Researchers Find Downside to Sleeping More Than 8 Hours a Day | Hacker News Reader

Researchers Find Downside to Sleeping More Than 8 Hours a Day

inverse.com

23 pointsprostoalex18 comments

Misleading title, buried lede:

sleeping longer than ten hours might be indicative of other problems that might give cardiologists concern, adds Brooke Aggarwal, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and clinical health education specialist in the Division of Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the study. “Scientists are not totally sure if sleeping too much is a risk to health itself, or if it is simply a marker of increased risk, she tells Inverse.

Agreed, misleading title. I know I've always functioned best at 9 hours. High school and early college, I remember my schedule: 9 hours. Mid-20s to mid-30s is vague to me, but after that, my partner says I always slept about 9 hours, and I still do. So I read this article with interest, but it says nothing to my situation. Shrug.

Not saying 9 hours isn't right for you, but if you track yourself using a device like Fitbit, you may be surprised by how much less you're actually sleeping.

I used to equates 8 hours of in-bed time to roughly 8 hours in sleep but found that unless I prepare for an ideal sleeping condition beforehand, it was more like 7.25 hours.

Now I try and set an in-bed goal of 8.5 hours so I can sleep roughly 8 hours.

The Oura tracker provides a lot of insight into sleeping patters, for example, last night I only got 1.3hrs of deep sleep out of 5hrs as the kids kept waking up so it wrecked havoc on my deep sleep.

But you are 100% correct, there is more to sleep than simply closing your eyes and preparing for a good nights rest starts as early as the time when you wake up.

I've had sleep studies (both at home and in a lab, 2 of each iirc). Only one of them determined that I might benefit from a CPAP machine and I was barely above the criteria that determined such. The others did not indicate any significant sleep issue. By that measure I don't see why the clock hours wouldn't reasonably correspond to the rest I actually get and (presumably) require.

Given that I didn't drill down to the study that this article (and other recent articles) are based on, my comment is as much a critique of the journalism as anything else. But by my reading of other studies, 9 hours is in the range of "normal" and this article leaves it in a grey area.

Can a mod change the title to something less misleading please?

>Scientists are not totally sure if sleeping too much is a risk to health itself, or if it is simply a marker of increased risk, she tells Inverse.

More breaking news: people suffering from depression also often suffer from sleeping disorders, including sleeping too much.

But please, don't tell that to the journalist who wrote this article, lest we see titles like "Researches Warn That Snoozing Your Alarm Has a Depressing Downside".

Thanks for summarizing this article in one sentence.

>don't tell that to the journalist who wrote this article

To be fair, headlines are often written by sub-editors rather than the article author. Journalists are often unfairly blamed for sensationalist headlines that they had no part in writing. The buried lede may be the journalist's fault, or it could also be the work of a sub-editor.

Anecdotally, most people I know who suffer from depression have insomnia.

Maybe the most ridiculous case of this I've seen. The entire article is basically refuting the framing of the title.

Normally the articles about these studies have one buried sentence discussing that it is very likely the reversed cause and effect is the correct interpretation ... before going right back to giving tips like "don't sleep in regularly".

So I guess this is an improvement on the norm at least.

And that's why people have less and less confidence in the medias//press.

Probably a reason, yes. The main reason, though, I think is the proliferation in what's available. Before we had few broadcasters, and they were pretty consistent; now anyone with an internet connection can broadcast. I don't think people have gotten less educated, but they now face more serious consequences from not being able to judge well.

If I had to guess people needing that much sleep are likely to have an underlying/undiagnosed sleep disorder like sleep apnea, which wreaks havoc on cardiovascular health.

Yep. I slept 7-8 hours all my life, until sleep apnea started to rear it's ugly head last year. Now, I consistently sleep 10-11. It's the only way I've found to not feel miserable and fatigued all day.

Please get a CPAP machine. They do wonders for people with even mild forms of sleep apnea.

CPAP changed my life

Reply on news.ycombinator.com