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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

What's crazier is only 4.5 hours of sleep each day. That makes me feel sick thinking about. Makes me feel even more grateful for my 15 second commute from my bed to computer :/

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Honestly, the 4.5 hours of sleep each day really makes me question the veracity of the story, or at least if it's somehow exaggerated.

While there are a small percentage of people who genetically require less sleep, 4.5 hours day in-day out would result in severe sleep deprivation symptoms in the vast majority of people. I know after a couple nights in a row with 6-7 hours of sleep I basically become pretty non-functional and I always get sick.

It depends, there are many in working in place like Hong Kong and Tokyo sleeping 4 hours a day. Including many of my colleagues. No idea how they do it because i need minimum of 8 and preferably 10 for my brain to function at decent level.

Any less sleep will means my productivity drop off rapidly and makes error and judgement that I need days to recover from.

You mentioned two places which have troublesome levels of both amphetamine abuse among workers, and in the case of Japan, has a word for “working oneself to death.”

Isn't the equivalent in the US. "death march"? I am not familiar with Japanese, so maybe it is more direct.

The word in Japanese is karoshi, literally "death from overwork."

"Death march" as commonly used in English-speaking nations is typically used as hyperbole or dark humour, whereas in Japan "karoshi" is used in a clinical sense for documented cause of death.

Karōshi [1] is the Japanese term.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi

Hence that is why by in wages per hours they are properly much lower, something that GDP or GDP per Capita dont measure, of course long working hours has absolutely nothing to do with productivity.

Another reason why I believe there should be some government regulation, or little regulation but worker union.

> Another reason why I believe there should be some government regulation, or little regulation but worker union.

Unsurprisingly there is such regulation in Europe. It's illegal to work over certain amount of time -- it's the employer that potentially gets into trouble so this is usually observed as far as I know. There are allowances for short periods of overtime, but strict limits over longer intervals.

> Honestly, the 4.5 hours of sleep each day really makes me question the veracity of the story, or at least if it's somehow exaggerated.

It's true.

I've met people who slept 3 hours a night regularly to make ends meet. They seem and act normal until you try to have a conversation with them or ask them to do something outside their routine or that requires thought.

You'd be surprised how much of human social and work behavior comes automatically. You can sleepwalk through modern life and never have to wake up.

They were even capable of getting passing grades in university. Even some kinds of learning come mechanically.

If she is getting only 4.5 hours of sleep, the best use of her time on the train on the way to work is to sleep, not drink tea and chit-chat.

The article does say that she sleeps on the train sometimes. I also wondered if this is her primary commuting activity, and that it's downplayed because the story wouldn't be as compelling if she slept 4.5 hours plus another 90 mins on the train each way, which would add up to 7.5 hours.

Might add up numerically but it is not of the same quality.

4.5 hours and she is 60 years old. I know for me the older I get the more important getting 7-8 hours is, so not sure how she is pulling that off!

It's natural that older people tend to need less sleep though.

It's normal, but we don't really know why people tend to sleep less as they get older. A lot of things we traditionally viewed as a normal part of aging are now seen as disease pathology. She's also been doing this for 16 years, so age doesn't really explain it anyway.

That is a common misconception: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/aging-and-sleep

It's not that they need less sleep, it's that they don't sleep as well as they did in earlier years.

Sleeping is harder but you still need the sleep.

Well as someone over 45 I can say if I get less than 6 hours I'm functioning on half my normal IQ. Engineering requires deep concentration for me that means 8 hours sleep if I want to perform as aggressively as my juniors.

Sleep on the train might help a bit, still crazy.

This was the craziest part for me, and I have no doubt that such low quantity of sleep would affect a person negatively.

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