Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says
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In 1971, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott repeated the experiment on the lunar surface with a hammer and a feather. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_Leaning_Tower_of_P... (includes a link to a video clip; jump to about 0:35).
Studies are only valuable when they form a scientific consensus over repeated experiments or provide some predictive power that can be confirmed through other experiments.
To use a studies as a prescriptive guide to base your life on, or change of habits is an error IMHO, and ironically, quite unscientific.
I guess you could say its a pet peeve of mine. 9 times out of 10 when I investigate a "studies have shown" comment, it turns out to be half-true or based on weak science, or too new to be replicated by other scientists, or sometimes the context is completely different from its use in an argument.
Suppose it were true. Join a heavy rock and a light rock by a cord and drop them from a tower. If the light rock falls slower, eventually the cord will be pulled taut and retard the fall of the heavier, so this system falls more slowly than the heavy rock alone. But the system is heavier than the heavy rock alone, so it should fall faster, a contradiction.
The gold standard is a model that explains that behavior, and experimental studies that work as the model predicts. The model that big ricks fall faster makes sense, but it isn't backed by experiences. Many studies have seemed to show something but in fact the authors just didn't realize they had to control for something important (sometimes an accident, sometimes outright scientific fraud)
"The experiment did take place in Delft in 16th century the Netherlands, when the mathematician and physicist Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot (the father of Hugo de Groot) conducted the experiment from the top of the Nieuwe Kerk."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_Leaning_Tower_of_P...
Agriculture began about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. It's not much different than 6,000 years and I only mention it because of your question mark.
Here is a link, if you're curious:
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/development-of-ag...
It's worth adding that there were still some nomadic traits, initially. They'd plant and move on, hunting as they went, and would come back to where they planted when it was time to harvest. The speculation that I'm familiar with suggests that they did this with naturally growing crops before they began to cultivate them.
This isn't my domain, I just like documentaries.
Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize.
Or, sometimes, rival tribes to fight with and kill -- not everything is (necessarily) hunky-dory in every tribal society.
OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
What makes a bigot crazier than anything? Seeing one of "our" females with one of "their" males.
E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds.
* Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
I have always loved how Star Trek aliens are a reflection of some part of humanity.
Minor motivations and proximity are enough to set it off. And thereare plenty of motivations anyway: fighting over good hunting areas, water, gathering areas, and women.
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare.
Outside of what, the ministry of hunting and gathering?
Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot).
I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves.
Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit.
Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids.
A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses.
This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids.
Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
School is simply a horrific hellhole for the bottom 20% of kids. People just like to feel like it's not. And unfortunately "bottom 20%" can happen to anyone -- it's not merit-based. More like affluence-based.
Yes, that's exactly the sentiment.
Well, it's not like the problem can be solved, so I guess parents need something to convince themselves they're making a difference.
1.) too resource constrained. There are plenty of studies suggesting ties between drier climates with stricter societies. Maybe desertification is a deep enough issue to address actively.
2.) not enough actual mental aid - for one, counseling parents of bullies. I realize this would employ a ton of counselors and I see nothing wrong with that expense.
3.) Look for ways to address the "it's cool to be stupid" meme. Ways to do so could include devoting resources to things like the FIRST Robotics competition.
Sure they are. A bus is a different environment than school. For one, the only adult is actively concentrating the opposite direction of all the kids, who have large seat backs that block view of all but their heads. That leaves a lot more room for... activities.
I took the bus a few times when I was in junior high school almost two decades ago. I faced very minor bullying every trip. At school 7/8 of my classes were "advanced" in some way (honors, pre-AP, AP, orchestra, etc) so I didn't interact with the kids doing the bullying. I can count on one had the times I felt bullied at school during those years.
Now for me it's possible I would have been better served by just learning to handle small stuff like that, but I can certainly see how a bus ride could be hell for some kids and then they'd be mostly ok at school (maybe just some incidents at PE and lunch).
I think the bussing is avoided simply because it's a chicken/egg problem - if an significant number of parents don't opt-in, then they can't service the populace at large. In my kids current district they only bus between schools - if you live > 1mi from a school, you might as well walk/drive.
Not a parent but I wouldn't expect to drive children to protect them from bullies but child kidnappers or other random dangers. I'm pretty sure that's why my parents drove me too.
I never had any issues walking to the bus stop starting in kindergarten. Though granted I almost never walked alone. Usually with a friend or two.
I'm in a much more affluent place now. I see parents walking their kids to the corner of the street of our housing complex. Seems a bit extreme to say the least.
So, the net result is mostly just empty buses, and wasted gas.
OTOH though, we have elementary schools in urban/suburban areas where 1/2 of the population of the school falls within the 2 mile radius (great saves money on busing!). Combined with high speed traffic, questionable neighborhoods, bad weather, a tendency towards overprotective parenting, and most parents of early elementary school children are going to be driving them rather than letting them walk to school.
The crazy thing is that most elementary schools are going to be getting out at ~3PM, which is far to early for most parents to leave their jobs, which means they end up paying a few hundred dollars a month per child in after school fees. A real problem for people near the poverty line, so those are the 5 year olds you see walking home alone at 3PM...
The school isn't built like a sports arena, so traffic flow around it is fine throughout the rest of the day, but morning dropoff in particular is very congested because the volume of traffic spikes for a single 15 minute period each day.
Coupled with general morning rush hour traffic, this ripples out to long left-turn waits (no turning arrow), congestion, angry drivers trying to cut down residential streets, parking problems, and so on. Then depending on how far away you had to park, you have to walk that distance with young kids.
Pick up time is easier, especially with after school programs, because the spike is diffused out over a wider range of time.
I can only suggest this is the kind of thing that's generally fixable by a local community.
Things do seem to have changed now. Or it's just that I moved. Not sure.
I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car is often a simpler (if not the only) option available.
So 13+ hours each week.
As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.
Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.
The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away.
A map of US commute times: https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-ti...
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
Not to turn this into something else, but pursuing things during "idle" time is another reason why if reasonably possible, basic income could be great alongside more advancements like automation occurring.
I'm not very familiar with this particular area, but I do know from books like The Better Angles Of Our Nature (and criticisms thereof) that this is a contentious statement. There are many myths about ancient humans, some that overly indulge in 'savagery' and others that are too idyllic.
The evidence for either interpretation is fairly fraught and I'm deeply skeptical of any affirmative claims one way or another.
It’s interesting you’d say that. I agree on average, but the enjoyment in that lifestyle would be hard to imagine in ours. I don’t think it’s hard to see our perception of pleasurable things is different from frequency.
Frankly I think there are only small, incremental improvements to happiness possible after modern healthcare and plumbing. Which are, granted, still extremely expensive where I live.
Looking at it purely in terms for food and survival requires very little energy to get by life. But that comes with its own problems. Actually Hellenistic period in many ways was a far better time to live in than now.
Many people still work +100 hour weeks - just not all for their primary paying jobs. Raising children, side projects, home repair, etc..
For what it's worth I don't regret it but man, I really do think "hmm... when will I next have 15 minutes where I have the use of both hands and no creature yelling at me and I'm not at work?"
I could just sleep less (with dire consequences noted here), but I've managed to keep getting 7 hours or so a day (not all in one go, but it could be worse).
But that's not a global solution to the problem. We can't all be lazy rent seeking drains on society.
I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
Keynes predicted we'd be down to 3 or 4 hours a day by now, but that never happened due (partly) to the ever-increasing competitive ability/imposition that technology allows managers and shareholders to impose on labor in an effort to maximize economic potential and productivity.
Even now, average working hours in developed nations are above the "legal norm".
Though the automation definitely helped to make it more feasible to work less, there is still a political fight to be had to push the hours down even more.
Automation and increased productivity has resulted in a lot of leisure. It’s not evenly distributed but hours worked per capita is not on an upward trend.
It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.
Children would also be naturally spaced because breastfeeding around the clock typically continued until the child was at least 18 months old, meaning that they would normally be 15-30 months apart (the amount of time that breastfeeding acts a contraceptive varies widely from woman to woman but typically breastfeeding on demand will halt a woman's reproductive activity for at least 6 months).
With your four display setup, now perched on your nose, moving between sitting desk, standing desk, and stretching on the floor, means moving a wireless keyboard. And for tasks where phone-like keyboards are good enough, no need for the desk, just wander.
Twitch a finger on a pad, twitch a hand and arm on mouse or controller or knee, or raise your arms and dance. You, not the task, determine your style.
Overlay work, while hanging with children. Or map remote kids, into your virtual world. Helicopter parents, meet drones.
Commuting? Well, I suppose some prefer the village well, to indoor plumbing - it's a chance to socialize, away from family oversight. And I suppose commuting will become more pleasant, as the roads clear out - have you seen video of 1950's highways? ;)
There's a meme, of people blithely living their lives, ignoring the future, not appreciating they will soon be stumbling through the smoking ruins of their city. Perhaps we need its complement. People blithely stumbling through smoking ruins, not appreciating they will soon be living in a city.
I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.
As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.
Where’s this magical place?
And I heard similar things about south and east of Asia
I told him I'd never again work at a job that required me to be there at 9am, because I'm effectively useless before 11am, completely independent of how much sleep I've had the night before. The only plus side, I joked, was that even though I'd only gotten 4-6 productive hours of work done, no one batted an eye when I left at 5pm, since I'd been there since 9.
Then I got layed off.
Remember, its not how many hours you work, its how many hours you work when the boss is there.chores - have less stuff to maintain.
eating - not sure what can be done here.
exercise - look into tabata or hiit. you can workout 2x20min a week.
you can also find way to be more efficient with your activities to cut off time on each one, even if you keep it.
sure none of these suggestions is without cost. but these suggestions can be enacted to the end goal of more time (for sleep or whatever)
* You either pre-cook meals on the weekend, or utilize a meal substitute like Soylent (or both)
* Most chores involve cleaning things that just get dirty as part of their normal use, if you shower and spend most of your "toilet time" at work, you automatically have someone who's going to clean up after you.
What kind of life do you lead where being stuck in traffic, daily meal preparation, and shitting on your own toilet is a constant thrill ride?
I guess I'm just surprised when people don't share the same joy of cooking. Or, for that matter, taking an excellent bowel movement in one's own toilet.
On the other hand, as the saying goes: I make a nickel, boss makes a dime; that's why I poop on company time.
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
You can kind of see this transition happening if you visit currently-industrializing countries like India or China.
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.
I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
Sleep is a vital part of life. You are not missing out on life if you sleep--you are living.
In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])
As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24429-sleep-boosts-br...
It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.
Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.
But even if some amount is permanent, so what? Does my brain need to be in mint condition? If the cost of getting more enjoyment out of life is a little brain damage, so be it. I hold no ego about my brain being perfect. Performance is only one aspect of life and not one I strive to prioritize significantly over enjoyment.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/01/04/46062060...
...But everyone’s brain is different, and if you don’t feel your enjoyment of life is being affected, then it’s entirely possible your brain is getting all its maintenance needs met in the time you sleep.
I didn’t mean to sound moralizing or judgmental— these decisions are of course entirely ours to make for ourselves.
That's making the huge assumption that you're willing to constantly seek your maximum pay and that you get paid solely for your measurable productivity output, which is in my experience very rarely the case. More often than not you get paid based on capabilities and responsibilities, not significantly more or less on your output. It's certainly not a direct X% less productive = X% less pay relationship. I believe it's been shown that seeking new employers is the best way to maximize pay, but that means interviews are often the difference between you and more pay, yet no one can judge future productivity in an interview.
> you would shorten your life to a month at best
To my knowledge, sleep dep hasn't actually killed people directly like this, they simply start sleeping.
Actually, there is at least one example, surely there are more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/man-dies-11-days-no...
That is not how it works practically. Less productive people don't get less salaries, unless their productivity is going really really down. Most companies use hours spend at work as proxy for productivity for salary purposes. Oftentimes you may look like super productive cause you are fixing a lot of bugs or constantly runing meetings. That bug were cause by you or those meetings could be half shorter is something superiors rarely see.
It is just hard to measure exact productivity.
That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.
https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro...
I've done it, and others have as well.
Could be sleep apnea, but in my case I felt congested all the time. What I thought was allergies was actually the linings of my sinuses inflamed to the point of closing off air passages.
Unclear if the root cause in my case was acid-reflux into the sinus cavities or exposure to dust from ground zero.
The resulting surgery kind of sucked (free tip: don't have your sinuses roto-rootered in the winter) but ever since I've been able to sleep a solid 6-7 hours every night. I now wake up rested, don't feel groggy, typically without an alarm.
Another thing I've learned is the CPAP machines now phone home to the insurance company to give them compliance data on how and when you use the machine. Less happy about that.
It took her a solid year of being a zombie before she figured out what was happening and why. She bought a CPAP, and it's made a huge difference in her quality of life.
So if you're looking to try out a non-surgical fix while you ponder a surgery, consider buying/renting/borrowing a CPAP!
They are. But when the alternative is surgery to enlarge your nasal passages (which, like any form of surgery, may or may not work), well, forcing oneself to get used to it is the lesser of two evils.
Then I started taking fexofenadine (allegra) and fluticasone (nasonex) every day. After 2 weeks, nearly every problem I had vanished. No more sinus infections, I could breathe and smell, I slept incredibly, no more poo brain, no more 2pm "head of concrete." It was like I started a new life.
Anyway if you have any of the above try that drug routine maybe? You gotta keep it up non stop for 2 weeks straight to see results, and the potential downside is that now if I get off my antihistamines for like a day even, I'm likely to instantly get a sinus infection.
Anyway, that all went away when I quit Allegra. Now I just use the fluticasone. But I had to get allergy shots for a while, because in my case, the problem was the cat that slept on my bed.
I cut gluten out of my life, and basically everything changed. I no longer get 10 sinus infections a year, I don't have to take any allergy medicines, my depression went away, and I can sleep less.
All of my doctors told me to take drugs to solve it, but it turns out I am gluten intolerant, and cutting it out has changed my life forever.
I was told to cut wheat down to 10% max of my diet, under very strange circumstances (not going to go into it here; it was weird and made no sense, also, this person wasn't a doctor or anything and didn't tell me how it might affect me to change my diet this way).
I tried it for two weeks. I went to the store, got gluten-free equivalents of regular foods, and this was long before gluten-free was a fad so it was hard to find stuff.
Within two days, literally, I felt 10 years younger. My digestion went from kinda bad, always feeling bloated, often unpleasant times in the bathroom, to, well, a really good experience. My skin went from being kind of sallow and puffy to healthy and glowing.
I used to strain my back and neck regularly, and for no reason. I'd spend maybe a month's worth of days limping around with back/neck strain. That ended, entirely.
My mood improved to an amazing degree, which was also really surprising.
And last, I used to get sick 4-5 times a year, and without fail if I didn't get enough sleep, even two nights in a row. Now, I get sick maybe once a year, much more in line with what I see in other people.
I think I too had a low-grade gluten intolerance (probably not celiac, though I've never been tested); getting rid of it was probably the best health decision I've ever made, for impact on quality of life.
Anyway, just wanted to share my story. :)
Fast forward 6 months or so... I have serious difficulty sleeping more than 8 hours, can hardly sleep past when the sun comes up. Don't need an alarm to wake up, and feel well rested after 7 hours of sleep. I'm also so much more productive at work, actually feel awake and can focus on things. Prior to the CPAP machine I don't think I ever actually understood what it was like to not feel tired, it was just my normal state so I was actually tired without even realizing it. It was a life altering change that didn't happen overnight. I've tried a couple times to sleep without the CPAP machine, and it just doesn't happen. I imagine its the same as sleeping before, I just notice how I'm unable to sleep now.
This might not be true for everyone, but if you're told you snore really bad, and don't feel exhausted all the time, but can sleep constantly... you may have sleep apnea and are just dealing with the symptoms without even realizing. It was absolutely worth getting checked out for me.
Luckily I stuck with it, and after a few months I had to sleep without the machine for about a week and noticed a massive difference - I felt like hot garbage. The whole week without it I was so tired, had headaches every day, constant brain fog, and it was just hard to sleep in general. Now I'm a big believer in the CPAP machine and happily wear it every night.
Bonus: my wife no longer wakes me up every night for snoring ;)
Prior to treatment, did your sinuses open up completely during hard aerobic exercise and then feel like they slam shut as soon as you were done?
The symptoms, in retrospect, were the constant feeling of a stuffy noise and headaches during air pressure changes like sudden altitude changes while flying (gradual ascent/descent didn’t bother me most of the time).
My doctor initially declared I had sleep apnea, only after that test did he refer me to an ENT who diagnosed it in a few minutes with some sort of scope they stick up your nasal passages.
I don’t feel any need to ‘sleep in’ on weekends.
Yes, I work from home and own my own company, so I have the luxury of taking a nap in the middle of the day.
If I were to try to force myself to sleep 8 or 9 hours I feel worse; so I don’t do that anymore.
I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.
The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.
Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this
If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.
You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.
Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.
[1] http://www.bcmj.org/article/sleep-deprivation-among-physicia...
Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?
> What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?
Sure, if that was all there was to it, then you'd be 100% right. The knowledge we seem to be gaining from these discussions is that a programmer who works 6 hours a day is overall more productive than one who works 8 hours a day, let alone one who has been on a 16 hour death march for 6 months. The same idea applied to the doctor example may mean that your doctor is less likely to save your life if they're on the 28th hour of their shift than one that wasn't.
Yes, there's a time and a place for burning a candle at both ends, but we seem to think that this is OK to do in the long term. So sure, if you need to pull a rare 20-hour marathon to fix an urgent problem, do it - the value might well justify the cost. But don't tell yourself that it's sustainable or even optimal in the long term, evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite.
> I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious?
It is not in fact obvious. So many places reward time spent more than quality work. Just today at a meetup we were talking about how to shift people away from damaging and expensive heroics to investing in not creating such big problems that you need work-all-night heroes. The industry is notorious for death marches and work-all-the-time startups. And it's also notorious for buggy, low-productivity, high-tech-debt code bases and giant rewrites caused by years of accumulated short-term thinking.
If it's obvious to you, skip over the articles. Not everything has to be for you.
I'm guessing the 10 hours is just making up for sleep debt and that might taper off if I could sleep as much as I wanted every night. But the realities of life (kids in school, work, kid's activities, etc.) mean that I have to be awake by about 6:45am and being in bed and asleep before 10:00 just doesn't happen very often either.
I really notice when I get less sleep I make a bunch more comments on HN / reddit or use Twitter much more.
I've noticed when I sleep better I can better focus on long-form entertainment (reading a novel vs. browsing HN, for example).
What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Can you tell the difference between a 6th hour brain and a 7th hour brain? Does anything you eat or do during a day affect how long this process takes? What about hydration / nutrition?
I'm sure these are all answerable, but I'm not sure most people know the answers, and this article certainly doesn't get us any closer to understanding.
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:D
Now I show up to work the next day. Certainly less sleep has some effect on me. But that doesn't devalue the increased productivity from the previous evening.
The brain is a limited resource. There might be occasional short term hacks/cheats. But on average you'll have X gallons in the mental tank. This is true. If you spend that at home then yes you will be "less productive" at work.
What I don't get are people that brag about not getting much sleep. It's clearly unhealthy. Would you brag about your poor eating habits? Or not following a medication regimen?
I know the science is still early, but I have no doubt that poor sleep has a significant, long-term, permanent impact on health.
Some of the most talented and productive developers I know are in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and have a lifestyle that would be considered impossible by many in the States.
The brain needs time to recharge, time away from "work", time to think about work without actually doing work, and the punch that gets packed into a shorter work day can be much greater if the brain is working at optimum capacity, which usually doesn't happen if it is taxed for loads of hours day after day after day.
For me personally, my best ideas come when I am away from a computer, and my brain is free to wander. The more time I sit at a computer, ironically the less likely good ideas will come. Most work environments in the States have not learned this yet.
Totally wrong. I just finished 4 months of military training. Sleep deprivation was part of the training. We were constantly sleep deprived. It impacted our performance, that was the point. That said, I'm one of those people who always seems to get up 2 minutes before the alarm. Even in my sleep-deprived state, less than four hours a night for weeks, I still woke up before my alarm.
I am sure you can reinvent the wheel and then some in what's left. People are productive when they are productive, you can come up with the idea to change the world in 60 mins...or never in your lifetime.
If Einstein had lived to 150 it's not a given that his contribution to the would would have 2X...
I've tried maintaining 8 hours of sleep daily in such conditions. What I've found is that I'm productive for two days. By Tuesday or Wednesday night, I'm frustrated and bored, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing something interesting and, bam, week derailed. For me, 6.5 hours is the compromise that works. Plus, I sleep 9 hours on Friday and Saturday nights.
A four to five hour deviation is quite significant. That's a difference of 80% between the most amount of sleep needed and the least.
> "I suppose the rule of thumb in adults is about seven to eight hours, but is that based on any really solid science? I would sort of say not," said Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience and head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vv7eqx/why-do-dif...
> Prescribing one amount of sleep for every kind of person seems very obviously wrong.
That's, AFAIK, not.
Even if I don't feel tired, I notice that my thoughts are more muddled and it's hard to concentrate. If I get 6 hours or less of sleep one night, it's usually not a problem. But if the lack of sleep is over multiple days (like it usually is), then it becomes much worse.
So, what if you get 8.5 hours of sleep but you still could sleep, after the alarm clock goes off? there should be some upper limit, maybe 9?
Despite knowing that I just don't need a lot in the way of sleep, it seems that every time I make that claim, it's met with incredulity, but having worked a job for 6 years in a different time zone, and with a loose schedule, whenever I just went to bed when I got tired, and woke up when I woke up, I found that the median sleep length was in the 5-5.5 hour range.
I pretty much require 9 hours on a monophasic schedule to feel as sharp.
I personally believe sleep is simply a cleaning cycle for the brain, waiting 16 hours between cleaning cycles may be deleterious.
You can totally lose symptoms of tiredness, only to wind up with dementia at later point in life.
Notice, my sleep pattern contains 3 full cycles a day. And less time between cycles.
I'm not just subsisting on short naps.
The second link simply confirms what I initially said, that sleep is a cleaning cycle for the brain.
This is not a news article, and is not journalism. This is an advertisement for a book.
Edit: downvotes why?
Blood is not affected by magnetic fields, it seems to me. https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-blood-attracted-to-a-magnet-s...
The argument in #9 as I understand it is, over the course of your lifetime, the cumulative minuscule effect of how you sleep relative to the Earths magnetic field can have a negative effect on your health, increasing the risk of stroke or brain related conditions.
To prove or disprove would require long term study (in the order of a human lifetime) with equipment capable of detecting very small changes while eliminating all other effects.
Meanwhile the guru in question is one that gets invited to Talk at Google, if that's any measure of credibility - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQn8X4FbpTM