Hacker News Reader

Comment by weliketocode | Hacker News Reader

I know a very successful banker who prides himself on sleeping 4 hours a night because he believes that is the optimal point where each additional hour no longer has any incremental benefit.

I have gone through periods of high and low amounts of sleep for both work and personal reasons.

Sleep has always been phrased in terms of time - ie get x hours of uninterrupted sleep to perform your best. But there has to be more to it than that.

I've stayed up all night and felt rejuvenated the next day. And I've had lazy Sundays where I've remained tired the entire day.

I might not have not seen the scientific study on it yet, but I believe the quality of your sleep has a lot to do with the nature of when and why you're sleeping as well as your mental state when doing so.

View on HN

After giving up an enforced routine schedule and allowing my sleep to settle where it will, I have found my sleeping "schedule" to be largely irregular.

Sometimes I want to stay up all night and keep going the next day. Other times, I go to bed at 9 and get up early the next morning. Sometimes I only need a couple of naps. Other times, I want to keep on sleeping, which I allow myself to do.

I have slept for 20 hours straight before, with only short breaks to pee and drink water. I think this typically happens when I contract a cold or flu, and helps my body focus on fighting it off.

I feel much, much better than when I used to have to be at the office every weekday, even if I could come in at noon.

I presume you work remotely?

I've gradually given up using currency, and no longer need to work.

Well, you may as well have changed the laws of physics. Care to share how you managed this?

I sleep outside, occasionally couchsurfing. I scavenge my food and everything else. I'm not 100% currency-free, but close to it.

In the traditional medicine system of India (Ayurveda), there is an anecdote passed around that goes something like this: for each hour of sleep before midnight, count it as two hours. For each hour of sleep between midnight and sunrise, count it as one hour. Sleeping after sunrise counts for zero - it is useless.

And I've observed this to be true in my life. The most peaceful, restful sleep I experience is consistently between 10pm and 1am.

I fully agree with your dismissal of hours slept being the quantitative unit of sleep, and I'm similarly curious about what constitutes a healthy, effective sleep habit...

Sounds like it's not really worth sleeping during summer above the Arctic Circle, then.

Or it is possible that humans are maladapted to living in the artic circle.

Maybe by extension it’s not really worth living there ;)

My grandparents are farmers in part of Northern Europe where currently it’s dark from 11pm - 3am (it’s never truly dark though, and if you look North in the middle of the night it is distinctly brighter). Their sleeping patterns do strongly follow that of the sun, in the winter they sleep more and in the summer they sleep a lot less.

For the work they do this is good though, in the summer there are a lot more things to do, whereas in winter when it’s -20c and the ground is covered in snow, there isn’t very much to do.

In a way I think they have it better than me, trying to go to sleep when it’s still a bright sunny day outside just feels weird.

But there are definitely people who sleep right in the middle of the day, eg siestas in sunny places.

can confirm. taking my nap now, in fact!

If you go to sleep at 4pm and wake up at midnight, does that count as 16 hours of sleep or zero? This system suffers from the reverse Gremlins problem.

> In the traditional medicine system of India (Ayurveda)

“Ayurveda medicine is considered pseudoscientific.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda

You skipped the following sentence in your quote: "Other researchers consider it a protoscience, or trans-science system instead."

Early thought systems evolved from hundreds of generations of folk wisdom. There are significant enough gaps in modern scientific understanding that to discount these systems is foolish.

Note that the current discussion is set in such a gap.

From the god of the gaps to the pseudoscience of the gaps. The same 5 old tricks to justify superstition and folk belief.

I'd expect most traditional medicines to be considered pseudoscientic if they predate the invention of the scientific method.

That said, I'd take science-driven modern medicine over weird herbs and rhino horns any day of the week.

> Sleeping after sunrise counts for zero - it is useless.

I don't know about some people, but for me this is practically the silliest thing I've ever heard.

I need 8 hrs of sleep period, and the time of day has zero effect on my alertness. It can be 9pm-5am or 3am-12pm, it's exactly the same.

But if I get only 6 hrs of sleep? I'm miserable.

I can't even begin to imagine where the idea that the hour of the day matters would have come from.

And just think of nighttime workers. Obviously their daytime sleep counts...

> I can't even begin to imagine where the idea that the hour of the day matters would have come from.

Many bodily functions such as hormone production are affected by your circadian rhythm [1]. Ambient light also seems to have an effect on quality of sleep.

[1] https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_Circadia...

> I can't even begin to imagine where the idea that the hour of the day matters would have come from.

The idea that sleeping in is lazy and self-indulgent while rising at dawn is virtuously ascetic?

> I need 8 hrs of sleep period, and the time of day has zero effect on my alertness.

It matters a lot, especially if it’s 5 AM - 1 PM. In high school, I was an RF technician, testing the rollout of LTE in my area. We had to conduct drive tests at night, due to traffic concerns. Working at night and sleeping during the day seriously disrupts your natural circadian rhythm. The only reason we as humans don’t sleep immediately after sunset is due to the invention of artificial light.

> And just think of nighttime workers. Obviously their daytime sleep counts...

I think the quote is more an aphorism than rigorous guide. The framers of the quote probably didn’t anticipate the night shift ;)

It's interesting to consider that the 9-5 workday is a very modern innovation, especially considering how long Ayurveda has been around.

I sleep during the day and work nights, so yeah, that's complete crap.

Naps in the day have repeatedly been shown to be helpful and have positive health benefits. I’d say this anecdote is just like a lot of anecdotes passed down by humans and doesn’t match science.

The anecdote does, in some ways, match science: hormones in the body operate on a schedule that is derived from specific frequencies of ambient light, and therefore ultimately the position of the sun.

My problem with ayurveda and other traditional stuff is people not realizing they were not your popular paracetamol tablets you could gulp down and be effective. These were wholesome lifestyles. So cherry picking parts may just not be effective for most people and gives traditional stuff a bad name.

I have benefitted immensely from yoga and parts of ayurveda and I laugh at people who dismiss them but I don't like them being cherry picked and tested which diminishes trust in them

Wait - what? You like parts of them but you don’t like people who like parts of them?

If you follow the "normal" schedule of sleeping (i.e. you don't work nights or something), then this probably has more to do with the deeper stages of sleep being more common at the beginning of the sleeping session and REM sleep more common as sleep duration continues.

As a person who induces lucid dreams as a hobby, I sometimes manage to make use of those long lazy mornings on weekends to lucid dream. I've found it's very difficult to have a lucid dream in the first two or three sleep cycles. After that, it's much easier because the REM stage of sleep is longer. Not that I've found that having lucid dreams is easy, I get one day like that every month or two and a spontaneous one here or there in between.

There are some humans who only need 5 hours of sleep a night. Others that need 8 or 10. A good indicator is during a long vacation, without an alarm, how long do you typically sleep? If I allow my body to wake up naturally, it's almost always after 7 hours.

If you go long enough without needing to be on a schedule, studies have found a lot of people move back into a rolling/rotating sleep cycle .. a few hours at a time throughout the day/night. I found myself doing this while I took a several month sabbatical from the workforce.

> There are some humans who only need 5 hours of sleep

Define "need". Also, citation needed.

Just because you can get away with it and live, doesn't mean it's the best move.

> citation needed

“In 2009, a woman came into Ying-Hui Fu’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, complaining that she always woke up too early. At first, Fu thought the woman was an extreme morning lark – a person who goes to bed early and wakes early. However, the woman explained that she actually went to bed around midnight and woke at 4am feeling completely alert. It was the same for several members of her family, she said.

Fu and her colleagues compared the genome of different family members. They discovered a tiny mutation in a gene called DEC2 that was present in those who were short-sleepers, but not in members of the family who had normal length sleep, nor in 250 unrelated volunteers.

When the team bred mice to express this same mutation, the rodents also slept less but performed just as well as regular mice when given physical and cognitive tasks.“

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150706-the-woman-who-barel...

And we have not started genetically engineering this mutation into humans, why exactly?

Unforeseen consequences is a reason I would not touch this. Something that correlates with one positive thing can also (and often does) have correlations to other negative things that greatly outweigh the positive. And sometimes the latter can be much more difficult to discern than the former.

For instance in the US today childhood injury and fatality rates have plummeted [1]. And this seems like an obviously good thing. And one might reasonably hypothesize that the increase in rules and regulations against letting children play independently, as well as the rise of helicopter parenting has played some substantial role in this. Since it's very easy to see the link there.

Yet at the same time other factors such such as childhood mental illness, obesity, and other major issues have sharply increased. Relative academic results are down and even IQ levels are declining. Are these linked to the behaviors that have driven the decrease in injuries in fatalities? Well that's a lot harder to say, though I think it's a very reasonable hypothesis that at least some of these issues are linked with the same behaviors that have reduced childhood injury/mortality rates.

This is a recurring pattern in many things. Our understanding of the causality of genetics right now is essentially 0 keeping in mind that saying gene A 'causes' effect B is no more a meaningful understanding of the reason for the causality there than saying rain clouds cause rain.

[1] - https://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=unintentional-injuri...

Right, that's why our ancestors didn't all evolve that mutation anyway. But our ancestral environment isn't the same as our current environment: just engineer more genes to paper over each successive disadvantage, recursively, until the only remaining disadvantage is "reduced energy efficiency". Because our current environment is more than efficient at supplying humans with energy.

There are some studies - I'll have to do some digging to find them - that show that even if you "feel rejuvenated" the next day, you will still not be performing at full cognitive capacity. I think this makes much anecdotal evidence invalid.

Melatonin is interesting, I occasionally take it when I can't fall asleep, it generally works although I try not to use it too often. Occasionally, I wake up in the middle of the night tho and got into the habit of taking a 3mg melatonin pill to get me back to sleep. More often than not, the resulting sleep, probably around 4 hours left me feeling absolutely amazing, I mean better rested than I have been in years it was that big of a difference.

Of course sometimes it doesn't have that effect, but I've managed to repeat it 2-3 times and I know for a fact that simply being awake in the middle of the night and going back to sleep again doesn't have that effect.

You might be interested in this link. https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

Gwern claims:

1. 0.1mg is an effective dose.

2. It is probably beneficial to take it every night before sleep.

Bankers also think they add value to the world, so

Reply on news.ycombinator.com