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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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)

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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