleep. I understand this is a "natural" pattern from years past, but it's incredible disruptive. I'm back to setting an alarm and jolting myself awake, which doesn't sound like the best way to do things, but oh well.
My wife and I each take a separate sleep-in day on the weekends (someone has to get up with the kids) to make up for stuff like this. I'd rather not have one since it cuts heavily in to nice daylight hours, but as it is it's do the 12-hour-sleep make-up thing on the weekend or risk having a 3-hours-of-sleep night on a Tuesday because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.
The only solution I can come up with is "get rich enough not to have an alarm". :-/
There are a lot of cues that change when you get tired, but the body's internal rhythms should be expected to work on roughly a 24h cycle, and resist attempts to disrupt any cycle that's been followed for the last few days. It seems to work towards sufficiency of sleep about as strongly as it works towards regularity.
And we've engineered a week in which we're expected to 'sleep in', two days out of seven.
Why would you consider this as any evidence about whether the general population sleeps more or less? When you participate in a study, you are not making your usual decisions; you're cooperating and will sleep as long as you can or they let you, and there doesn't seem like much reason to expect sleep lab technicians to have gotten more impatient over the years and start rushing in to wake up subjects at hour 7.
Seems hard to do though when you're working a job, moonlighting projects, life gets in the way, etc..
My experience was the same. I used to fall in REM very quickly, many times in the 20 min naps. Here I say REM but really I mean dreams and I'm taking dreams to be a proxy for REM.
One thing though: I had a really hard time waking up from the short nap and had to have my girlfriend call me to wake me up every day. If you don't have a (girl/boy)friend to help you with this, or a very aggressive alarm clock, YMMV.
Another friend is doing a similar cycle right now and it's the same for him ... he has some friends ("accountability partners") who will call him to wake him up daily from his shorter nap and I think they talk about how their day went and then hang up.
How do you know you are in REM sleep by the way? Can you only dream during REM? I do often dream in the 9 min between my alarm snoozing, even if I do it a couple of times in a row. Does that mean I'm immediately back in REM sleep?
Why is that?
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/02/what-its-like-to-need-h...
I wear contact lenses, and keeping my eyes closed for more than 5 minutes will really dry up and irritate my eyes (beyond relief with lens solution). The problem is that when I take them out before taking a nap, beside the effort that that takes, my eyes will not take kindly to putting them in so quickly again. In the morning it's not usually a problem. Does anyone have anything to share about that?
If it's just the protein buildup on the lens, you might try taking out set A, napping quickly, and inserting a fresh set B of lenses while set A continues to clean in the solution. They're cheap enough to try anyway.
I also have dreams when taking a 20-30 minutes nap during the day, and I can remember them more often. But I still can't go more than a few days sleeping a total of 6 or less hours, I'm just too tired. I need 7 hours at least.
What a waste of time... :-)
That's a pretty big leap to make. If the natural sleep cycle has several stages, it's likely that the other stages are also important.
I'm curious about your experiment. What worked, what didn't, and what changes you notice (including potential placebo effects).