Except, sleep isn't a debt because the loss can't be repaid.
This is one of many important things I have picked up from Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote "Why We Sleep" and has been doing the podcast rounds lately.
Not to pick on you at all. It sounds like you have made some big realizations and are making fantastic changes. Realizing I can't make up sleep to pay off the "debt" has been eye opening.
sort of?
The impact of missed sleep has a half life. A single night of 4 hours sleep, followed by a year of normal nights sleep will lead to a me that is indistinguishable from the me that slept 8 hours that same night.
I'm all for sleeping properly, but lets not suggest that it is the end of the world any time someone doesn't get their standard n hours
And please note, I'm not prescribing or suggesting anything about the end of the world regarding a single missed night of sleep. I am commenting about the world of ignorance I had regarding sleep prior to a very recent education.
If you or other people reading this are unaware of the depth of what sleep research has learned in the past 15 or so years I will point you to this six hour conversation that Dr. Matthew Walker had with Peter Attia on his podcast.
Part 1 https://podcastnotes.org/2019/04/02/sleep-4/ Part 2 https://podcastnotes.org/2019/04/17/sleep-5/ Part 3 https://podcastnotes.org/2019/04/18/sleep-6/
Sleep is much more important than anybody ever imagined and sufficient sleep is the cure to a large percentage of western societies problems. There are few financial incentives in promoting sleep so we do not hear about this over drugs, caffeine etc.
REM sleep is the source of creativity and thought resolution where different parts of the brain communicate that do not usually. Rem sleep occurs in the last two hours of an 8 hour sleep.
Non rem sleep is where the brain clears itself of the byproducts of brain activity. Without this the brain becomes damaged and is probably the cause of dementia.
Sleeping pills, LCDs, artificial light, caffeine, alarm clocks, early school starts and alcohol are all very bad.
Sleep in a dark room at 18 degrees celsius for 8 hours, allowing 1 hour to fall asleep.
Slight quibble: the fraction of REM sleep in each sleep cycle is highest during the last sleep cycle of the night.
He’s the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, so you could also look up his lab’s scholarly publications https://www.humansleepscience.com/p-u-b-l-i-c-a-t-i-o-n-s
Usually. Except if the 4 hours of sleep leads you to crash your car, or run into a pedestrian, or forget your child in a car.
In the usual case, a day of missed sleep is normally OK, but when you are responsible for other people (rather than just code quality/productivity), why risk it? And even in the general case...why risk it? It is far better to lead a normal lifestyle and be at peak performance in all parts of your responsibility.
> In the usual case, a day of missed sleep is normally OK, but when you are responsible for other people (rather than just code quality/productivity), why risk it? And even in the general case...why risk it? It is far better to lead a normal lifestyle and be at peak performance in all parts of your responsibility.
I'm sure most people with responsibilities getting less than their required sleep are not doing it by choice. When I have had to forgo sleep it was out of necessity (primarily to work a second job). Of course it is far better to get the optimal sleep your body needs. It's not about people intentionally engaging in risky behavior needlessly—oftentimes people are trading sleep for putting food on the table, for instance.
In my case it wasn't a second job, it was trying to be more productive to help a fledgling company fly. In retrospect I'd have been a lot more productive with a good 8 hours sleep in my tank every night.
Walker's book on sleep opened my eyes that much that I bought copies for all the family. I've never done that before.
Ironically people with kids, especially early on, frequently have 4 hours of sleep...if they're lucky.
In the previously mentioned podcast the host, a former doctor, tells a pretty scary story about being a sleep deprived doctor.
After a week or two of great sleep, I will feel the effects of even a single night at 6-7 hours. My blood glucose tracking makes this clear (it's going to be north of 100 in fasted state), and if the required work for the day is cognitively challenging, ie. "deep work", it will be distraction city.
I think of it kind of like burning yourself on a flame. Yes, a second degree burn will heal, and in a year you won't notice it, but if you do it over and over, or really burn yourself, you'll scar or kill nerves and never fully recover.
You do actual damage to your brain when you don't sleep enough, and it will effect your memory and cognition permanently if you do it too much.
We initially planned to use a side-car crib (we had a convertible crib with one wall removed, pushed up against our bed with the mattresses at the same height so it formed an extension of the sleep surface) but our son was such a barnacle baby that he refused to sleep even a foot away from me. Not all babies are that clingy, so it’s definitely a good option for a lot of families.
Bedsharing allowed both me and my husband to avoid sleep deprivation, even with a newborn. Our son would wake up and start to squirm and make tiny noises, which was enough to wake me up so I could nurse him, but never reached the level of crying that would wake up my husband, who was able to sleep a normal 8 hours and get up for work feeling well-rested.
I was also able to get rest equivalent to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep; it just required staying in bed for 12 hours in those first few months because of all the partial wake-ups for nursing.
I can’t imagine how much more difficult our lives would have been without the high-quality sleep we were able to get due to our choice to bed-share.
We’re in the process of transitioning our 2-year-old to his own bed to make room for his little brother who is due in a few months. The transition is going very smoothly. We could have done it sooner but bedsharing was working well for all of us so we saw no reason to make a change.
Here’s the link to the book “Sweet Sleep” Even if you’re not comfortable bed-sharing intentionally, it’s important to have a safe sleep surface set up because of how common it is for parents (especially breast-feeding mothers) to fall asleep accidentally with their babies. Much safer for accidental co-sleeping to happen in a prepared bed vs. on a recliner or couch where the risks of suffocation are very high. https://g.co/kgs/jCrdAX
If worried about this, use a bassinet bed extension. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/542613455077053089/
The idea is to have the baby on the mother’s body or next to it, touching.
When the child stirs, the mom can react without either of them fully waking up. And the child would not need to wake up, freak out and cry to get attended to, so they grow up without the wake-up-alone-into-terror neuropathways.
No, it's on average quite low, but notably higher than not cosleeping, and the consequences are severe so many people generally prefer (and the medical community generally recommends) to avoid the risk, at least as a regular practice.
IIRC, there is some reason to believe that the on average risk is misleadingly high for many concrete cases, though, because it seems like there are other factors without which the risk does not increase [EDIT: nearly as much as the on-average increase would suggest] (and with which the risk increase is much higher than the on-average increase), but I forget the details.
Of course, these are public health interpretations of the data which are applied across a population. Individual parents need to do their own risk / benefit analysis.
Also, people sometimes mean different things by the term "cosleeping". In this thread it seems to be mostly people talking about parents and the child sleeping in a bed, but some people include parent and child sleeping on a sofa or in a chair. This (couch or chair cosleeping) is riskier than bed cosleeping.
For example, localized air pollution from an idling pickup truck is obviously worse than standing outside near someone smoking, but I see people waving their arms around and making ridiculous faces and asking outdoor smokers to move, while I have never seen someone make an objection to the driver of an idling vehicle.
My 2-year-old kid and I walk around San Francisco barefoot, and on a daily basis strangers suggest that we are taking our lives into our own hands (because of the vanishingly tiny chance he might find a junkie’s discarded hypodermic needle, step on it in a way that injected the junkie’s blood, and contract a fatal blood-borne disease), but I have never once heard someone suggest it was a bad idea to walk in the vicinity of automobile traffic, objectively many orders of magnitude riskier. The society is almost entirely unwilling to slow automobile traffic, but the public library won’t allow us inside without shoes because a book might fall on our feet or something. Most people seem entirely unaware of the effects of habitually wearing stiff shoes on foot development and gross motor skills.
It is considered horrible for children to have a small sip of alcohol (for fear of profound brain damage? a slippery slope to moral decadence?) but large amounts of sugar are just fine and strangers are constantly offering children candy and juice and cookies etc., and once someone turns 21 years old then any amount of alcohol consumption is considered more or less fine as long as the person isn’t driving.
Brushing and flossing teeth multiple times per day is considered a mandatory part of basic hygiene, but again, nobody has any problem with people constantly eating sugar and simple starches, the main drivers of cavities.
Pregnant women are told to avoid all sorts of foods and activities (and sometimes judged severely if they disregard the advice) despite in many cases very poor evidence supporting those proscriptions.
Some people with medium skin-tone religiously apply sunscreen when they plan to spend a short while in the sun, but seldom consider the harms of insufficient sun exposure, or the potential risk of whatever gunk is in the sunscreen.
All manner of toys are marked “age 3+” including things that couldn’t possibly be choked on, and some parents seem to believe those warnings, but any family religiously following such advice is delaying their kids’ fine motor skills by 1.5 years.
Relevant to this discussion: many school-aged children end up chronically sleep deprived because school schedules don’t align with their natural sleep rhythm; the problems this causes (aggression/irritability, tiredness, distraction, problems with working memory, ...) are treated as the children’s intentional personal failings which they are then punished for.
As for co-sleeping: the benefits to our family have been very obvious. We all get more or less enough sleep, babies can eat whenever they like, and everyone maintains a close physical relationship.
It's unlikely that he would step on a needle, specifically, but not so unlikely he steps on something sharp, e.g. glass, or a stone.
> I have never once heard someone suggest it was a bad idea to walk in the vicinity of automobile traffic
you've never heard anyone suggest a 2 year old should not walk near road traffic? young children are explicitly told to stay away from roads without an adult all the time, and parents will often hold their hands near cars so they don't run in front of them.
> but large amounts of sugar are just fine
On the contrary, I hear people complain about kids sugar intake all the time. alcohol is an entirely different thing entirely.
> once someone turns 21 years old then any amount of alcohol consumption is considered more or less fine
It's legal, it isn't necessarily encouraged outside that age group.
> nobody has any problem with people constantly eating sugar
If you brush and floss, there is no hazard to your teeth.
> but seldom consider the harms of insufficient sun exposure
vitamin D deficiency can be fixed with a pill, skin cancer can't.
> including things that couldn’t possibly be choked on
If you don't know why it's marked that way, you are appealing to ignorance.
> school schedules don’t align with their natural sleep rhythm
what is their natural sleep rhythm?
Public places require shoes for hygiene reasons, not for book-dropping incidents.
If the worry is something like fungal or bacterial infections of the feet, those thrive in the warm, wet environment of a sock/shoe, and can’t survive when consistently exposed to fresh air and sunshine.
If the worry is injury/liability, then high-heeled shoes would be the obvious first thing to ban. Those are dramatically more dangerous than bare feet in basically every context.
I suppose if someone had gaping sores on the bottoms of their feet it might leave gross/contagious residue? But someone could just as easily track vomit, feces, cake frosting, rotten food, chewing gum, or whatever other yucky thing in on the bottom of their shoe. The “has a serious contagious skin disease” case seems like it would be handled better with a more targeted restriction, since I don’t think you want such people’s hands touching stuff in public spaces either.
My guess is that the real reason is to keep barefoot, shirtless, etc. homeless people and/or hippies out of public buildings. There are also rules against lying down, being drunk or intoxicated, making loud noises, bringing luggage or carts, communicating “willfully” or obscenely, emitting strong odors, &c. I’d be curious to learn more about the history of restrictions against bare feet in particular.
The hygiene of your foot, not their floor, i.e they don't want you walking on their (relatively) dirty floor bare-foot.
Also, if they allowed others to walk in bare-foot, gaping sores etc would make the floor dirtier.
I'm pretty sure they don't "allow" you to vomit on the floor, or throw rotting food onto it either, but if you did that (unintentionally?) I'm sure they would clean it up and disinfect the floor, for hygiene reasons. That people might track those things in in trace amounts is why the floor is considered dirty, and why it is probably cleaned periodically.
Yes, that's my understanding, but I wasn't clear; I've corrected the comment to clarify.
WHAT!? No way.
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a real danger and not something to be dismissed lightly.
Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.
Is there evidence for this?
We're not discussing babies, solely. That's seemingly the issue/controversy.
I haven't thought about this in years, but I believe I slept in my parents's bed until I was around 8 years old (at which point I stopped by choice). Perhaps they just never told me, but my parents seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.
Why?
The link you gave says 2500 per year due to SIDS - which appears overstated by 70%.
Either way, it is significant.
Your mileage on this may vary, as I went something like 9 years over three kids without having significantly undisturbed sleep.
Having at least 3-4 months of an infant after birth (the forth trimester) be difficult to sleep and calm down is quite normal. And based on the anecdotal data from my friends in similar points of their lives, even average.
The outliers are the ones who sleep through the night immediately (which can be dangerous) and those who wake up every sleep cycle.
By the time you get to 3, it's pretty evident that each child comes pre-built with their own unique tour-de-force of personality, and parents are just as beholden to it as anyone else.
Our first actually taught us this lesson. We have friends with really, really easy kids. Our oldest - 4 years old now - is... tough. She has always been very hard headed. She has always stood up for herself and what she wants. She is persistent. My friends joke about how someday she is going to conquer the world.
Our twins are much easier. And much "better" behaved at similar ages. Sometimes you get what you get.
Appreciate you may not have meant to imply this, but breastfeeding does not mean minimum hassle at night. We lived on about 3-5 hours a night for about 18 months. You got lucky.
All of the reasons that follow boil down to, essentially, "this book is so obviously true that there's no need to read it." That's hardly a damning review, it's a bit closer to the most vehement agreement possible.
"Scientifically, The Case Against Sugar suffers from a condition Steven Pinker has called the “Igon Value Problem”. This term describes the tendency of certain science journalists to arrive at obtuse conclusions due to a superficial understanding of their subject matter"
and later
"Taubes argues that sugar is the only factor that reliably shows up when a culture develops Western noncommunicable diseases, supporting the point with examples of cultures that adopted sugar-rich diets and became ill. Yet he makes no effort to look for a counterexample that could refute his argument: a traditionally-living culture that has a high intake of sugar and does not suffer from Western noncommunicable diseases."
These are just two examples. My understanding (from those two reviews only!), is that you will come away LESS well informed when reading this book. Now, if you provide me with an expert opinion in favour of the book, I'm happy to change my mind.
FYI Apart from moments where I try to recover fast (1-60min) from a near max physical effort, I avoid sugar anyway. I do NOT promote eating sugar.
1) He is an evangelist about the dangers of fructose, which is ubiquitous in the Standard American Diet (SAD) 2) I gather that he has a few positions that are not unreasonable but are also not fully supported by research, yet
Having said that, I learned a lot from him about fructose metabolism, how it has to be metabolized by the liver, and what happens to excess. The analogy that sticks in my head is that excess fructose consumption is like foie-grasing ourselves. We get Non-alocoholic fatty liver and it's happening to children at unprecedented numbers.
He too was on Peter Attia's podcast (I mentioned in a comment above) and it has some good show notes.
Edit: to incorporate the valid suggestion below
> You can miss a good night's sleep and make it up later in terms of being rested, but whatever lessons and growth from the day prior to the lack of sleep will never be processed. They are lost, even if you sleep enough on a later night.
> It's sort of like saying there is 'eat healthy debt' where you eat junk food all week and then try to cancel it by eating super healthy on the weekend. That healthy eating on the weekend is a good thing, but it doesn't un-eat the unhealthy food.
Your two examples are not equivalent. In the first you mention missing _a_ good night's sleep. In the second you are not missing a night of healthy eating but intentionally engaging in the opposite consistently. A more accurate comparison would be something like a "cheat day" in a diet, to follow the logic of the first example.
From what I remember he said if you stay up all night you don't sleep 16 hours the next night to make up for the missing 8 hours (you may only sleep 12) therefore you never make up that 4.
I'd suspect that it doesn't work that way and you can catch up without requiring double the amount of time (there's probably a consistent overhead).
If I'm missing some core of his argument please let me know, but from what I heard it made me dismiss the rest as probably bad.
It’s repaid all at the end.
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
Are you saying that there are significant health repurcussions even after bad sleep habits have been fixed? Do you have a source for that? I have... er... a vested interest
I finished most of the book, but don’t remember seeing what he wrote on this.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/02/22/naps_boost_learning_cap...
"Can naps help with sleep debt?
Walker: And the answer, unfortunately, is no. Sleep is actually not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at some later point in time. So sleep is an all-or-nothing event in that sense. So you can't short sleep during the week and then try to binge and oversleep at the weekend."
https://www.businessinsider.com/sleep-expert-naps-dangerous-...
But the lost productivity from when we were tired can not be recovered.