Study: Sleep interruptions worse for mood than overall reduced amount of sleep | Hacker News Reader

Study: Sleep interruptions worse for mood than overall reduced amount of sleep

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94 pointsAmorymeltzer29 comments

As a person with two very talkative and aggressive Siamese cats, this rings a bit too true as well. Before I got together with my wife (she chooses cats over children) I had continuous sleep quite regularly in my life and now I can hardly have a night anymore where I'm not woken at some ungodly hour of the night by a hungry cat. Nowadays, I'm significantly more irritable and foggy headed than I've been in my life (granted, it's not just the sleep irregularity I'd guess but it's quite significant to casual observers like friends it seems). When I go on vacation or business trips I'm in so much in better control of my mood (week long trips are much more productive than a month at home) I'd rather have two red eye flights in a week than stay at home for a few days.

I liken having these cats to having perpetual toddlers - they're cute and affectionate but they're incredibly nasty and can be exhausting to keep up. Sometimes I wonder if having children would be aggregately in my less taxing.

> Sometimes I wonder if having children would be aggregately in my less taxing.

At least human children stand a chance of growing out of their crappy phases. Plus, when they get big enough you can give them a shovel and put them to work.

Cats, by contrast, tend to be life-long assholes.

Well, as the owner of 2 Burmese cats and the parent of a gallivanting teenage son I know which one causes the more serious night time headaches.

To deal with the cats want food before we awake we bought an automatic feeder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0002YHUPC/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=... - it seems to work most mornings, but we do think one of our cats may take the food from both so we give them the second part of their breakfast when we wake up. Today they wanted 2nd part of breakfast earlier, they didn't know about the time change ;)

My wife and I also have the same problem. I recommend you to use automatic feeders if your cats are healthy enough to eat dry food. It's much better now after using them, the problem hasn't gone completely though.

I wake up and give them wet AND dry food, unfortunately. We have older / senior / senile cats that have a combo of prescription and wet food that's best for their digestive and urinary systems. I've yet to find a wet food automation system that will work reliably let alone be affordable.

I'm sure its the cats, but you might want to get a Carbon Monoxide detector just in case: https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_posti...

I hardly ever get headaches and I have three CO detectors in the house that I changed the batteries and tested when I moved in, but I didn't know about the symptoms of CO poisoning in non-lethal doses.

When I had a cat who would wake us up in the whee morning for food we (my family) ended up just putting him in the back room and closing the door.

In the end we'd walk in about an hour after was his wake us up time and he'd just be sleeping on the chair, so it didn't seem to detrimental to him.

And of course there was water and I usually left a small bowl of food.

Now when I left for college one day and basically disappeared from his life, he got pretty sad (he started sleeping on my bed which he'd rarely done, and meowing more often) and when I first came back on some vacation he'd barely let me pet him. It took a bit to regain his friendship.

I always felt pretty bad about that, he was a great cat.

As a person with a toddler and 2 very talkative simanese cats, I cann tek k tiy= lplease just let me go back to lsepp

I'll be blunt. Why do you keep the cats then?

Can't you at least lock them in some other part of the house at night?

They destroy doors (one's claws are scalpel-sharp and the scraping can be heard across the house) or carpet (I've had carpet destroyed by locking one out before and the crying is not quiet either) trying to get to their parents (the behavioral cues show that I'm a parent to them) due to some serious separation anxiety it seems, and they make frequent trips to the litter box or water bowl (male cats are known to get kidney disease oftentimes which results in excessive drinking and urination).

Did you try introducing catnip to them at night (if it makes them sleepy) or late in the evening (if it makes them very active and tires them)?

Good quality ear plugs and a brown/pink/white-noise generating app for your phone. I have children who get up early and stomp around the house. Doing this (and a sleep mask) have radically improved my sleep-time)

Could you elaborate on how the plugs and app work together? Or do you play the white noise from your phone's speakers on top of the ear plugs? Do you leave it playing overnight? Or with a timer? I'm really curious.

I leave it playing overnight (plugged in, or course). The combination works much better than either alone, plus I can play the white noise much louder without it bothering me for extra power.

I lock my cats up at night for exactly this reason.

I've tried and tried to get them to leave me alone at night and they won't, so they get locked into one of the bathrooms at night.

I don't necessarily like doing that, but the alternative is to get rid of the cats completely. I will not have my sleep interrupted to the point that it affects my daily life for a pet. I love my cats to death, but they are not worth that.

My understanding is that REM sleep is the most important bit of sleep[1], and ever sleep cycle (~1.5 hours) you get more REM sleep than the previous cycle.

While I haven't run the numbers in years, I remember comparing the total amount of REM sleep between someone who slept 7.5 hours (5 cycles) straight vs. someone who slept 9 hours, broken into half (3 cycles and 3 cycles) and finding out that the 7.5 hours got more REM sleep overall.

Granted, this is a very rough calculation based on average numbers of a very simplified explanation, but it would be an interesting issue to research.

[1]per our current understanding of the brain, which is quite lacking overall.

common misperception but not true [1]. All phases are important and REM comes last so it's easy to say it's the most important, because it gets cut short most easily.

yes, you are right about the increasing amount of REM in each cycle.

Overall, if you are relatively healthy, sleep shouild be straightforward - black out your room, eliminate random noise like cats jumping on you and don't turn on an alarm.

[1] Source: I ran a sleep medicine business for 5 years but don't have time to officially source this

I always find it soothing when a study supports what seems empirically true about the human body. So much research into the brain (especially where it intersects with the rest of the body, e.g. sleep) seems paradoxical & contradictory.

Unrelated: the ads at the bottom of this site really do a masterful job of demolishing it's credibility... wow.

Wow, you weren't kidding.

Screenshot for those with ad-blocking software (mildly nsfw): http://i.imgur.com/Aq1lWNe.jpg

I can anecdotally confirm and at the same time fail to confirm these findings. Since recently I am awoken about 1—2 times per night. Yet, the noise is only disturbing enough to awake me in between my sleep cycles. I have not noticed any mood changes.

However after my son was born I definitely noticed a considerable drop in mood due to being awoken randomly at night. (It was also roughly 1—2 times a night)

I wonder if the stage of the sleep cycle—one is experiencing—would influence the mood changes.

As a parent with a small baby I can anecdotally validate this.

As a parent with a small baby, I support your claim and feel your pain... I also found out that the status/quality of the parents' relationship is totally dependent on the baby's sleep.

As a parent of an older child, I can assure you: It will get better.

One tip I found especially helpful when trying to let my child sleep through the night: Try not to be on their side, when they fall asleep. If they wake up during the night and you're gone, they will more likely stay awake and call for you. When you were not there when they fell asleep. They will more likely sleep again without calling for you, when they wake up. A person usually wakes up several times per night. It is important to make it as easy as possible to fall asleep again when that happens.

1/3 of people can function okay with persistent poor quality sleep. 1/3 of people can survive but are very grumpy with persistent poor quality sleep. 1/3 of people suffer catastrophic consequences with persistent poor quality sleep.

Apparently this distribution is completely random, and usually only manifests itself in situations like having a kid, etc.

As a parent with a 13 month old I can also confirm this for us.

This is one of the more insane articles I've read.

'Delayed bedtime group' - great, but were they delayed by one minute, one hour, or 4 hours? How much sleep did the delayed bedtime group get? It seems highly relevant to the article.

If you clickthrough to the Sleep link: http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=30292 , you can download the fulltext through Sci-hub https://www.dropbox.com/s/sqq41vhyji9pjws/2015-finan.pdf / http://sci-hub.org/downloads/cdac/10.0000@www.journalsleep.o...

The delayed amount was not a fixed amount but calibrated to another subject's total sleep, so you can't say exactly how much each one was delayed by overall:

"RSO During Nights 2–4 of RSO, subjects’ total sleep opportu- nity period was restricted and yoked to the amount of total sleep time achieved by a matched subject in the FA group. This was accomplished by delaying the RSO subject’s bedtime and keeping a fixed wake time. For example, if an FA subject achieved 210 min of total sleep time on Night 2, the yoked RSO subject would be provided a 210-min opportunity for undisturbed sleep (bedtime 03:30, wake time 07:00) on Night 2. Subjects in the RSO condition were monitored polysomno- graphically for an entire 8-h period."

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