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Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

One thing that never seems to be discussed in these type of articles is that for most people time awake is significantly more valuable than time spent asleep. An extended lifespan is of little use to me if those extra hours are spent unconscious.

If I spend 10% extra of my time awake (2.4 hours) but shorten my life by 5%, that seems like a worthwhile trade-off. (That's just an example; I've no idea if those figures are in any way plausible, but I'd be interested in any research that tried to figure out the optimum level of sleep for maximum life-awake time.)

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>One thing that never seems to be discussed in these type of articles is that for most people time awake is significantly more valuable than time spent asleep. An extended lifespan is of little use to me if those extra hours are spent unconscious.

Those extra awake hours will be worse quality anyway, and less productive, because of the insufficient sleep -- and this is cumulative too.

That would make sense if one were talking about time spent on furthering one’s goals, or enjoying life’s pleasures. But in many cases I think we are talking about an hour before sleep spent “idly” browsing social networks for one more “information fix” which I suspect most would not consider worth the trade off if made to choose. A bit similar to smoking perhaps... the reduction in productive life span feels far away, and the temptation in the moment is hard to resist.

When you put it this way, it makes me realize I'd rather live 400 years while losing three quarters of my waking hours than to live 100 years without any loss of waking hours. Experience centuries, and all that.

Exactly. And just imagine they find fixes for all the age related diseases (basically any organ failure) in the next decades, but not for Alzheimer‘s. You will hate yourself for not just having slept more. Perhaps everybody is then almost guaranteed to turn 125, and you come down with Alzheimer‘s at age 65.

"One thing that never seems to be discussed in these type of articles is that for most people time awake is significantly more valuable than time spent asleep."

time asleep is much more valuable than time awake when you need to sleep. ever notice how shitty life is when you need to sleep, or how good a good night's sleep feels when you need it?

I'm pretty sure the numbers aren't plausible. I feel at my best if I sleep about 8-9 hours. Maybe I can cut half an hour and still do well but sleeping only 6 hours every day guarantees I'll feel like shit all the time and I'd be surprised if it shortens my lifespan by anything less than 30%

Additional anecdote here, if I sleep 8 hours or more I feel horrible, the same as if I slept 12 (oversleeping) but I feel better than ever when I get 5-7.5 hours a night. I don't think there's a one size fits all, sort of like calorie counting

Are you able to "oversleep" even when you are not sick? I suspect that the few times that I've been able to sleep more than 9 hours have all been because of illness and/or bad quality sleep. I can easily stay in bed for 12 hours, but staying asleep is another matter.

Yup, though one might argue that I'm always sick, because I have mild allergies to just about everything airborne. Otherwise on a completely normal day, if I sleep for 8 hours I'll feel as if I overslept, especially if it's more than one night in a row

New research is showing how the brain resets during sleep. Sleep is when the brain dumps lymph, which is how the body takes out the trash, so to speak. Some synapses also shrink substantially, which is apparently critical to the ability to learn new information and create new memories.

If you don't get adequate amounts of good quality sleep, your mind does not function as well. If you think sleep is a waste of time and reduces the amount of life you are experiencing, try keeping a dream journal or reading up on lucid dreaming. A lot goes on in the mind while you sleep. It can be a valuable part of your life experience, in addition to the critical role sleep places in health and welfare.

This makes no sense. It's not just that you might, for example, die at 70 instead of 75 if you don't sleep. The point is that your quality of life during those 70 years would be horrible, for all the points listed in the article.

But you could use caloric restriction to get some of those years back. You're probably near rock-bottom grumpiness/misery anyway so the cost is minimal.

There's bound to be some level of trade-off. For example, you might be marginally better off health-wise to sleep for 8.5 rather than 8 hours but that's a lot of extra time wasted if the benefit is negligible.

Another perspective is that time asleep is not wasted at all. In Tibetan dream yoga, sleep is extremely important time to practice meditation.

Does that involve lucid dreaming? I rarely manage to get any conscious control when I'm dreaming but last time I did it occurred to me in the dream to question whether I was getting the full physiological benefit of sleep if I'd managed to "manually override" the process.

Yeah, lucid dreaming is the middle of the progression of the practice. The lower being regular dreams, and the higher being clear light dreams (where one resides in pure awareness). I am just a student though. The best teacher I can recommend is Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. He has a YouTube channel with a lot of free resources.

If you're advanced enough to remain aware even while sleeping you've probably already adjusted your life to be quite balanced.

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