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Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

In "The Promise of Sleep", the author talks about naps and getting tired in the afternoon, and his conclusion is that the only reason people get tired in the afternoon (which is when your clock-dependent alerting is at its lowest) is because they are sleep deprived. If you are well rested and don't have sleep debt, you should not get tired at that time.

Having consciously tried to get enough sleep over the past 2 years or so, I believe he's right. These days, I barely notice any afternoon dip and when I do, it's when my sleep has been disturbed for some reason.

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In "SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" the author (Strogatz) talks about how in a cave environment, people still take naps a little after noon. People are just as likely to be asleep at 2pm as they are at 4am. Car accidents peak around that time. People fall asleep when their basal temperature is at their lowest, and yup, guess what, people experience a body temperature dip in the late afternoon.

Basically, all the evidence he provides points to a built-in nap time. I, of course, take the physicist's side over the physician's...

Again, Dement doesn't argue against this. There is a tendency to get tired in the afternoon, because clock-dependent alerting (which give us our diurnal sleep schedule) dips at that time. But he's arguing that the reason this is affecting people so strongly is because basically everyone is chronically sleep deprived.

I think lunch can also be to blame for afternoon fatigue, depending on what you eat.

After my surf-and-turf, three-martini lunches, I do tend to get drowsy

That I can handle. It's the afternoon tryst with my secretary that leaves me incapacitated.

I didn't realize we had so many VCs among HN's readership.

Or 1960s advertising executives.

He specifically says that's not the case.

Well even if that's true (n=2 isn't a sample), it doesn't affect the article's claims. The pilots mentioned performed better than the baseline.

Nothing I said implied that the pilots shouldn't perform better than the baseline, unless pilots are a group in society that uniquely carry less sleep debt than average.

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