Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen. Your body knows exactly how much sleep it needs.
But that's not compatible with the "work hard, play hard" and hustler mentality I guess. Let's see how it impacts us when we get older, I'm fairly certain that the younger you are the more abuse your body can take, it usually has lasting consequences though.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-scary-ways-sleep-depr...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-sleep-crimes-adults_n_58...
If I sleep 5-7 hours on the otherhand, I feel much better.
As a personal anecdote: I once slept for 10.5-11 hours a day for about 2 weeks. I decided that I need to catch up on sleep, so I went to bed at 8PM every night, fell asleep by 9 and awoke between 7:30 and 8. After about 2 weeks I stopped falling asleep by 9 and would fall asleep around 11 and wake up at 7, at which time I stopped my "sleep fattening". I did feel like a weirdo going to bed at 8, but it felt great at the end.
YMMV, but if you can sleep for 12 hours a night I would consider letting your body do it for at least several days to see if it would switch to a different mode that your would like more. My 2c.
source: am old.
Especially in the winter, waking up in a room with sub 30% humidity is brutal.
I had and have the problem that if I don't put alarm on, I will oversleep and my day gets kind of ruined. So for me I always have to set an alarm and if I feel tired and have nothing on morning I'll maybe bump it by an hour. For me the best sleep schedule is going to bed by 12-2 and waking up between 8:00-9:30. This way if I occasionally stay up till 3-5 my sleep rhythm won't be completely ruined.
I have experimented with various different tricks and styles, recently after a long vacation in different timezone allowed me to completely transform my sleep rhythm. After I came back I woke up automatically 6:00 sharp without any alarm, and I went to sleep 22-23 which was quite bizarre. Sadly though I enjoy late evenings much more than early mornings so even if I went to sleep 0:30 I'd wake up at 6, very tired, which led me to sleep longer and in the end ruining the rhythm.
But what I've found out is, that you want to wake up exactly during the light sleep cycle as that's when you feel no tiredness at all waking up. If you try waking up during REM or deep sleep it will feel like pulling teeth. For me the best time is somewhere around 8 if I go to sleep by 1-2 which counts up as ~7 hours. Should probably track it better but yeah. Also I bought wake-up light alarm clock which is interesting but I don't know yet has it actually an effect.
Although I have to say following an exact schedule is probably the best solution sleep-wise. Decide a time when you have to be at bed and an exact time when you have to wake up, no matter what. I think doing this during my vacation is what caused it to be so ingrained in my body that I was able to wake up at 6 without any alarm.
I feel like there really are people who have different needs.
I set an alarm for 6am, but even without one I'm up between 6-7.
Personally, I think the key for people who have a hard time sleeping is consistency. If someone is trying to go to sleep at 10pm Sunday through Thursday, but then staying up until 2-3am Friday and Saturday it's no wonder they can't get on a schedule.
A possible explanation is that you've trained your body to wake at that time -- but it isn't necessarily enough/appropriate sleep.
Without those feelings of tiredness, how would you know if it's training or your actual internal clock working correctly?
The whole thing is to listen to your body, the problem is when people do 12 to 6 with an alarm, while they'd actually sleep form 10 to 7 without external constraints.
Of course, lying down for a long time will have side effect on your muscles (headaches, groggyness) but I'm sure your body would return to normal sleep patterns after some time.
Check "Why we sleep" recommended elsewhere in this thread if you want to fix it.
Try to increase your bedtime slowly to 8 hours, maybe 9(but not much more than that) and keep at that for a while. See if there is any benefit.
It is unlikely that you are part of the tiny minority that requires less than 6 hours of sleep, so you should be sleep-deprived with only 5 hours.
Personal anecdote: my sleep patterns were very similar. Until I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. My body wanted more sleep – but the more I slept, the more apnea events I would have. So, I would wake up feeling like death, and with a headache, due to my brain getting starved of oxygen.
Not saying that this is your problem or that there is even a problem, but you could raise this issue on your next checkup. Maybe your doctor will have some suggestions.
Because it is weird, as you rightly point out. Trust your judgement.
In my experience it takes years for circadian changes to stabilize, at least once they are sufficiently disrupted (I have Non-24 and have been able to stop shifting my sleep for over a year at a time but eventually it comes back). At the same time, it seems to me that catching up on sleep is only really possible to a limited extent and only for a couple of days after sleep deprevation no matter how long the deprevation. Getting sufficient sleep for a while after sleep deprevation does seem to help reduce the effects of future deprevation, but I don't think getting extra sleep really helps. Keeping a stable circadian rhythm with suffient sleep is most important.
I suspect that if not something like apnea that 10-12 hour sleep might be due to how sleep is maintained. There is a sleep or awake switch in the brain and also a "maintain the current state" network. To make the shift to awake cleanly, the "maintain current state" system is likely stronger in the morning (on a circadian rhythm, not just "after you wake up") but if you manage to be sleeping at the time it kicks in more strongly it may keep you asleep for hours even without any particular need to be asleep. This isn't necessarily what is actually happening but I think it fits the evidence.
I don't think longer sleep is always worse than the alternative, however I suspect if it feels necessary then it is a sign of a more serious sleep issue and if it doesn't feel necessary then aiming for a regular circadian rhythm with sufficient sleep is a better option.
This was the case for me until I started (a) going to bed shortly after dark and (b) leaving the blinds open.
An really incredible thing happened: I started feeling tired around dusk, and awake at dawn.
Note that it's best to avoid/limit screens and LED lights past dark.
You're likely waking at the optimal time of completion of a complete sleep cycle. That doesn't necessarily mean you're getting enough sleep overall.
I force myself to not sleep more than 7 hours.
If you can get several weeks of vacation with no alarm, you may find yourself sleeping 10-12 hours a night for a while, but eventually it should decrease.
Now my body sleeps 8 hours and I wake up the same time every day.
If I stay up later than usual then I'll often wake up at the usual time and just sleep a little less, but sometimes I'll sleep a bit longer. Either way I still feel very tired breaking out of my schedule. I'm also lucky enough to have an employer allows a relatively flexible schedule so I could experiment with this for a while.
Or, try camping for a few days. Try not to look at your phone after sunset.
As far as the “work hard, play hard” mentality, I’ve chosen to work at startups/companies where I can come into the office flexibly (usually around 10) and it’s worked great.
One final note: I wonder if the rampant depression and suicidal thoughts I had as a teenager, that are now entirely gone, were a product of the fact that I was forced to wake up every day at 6 AM to an alarm. I was such an anti-social, depressed creep it’s terrifying to think we continually subject our children to this sleep-deprivating schedule.
The whole idea of 'natural' is normative garbage.
Let me guess, you sleep immediately on a plane as soon as doors close, too? We're not all built the same way.
Well that's a feature of our economy, and a whole other issue. Artifact of the industrial revolution if I'm not mistaken; "8 hrs of sleep, 8 hrs of work, 8hrs of entertainment"; which is obviously a lie and not much more than propaganda, but people seems to put up with it. It doesn't work very well you you add commute time, chores, &c. in the mix.
> Let me guess, you sleep immediately on a plane as soon as doors close, too? We're not all built the same way.
Quite the opposite, I always need 0.5-1 hour to fall asleep, and that's in my pitch black, noise free bedroom. Never slept in a plane, albeit I don't fly very often.
> The whole idea of 'natural' is normative garbage
You do you. Technology evolved much faster than our bodies during the last 200-300 years, our internal cycle still heavily relies on light (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm), now you can chose to ignore that or go with what evolution designed you for. You can brush of "natural" as being a hippie thing if you want, at the end of the day we're all slave to our bodies, better at least try to please it than to force it in "unnatural" processes.
I'm just a regular guy with a regular IT job, of course my experience won't match a factory worker, but if I can help a few people here and there I've done my part.
You're not mistaken, just missing the critical detail: it was a demand of the labor movement. An improvement over the nightmare of far longer hours in the early industrial revolution. But we've digressed.
> The whole idea of 'natural' is normative garbage
You do you. Technology evolved much faster than our bodies during the last 200-300 years, our internal cycle still heavily relies on light (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm), now you can chose to ignore that or go with what evolution designed you for. You can brush of "natural" as being a hippie thing if you want, at the end of the day we're all slave to our bodies, better at least try to please it than to force it in "unnatural" processes.
My point was that it's kind of silly to talk about nature or natural in this context. I'm a regular IT guy, too, and unless I abscond to a place where I don't have to work ever again or have full control over my schedule, the moralisms are just salt in the wound. Most people aren't sleeping enough because of work demands and stress, not because they didn't read an article which says obvious things - yeah, we all know about natural light, blue light, screen time and caffeine at this point. What we don't know is how to pay a mortgage and 'go natural' simultaneously.
A lot of people eat like shit, don't exercise (enough), come back from 8 hours of sitting at a desk to do what ? Sit on a sofa and empty a few beers. After a while, when their body can't "catch up" they feel the effects and wonder what happened.
> But we've digressed.
Yes, too bad HN doesn't really work for longer conversations.
> An improvement over the nightmare of far longer hours in the early industrial revolution. But we've digressed.
Sure, but what is it now ? For most people in 1st world countries it isn't about survival, especially for us, IT workers. Albeit poor people in countries completely rejecting socialism ideas still struggle just as much as 100 years ago. The survival nightmare isn't there anymore. Now we're suffering the blowback of an economy that can't sustain itself without constant growth.
"The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem
I call that my weekend alarm clock. When I was younger I'd stay up late on the weekends and wake up an appropriate 8-10 hours after I fell asleep. Now I can go to bed whenever and still wake up at 6 am to the thought of "Hey, do you think that crack you noticed yesterday is a sign of foundation problems? When do you want to fix that sink? You really need to think about getting the deck replaced."
I do this once a year for one month for general health purposes.
I am no less groggy in the morning. (No alarm means I wake up at 4AM or after 11 hours.) I am no more energetic. I sleep about the same number of hours as I did otherwise. Generally speaking, I noticed no physiological changes other than (a) craving sugar and (b) losing weight (due to cutting out alcohol and related foods).
(Granted, I haven't been chronically sleep deprived for years.)
For what it's worth, I have the same anecdote. I don't see any dramatic difference. Same with avoiding caffeine and I normally drink a lot of tea and coffee.
You're at the baseline they were already talking about.
I'm frequently acutely sleep deprived. (Which is relevant within the context of a "catch-up sleep" article.) And while I don't use alcohol and caffeine to support my sleep cycle, I certainly take each frequently.
Cutting them out had no dramatic effect on my sleep quality. TL; DR Results from cutting out alcohol and caffeine may vary, and not everyone's body knows how much sleep it needs.
What has worked the best for me is having an alarm for 7am, 6-7 days as week. If I am having heaps of trouble sleeping I'll disable it and maybe sleep 1hr more, but in general I keep is consistent, and when I wake up it takes me a much shorter time to feel human again.
You need activity/exercise for good sleep.
Is that due to the sleep, or the lack of work and general de-stressing?
avoid artificial light after 8
Once you get used to a couple candles carried (per person) and maybe one in the room for general illumination—which only took me a couple days—electrical multi-room illumination at night seems irritatingly bright and kinda insane. Sort of like when you cut out soda and then try one after a while and are put off by how cloyingly sweet it is.
[0] I wouldn't do it again without a shaded candle holder, for instance, otherwise you end up looking at them by accident all the time which is painful when your eyes are adjusted for low light. Would probably need to bump up to three candles to account for the shade.
You don't have to go to bed at 8, just don't stay in bright light at least a few hours before you want to fall asleep.
You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on the number of participants. Your comment might mislead others with not enough knowledge of stats I think.
That study tracked 38,000 people over 13 years. "People who slept for fewer than the recommended seven hours each weekday, but caught an extra hour or two on weekends, lived just as long as people who always slept seven hours, the authors reported."
I still find it worrying here because we know there's substantial variance in how/when people sleep, and 36 is well below "representative sample" numbers. More generally, a 36 participant, 2 week study ought to be examined pretty carefully when it contradicts a study (Akerstedt et al) on 38,000 subjects over 13 years. I can hardly blame the authors for that, though; small lab confirmations of large self-report studies are a useful and established practice.
But I don't think that's the damning part. The 9 night study span is incredibly worrying for trying to assess a long-term effect. If a value shifts over that span, is it rising steadily, rising to a new equilibrium, or reacting to a change and then returning to homeostasis?
(I do want to give credit to the study for using pre-experiment substance/diet/sleep control, and then applying individual sleep times to avoid "night owls" being a confounder. Seeing studies judge "sleep time" by making all subjects go to bed at the same hour is infuriating.)
Finally, there's strong evidence that something was unusual about study conditions. The WaPo article claims that the weekend sleepers "gained nearly three pounds over two weeks", but that's pretty much journalistic malpractice. The study actually found that all patients in the study gained weight; more weight with higher confidence for the low-sleep groups, but the groups had heavy overlap in amount gained. We can be confident that two weeks of work-schedule sleep do not cause that sort of weight gain for most people, since the reduction to the absurd there is everyone gaining ~70 lb/year indefinitely. It's the sort of number which raises pretty significant questions about how this compares to anything outside the lab setting.
The file-drawer problem with small lab studies is serious, and can't be solved with effect sizes; it's much easier to run a few of these and publish the hits than to do that with large-population studies.
But small lab studies provide a lot of value alongside population studies. They help reveal issues with bad self-report data, which are major concerns for sleep and weight questions. They also offer an efficient way to replicate and extend large studies. If you're spending a decade with 10k+ subjects, gathering a huge range of data is understandable (and I would argue, preferable). But it leaves you with a choice between salami slicing across all your variables, or applying multiple-comparisons corrections that destroy your sensitivity. Using large multi-factor studies as exploratory work, then validating effects with small focused studies is actually a pretty healthy outcome.
A final thought: I have a lot of problems with this study, but file-drawer issues aren't one of them. Looking at a bunch of correlated variables (insulin sensitivity, weight gain, outside-meal eating, etc) and reporting them all is a solid way to mitigate that - we know those things should correlate for basically any real effect, which makes it much harder to stumble into a false positive and publish.
It's just publication pressure (or worse, as other commenters have hinted at).
You can't say that. (Ok, of course everyone has the right to her opinions.) The point of the scientific method is that it is, in many ways, self-correcting. It's getting addressed, albeit slowly. It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure.
I mean -- you can say that personally, and it probably makes sense, but as a society we need to get social sciences and medicine into a better shape instead of just 'letting it go'.
Oh, so what should we go to now in order to try to expand our knowledge about this? What are you suggesting?
It's draped in the language of knowing, but it's purely emotional material; stuff that makes you feel good, and makes you feel smart for feeling right.
(I also think the desire to drape our tribal impulses in scientific form comes from society prizing smarts for so very, very long, but that's another story.)
He has his opinions, positions and motives just like anyone else, but is open about them. If anything he is a rock star lecturer that exemplifies how informative, accurate, sincere, progressive, intimate, and inspiring science can be. He helps people for a living as a psychologist and a lecturer. If he offends you then you either have issues or don't understand him or both, but he would gladly engage with you either way.
Most that disagree with him disagree with the science, which puts them in the same boat as climate change deniers, of which there are plenty voicing their alternate facts online. But their voice doesn't validate their claims. Science is not a democracy.
If dissing someone is allowed then why isn't praising them? And praising them well?
Because I exaggerated?
But did I?
He continues to help millions of people. Can't say that about many people.
Regarding his work/words: He's right about the biological differences between men and women. He's right about social hierarchies and power structures being inevitable. He's right about the government's overreach on speech being dangerous. He's right about proper discourse on any matter being uncomfortable. He's right about the value of honesty and integrity. He's right about ways to piece your life and yourself back together.
And by right I don't mean binary true or false, because that isn't how science works. By right, I mean the most accurate knowledge we currently have on the topic that could be usefully applied to a problem at hand compared to other less accurate knowledge that is already being applied to problems at hand. Seeing this is why he stood up, and many stood up with him.
You can't be a quack and help so many people or be right about so many things. And at the end of the day he's just a lecturer that's really really good at his job -- at engaging his students and sharing the wealth of knowledge that already exists. And yes, using that knowledge to point out why you are wrong does make him offensive to a lot of people. You don't have to be one of them. And yes, he has turned activist. You don't have to turn into one, by why not? But if you have, then why against?
He isn't anti-scientific. He just isn't. That's a blatantly false claim.
Hmmm no we can also think he uses mostly weak papers with dodgy methodologies and over-generalizes the conclusions. Not all scientists within a field agree with any given scientist of that field, that would be ludicrous.
And I never said all scientists agree. Typical straw man. But what I will say is there are plenty of climate change deniers that claim to be scientists.
Nothing is indefensible. Challenge him all you want.
His views are his views. Most of his lectures are about other people's work. When he draws conclusions his logic is sound and his premises are transparent. Talk, think, debate.
Why hate? He continues to help so many people.
Is there a list of people building on the work of Jordan Peterson? I'd like to see it.
See it. You could have just Google it.
He's listed as first author on three of the first 20 entries, and one of those is a pop-sci book, not an academic paper. Of the other two, one is from 17 years ago and the other is from 29 years ago.
This is not the publication record of an influential social scientist.
Knocking him for collaborating is ignorant and disingenuous. Scientists collaborate. His record shows he is a real scientist. It doesn't have to show he is the best or that he deserves a Nobel Prize. At this point, he's probably a better candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize if anything, but this only goes to show what he's been working on lately, which is more activism than scientific research. More Neil deGrasse Tyson than Einstein, but that doesn't make Neil a fake scientist.
JDP's last book he did write for a broader audience. Great move. Even I read it. And he brought with him the scientists and the research that otherwise would not have reached his audience.
His book is maybe 75% work of other scientists, 20% story telling, and 5% what he draws from it. Basically his 12 rules. He demonstrates how to draw meaning and meaningful conclusions rationally, with well grounded premises. If you have low tolerance for the more abstract genre of ancient story analysis, then skip it. Or maybe there is some truth to it? Decide for yourself.
Did you read his book? Fine if you didn't but I wouldn't claim to understand him if I hadn't. Maybe you have issues with him, which is fine, but again, that is a separate matter than the substance of his lectures. Which are all highly specific by the way. So to say they're all based on weak papers or that he's selling snake oil is an immediate tell that, again, you either don't understand him or have other issues/motives.
(Thanks HN for not letting me reply, claiming I'm posting too fast, when clearly I'm not. Not sure how you're suppose to have a conversation.)
Important work, I'm sure, but not what I'd call groundbreaking; I think the effects of drinking on cognition have been somewhat well-known, at least anecdotally, for at least a few thousand years, give or take.
Conclusions are cheap.
Citation needed. Because hyperbole is no different in meta.
Citation need... Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper.
It's literally an academic discussion insofar as it's about the technicalities of an academic paper.
So yes, you really do need to support your arguments if you want them to be taken seriously.
and past issues.
They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong.
I'm not necessarily saying I support a balance sheet view of sleep, I just think these kinds of articles are not very careful with the kind of wording they use. Also maybe I'm just living under a rock, but I don't feel like its that common to only get 5 hours of sleep every single weekday unless you're like a single parent with a baby (in which case you probably wouldn't magically get 8 hours on the weekend), I'd be more interested to see what happens if this was done in smaller spurts, like two consecutive days with three or four hours of sleep to emulate some work or school deadline approaching, but then 8 or 9 the rest of the week after its complete. As it stands now, the title of the article comes off as click bait because its a pretty fear-mongering conclusion drawn from what I consider to be pretty extreme circumstances.
Well, if you take a reference of 7 hours instead of 8, it is more possible. That's kind of what I was doing when I was in high-school: sleeping 5 hours or under on week days, so a total of about 24-25 hours over 5 days; and then sleeping 12 hours or more on week-end nights. So I was sleeping as much in those 2 days, as I was in the other 5, for a total of about 50 hours / week, which is around 7 hours per day on average.
Note that I do not recommend this rhythm! Periodically during those years, I suffered from awful 3- to 5-days long periods during which I was... I don't know how to explain, like if there was a cotton wall between the world and me, I had no control over anything, everything was happening automatically, I had kind of visions of stuff that would happen not matter what I'd do, etc. I guess all of this was caused by sleep deprivation. Gee, I don't miss those periods... luckily it stopped after high-school.
But all my life, I have had huge difficulties to fall asleep at night, and also suffered from stress, which doesn't combine well with the necessities of school times, work times, and other mandatory times: I generally managed to sleep earlier when there was no need to wake up early... If I ever need to wake up at 5 or 4 AM, I won't even manage to get any sleep (or 45 minutes with 10 sweaty 180 heartbeats per minute wake-up inside).
This very much depends on statistical power. If the effect size is big enough, 36 participants can be plenty.
I suspect the effect sizes of sleep deprivation are probably quite large.
Seems it even worse. Thanks for sparing many people's time with your comment.
Then you let your subjects rest up and repeat it again another few times, to make sure that its repeatable and not a coincidence.
[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.12712
Nevertheless it's much harder to convince people to do what's more efficient compared to what _feels_ better when it comes to sleep. I for one feel much better if I wake up 7am sharp every day but it doesn't not feel that way naturally.
I can be short of sleep and feeling awful each day of the working week, and then sleep in at the weekend and feel good that day relative to the last five.
Have I 'caught-up'? Or does catching up mean negating long-term side-effects of sleep deprivation?
This is the issue, and it's why the person who titled this article ought to be ashamed.
We know sleep-deprived people sleep extra if you let them, in amounts predicted by their sleep deprivation. We know the recovery sleep produces better results on a bunch of metrics than getting ~8 hours without extra recovery time. We also know that they don't make up lost sleep hours one-to-one; they add a few hours over a few days then return to baseline, and the fraction recovered declines as the amount of deprivation rises. So.. what does all of that mean?
I know my athletic performance responds to recovery sleep; I've seen studies saying cognitive performance does too. Does insulin sensitivity recover fully? (The author's past work finds "sorta".) Does that recovery provide a better baseline when deprivation starts again, or does it just shift to a new target level regardless? (This implies it just moves to the lower level.) How about the same two questions for memory? For muscle and aerobic exercise? And then: does time with recovered functioning correct long-term damage, mitigate it, or just stop worsening it? Is the short-term "elevated amyloid plaque levels" result actually tied to Alzheimer's, or do they just share a mechanism?
Summarizing a one-weekend insulin sensitivity result as though it settles 50 different questions sharing a broad label is ridiculous.
https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/5580588...
Now, though, with an 18 month old I do a lot better - maybe even better than before having her. She still wakes up early (6:30 AM or so) BUT now that I know I absolutely, positively, HAVE to get to bed at a decent hour, I go to bed before 10 PM most nights - 9:30 or even 9:00 is not rare (and I find myself considering it a luxury). I used to know that I _should_ get to bed by 11:00 PM or so but often pushed it to 12:00 or 1:00 (mind you in college I tried to get to bed by 4 AM as a rule - I like night).
I wake up before her even some mornings, and we have a couple hours of daddy-daughter time. We even watched the sun rise in winter; it's nice.
But before her I HATED getting up early.
Was lucky. Got some good advice. Listened to it. Kids and parents are more happy now.
We now have more than three and it is still way less stressful.
Around one year they can learn to sleep well.
Every parent that kids needs to learn to eat and drink from cups.
I also understood and enjoyed helping my oldest daughter learn to walk.
But for some reason it never occured to me that sleeping is something that many kids will need to learn.
The basic rules are simple.
Part 1: make sure the environment don't change while they are asleep
After a certain age:
- never let them fall asleep with a bottle
- or while you are singing or saying prayers
- or listening to music
- or watching tv
Do read stories, sing, play and try to make sure they are happy when they go to bed. Just make sure they are awake.
Basically they shouldn't fall asleep in a state they won't be in the next time they turn around furing sleep.
Kids after a certain age should fall asleep in their own bed and on their own.
Part 2:
Kids should not be afraid and cry themselves to sleep.
But if you just leave them alone in their bed they will.
Instead say some magic nice words that you decide, then walk out. Start a timer for one minute. Walk back in (even if the kid isn't crying) say the same words you said when you left. The rest of of the night until the kid fall asleep (i.e. not until the calm down) go back every 3rd minute, i.e. every 180 seconds, sharp. Use a timer. Say the same words.
The next day use 3 minutes first and 5 minutes the rest of the evening. Use a timer. Be consequent.
What you want to teach is you are going to be there for them either they cry or not.
Don't stop until after they are asleep. (I happily go back two times more and I don't care if it seems they are sleeping, if tjey open their eyes they'll close them just as fast, now convinced that you are still there.) If one stop going back when they calm down then they understand they'll have to cry to get attention.
Next day 5 and 7 minutes, then 7 and 9 etc. By now they are probably relaxing after a few minutes.
Except for my first who had already gotten a bad habit by the time I started teaching, the rest picked it up in 3 or 4 days. After that they'd enjoy going to bed.
Two more things;
- make sure somebody can hear them if they wake up in the night. Mostly because who wants their kid to be afraid, but a nive side effect is they learn that thet are not forgotten.
- do sleep training on good days (not when new teeths are arriving or while they have the cold)
> But if you just leave them alone in their bed they will.
Worked for us 3x. Did it soon after they no longer physically needed to eat in the night, which is a lot earlier than you'd think. Did it around 3 months IIRC. Two or three bad nights with each one (listening to the crying is no fun and I get why people cave) and pretty much smooth sailing from there on.
We did do some prep by deliberately delaying our responses to their crying, especially at night time, weeks earlier, and stretching out that delay as weeks went on, to break the "I cry, they show up seconds later, spazzing out and showering me with attention" expectation. We might have had to prep by pushing them to one nighttime feeding too, but they'd done that on their own by then anyway—then again, delaying responses helps with that since you're not rushing in there every time they whimper, so that may have been why that part happened "naturally".
We live in a flat with poor soundproofing and out of a desire not to make our neighbours miserable (especially the nurse who really needs a good night's sleep after a long shift..) we've tried to minimize night crying. She sleeps pretty well now.
We were fortunate enough to be in detached housing. If we'd still not been consistently getting full nights of sleep until almost a year after our first one was born (as in the post I initially responded to, I gather) we definitely wouldn't have had two more. Yikes. Our total months of disrupted sleep for all three combined isn't that long.
They are (after the first 10 months are over). But for that first 6-10 months, oh sweet fuck is it miserable. I honestly don't remember anything from that time period other than exhaustion. And you can see it on new parents faces. That blank, almost ptsd stare.
It's hilarious.
By the time the cuteness starts to wear off, the worst is over. Well, they don't listen, disobey everything, and supposedly puberty is going to be even worse, but at least you can play boardgames with them. Played X-wing with my 9 year old yesterday. That makes the 9 year investment worth it.
I still go to bed late at times and absolutely regret it the next morning. On days when I go to bed before 10, I feel amazing - totally refreshed, happy, physically well and ready to go. On days I go to bed past 11:30 or closer to 12 - 12:30, I feel like total shit. Waking up hurts. My body aches so much and brain asleep most of the day. My eyes are closing and I cannot focus. Those days are usually the ones where my kiddo is most taxing on me, as if he knows dad feels like shit so why not make him wish he were dead.
Sleep is so damn important. Don’t skip it. I probably shaved 5-10 years of my life already.
There was a doc on Joe Rogan show talking all about sleep - so eye opening, highly recommend looking for that interview if you’d rather listen than read.
I have the opposite problem though my son is already a night owl and keeps finding excuses to come back to our room and tell us random things!
The mortality rate among participants with short sleep during weekdays, but long sleep during weekends, did not differ from the rate of the reference group. Among individuals ≥65 years old, no association between weekend sleep or weekday/weekend sleep durations and mortality was observed. In conclusion, short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased mortality in subjects <65 years. In the same age group, short sleep (or long sleep) on both weekdays and weekend showed increased mortality. Possibly, long week- end sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712
Having a chance to "reset" during the weekend helps me more mentally than it might help physically. Deep sleep has been described to work as a scrubber of sorts, so longer periods of deep sleep should help with scrubbing all that mental cruft away.
Plus just being able to relax goes a long way, knowing you have to be somewhere by certain time always puts some weight on you that can negatively impact your sleep.
> weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of insufficient sleep
Just like 'ferros' described, if you have a single occasional week of limited sleep, making it up on the weekends DOES have benefits. The problem starts when you repeatedly sleep an inadequate number of hours during the week.
This has almost nothing to do with what ferros said. No, resting on the weekend won't uneat or burn the extra calories, in the same way that it won't rewrite all your bad code or help your fuzzy memory, but it could very well help you perform at a more normal level the next week.
Towards the end of the book The Hungry Brain, by Guyenet, there's a reference to research where both the sleep deprived group and the control group are let loose in the city and allowed to eat whatever they wanted, conditioned on letting the researchers weight and classify it first.
On average, the sleep deprived group ate around 300 calories more.
(sorry I can't produce the original reference, I don't have the book with me)
The mechanism that drives this are the hormones ghrelin and leptin. Look up their action if you're interested.
Also, to your point, very few people spend their sleeping hours eating. You could eat 1500 calories for every meal and be very lithe - if you slept 23 hours a day. By contrast, it seems anecdotally that people who get less sleep tend to eat more food and more of it is unhealthy: late night Taco Bell, delivery when you're pulling an all-nighter, etc.
Best diet pill on the market? Unisom.
Not sure if this statement is sound, for the average person.
If you ate 4500 per day, spread across 3, 20 minute meals, and spent the remaining 23 hours sleeping... your energy expenditure would be minimal, whilst your energy intake large. The average person would gain weight rapidly. (300lb athletes perhaps not, but these are outliers).
Maybe all it says is they grew up thinking that "weekend sleeping helped catch-up" and now they only remember the confirming evidence and discard the disconfirming evidence to support their confirmation bias?
Should his feelings count as evidence in any meaningful sense?
Or do we generally assume that his feelings -- especially since they are contrary to science -- are not a good guide to what really happens?
This is different from the question of whether he is actually sober, of course. But the post you're replying to is specifically about the claim that X person feels better, not about any physical effects on their body. I'd rather trust a person about how they say they feel (especially at a given moment), than studies trying to determine how most people probably feel or ought to feel in a similar situation.
Margarine is good for you in 1970, bad for you in 2010.
Good luck.
Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal.
It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires.
I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
Example: [Apparently] having coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, it's that caffeine dependency (and maybe a little dehydration) makes you feel terrible. Coffee temporarily reverse this negative [local maxima].
Coffee appears to wake you up, but it's doing the opposite.
There are many common examples - 'drinking doesn't affect my driving', 'I don't drink heavily', 'advertising doesn't affect me', 'I get enough exercise', 'my diet is healthy', 'I go to church regularly'.
Reports here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7...., for example, have measured overreporting of exercise/church attendance at double.
Pain scores, Depression scores are the ones I remember right now
So yes, it is something that's used because you don't have a way of directly measuring all things
The point is you can't do anything with his anecdote. It gives you no more information about what you should do, and is therefore technically useless.
Only way I've managed to recover is to take an entire month off, sleep as much as I want for the first week (or two) and slowly try to shift back into an 8 hour cycle.
It's true that what I feel doesn't count towards proving a scientific fact for other people, but I don't see why it can't prove it for myself. After all, people's bodies occupy a broad continuum when it comes to how they operate, and scientific studies generally stipulate that their conclusions aren't true for everyone.
Instead it was to, within seconds/minutes, post about how this new scientific finding doesn't apply to them and they don't need to change any existing beliefs or behavior.
Surely our default reaction should be to deeply question our existing beliefs when disconfirming evidence comes up?
They've done some previous work on catch-up sleep and demonstrated that insulin sensitivity recovers to baseline, though not necessarily fast. Their claim here is that catch-up sleep doesn't seem to offset prior effects (e.g. by overcorrecting) or buffer against new deprivation (that is, you fall off abruptly to where the no-weekend people are). They didn't have anybody do 8 hours, no recovery on weekends, which is a shame, but they also didn't claim anything beyond "recovery sleep doesn't counteract/prevent the damage".
The person who wrote the WP article, on the other hand, has an awful lot to answer for... That garbage title is only the start of the horrible misrepresentation.
Our bodies adjust to different behavior over time, and it's only after the adjustment that you can begin to meaningfully compare and contrast different behaviors. Imagine you take random people and require they start running 4 miles a day with no consideration given to the preexisting patterns of physical activity! Well it'd certainly give the media their clickbait of the day as they 'discover' running is bad for you.
[1] - https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...
I would love to see an experiment where:
Group A: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and "catch up on sleep" during the weekends.
Group B: Sleep 5h per day on weekdays, and sleep the normal replenishing time on weekends (8-7h).
And then compare the effects of the weekend sleep.
I'm very sceptical of the "sleep debt" idea, which gives people the impression that they can do whatever they want with sleep and pay it back later. I honestly doubt you can pay any of the sleep debt you contracted over 2 days ago...
One finds that people recover a portion of recent lost sleep and that's it; a week on 5 hours/night and two weeks prompt similar recovery amounts, and 48 hours awake prompts similar recovery to 72 hours awake. Which certainly says you can't "pay off" arbitrary debt.
The other one is from the same authors as this, finding that after chronic sleep deprivation, oral-glucose insulin response recovers within 3 days of 'free' sleep, but IV-glucose response isn't back to baseline after 5 days. Which suggests the added recovery sleep might just be a way to get back on track faster, rather than actually offsetting anything (at least for insulin).
But I don't think I've ever seen a study actually comparing the two conditions.
It's possible to feel good and still have detrimental health effects occurring. It feels good to eat cheeseburgers. We all feel better after catch-up sleep, that doesn't mean that detrimental effects haven't taken place.
(This is leaving aside the debate about the study's sample size - which clearly requires further replication of results).
One advantage of the extra time is that I finally have beaten my favorite game FTL with every ship! With our first baby I read through all the Game of Thrones books (I was hoping book 6 would be out by the time this kid was born!!)
The premise of the book Promise of Sleep is "Sleep Debt" and they proved you can pay back Sleep Debt up to about 1-2 weeks worth and the rest is absorbed by the body.
They then go on to "...those gains were wiped out when people plunged right back into their same sleep-deprived schedule the next Monday.", which again is incompatible with the title because they are saying that there is benefit but most just kill the benefit, so weekend sleep catch-up is not a lie, but Carolyn Y. Johnson (or their Editor in Chief) are lying with the title.
That title is click-bait for sure.
At least that's been my experience.
More seriously, my body seems to have adapted to shorter sleep. I used to read about famous insomniacs like Napoleon who functioned quite well on only 2 hours of sleep per night, but lately my body seems to have become unable to sleep for 8 hours. I often sleep only 5 hours and that seems to work fine for me now.
https://shop.hatchbaby.com/pages/rest
https://www.keenglow.com/ (PLUG: I'm a stay-at-home dad and this last one is mine)
They can help with other routine stuff too, like bedtime or screen time.
There is a real cost to sleeping less or sleeping too much and that some will feel the impact more than others also depending on the environment they are in (e.g increased stress, etc).
Depending on the combined variables in conjunction to lack of sleep, some may see positive gains by 'catching-up' on the weekend (think of parents for example), although it is likely that a marginal amount of lack of sleep will continue to accumulate over longer periods of time. This in turn can potentially lead to increased risk of heart attack and other issues.
The lack of sleep scenario can be seeing a little with the same lens as smoking, results can vary from person to person, but on average, it has a real negative impact when done often or under unfavorable circumstances.
I bet the range range is enormous as to how sleep affects people.
I have difficulties falling asleep and a little bit of apnea and getting a grip on how to get consistent "gold standard" sleep is really frustrating.
I've tried forcing myself to sleep early using sleep meds, which doesn't really seem to work well or be a really good long term solution. Cutting coffee and/or alcohol for periods which doesn't seem to have any significant effects.
Irritatingly the most successful solution I found for a period was movement, as in someone driving me in a car on a long drive, I'd fall asleep in seconds into a deep sleep. Except that doesn't seem to happen on a train or taxi (not sure why yet), and it would be problematic working out how to do that routinely.
I usually sleep more on the weekends. If I don't, I usually start to manifest cold-like symptoms, indicating that my immune system is struggling. To me, this suggest that catch-up sleep definitely helps in some regards. I can't speak about long-term effects, but I don't think having a malfunctioning immune system would be good for me in the long run either.
This is one of those cases where the effect is so clearly pronounced, I utterly don't care what "the medical science" says on the subject. Maybe it's different for different people.
(I generally do get 6-7 hours of sleep on any day, though. No idea how people sleep less than 6 hours a day without collapsing at the end of the week.)
I got a pair that claims to block a very large amount of blue light (at the expense of a distinct orange tint), and just wear them after it gets dark.
It makes sense that they work; your brain uses blue light to time the release of melatonin and such, and our ancestors were only exposed to non-blue light from sitting besides the campfire socializing after the sun went down.
Wearing these allows me to experience much less of a consequence for using a computer at night which I simply cannot get myself to avoid.
When I was at University in 2011, I had a sleep psychologist take one of our psychology classes and it was well known back then that catching up on a week of sleep deprivation on the weekend doesn't work and only provides short term results. This article focuses on the caloric effects, but recently articles have been linking the research to purely the effects its has on your circadian rhythms.
- source: I've been doing it for years.
Don't know if this is good or bad.
EDIT Either way I definitely don't want to trigger another conversation on the ethics of script/tracking/ad-blocking. I am wondering if this subscribe-with-your-data model is legally compliant with the GDPR. This is not a moral question (or at least I am not interested in a moral answer).
I have actually read some of the resources AND been there whilst customers received advice from lawyers. From what I had understood this model looked dubious.
I have not seen a discussion of this that didn't just end up in talking about morals. Even excluding this I really only wanted input from experts - answers from actual lawyers about GDPR have surprised me compared to what developers had assumed about it...
NB If I had a customer that proposed this model I would still insist that they consulted with their own legal advice before proceeding!
Given what you have said, perhaps the literature is not as obvious as I thought. As far as this model is concerned, it would not be compliant with the law as I read it and as I have had it explained to me. I don't deny that a party with enough money might be able to muscle a reading into existence that allows them to do this anyway, but that is I think an established risk of the legal system. For now we must operate with the law as written and broadly interpreted inside the EU.
Reading the guidelines is not the tricky part of GDPR. The hard part is: "I have a website, am I compliant or what do I have to change to become compliant?" Mapping the guidelines on to real world systems is where the difficult analysis comes in.
But I guess that the average lawyer knowledgable on GDPR issues would struggle to sort an array even in O(n^2) time so what do they know...
I.e. all things are simple to those that understand them!
I think the point of this is to say that the negative effects on the body of lack of sleep on the body can't be reversed by the weekend catch up.
That doesn't mean you don't feel better after that weekend lie in or catch-up nap!
I have about 4 years of my life I can barely remember because it was work, on call, broken nights with babies, sleep, work, take turns to nap at weekends. Our second child was called Rachel because the only leisure time we had was taken to watch an episode of Friends every night before turning in and it worked on our subconscious. We had the energy to do nothing more (well, we obviously did one thing more... but I digress).