I highly suggest reading the book to explore more about your sleep.
However, take some of the science positions in the book with a grain of salt. The author is notorious for being directionally correct in his opinions, but exaggerating a lot of the science for dramatic effect. This doesn't matter at all if you're reading the book to convince yourself to build better sleep habits, of course.
However, it does seem to leave some people with exaggerated worries or anxiety about dying early or developing serious disease conditions if they've ever gone through periods of life with short sleep (college, raising kids, video game addiction) or if they're in a life situation that limits their sleep. In that regard, it's worth noting that the author is really stretching some of the studies and cherry-picking results to support his argument. Getting 6 hours per sleep at night will not be the death of you, despite what the book suggests.
It's also commonly known that people get less sleep than they think they do. Someone might tell you they get 8 hours of sleep each night because they try to sleep from 11PM to 7AM, but in reality they stretch their bed time to midnight more often than not and then read their phone in bed for 15-30 minutes. Sleep advocates try to compensate by exaggerating target sleep times for adults to 8 hours. In reality, 7-ish hours of sleep appears to be just fine for most adults, with some requiring less and others requiring more. That said, most people will have to target 8 hours of dedicated bed time to really get those 7 hours of sleep in practice, hence the common exaggerations.
If I sleep LESS (5, 6 hours) I feel better. More energy, lighter on my feet, less depressed.
That lack of sleep always catches up with me though, and after 4-5 days of that I'll have a day where I just feel EXHAUSTED and end up sleeping like 10 hours that night.
This is a well-known phenomenon, believe it or not. Acute sleep deprivation has a strong anti-depressant effect in people suffering from depression. It can even trigger hypomanic or manic episodes in people who have bipolar disorder. Scientific American wrote a nice article about it several years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sleep-depriva...
As you noticed, the effect is completely unsustainable. Chronic sleep deprivation will worsen depression, not improve it.
There has been some research into using acute sleep deprivation to kick-start treatment with traditional antidepressant medication. Results are mixed, but it can help some patients cope until the antidepressants start working.
There is also some [very] weak evidence that advancing your sleep phase (going to bed earlier, waking up earlier) can stabilize the acute antidepressant effects for a couple of days: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12799743/
Long term, treating the underlying depression with traditional methods (CBT, bright light therapy, exercise, antidepressant medications) is the only sustainable solution for most people.
Depression studies are basically useless without a control group. In any given depression cohort, a number of patients will spontaneously improve even if they receive placebo or no treatment at all. For many (lucky) people, depressive episodes simply resolve after some time, so capturing them in studies without control groups can produce misleading results.
Paraphrased from the book - basically once you get passed the number of REM cycles needed all of the sleep after that is worthless and ends up just making you groggy. In other words the idea of "catching up on sleep" is BS.
As I noted in this thread - I don't think 100% of what author communicates in the book is factual or conclusive, but he does a great job of collecting multiple perspectives and studies to combine it into one thought provoking read. Like any book that has an agenda/angle, a healthy dose of skepticism is always required.
I'm in my 50's, FWIW.
I've read it and I agree. Although he does admit in the beginning that there basically is not much conclusive facts about sleep, hence his motivation for writing the book. It's implied that what he is saying is fact, and its a lot more correlation than I think panacea.
> It's also commonly known that people get less sleep than they think they do.
A few things IIRC from the book:
- The specific number is irrelevant as long as its "around 7~9"
- If you're lying down / resting this still "counts" (its not as impactful, but still beneficial)
If people don't want to read the book, the JRE podcast is actually pretty good at summarizing whats in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
Good high level points about what to do to get to sleep (5 things):
Anyone who expects to learn something from a Joe Rogan podcast should understand that it is for the most part, a podcast where people go to have their ideas go unchallenged: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-experie...
I mean I generally agree that he doesn't necessarily challenge his interviewees but to say you don't learn something from JRE is kind of off IMO.
Anyway, that's besides the point because I've both read the book and watched the podcast. Additionally I've checked some of the sources and they're consistent with what the author has communicated. In a world of sound bites, I'm simply offering that this soundbite is better than single sentence headliners but not as good as reading a whole book or even further, reading a book and every source.
He also specifically and thoroughly goes over the sleep window thing, unless I'm remembering another book.
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
Interesting topic nevertheless.
When I wake up, even if it's 4.5hrs, my brain is typically going a mile-a-minute. There's so much I want to accomplish, it's hard to be mindful and go back to sleep (so I rarely do, especially if it's 'only' 6hrs vs. the 7.5 I seem to need).
I looked back at my sleep logs, and I've slept longer than 7.5 only a handful of times in 2020, and it's always correlated with several nights of 1.5, 3, or 4.5 hrs.
I used to think of sleep as something that I could put off on a whim and catch-up on over the weekend. I would stay up later to play video games or program if I felt like it. Now, I'm a lot more rigorous in keeping to my nighttime sleep schedule. Whatever I'm doing can normally wait until the next day.