Health dangers of sleep deprivation | Hacker News Reader

Health dangers of sleep deprivation

independent.co.uk

234 pointspmoriarty113 comments

> Lack of sleep changes how insulin operates in your body and how quickly your cells absorb sugar. After a week of short sleep nights (say, five or six hours), your doctor could diagnose you with pre-diabetes, Walker says.

My father intentionally tried to sleep as little as possible in his 20s, 30s, and into his 40s - sleeping four hours a night was common - in order to get more done - and he ended up with diabetes.

Chronic and extreme lack of sleep was his only risk factor.

Don't screw around. Get your sleep.

My dad's one of those lucky guys who did 5 hours a night his entire career (probably going back to his Navy days at least). Now that he's retired, he's a bit more leisurely and sleeps until 6:30 or so (instead of 4:50!) but often I receive emails from him at 1 or 2am, and we'll easily stay up half the night chatting when I'm visiting. He's one of the healthiest 79 year olds you'll ever meet, and not due to a particularly great diet or exercise (though both are fine in his case; he's just not a health nut). The thing that always made me jealous about him is not so much his ability to thrive on less sleep than most of us, but his ability to wake up. One beep from a digital watch alarm and he's out of bed, feet on the floor. I can't wake up to save my life. But then again, I try to get as close to 8h a night as possible, particularly as I've focused more than ever on my health and fitness.

Waking to an alarm is a training thing. You have to make it policy that when the alarm goes off, you're up and out of bed within 10 seconds.

You'll never sleep through an alarm again. It's the snooze button that kills people.

Needing very few hours of sleep is extremely rare. Basically everyone who claims to get along with less than the usual 7-8h of sleep do worse in various cognitive performance tests and most likely will suffer in longer term as well. Matthew Walker writes about this in his excellent book Why we sleep.

Some people may have the ability to drop into deep states of sleep with unusual rapidity where they don't need the extra ramp up and ramp down hours that most of us need so they can make do with 5 hours with the same quality it takes most of us to reach with 8.

I am perfectly refreshed with 5 hours sleep for exactly that reason. I have narcolepsy. Basically I fall asleep immediately and hit REM sleep a minute or two later. That saves the 90 minutes it takes most people need to reach the REM stage. My normal sleeping pattern is in bed at 1am, up before 6am, at work by 7am.

How do you know you go into REM? Do you use any sleep tracking device? Could you please suggest here?

the flipside is you really get a lot of quality time in in your 20s 30s and 40s. Doesn't that count for something? If you sleep five instead of eight hours a night that's actually about two years of additional lifetime even if your lack of sleep kills you at 70 rather than 80, and I'd guess 10 years of life reduction is way too pessimistic of a guess, and it's the bad years at the end you're sacrificing anyway

I'm somewhat serious actually, I'm not convinced that sleeping your youth away is actually a good trade-off. Not to mention that sport, a healthy diet and checkups can probably mitigate the downsides to some degree.

> even if your lack of sleep kills you at 70 rather than 80

If only it were that simple.

There's lifespan, and there's quality of life. Diabetes attacks both.

So, not only will you likely die earlier, you're at far greater risk for developing a degenerative disease - possibly cognitive in nature. Or organ failure. Or amputation. Or blindness. Or all of the above.

And if you don't, you'll still spend your remaining days worrying about it.

Such a shame the subtitle of the article is all about quantity. Quality of life far outweighs quantity, but this subtitle probably serves better as clikckbait.

I'm with you on this. There was over a decade where I regularly stayed up for days on end hacking on projects and just generally studying and learning new things. It's never been a challenge for me to do. If there's something engaging which I'm immersed in, the days just tick by, no drugs/caffeine involved.

Had I not done those projects, I wouldn't be anywhere near as knowledgable as I am today. So far my health and fitness is great, and there doesn't seem to have been any lasting negative effects.

But I make a very conscious effort to avoid pulling all-nighters now which I still naturally will tend towards if immersed in something. Before age 30 though, depending on your physiology and general health/lifestyle, I'm of the opinion that all-nighters can easily be a win.

I think the biggest risk with establishing the productive all-nighter capability earlier in life is later in life when the consequences are more grave you'll still have that tendency. It reminds me of how body-builders or similarly oversized muscular folks often tend to become obese later in life when they can't sustain the physical activity of the past, but of course habitually/pleasurably persist the high intake of calories.

As someone who is getting 5 hours of sleep and travelling to work/working/travelling home every day at the moment (short staffed and busy period), I can guarantee that it is not qualify time. Even if I had a day off, doing anything meaningful with that time would be impossible.

Sleeping 5 hours a night for a few days is doable, but you're going to be a zombie while awake.

Doing this permanetly? No idea how ops father did it, but I imagine I'll have a serious health problem before the weeks out at this rate (only half joking here, actually a little concerned).

>Doing this permanently? No idea how ops father did it, but I imagine I'll have a serious health problem before the weeks out at this rate (only half joking here, actually a little concerned).

I get about 5 to 6 hours per night as well on average and I'm feeling fine. I workout regularly and don't smoke and rarely drink, physically fine as well and don't feel tired.

Your mileage may vary obviously but I think a lot of association of health risk with reduced sleep is probably attributable to unhealthy lifestyles overall (interestingly enough there's also higher associated mortality with excess sleeping)

> I think a lot of association of health risk with reduced sleep is probably attributable to unhealthy lifestyles overall

Even the experts don't really know why, so you're just guessing, and taking a huge risk.

However, the evidence seems to be pointing to physiological damage directly caused by the lack of sleep, and that 7-8 hours is ideal for nearly everyone.

Again, ymmv and my account is anecdotal, but my father was (and is, aside from the diabetes) an extremely healthy person, both in habit and on paper (cholesterol numbers, etc.) That's why his diabetes was such a mystery.

It doesn't seem like you can out-health a lack of sleep any more than you can out-health radiation exposure. And like radiation, the effects may be cumulative.

Interesting.

Howany hours are you working per day? I'm doing 12+ so that's probably adding to the exhaustion factor a lot.

Might be interesting to try this without working insane hours haha.

I sleep terrible during the work week but get good rest on the weekends. Usually only 4-5 hours during the week and work ~10 hours / day. I don't usually feel like a Zombie.

Weekends I get anywhere from 8 to 12+ hours of sleep.

Yes, definitely less than 12 on average. Probably eight or nine. I think that'd burn me out as well.

I understand the sentiment, however I think you’re vastly underestimating the impact it will have on your life.

Diabetes gets joked about a lot - only those that have it understand how utterly shit it is. I assure you the trade off isn’t worth it.

Yep, I was diagnosed with Type 1 in my early 30s. Only good thing about it is that it’ll probably kill me sooner rather than later so I don’t have to live with it as long.

Without being presumptuous, do you know about Sugar Surfing?

Learning this management technique has made a massive difference in the cognitive load of the disease. The toil is still there, but the burden is reduced.

To be honest, I never liked my life in the first place. This has just kind of been the icing on the cake (no pun intended).

Goal is to outlive my cat (he wouldn’t understand if I was gone) and then just see what happens. Figure I can make it 5 more years or so.

Yeah it’s tough!

Meditation is a great tool to help deal with the sense that life is meaningless. Good luck - I hope you find your way :)

Yeah thanks. If I meditate enough maybe my pancreas will work, I won’t be worthless, and there’ll be a reason to get up in the morning.

Sometimes there’s no answer and nothing that will help make things better. I can accept that. Seems to be other people who can’t.

For what it's worth, most of the advice I've heard about diet with regards to typeI diabetes is garbage (the typeII advice was always better). It took more than a year for an engineering friend of mine who specializes in signal processing to convince his girlfriend to ignore her doctor's dieting advice, and her blood sugar, and health in general, improved greatly as a result.

Basically his take on it is that typeI diabetics target the wrong thing. They're told to eat a high carb diet and estimate the amount of insulin they need to modulate their blood sugar. His take was that you should take a consistent amount of insulin more regularly, while eating a fattier more protein heavy diet, occassionally using fast carbs to bring up low blood sugar. The fat and protein will tend to lower the glycemic index of food, so you'll get less spikes, and more importantly less ringing of your blood sugar, which can lead to taking too much insulin (ringing is a signal processing term which describes the phenomenon of what tends to happen when you slam a signal high or low, where the signal will oscillate around an upper or lower value until the signal settles on the new value). Basically the goal is to have a more stable, and more predictable blood sugar level throughout the day. Also, when taking blood sugar measurements, taking multiple measurements minutes apart will tell you whether you're on the rising side or the falling side of a peak, and can give you a better idea as to whether more insulin is needed, or if it'll make you crash since you're already coming down.

To sum up, the slower the carbs you eat, the better, also fat and protein slow down carbs as well. Also, eating carbs to bring up blood sugar is superior to taking (more) insulin to bring down blood sugar.

Anyways, good luck to you. I'm sorry life is sucking for you right now (and historically).

Meditating won’t make your pancreas work. I’m not suggesting that. What it will give you is a reason to get up in the morning and it will boost you self worth.

I wish I could transfer experience, but I can’t, so all I can say is try it for 6 weeks and prove me wrong.

I knew multiple people who attempted sort of this and they tended to be more irritable and sort-of-dumber while trying this.

I recall reading that if you sleep less then six hours per night for more then two weeks straight, then the impact on your reflexes, attentiveness and performance is as if you would be permanently under alcohol influence. You may feel good, but impact is measurable.

“Quality” is subjective

I don't doubt that it is, but if we would ask a hundred people if they would want to spend time in their 20s, 30s or 40s again I think we would both agree that the answer would be pretty clear, not to mention that most professional activity, such as entrepreneurship, scientific or career advancement occurs in that period of life.

> most professional activity, such as entrepreneurship, scientific or career advancement occurs in that period of life

entrepreneurship and scientific advancement? Meh. Lots of evidence there are sweet spots for that well into your 50s and beyond.

Would you rather work an extra decade but live healthily into your 80s or 90s - or try to cram it all in so you can retire unhealthy and miserable in your 50s with your life cut short and dying before you reach 70?

I know that's not always the exact trade-off, but I'd rather get my full eight in every night and work productively into my 60s as a healthy person.

The idea that work and relaxation are two extreme, distinct periods of life makes sense for a coal miner, but most of us here, fortunately, as "knowledge workers," have the luxury to weave the two together until we get dementia.

He wasn't overweight, or living on pizza, candy and soda? I ask because people with that sort of attitude, in my experience, tend to take shortcuts on diet as well.

He was a health nut before it was popular.

Lifted weights, ran nearly every day, ate a Mediterranean diet, low body fat, trim waist, healthy body weight, and a decent amount of muscle. He also did not eat much during the workday, so was effectively unintentionally doing intermittent fasting as well.

Ironically, one of his reasons for sleeping less was to have time to fit exercise into his hectic schedule.

His diabetes manifested as unexplained weight loss and muscle wasting.

So, no, he was not your "typical" diabetes patient.

Staying in low fat percentage range for long time can f up your hormonal and other systems. Not saying its the case here but something to take in considerations for those staying lean naturally

Yeah, if you're a bodybuilder or marathon runner carrying a single digit body fat percentage - which is not something the average person is going to "accidentally" do.

Everyone else is probably safe trying to get as lean as possible so long as they're not malnourished.

10-15% and you have somewhat defined sixpack. Lower range of that continuously naturally and you might have yourself a problem. You only have to be somewhat enthusiastic about fitness and watch what you eat to get there. Not that uncommon these days

Citation for 10% being dangerously low?

15% is pretty damn flabby though. Unless you have a very unique body composition and putting your fat into say your legs and butt (like women typically do) youll def have a soft doughnut around your waistline and no way you have six pack abs. Its more in the below 10% bf when you actually can start to dream about the 6pack if you actually have the muscle.

You've seen some misrepresented data. You commonly see fit people saying they have 6 or 8% fat % when they are closer to +12%. Most methods to determinate fat percentage are hilariously inaccurate. Look it up.

15% and you see hints of sixpack (clear outline) for most people who train.

I'm have Type 1 Diabetes (the autoimmune kind) and when I don't sleep or exercise properly, my blood sugar is at least 2X harder to manage. Its far more unpredictable and inconsistent.

In a weird way, its nice to have my body make these failures blatantly evident, rather than just hiding it behind a working pancreas and then dropping dead at random 15 years earlier than I should.

Diabetes is known as a/the major driver of heart disease

“Those identified with cardiovascular disease, not identified with diabetes, are simply undiagnosed."

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52faa95ee4b0b0a74811f...

> Don't screw around. Get your sleep.

Not always an option. My body wants to sleep during the day and be awake during the night. My boss does not agree with this schedule so I have to show up at the office when it's still light out. The end result is that I get maybe 5-6 hours of sleep a night. I don't see a way around this as I unfortunately need to have a job to survive.

I'm sorry you're being downvoted, but this is the case for the vast majority of people. There are probably a variety of interventions you can try: therapy, meditative practice, adjustments to diet and exercise habits, and dietary supplements.

Even if those things worked, it's still not my natural day/night rhythm so I'm not sure if that would actually benefit me (has this ever been researched?).

Interesting. I had a pre-diabetes marker read high on an annual blood test a few years ago. It has not reappeared since. I wonder if I just hadn’t slept much the week beforehand.

A1C is a two- to three-month average, so poor sleep over the past quarter of a year could affect it, afaik.

That was the one, and come to think of it we still had a baby that wasn’t sleeping too regularly right around that time.

Sleeping medication isn't always the right solution for people with inconsistent sleep schedules. Antihistamines which are not particularly addictive(compared to most drugs) and used for sleep activate the h1 receptor which promotes weight gain and diabetes.

Antihistamines are generally H1 antagonists, not agonists. They block the action of the histamine receptor(s); they don't activate them. They tend to stimulate appetite as a side-effect. "Prescription H1 antihistamine use did not significantly increase the OR for elevated glucose, insulin, or lipid levels." [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221329/#R6

No offense to your father, but where would anyone get the idea that this is a good thing to do?

Well, we now know a lot more about the health effects of lack of sleep than we did in like, the 1970s, which is when he started. And, I imagine if you're otherwise very healthy and "acclimate" to the short sleep schedule, you don't really notice the signals that you're running on a deficit.

I think people also thought that there were wider ranges of acceptable sleep, depending on the person, and it's turning out that's not true.

All of this "no, really, literally everyone needs eight hours of sleep every single night of their life no exceptions or it will actually kill you dead" has only come to light in the past two decades.

Going by the comments here, a lot of people think this way.

Yeah, hopefully people will take this as a wake-up call and start sleeping properly. Being obsessive about your health probably won't do much good, but I think you could ask any aging multimillionaire about whether it's worth more to take reasonable care of yourself or to work a little bit harder. Unless you are on the steets, money just isn't worth that much compared to good health. And you don't really need to kill yourself to make it to an UMC income in most circumstances if your IQ is around the hackernews average (my opinion)

Lots of people feel like if you could pul off 4 hrs sleep a night you should. Donald Trump has been touting his ability to do it for decades.

He’s a specimen of good mental and physical health too!

He's not bad for 71. If he read more and did more than just watch cable news, he'd be pretty sharp imo. My point was it was/is a holy grail of sorts. Not many could 'pull it off,' but if you manage to...

Not bad? He is obese and incoherent.

His reported go-to order from McDonalds (and he loves to eat fast food) is "two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fishes, and a large chocolate shake." Do you want to go ahead and calculate the calories on that meal or shall I?

Even if he were in good health, it would be in spite of his lifestyle, not because of it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-mcdonalds-order-review...

Kind of worthless to point out unless he's doing this on a regular basis. That slideshow certainly doesn't mention it.

I absolutely binge at McDonalds too, and more impressively than Trump, but I go a handful of times per year. That's the whole treat.

You couldn't use my receipt to pinpoint my physical health.

Because you think he would eat a healthy meal otherwise and only has that kind of junk from McDonalds?

> “on Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke.”

> Trump was also apparently demanding of the in-flight snack selection. The plane was regularly stocked with “Vienna Fingers, potato chips, pretzels, and many packages of Oreos because Trump, a renowned germaphobe, would not eat from a previously opened package,” the Post reports.

https://www.eater.com/2017/12/4/16733356/trump-fast-food-die...

I'm sure he's such a healthy eater even though people who have worked for him say otherwise, that and the fact that he is obese.

http://kwotable.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_6083-1280...

How can you offer an opinion to the contrary when you don't take 5 seconds to google "fast food" and "trump".

He even forced the US taxpayer to pay for golf cart rentals because he refuses to walk between holes. That's about the lowest-impact type of exercise you could get.

Based on the other sleep link posted here [1], this article itself warning people about sleep might be the thing harming people's sleep and health.

It's fine to tell people who are doing other things instead of sleeping that sleep is important. But many people don't sleep that well/long and I think this message about getting 8 hours of sleep is very harmful to them, since it causes anxiety and insomnia. It seems many people and cultures naturally sleep around 6.5 hours not 8 hours, so people should not worry if that's how long they sleep.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/20/cant-sl...

How does a culture have different sleep needs?

I meant the expectation of how much to sleep. It's often claimed that in the past people slept much more, but hunter gatherers actually sleep on average 6.5 hours a night.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170220-the-surprising-trut...

Siesta cultures a.o.

I meant quantity. That's moving some to a different time.

Siesta culture means sleeping an hour after lunch when the sun is higher and is more dangerous. You don't change your sleep hours because of that.

If you drive while sleep-deprived, you're at a significantly higher risk of being involved in a fatal accident. And it might not be you that gets killed.

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/best-cars-blog/2016/12/d...

I remember reading somewhere that if you're driving after being awake for over 24 hours it's the equivalent of driving with a 0.08 BAC (the legal limit in many countries).

I've done long haul driving while sleep deprived before, and I can believe it (not that I've driven while drunk to compare). I've done 9 hours of driving on 1 hour of sleep, fuelling myself with energy drinks and blasting the air conditioning on cold to keep me awake. In retrospect, not the best judgement, but I had my reasons at the time.

Yes. One of my worst and most shameful memories is nearly falling asleep at the wheel.

That was the first and last time. It's way too easy to think it can't happen to you. You just have to take it seriously.

Self-driving tech can't arrive fast enough.

Yep. We need to treat driving while sleep-deprived like driving while drunk. This has some societally untenable implications: new parents, people whose jobs/commutes/responsibilities do not leave time for enough sleep, people with on-call jobs, etc. need to have their driver licenses revoked. But I can at least set this standard for myself: if I haven't slept enough, I don't drive.

My brother and I make mobile apps. We had an office downtown in a large city. We would often work 20-24 hours and then drive home exhausted. A year ago, one block from our office while stopped at a red light, we saw a vehicle turn left hard on a yellow right as a bicyclist was crossing and hit the woman and she flew at least 6 feet vertically in the air. We called emergency services and someone else was right over helping her. When we drove past her she was out cold on the cement. I don't know what happened, but I assume she lived or I would have been called back by the police for my testimony. That was the day we decided we would no longer go to the office even though we had 4 more months on the lease. It just wasn't worth risking killing someone. I'm glad to have had that experience to shock me into realizing how stupid it was to be driving tired.

I don't think that will work. For example, I just admitted that this happened to me in a sibling comment, and immediately my reflex was to delete it.

Then I thought better of it. We are all human, and we're all pressed for time. We're not out partying. No one drinks to do their jobs.

This is not practically doable.

- There is no objective test the police can administer to determine that you're legally over the sleep deprivation limit.

- Unlike drinking, bad sleep is not (always) a choice people make. Many people don't even know they don't sleep well, and people's estimate of how many hours they sleep per night are often astonishingly wrong.

The psychomotor vigilance task (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_vigilance_task) is the gold standard for alertness testing. It's practical for the police to administer it during a traffic stop.

Right. Driving while drunk slows your reaction time. Falling asleep negates it. So sleep-related accidents are actually more dangerous.

Have you got any articles that show that? I would be interested to read more.

This is built on the premise that the modern 8 hour night is settled science. To my knowledge this isn't the case. I'm not saying that depriving yourself of sleep when you're tired is good, but I'm not so sure this should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

> This is built on the premise that the modern 8 hour night is settled science.

What do you mean by this? Urging people to sleep enough is not really a new and untested concept.

Is there a strong reason to think that frequently sleeping <8 hours is unlikely to cause harm? I think it would still be prudent to give all the studies in the article some consideration.

Science is pretty conclusive that lack of sleep (less than 7hr/night) increases risk for many serious conditions. The part we don’t really know is why it’s the case.

http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/matthew-walker

One of the best (and most eye-opening) podcast episodes ever. Worth every second of the 2 hrs.

I wish there was a transcript, it was really full of interesting facts. I personally have a tinnitus so lack of sleep is big a issue for me so I identified myself with a lot of things he said. I'm happy I discovered Tryptophan lately, it really helped me to get good a quality sleep.

Btw, another great episode is http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/peter-attia

Sleep is one thing I never sacrifice, everything else can wait/ be put off and Im in my mid 30s. 8-9 hrs a night and I feel fucking great every day.

I follow exactly the same rule. Sleep is maybe the greatest productivity factor. Same for rest in general. If I don't rest, I know for sure I will pay later adding "interest rates"

"...I will pay later..." this is so damn hard to grasp when you are young and pulling all nighters every day.

Tell it to my children, partner, co-workers, and the whole system.

Our society isn’t designed for average to poor people to be healthy.

> Our society isn’t designed for average to poor people to be healthy.

The truth. Capitalism isn't about needs and wants but miseries you can tolerate. Unfortunately a bunch of people raced to the bottom on lack of sleep and now that's the level of misery required to compete...

Original article from Business Insider with links to statistics: http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-much-sleep-is-enough-healt...

In 2016 I was diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy — essentially epilepsy with little/no explanation for the cause. Prior to my diagnosis I had horrible sleeping habits. Though we have no official evidence, my neurologist and I both think that years of abusing sleep was a large factor in my development of epilepsy. Finally, sleep and fatigue are major triggers for my seizures (if I don’t get a good nights rest then I’m much more likely to have an episode).

Where do naps fall into this? Does a 6 hour sleep + 2 hour nap later compare to 8 hour sleep?

> The World Health Organisation and Walker both recommend about eight hours a night as a good baseline.

I’ll take the shorter lifespan and bet that more diseases will be cured in the future. The extra hours of life I get every day will ultimately allow me to afford treatment.

Good for you if it doesn’t cause you any problems, but if I don’t get enough sleep I really notice my mood and productivity dips. Everyone is different, so just don’t enforce the same regime on others.

Health is never a priority until you smack your proverbial head off the concrete...

Theres a lot of evidence that the extra hour of sleep will boost your efficiency and quality of life while awake though.

Interestingly enough, this study seems to go on the oposite direction as this one from 2002:

- http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/health/sleepstudy.h...

>"individuals who now average 6.5 hours of sleep a night, can be reassured that this is a safe amount of sleep. From a health standpoint, there is no reason to sleep longer."

Dr. Walker has actually stated that very few people can operate with 5 hours of sleep due to genetics. Most of us need between 7 to 9 hours of sleep.

You're also more likely to get struck by lightning than be one of these people.

In bed?

After struggling with this problem while a student at Notre Dame I started a company to solve my own problem.

To that end - we've developed a behavioral therapy program combining neuroscience, sleep health products, hardware, analytics, and coaching to improve sleep. It's designed to make long-term changes to help you improve the quantity, quality, and regularity of your sleep. https://puresomni.com

If anyone has sleep specific questions let me know.

> men in Japan who sleep less than six hours a night are 400-500% likelier to have a heart attack

Seriously? People who sleep less might be at risk of all sorts of health problems, but not necessarily because they sleep less - people generally sleep less because they're doing [strenuous or destructive activity]. And it's much more likely that partying / working late into the night causes health problems, rather than solely the lack of sleep.

Correlation ≠ causation

I'm sure they control for that. I doubt the people doing the study are unaware of the most basic cognitive biases.

I find 8 hours of sleep excessive.

I'm always battling myself to sleep less than 6-7 hours every night but my body always manages to get better hold of me.

Sleeping more than eight hours gives me a headache and getting fewer than 6 hours sleep makes my entire day feel drowsy.

But I'll take feeling drowsy than a headache as it's been shown that working in sleep deprived state improves 'creativity'.

Headaches may come from poor sleep position or lack of caffeine.

If you get your sleep in order, you should sleep the same amount every day and wake up without an alarm clock.

See this doesn't work me. Even when I sleep 7 to 8 hours every night with alarm, when I put off alarm (say, in long holidays) I naturally sleep 7 to 8 hours a few days then suddenly I sleep very long (>= 10 hours) which completely screws my Circadian rhythm since it makes me harder to fall asleep.

Same thing happens to me, if I have so much as a day or two without an alarm I just careen off into ridiculous sleeping patterns. I have to set alarms during the weekend just to keep on course. If I have a week or more off I start to run off 25 hour days with ~9-10 hours sleep a night, and turn completely nocturnal in a couple of weeks.

Same, but I also need to note that I have a life-long insomnia that attacks every now and then which might be affecting this pattern.

Interesting. I've got the opposite problem. I can't even remember the last time I woke up in the middle of the night without an extremely loud alarm clock, and I feel like absolute death if I try and get up with less than 8-9 hours sleep.

Are a pillow and a mattress fitting you well?

I have to sleep at least six hours in order to stay alert for the entirety of the following day. Any less results in segments of the day when I'm zoning in and out, though it's not continuous.

Normally I can get an 8-9 hour sleep, sometimes even longer, at the end of the week, so I'd say I'm ok.

After we had our son, my sleeping pattern has changed. I sleep early at around 730PM. Then wake-up at around 8 or 8:30PM. Then sleep around at 12:30-1AM. Wake up at 7AM.

I get to take some sort of power nap for the day. And when I wake up, I feel fresh. Does any one else have a similar routine?

I'm not sure if it's healthy, but I do not feel tired or deprived at all.

good night

Moon.

I sleep therefore I am.

I dunno why you're marked as dead (FYI: your posts haven't been showing up for over a year at this point), this isn't a particularly bad comment.

Going to sleep. Peace.

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