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Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

I'll push this one step further: why is our entire society built around the idea that sleep literally doesn't matter?

- Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class.

- College + Sleep? Not gonna happen.

- 24 hour construction in certain part of NYC, check!

- Most cities quiet hours are very precisely 8 hours. Hope your days start at 6:30/7:00 and you're falling asleep precisely at 11pm, and all your neighbors do the same!

- Having attention deficit? Lets start with ADHD medecine, not with a sleep study, no sir.

- Bazillion jobs requiring on call, waking people up at all manner of time, as a standard thing.

- Neighbors woke you up? Toughen up bro!

- Myth around how so many people apparently can do just fine on 5 hours of sleep.

The hospital thing is just a symptom of a society built around lack of respect for sleep. No one seems to consider it an important thing. If you're drowsy because you couldn't sleep, it's considered a minor inconvenience and little more.

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My wife's background is in childhood development. Her job involves keeping up with studies in the field. I remember her talking about this issue. There's evidence that school start times should be flipped for elementary and high school students: elementary going in earlier and high school later. Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes.

Keep in mind that in our school district, elementary school students need to be in by 8:40 while high school students need to be in by 7:50.

Our neighborhood is setup for walking. The elementary school is a six block walk, so most people walk their kids to school. My daughter didn't sleep past 7:00 for most of elementary school. Our experience was that elementary really could have started closer to 8:00.

I'm with you on all your other points. But, I think our experience was significantly different for elementary school.

I would think that would be because teenagers are more likely to stay up late over elementary school kids.

It's a combination of a shifted sleep schedule and teenage brains going through significant, exhausting development.

As a counter-anecdote, we have to get our kids up by 7:30 to get them to their elementary school on time, and it's a battle every single morning. Left to their own devices, they would sleep to at least 8:30.

Kids are different, and we really don't have very good ways of dealing with that in some ways...

So, maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime? Not being snarky, am a parent myself.

It's possible. They are generally in bed by 8:30. We have tried experimenting with pushing it back to 8 and that did not have an obvious effect on their mornings and did make evenings a lot more miserable. Going even earlier than 8 is not really feasible given that dinner generally can't happen until 6pm.

(Our no-longer-elementary-schooler, by the way, never really had this problem. He just seems to sleep a lot less in general.... kids are different.)

Just an idea - you could try putting them to bed 15 min earlier every few days, and if they have trouble sleeping put on a short kids audiobook. Two of the most peaceful I know of from Audible are “The Tailor of Gloucester” read by Meryl Streep and “The Little House”.

Also depends on how young they are, if they are of reading age, then putting them to bed a little earlier and then allowing them to read for 15-20 minutes on their own can also be another way of calming them down.

Some of the kids mindfulness podcasts (Peace Out as an example) are also good for this kind of thing

Scripture Lullabies is really great too - very peaceful & soothing.

One is of reading age, one is just about there.

The one of reading age is already reading after he's in bed. The hard part is getting him to stop and actually go to sleep.

I will look into the podcasts; thank you for the suggestion!

Anecdotally based on my kid (n=1), stopping screen time about an hour before bedtime helps.

However, she still seems wired to fall sleep at a certain time, and we finally decided that fighting biology is a losing battle. The strategy of moving bedtime a little bit earlier each day didn't work at all.

There's definitely no screen time involved anywhere near bedtime. But yes, I'm pretty sure it would not help if there were!

> maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime?

One can try but you will be limited by biology: The problem is that our internal clocks are reset by daylight. You can't just shift yourself to another timezone, since your circadian rhythm will always set itself back to the respective local time. So if your brain prefers you to go to sleep and to wake up at certain points it will always be relative to "local (sunlight) time", not relative to human clock time.

Okay, but you don't have counter-evidence. Yes, kids are different, but YES, we also know that younger children generally desire sleep and wake earlier, and teens desire sleep and wake LATER than adults. Biologically. Why not start from there, and THEN acknowledge that everyone's different, rather than starting from the WORST principles and throw up our hands and say "we can't suit everyone, may as well screw as many people as possible!"?

Where did I suggest starting "from the WORST principles"?

What I would suggest is that there is not a Pareto-optimal solution here short of redesigning how schooling works entirely...

If the schools are fun and a great experience, the kids would wake up at 5 for school. The schools are so boring and useless, the kids obviously find no use or interest in attending them.

The kids are very happy to _go_ to school once they've woken up enough. It's that first 20 minutes after we start trying to wake them up that are miserable.

I actually went to a school corporation where this happened, about 20 years ago. I was in high school. School started at 7:38. We got up around 5:30, boarded the bus at 6:05, arrived to school at 7:00. Elementary school started at 8:55, with a similar length bus pre-schedule.

Our corporation hired a firm to do a study, found that younger children performed much better during earlier hours, and flipped the schedules. The next year, the high school started at 8:50, and the elementary school at 7:45, and the schedules have been essential unchanged since. I can't describe how much of a difference that 1.5 hours made to a 16-year old.

As a father of 3 young children, they rarely sleep past when I have to wake them for school anyway. The same is definitely not true of teenagers.

Makes a little more sense in the parent's position as well. An argument that is normally made to stop school start times from being set later is that the parents have jobs which require them to normally wake up the same time as their kids. Elementary school children obviously need this parental help in the morning much more than high school students who can even possibly get to school by themselves by driving or simply being self-sufficient enough to walk to the bus stop.

I'm envious. My high school started at 7:17am. It was brutal.

I took zero hour PE to add in an extra class and mine started at 6:30 am

OMG! 7:17am, that's crazy. Mine started at 8:30am, it was ok most days, especially later years as I generally enjoyed going, depending on what class was first. But 9am would have been better. (as that's when primary school started for me), which suited me really well.

> Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes.

I work in the education industry, and the education experts in our company have been saying this for years.

We had a brave school superintendent a few years ago who tried to get our local high school started at 9 a.m. instead of the traditional much earlier start. (Classes at 8 a.m., with many extra-curricular activities like band practice and swim practice at 7 a.m.) This is in the western U.S.

All the sleep-cycle research is on his side. And he was friendly, focused and persistent. But his campaign failed.

A later school start would have cut into the available daylight for after-school sports practices and events. Perhaps 30% of students participated in these, and perhaps 10% in total (or their parents!) were adamant that anything that short-changed the football team was an evil that needed to be stopped.

Still, the don't-do-it crowd was vocal and implacable. Eventually everyone else gave up. So high school students continue to get out of bed, very groggy, at a time that's too early for them, and struggle to get a grip on their morning classes. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Its always bizarre that they don't have activities involving daylight first so that school could run into the dark and nobody would care because you are indoors anyway.

Its basically that society used to require daylight to get anything done two centuries ago, and most people worked the farm by daylight, so fast forward generations and centuries and we are still structuring our lives around that - such that we are actually outside in the dark and doing our main activities indoors during the day.

Humanity is nothing if not set in its ways.

>Its always bizarre that they don't have activities involving daylight first so that school could run into the dark and nobody would care because you are indoors anyway.

Exactly!

Your last sentence could not be more true.

The other problem is do you have any idea of how much bureaucratic nonsense would have to be changed in order to make one simple change such as changing the schedule of a school start and stop time.

It makes you wonder how hard it is to change things that may be of higher importance than this.

My theory is that there is an eternal secret war between morning people and evening people and the morning people are winning. Resistance must be done in secret but fight back in every way you can.

The first rule of the resistance is that we don’t talk about the resistance with people who find 5:30am tolerable.

;)

Cough. Timezones. Cough...

And both groups don't even acknowledge the existence of 3rd shift workers. It's not even just businesses being closed or noise. As a night person even going on a walk can get you harassed by the cops or ticketed for being in a park. There's an implicit assumption, one that's been baked into law, that anyone doing things at night is up to no good.

It's because they keep getting the worm.

The trouble is that by the time the evening people get going, the morning people have already defined the world's schedules.

As father of three (a 3 year old and 1 year old twins), I've found that when we only had one kid, our schedule remained basically the same. But now with three, we are somewhat forced to shift toward being morning people. With multiple, good luck getting them back down to sleep if the sun is up. By the time you succeed, the others will decide to be awake. Also morning routines take longer, so you need to start your day earlier to compensate.

I feel like a big part of it is that very young children are geared towards being early (at least from my perspective) risers. Parents end up shifting their day to account for that. And then as kids get older, their rhythms start moving to starting the day later, but by that time the parents' routine is molded around being up early.

Not sure where I'm going with this exactly, just an observation of mine.

I think sleep is losing the war against staying awake, both in the morning and the evening. As a morning person, I often have a hard time participating in social activities when I'm trying to get to sleep by 9-10pm.

And it's a known biological fact that during teenager years the circadian rhythm is affected and normal sleep is pushed later in the night. Having teens wake up early is literally fighting biology and can't but have negative results on their health, education, socialization, etc.

Sure, I barely remember high school seeing how I was half asleep most of it. There was not a day when I did not fall asleep in class early in the morning. I remember having to fake like I was looking down to pick something up just so I could sleep.

I remember trying to sleep in between classes. Like, I would close my eyes and touch the wall in the hallway so that I could "sleep" while I was walking to my next class.

I had the same problem in college. Classes started at 0830 but for me it was still too early. I was always falling asleep and after a while I just stopped attending.

I just started attending the sections of the same class that started at 930, except on test days. The professors knew I was doing it, but didn't seem to mind.

I had a math teacher surreptitiously call the office and report that I was a drug user, due to my falling asleep at his 10:30 class. I always felt extremely drowsy 3-4 hours after rising. Now I wonder if it’s related to how I have been diagnosed with celiac disease, which has caused extreme fatigue 2-4 hours after eating in my adult life.

How many desks in high school did I drool on while sleeping I wonder?

The Elementary school comment rings so true. We have to get my seven year old up at 6:15 to get to school at 7:30. That's if we take him, if he caught the bus he would have to be AT the stop by 6:15. Every day is a battle against exhaustion. On the days that school is delayed due to weather and he can get up naturally at maybe 7:30, he is so much better. He feels better, his attitude is more positive, and he does so much better with learning.

Why does the school bus pick him up more than an hour before school starts? That seems ridiculous.

To pick up the other kids on a long route.

> To pick up the other kids on a long route.

The obvious problem then being that the routes are too long.

You have to wonder if there isn't some kind of carpool incentive the school could give to parents to get rid of 90-100% of buses. How many stay at home parents with 9-passenger vehicles would be willing to make $500/month by filling their minivan with other kids when they deliver their own kid as they were going to do regardless?

Cheaper than buses, kids spend less time sitting in vehicles because there are 8 kids instead of 30, fewer vehicles (and especially fewer huge diesel buses) on the road because those parents were driving their kids anyway.

All kinds of liability problems with that. School bus drivers are presumably vetted and trained to deal with not just getting from point A to point B, but dealing with students along the way.

School bus driver "vetting" is checking their driving and criminal record and "training" is essentially how to operate a large vehicle. The first could still be done, the second doesn't apply.

And the liability issues all seem to go the other way, don't they? Buses are less safe (they don't even have seatbelts), problematic incidents involve a larger number of students, the buses are more officially associated with the schools, etc. And actual parents obviously have better incentives to make sure their kids are safe than someone who is only doing it for a paycheck.

In 9th grade, my bus driver let an obviously angry man onto the bus.

Some kids threw peanuts out the window and into his car. He followed us to the next stop and pounded on the door. She courteously opened the door and in he came, shouting the whole way.

The awkwardness was compounded when I realized I had known this man for 10 years.

I don’t have a very high opinion of bus driver training.

I actually did the math on this in my district. Based on the cost data they published, it costs (roughly) $1.5-2/ride on our school bus system. Allowing 20 minutes for pick up and drop off, no current ride-sharing system I know about would be cost competitive, but its a relatively close thing.

RE carpooling, this probably cost competitive but their are other factors that make this harder than you think. Buses are allowed exemptions to booster seat rules, minivans aren't- do you leave the van full of car of booster seats all day? Do kids carry their own? My kindergartener still has issues buckling their self in in a crowded car, that really pushes up pickup/drop off time spent. How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble? Who is liable for accidents? Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

None of these are insolvable, but they also aren't easy.

School busing in the era of autonomous vehicles gets a lot more interesting- you could have much smaller and efficient pick up routes. However, I think it will take (US at least) society a while before they are willing to leave 4-8 children alone in a car for 30 minutes a day. It just takes a couple 5th graders fighting in a car before the district decides supervision is needed.

> Buses are allowed exemptions to booster seat rules, minivans aren't

Buses are allowed exemptions for pragmatic reasons, not safety reasons. Whatever the rule is, it should be the same for both, in which case there is no relative advantage. If you're not willing to allow it for a minivan, why are you willing to allow it for a bus? (This also doesn't apply to high school students who don't need them anyway.)

> How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble?

How do you do it when the school bus driver is? You maintain some level of reserve and you send someone else.

> Who is liable for accidents?

The insurance company. The better question is who pays for the insurance, but considering that the school would already be paying for it for a school bus, it still doesn't appear to be any disadvantage for the school either way.

> Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

They're voluntarily choosing to drive someone else's kids for money. If you want to do that and they don't, they don't get put on the roster and don't get paid. It seems like the only real question is whether (or how often) it's worth the cost given the expected probability of drug abuse in your parent population.

> Buses are allowed exemptions for pragmatic reasons, not safety reasons.

No, buses are safer, period, even without seatbelts. Occupants of bigger vehicles have much better outcomes in auto collisions, and buses are some of the biggest vehicles on the road.

Also, most school buses don't do much freeway driving... Not having a seatbelt in 25 mph collision is one thing. Not having a seatbelt in a 70 mph collision is lethal.

> No, buses are safer, period, even without seatbelts. Occupants of bigger vehicles have much better outcomes in auto collisions, and buses are some of the biggest vehicles on the road.

By causing much worse outcomes for occupants of the other vehicle or pedestrians in the same collision. Not really something you want to have around your schools and homes where your kids may be the pedestrians or occupants of the other vehicles.

It's also no help for single-vehicle collisions, which are nearly two thirds of auto collisions. 12 ton bus vs. 2000 ton overpass, overpass wins.

In addition to the unfortunate high center of gravity that increases the probability of rollovers (which are especially likely to cause injury without seatbelts).

> Also, most school buses don't do much freeway driving... Not having a seatbelt in 25 mph collision is one thing. Not having a seatbelt in a 70 mph collision is lethal.

Which is a reason why statistics make school buses appear safer than they actually are -- a minivan picking up the same kids would be on the same roads with the same traffic speeds, even if the "average" minivan would be on different roads traveling at higher speeds.

That may even be a good basis for the rule -- car seat required if traveling more than 35MPH.

> By causing much worse outcomes for occupants of the other vehicle or pedestrians in the same collision. Not really something you want to have around your schools and homes where your kids may be the pedestrians or occupants of the other vehicles.

This has nothing to do with whether or not bus riders need to wear seat belts.

> It's also no help for single-vehicle collisions, which are nearly two thirds of auto collisions. 12 ton bus vs. 2000 ton overpass, overpass wins.

> In addition to the unfortunate high center of gravity that increases the probability of rollovers (which are especially likely to cause injury without seatbelts).

You're making buses sound like deathtraps. And yet, per passanger-mile traveled, they, despite lacking seatbelts, are two orders of magnitude safer then personal automobiles. [1] 0.11 deaths/billion miles, versus 7.3 deaths.

Buses, the way we currently use them, are much safer then cars. This isn't even a point of debate.

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transpor...

You are right in "the way we currently use them", but that doesn't make buses inherently as safe as you imply. Buses get professional, trained drivers, subject to substance abuse testing and rest laws, consistently driving the same route. In the resource you shared, it looked like professionally driven cars (presumably mostly taxis and town cars? from 2000-2009) also had dramatically lower death rates, although they didn't give the deaths/passenger mile number.

> no relative advantage

Speed doesn’t kill, change in speed kills.

With significant mass at play, a bus in a collission doesn’t change speed as suddenly as a car, thus passengers experience less G force.

The rule does appear to relate to weight, and safety reasons:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/01/why-the-schoo...

Notable quote:

> Federal agencies like the National Highway Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have long maintained that even without seat belts, school buses are the safest mode of transportation for children. Between 2005 and 2014, NHTSA reported 1,191 crashes involving school buses or other vehicles functioning as school buses. That makes up less than 1 percent of the 331,730 fatal collisions in those 10 years. Among the 133 people who die each year on average in related crashes, only 11 are bus passengers or drivers.

However, that doesn’t help when the bus collides with an immovable object, so the rules are being reconsidered.

Sounds like my experience growing up in a rural area. My high school was on the other side of our county, so I was the first person on the bus every morning, 60 minute ride each way.

While on subject of school buses, my driver would not let me cross the street on the way home, so even though I was the first stop, I’d have to wait until we looped all the way around to the end. My stepdad had to scream down their throats and they finally caved, I came home an hour earlier. Talk about the stupidity of that situation!

Just realized I wrote basically the same comment as you. I wish my stepdad had yelled at them! It didn't even occur to me that I could complain.

Oh it didn’t occur to me right away either. This was in middle school and I was not the smartest cookie, so I must have wasted at least 5 trips before the revelation occurred.

Kind of off topic, but a fun story: Growing up, we were the last kids off our bus and the ride took an hour. The silly thing was, there was a different bus that drove past our literally five minutes after school got out. Eventually they figured it out and switched the route we were on, but by then we were old enough to not ride the bus most of the time.

For me it was often 90 minutes to get home, but about 30 minutes into the trip we would drive right by my house. Problem was, it was on the other side of the street, and they wouldn't let me cross. This was in middle school, on a street that I crossed by myself all the time.

Traffic? Traffic at that time of day can be crushing. Arounds here, anyway.

Small town America. The high school I attended in 9th grade was a 30 minute drive away if there was no traffic and first bell was at 7:00 AM. It also served 2-3 small towns in the area. I took the bus before I could drive, and my bus stop was one of the first on the route that had to pick up kids from all over the place because we didn't have a lot of busses. So in order to get me to school on time for 7:00 AM, I got picked up at 5:45 AM.

Jeez... couldn’t they spend a couple bucks more for extra service?

Now that’s in essence the whole problem with tax cuts and privatizations: public service is cut to the bone, and privatized ones maximize their profits together with the citizenry’s inconvenience.

more schools are consolidated these days. In some places, one large school serves 3 counties. I don't know why.

It's more expensive to run three schools. And if those three schools don't each have enough students, they're going to be underfunded as funding is largely based on the number of students.

So the problem starts multiplying.

1. Can't afford supplies, facilities, etc.

2. Can't afford to be properly staffed.

3. The school is invariably going to be under-performing and we've decided as a society that if your school isn't performing well we're going to penalize it by cutting funding, which exacerbates the funding problem.

4. You've got all sorts of people, fiscal hawks, tax payers, etc who don't really want to pay for education, let alone pay for half empty schools and all that overheard. No one really wants to subsidize a ghost town...

So the result is school districts that are too small to make sense being combined together to try and pool their resources and maintain quality and efficiency.

So if you live out in super rural or low population density areas, and families aren't churning out children like they're old school farmers or Catholics, then this is the sort of reality you'll have to deal with.

For this and most questions regarding school schedules, consider the point that the timing is for the convenience of the adults who need to go l get to work / back home / other tasks, not the children. A school system that puts kids first would start by 9am but how would society cope with that ?

> A school system that puts kids first would start by 9am but how would society cope with that ?

Do it like daylight savings time. Have everything start two hours later, all year. The issue for the kids is time related to sunrise, not time related to when the parents go to work.

> The issue for the kids is time related to sunrise, not time related to when the parents go to work.

Is that what it is? I thought it was total sleep duration. Do you have a link explaining more?

> I thought it was total sleep duration.

They're related. If you go to sleep at the same time (relative to actual-midnight) and get up an hour before school, you get more sleep when school starts later.

Or else what difference would any of it make? If all you did was start school at 9:30 instead of 7:30 and then kids used that to go to bed two hours later, nothing has changed. But when people go to sleep (and are inclined to wake up) has a lot to do with daylight.

If you go to sleep at the same time (relative to actual-midnight) and get up an hour before school, you get more sleep when school starts later.

That still doesn't seem all that helpful. If my high school had started at 10 instead of 8, I'd be out of class at 5:30 instead of 3:30, done with fencing practice at 8 instead of 6, etc. I'd finish the night's homework two hours later, and finishing that was already well past sundown even on the original schedule. A later start time wouldn't have been an opportunity to stay up later -- it would have been an obligation to stay up later.

The only way you'll be getting more sleep is by doing less non-sleep. You can't add hours to the day. What you can do is to arrange the sleeping hours so that they're the ones that come more naturally to more of the people in that age group.

The total lack of unscheduled time is an independent problem.

8:45-9 is the standard school start time in the UK at least.

Our middle schools start at 9:15am and society copes just fine.

Where I grew up the high school was a 45 minute drive away. We would get picked up an hour early so there was a little leeway in case of traffic.

Same, in Indiana. High school started at 7:45, bus picked up at 6:45.

A lot of elementary schools start early because of parent pressure to start early, because parents need to get their kids to school so they can get to work themselves.

We are lucky that our school district provides before and after school programs since my daughter's elementary school doesn't start until after 9:00 AM.

I don’t see a lot of evidence that elementary schools have started classes earlier as more households have relied on both parents working. I _have_ seen an increase in after-school programs to make up the gap between school letting out and parents getting off of work.

The battle to get up early is about as old as time. We aren’t that far removed from an agrarian-based economy, and farm work has always required very early rising (my father grew up raising dairy cows: he was fond of reminding us as children that the cows don’t care how tired you are).

“Early to bed and early to rise” is not a modern day mantra, but I fear we’ve kept the wake up call constant while continuing to push how long we stay up. I don’t know how to fix it: if your kid is in an after-school program until 6, comes home to eat dinner, and then still has to do homework... I don’t see how an early bedtime is even possible.

>I don’t see a lot of evidence

Have you actually looked? Ask some parents and see what replies you get.

I’m a father of three. I’ve had my kids in schools in four different cities. If we’re playing anecdotes, growing up my elementary school started at 8:00. My kid’s have had school start around 7:45. I don’t think that 15 minutes is the issue.

Continuing our story time, as a child a very small number of my classmates were part of after-school programs. Kids today are much more scheduled and for far later into the day. I grew up wandering the streets and maybe had baseball practice one day a week with a game on Saturday. I was home from school around 3:30, had homework done by 4:30-5:00, ate dinner around 5:30, and was put to bed (in elementary school) by 8.

I remember the thrill of having my bed time pushed to 9 around 8th grade. Bed time was 10 in high school except for weekends.

Very few people rode the bus to school: most had a parent drop them off.

This game changes significantly when both parents work. If both parents have to be in the office by 8, kids have to take the bus. Which means they have to get up very early. If both parents work until 5, then kids have to be in after-school programs. They’ll get home by 6-ish and have to fit in dinner, homework, and whatever activities they need to put on their resume to get into college.

You forgot my favorite. In California (and probably other states), the building codes for apartment sound proofing are much weaker than for condos.

If you wanted to sleep, you shouldn’t have chosen to rent. Your landlord couldn’t be expected to pay $1000’s [1] extra to build your apartment, after all.

(1) https://www.remodelingexpense.com/costs/cost-soundproof-insu...

Counterpoint: regulations like these are part of what leads to an affordability crisis. It all adds up.

I don't have anything backing this up, buty personal experience is that NIMBY is partly because of the lack of proper building code. People are TERRIFIED of neighbor noise, most of which could be dealt with with better insulation.

I hear this claim thrown around a lot, but I've never seen the legal code pointing to a difference in minimum standards for apartments vs condo. Section 25 (http://mlacoustics.com/projects/multifamily/CA.noise.final.p...) treats them the same.

Do you know where the differing laws are?

My best semester in college I managed to have a schedule of classes that started at 2pm and finished by 8pm.

Pretty sure it's the only time in my life where I've literally slept as much as I wanted...and felt great.

Same. My dorm-mates were confounded that I was getting straight "A" grades and seemingly always sleeping.

My exams were regularly scheduled at 09:00 in the morning. I would regularly gasp when reviewing the errors I made, wondering how drunk I must have been to make such gross ones. Indeed I was drunk... from sleep deprivation. I wonder how much has this affected my overall performance as a student and later as a professional...

Because civilizations are built and ruled by Type A people, who usually sleep less and get up super early, they are known to die younger though.

And %3.3 people have DSPS, who are just simply labelled as sleazy.

To add to your list, a big one for me is the ritualization of coffee. Can't focus until you've had a cup!

Which is honestly a lot like not being able to calm down until you've had a cigarette. Doesn't seem to be a problem for those who just never do it.

School starts early because most adults have to get to work by 8:30 or 9, and they need to drop off their kids early enough to drive potentially a considerable distance to that work after the drop off.

The school thing is a challenge. If the parents have to be at work 8-5 plus time to drive there, the kids have to be up at the same time so they can be dropped off either at school or a day care setting to be put on a bus later. If the parent has a longer drive to work, the child must get up that much earlier. I don't really know how to solve this problem.

Our school district has a before school program starting as early as 7:00 so kids that need to be can be dropped off early, but most kids arrive much later. Classes don't start until 9:00 at our school.

Isn't that the same thing though? It's a very common problem without an easy solution.

Kind of the same, but at least it gives parents options. Most kids arrive just before classes start, instead of forcing everybody to get there really early.

One theory I've heard is that sleep deprivation is used as part of conditioning techniques. Doctors are conditioned to tolerate things most people would not (cutting people open, touching diseased people, dealing with people dying) and sleep deprivation may be one way in which their minds are made malleable. The same with grad students and soldiers. This may be one of the primary methods by which society makes young people behave the way it wants them to; mess with their minds, then tell them what to do, and repeat it long enough until they keep doing it on their own.

> Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class.

The primary purpose of K-12 education these days is to keep kids locked up so their parents can go to work. If Mom and Dad have to be at work at 8, as is often the case, the kids have to be at school before 8. Teenagers, who naturally sleep in later than younger kids, would be better served starting school at 9, but because our society still infantilizes teenagers and young adults, we can't systemically trust them to fend for themselves in the mornings.

This isn't to say that K-12 schools are entirely unconcerned with actual education, but it has to accomplish this goal within the constraint of keeping children locked up.

> College + Sleep? Not gonna happen.

Wait, what? I slept so much in college. Way more than at any other point in my life. You schedule your own classes and aren't actually in class that much, gives you plenty of time to sleep.

Probably depends what you study and at what rate. Alot of students work fulltime in addition to studying fulltime, which basically puts sleep and eating secondary or even tertiary. Socializing isn't on the radar for many.

Working full time and going to school full time is basically having two full time jobs... that would clearly hinder sleep.

The statement, however, said college means no sleep. That is a bit disingenuous to say that was meant to imply the person was working full time.

That would be like saying "living in an apartment means no sleep!" because you lived in an apartment above a 24 hour bowing alley.

Fair enough, but I understood your comment to mean that college was a "point in [your] life" that had ample time for sleep. I was just pointing out that that point in many people's lives has less sleep due to college, not more.

I worked 3 jobs, was on the newspaper, ran track, and took a full course load on top of commuting home when I could -- I probably slept more than I do now but it was def not enough!

Sounds like the college part was only a minor contributor to the no sleep... it was doing all the other things along with it that lead to no sleep.

My workload in college was insane. For one of my semesters I had zero social life and slept a day out of two, one out of three near the end. It was awful. I didn't have a job and lived with my parents who handled food too. Not many people made it through. Was a shitty community college. I would have had an easier time at MIT, heh.

I've had some of the best lucid dreams I've ever had while my sleep was disrupted by living in the second story of a building smack dab in the corner of a very busy street corner during broad daylight. I had a night job so my sleep schedule was from 7am to 3pm. All in all I had half a dozen lucid dreams and one mindblowingly extreme out-of-body experience which left me breathless upon waking. I think I even had a night terror or two while I was there.

I didn't hate it. Sleeping during the day has taught me how to put a pillow over my head in order to block out all light, and now I can sleep in the brightest loudest room without trouble.

I haven't had lucid dreams since then, or if I have, they've been really really rare and extremely hard to remember. Now that I think about it... Could my lucid dreams and OOB have been triggered by smog from the traffic in that area??

>I've had some of the best lucid dreams I've ever had while my sleep was disrupted by living in the second story of a building smack dab in the corner of a very busy street corner

Though not during the day, I lived in a second floor apartment that overlooked a traffic circle that had an elevated subway stop, was a main route for ambulances going to the hospital a block away, and a crucial interchange for traffic entering/existing that part of the city. I barely slept for the first few days and then got the best sleep of my life. I rarely woke up for anything other than my nightly trip to the restroom.

Fast forward a few years and I now live in the suburbs. I've been woken up several times in the past month by the sounds of a mouse scurrying in the ceiling of an adjacent room.

Tell me about it. We have to get our high school kids up at 5am to get to school on time while the middle schoolers don't have to get up till 8am or so (school starts at 9:15).

I deadass pre-planned being asleep during my second hour of high school, after recognizing that whatever alertness I summoned in the walk, the bus, and first interactions of the day would dissipate by then. If a study hall was an option, I would take it and sleep at my desk. If it wasn't, I would still sleep at my desk and try to cold-test my way into a D.

Damn very nice summary. I do think the kids in school thing, however, is more of a symptom of our generation as parents- they love staying up late, thus keeping their kids up late. just sayin... that being said - NOT A PARENT!

When I've stayed over at friends house (who are parents) they have very strict go to bed times for their kids. THOSE darn crazy kids are up at 5 or 5:30 banging around the house full of energy.

Add time necessary to get to school when your commute isn't the best and it becomes even more fun.

I remember having to get up at 5:20 AM four days a week, to leave 20 minutes later to catch a bus at 5:58 AM to be get to high school in time for classes starting at 7:10 AM. And a teacher complaining to my parents that I often seem tired.

"Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class"

That's the only reason I don't put my daughter on the school bus. I can save her an extra 30 minutes of sleep by driving her to the school myself.

I guess on paper going without sleep gives you some kind of competitive advantage? A company that believes otherwise could bet on giving their workers more sleep and they should gain an advantage by doing so.

Most companies (not startups) don't have their employees work much more than 40 hours.

Lack of sleep is very rarely an issue with your employer.

In which fields? Financial/Law firms are routinely scrutinized because they overwork their employees, just to name a few. Doctors, EMS personnel, Police, all work more than 40 hours. There may not be mandated work hours over 40, but the culture/workload creates that environment anyway.

Even with an 8 hour day plus a long commute, there are at least 14-15 hours a day left for you. If you aren't finding time in there to sleep, that's on you.

Good thing that work is literally my only responsibility as an adult. /s

As others have said, sleep deprivation is the norm in certain fields like healthcare. There are also jobs where you work 40 hours but the schedules are so random that they can also screw with your sleep such as retail. And a lot of top performing companies in a variety of fields expect people to always be on.

People shouldn't be so beholden that they need someone else to give them sleep.

This can be done indirectly by reducing the work day from 8 hours to 6 hours, those who otherwise need to get up early to commute may have a bit more time to settle down in the evening.

And reducing the productivity of workers by 25% couldn't possibly have any bad effects. /s

In all seriousness, I've seen mentions of studies that suggest going from 8 hours to 6 does _not_ correlate with a 25% decrease in productivity, because most people aren't consistently productive for all 8 hours of a day. I know in my case, there's an extremely strong inverse correlation with productivity and how bored I am with a particular task. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Actually there was an interesting study done to show that most people in the office environment on average do 4 hours of work (actual work) and the rest is breaks, distractions, chit chat, bathroom breaks etc. I have found the 4 hour figure to be much too generous, I’d say on average people work less than 4 hours (maybe closer to 3) the other 5 are a total waste.

When I first started freelancing hourly, it was a sobering feeling to see how little of my time was actually billable for actual work. It takes random screen grabbing software to make you realize that most of the time you are not working. Of course those days have long passed for me but I’m always left to remember just how wasteful office workplaces are and how much time people waste away in their life. More than half of their working life is a total waste. Tell me, how does that make you feel? :)

I'd think so, if you're up against enough people willing to sacrifice sleep/social lives to get a job/project done faster

This assumes raw time spent guarantees faster delivery with comparable quality of work in spite of efficiency implications of low morale and insufficient sleep. I'm sure it does help to a point but I imagine there's an individual threshold where it seizes to be productive.

Having to choose a schedule that irritates the least number of people is somewhat different than hospital staff poking and prodding people every hour or so throughout the night, don't you think?

No. My point is that I'm every bit of society we consider sleep as something you can cut as opposed to something critical. Yes my examples were different, but they have the same root cause: quality of sleep isn't considered a big deal.

Except your examples (several of them, at least) are essentially unsolvable. We can't find a time that everyone will agree on, so we collectively chose an arbitrary time that most people seem to deal with okay, and ran with it.

The hospital staff absolutely knows that sleep is important, but they have competing goals that are deemed important enough to interrupt sleep for. That seems very much different from societal-level / cultural priorities.

You might have forgotten to mention our society's addiction to caffeine... Am writing this sleep-deprived, on my fourth espresso, check. :-)

This is bullshit bravado, even when increasingly studies point out the correlation between all kinds of diseases and poor sleep.

Instead of elementary school did you mean secondary? Here elementary school starts the latest.

Dunno, don't have kids. I just know I see the little kids walking around with their parents whenever I'm unfortunate enough to have to be out that early, and I assume hundreds of 9 years old didn't all have to go to a birthday party at 7 am all at the same time.

what a good summary. so true.

> Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class

Isn't the amount of sleep you get determined by when you go to sleep? So if elementary school kids need more sleep just... put them to bed earlier?

While I think most elementary school kids probably should be put to bed earlier (even if their school doesn't start so early), it's easier said than done. Imagine having to get home from your commute, feed your family, getting the older siblings to/from extracurriculars and then getting the elementary school ones to bed by 7:00/8:00pm.

Yeah but time is zero sum. Let's pretend school now starts at 9. Now everything is shifted by 2 hours. Extracurriculars are now 2 hours later, feeding your family is now 2 hours later, etc.

"Imagine having to get home from your commute, feed your family, getting the older siblings to/from extracurriculars and then getting the elementary school ones to bed by 9:00/10:00pm. It's easier said than done! School needs to start at 11!"

I must be missing something. How is your family life going to be less hectic after work with school being 2 hours later?

> Let's pretend school now starts at 9. Now everything is shifted by 2 hours.

(1) The school day is too long and the school year too short, anyway, so chopping two hours off the end of the day and making it up by extending the school year would be a win.

(2) Even if you don't do that, eliminating the end-of-school to end-of-typical-fulltime-work gap would be a different win.

Biological clock aside, the kids might not be able to sleep earlier. Can't go to sleep before 7 if the jack hammers are going on until 7, for example.

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