Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This also flies in the face of things like Fatal Familial Insomnia and Sporadic Fatal Insomnia where patients soon die after suffering though months and months of insomnia[0].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S108707921...
No it doesn't. Those are prion diseases that cause protein transcription errors in the brain. It is completely different from normal insomnia. Not a good example.
When 0% of a group have the deadly variant, that variant is useless for establishing an overall link to early death.
At one point I stopped trying to fight the insomnia, instead just trying to stay up as long as possible. I didn't have a job at the time.
After a few days of practically no sleep but all conscious activity, I'd be playing video games or reading or whatever, I fell into a deep sleep for like 12-14 hours, and when I woke up, I felt refreshed like I'd never felt before, and my depression, well it was gone.
I believe that, just as sleep clears out some brain cruft, not sleeping can perform an inverse service that's almost as vital. The focus on "getting enough sleep" as some kind of religious mantra is keeping us from doing that.
My pet theory is that there are several conditions that look like "depression", one of them is produced by the body to prevent self-harm resulting from acute anxiety. This theory has two important consequences:
1) Trying to ease certain kinds of depression via medication or other direct-action tools is likely to cause unintended side-effects (self-harm, anxiety, mania) that the depression was there to prevent.
2) The body will fight back against any direct intervention, trying to reinstate control over unbalanced psyche, e.g. building up tolerance to medication. A more fruitful approach would be to locate and eviscerate the underlying anxiety-inducing problem; the depression should then lift on its own accord.
Like I said, it's just a pet theory, but it leads itself to validation.
Obviously I am not recommending that anyone try it without medical supervision, but people should at least know that it's an option.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sleep-depriva...
I'm in the middle of stuff and can't google a more concise source but I recall it being about 4-5 days
But your blog post specifically refers to chronic sleep loss.
I woke up thinking it was Monday but it was Tuesday. That took some explaining at work.
Felt amazing after about 30 hours of being awake and after the sleep's "jet lag" wore off.
I never experienced euphoria then, but in my younger years when I could still successfully pull all-nighters I found myself re-energized once the sun rose in the morning and this lasted typically until later that afternoon. This lead to a general rule where if I was planning on staying up that late I always tried to go to bed before the sun came up.
> But while the new report may lift concerns about an early death, it still links insomnia with illnesses such as dementia and depression, reports The Times.
I’ve always felt fine despite sleeping 5 hours. I wonder if the bell curve of what people need is centered on 8 hours and I’m just in the left hand tail somewhere?
https://www.businessinsider.com/some-people-only-need-a-few-...
I guess it’s like mentioning that Obama’s left handed when I say I’m left handed, conservatives would give me a weird look for comparing myself to Obama in any way, however benign.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/02/607638733...
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump...
I eventually found a course[1] that went through a 'sleep restriction' cycle, essentially limiting the amount of time you're allowed in bed to the actual amount of time you're asleep, according to rough measurements through an app or whatever. For me this started at 5.30 hours. It was dreadful, but each week you spent 90%+ of the time actually in bed asleep, you could give yourself another 15 minutes. Eventually I settled on 7.30 as the amount of time I needed.
I now have the occasional bad night, but I don't sweat it, and stick to 7.30 hours in bed each and every night on strict hours. It's transformed my life from the insomnia I had before.
Tons of people will pay good money to be genetically modified with that ability. You should feel lucky.
Given you seem to have spent a lot of time thinking about this, perhaps you've already been to a sleep medicine doctor, but if not, you really should. They'll be able to confirm you're one of the rare individuals who actually won't benefit from more sleep.
https://blog.sleepnumber.com/can-4-hours-of-sleep-a-night-be...
Although it's also possible you have one of the other genes or conditions that alters your sleep needs. But usually that comes with associated side effects. You report feeling fine so not sure what to make of that.
This is part of it, I think. In Why we Sleep, Dr. Walker specifically mentions that we often don't realize how sleep deprived we truly are. Given the fact that, if you rounded the percentage of people who have the mutation needed for less sleep, there's an effectively 0% chance of you having it, I'd say that's what's coming into play here.
Just a few weeks ago I had a few people telling me I was killing myself slowly by only sleeping 5.5 hours/night often times, despite not caring if it'd improve my mental performance.
This journo has no idea of how science functions. Probably thinks Google Scholar is a journal too.
I have a hard time believing long term sleep deprivation doesn't lead to an early death. If lack of sleep makes it harder to stay slim, increases chances of dementia and diabetes well then these issues probably help shorten the life expectancy?
I have a hard time believing this report.
- more in debt than people who work day shifts (the primary cause of debt in the US is medical), and are working night shifts for the differential pay;
- that people working night shifts are less qualified than people who work day shifts at the same salaries, lower qualifications are easy to associate with relatively lower class origins, and sickness goes up as class goes down (lack of preventative care, tougher living conditions)
- or something as trivial as that people who work night shifts smoke more. At night, there are fewer customers and there's more time between customers. There's generally lower staffing, so both fewer coworkers to annoy with your smoke and fewer coworker conversations to distract you from your need for a cigarette. Also, poorer people smoke more.
Why does everyone assume that any correlation is causal, direct, and (a specific callout) completely unrelated to class?
For this however, probably because of followup studies.
1) injecting mice woth cancerous cells and controlling their sleep. In sleep restricted mice it hit faster and harder
2) Sleep impairment is known to increase pathway activity that cancer uses for growth like inflammation
Sure, the occasional time spent in fantasyland can be nice, but I wouldn't want it to be necessary.
Its like i skipped 6-7hours ahead during the night.