The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
The key takeaway was:
> increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply.
So I am not surprised if merely looking at sleep amounts fails to explain differences.
Anecdotal, but I spent years not sleeping through university and sleeping in airports or on the train. Studied engineering and did a lot of hackathons and events and stuff. I figured out then that I didn't need full cognition or excellent decision making. I needed more hours cranking out work. I spent years sleeping just a few hours and often not sleeping on Saturday at all.
I do a lot less of that now as work never has 2AM deadlines but it is as though I am permanently in that 80% functionality state. I never felt that I got out of that state. I have never regained my ability to be detail oriented. I am still reliant on the crutches of spell check and Grammarly and my IDE to make sure I don't do something stupid. I use task lists for every little thing in my day.
So it is not that it does not impact cognition (at least in my case), it is that you get used to that impaired state and can't find a way back.
Only a year and a half removed from that, so maybe it takes more time, but I still feel heavily optimized for output over quality, even though that is no longer needed.
My baseline cognition was already impacted. More sleep just did not repair it.
It is noted in many sleep science studies that you cannot “recoup” lost sleep so this is plausible.
I personally would always put more faith in someone who carefully checks their work than someone who thinks they don't need to. The second person is making mistakes and just doesn't realize it.
If you feel this has impacted your life to the point where you need to hide your identity, maybe you should try therapy or a medical examination. Or just get more sleep
I cannot tell you if a change in my sleeping habits was the result of all that, if it has been a coincidence or if it preceded any improvements - but it certainly didn’t hurt the process.
Today, I don’t need therapy or medication anymore, can focus good enough on my work and in the stories my significant other tells me. I don’t get nervous anymore anytime I have to wait in a line, I do fewer mistakes, I can read a book and feel less bored, more happy. It’s something I had to learn, but I needed some help with that. It’s worth a try!
Today, I also realize a significant decrease in performance and happiness if I get a single night of bad sleep. Before I knew how my days could really feel, I didn’t care about that - but I’m sure I had been impacted badly, nevertheless.
This is your first advice. Anyway, no need to get pedantic. Fact is you're carelessly suggesting the use of some pretty heavy and specific medicine, to someone you don't know, based on a few words of text he wrote on an anonymous internet forum.
My sleep was somewhat destroyed from having kids. Not that I was extremely underslept, but my brain somehow stopped sleeping deeply it felt like. I awoke from every minute sound the kids made.
Today theyr'e 7 and 9 and I still wake from silly sounds.. Some sounds the kids make is like driving a knife through my ears. It is getting better but still...
The upside from this is now I don't need anywhwre near 8 hours of sleep anymore! 7 hours is almost too much, 6 works perfectly most of the time. 5 hours though is when I get into zombie-mode during daytime.
Maybe 27 minutes is just not enough? I’m sure the results would be different if they started to get 7 hours instead of 5.5.
Was this study better science that disproved the existing body? Or poorer science? Or is there something problematic about sleep in Chennai? Or special about the people in Chennai?
The full paper states:
> An enormous body of research, mostly conducted in sleep labs in rich countries, documents severe negative impacts of sleep deprivation on a range of outcomes from attention and memory to mood and health (Lim and Dinges, 2010; Banks and Dinges, 2007).
> While experimental evidence on the impact of increasing sleep in field settings is scarce, there is a widely-held belief among researchers and the public that reducing sleep deprivation would lead to improvements in economic outcomes (Walker, 2017).
> To document these priors, we surveyed 119 experts from sleep science and economics who predicted sizable economic benefits, including a 7% increase in work output, of increasing sleep by half an hour per night from the low levels observed in our setting.
Social science is fun.
While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.
1. They are different chemicals.
2. They are administered by different means (inhalation is vastly more impactful than swallowing a tablet).
3. The doses for pharmaceuticals are much lower.
By repeating this argument you create prejudice against those of us who live with ADHD and rely on medication to function normally.
Note that you are also creating prejudice against an already marginalized group of people, a subset of whom may have undiagnosed ADHD.
That's rich. Here's a prominent psychiatrist's view (who btw, supports and does prescribe amphetamine adhd medication):
"There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. On the one hand you have anti-psychiatry activists who will say that using Adderall for ADHD is exactly like giving kids crystal meth; on the other you'll have people who say that obviously normal amphetamine is okay, but meth-amphetamine is a demonic substance that will hijack your brain and destroy your life. The truth is more complicated.
Methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more effectively than unsubstituted amphetamine, but I'm not sure how much that matters since people take different doses of both, and a high dose of unsubstituted will end up with more reaching the brain than a low dose of meth. It seems to inhibit the dopamine transporter more effectively, which might matter, but I'm not enough of a pharmacologist to know how much. Meth takes effect more quickly, which seems to increase addictiveness in a sort of behaviorist sense where the sooner a stimulus gets reinforced, the more rewarding it will feel.
I think there's been a little bit more research since then, but the general takeaway - that the science doesn't support the vast gulf between these two drugs in the popular imagination - still seems true."[0]
[0]https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
I wonder how much research was done at the time and has been done in retrospect.
My high school started at 08:10 (I think) and elementary school at 08:15 and those were the earliest starters in the neighbourhood. University luckily started around 9.
In France kindergarten and primary school starts at 8:30 and ends at 16:30. Mid and high school at 8 or 9, never earlier.
This is very early for children and teens, really not physiological.
Personally I hated it at the time, because getting up early is not my thing, but now I appreciate the time I got to talk with my parents on my way to school thanks to that schedule arrangement.
Also to offset this early getting up, we jus went to bed earlier, like at 9pm or 10pm max, so not sure it really made a difference on anything.
> The combination of changing sleep patterns in adolescence and early school start times leaves secondary school classrooms filled with sleep-deprived students. Evidence is growing that having adolescents start school later in the morning improves grades and emotional well-being, and even reduces car accidents. Opponents cite costly adjustments to bussing schedules and decreased time after school for jobs, sports, or other activities as reasons to retain the status quo. While changing school start times is not a costless policy, it is one of the easiest to implement and least expensive ways of improving academic achievement
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/181/pdfs/educational-ef....
Of course, most kids lived on farms, some even had chores before going to school, and early to bed, early to rise was normal.
We had a few antenna TV stations, no cable, VCRs weren't around for the average family, and of course no Internet.
We also didn't have city street lights / ambient light, street noise, the sound of neighbours.
People have gotten up early to do farm work for aeons, and go to sleep early too. In fact, to be more precise, staying up past 8 or 9pm is an urban / modern aberration.
Point is, staying up late is the problem. Nothing more.
Now of course, society has changed, so maybe change is needed. However, there is also a lot of counter literature on even TV as a sleep depriver. And now we have phone in bed, with a glowing screen, keeping a mind active.
My point? OK, change the time. However, will kids just stay up even later?
Or, as they do now, will they think "I should go to sleep now, or I will be tired tomorrow, but just one more text..."?
I mean with most clocks also being internet connected computers it wouldnt be too hard to make a system where you measure time in hours after average sunrise in a tike zone.
That is where I live right now it's sunrise +3.
I'll reschedule the daily 'standup' to SR+3.5, the banks open at SR+3 and close at SR+11.
One major consequence I can see is that now we have north south timezones on top of east west.
This would break in the extreme north or south where there are days without a sunrise.
At no point did I cite biology. Instead, I validated that different wake-up times have existed in the past, and in fact still do.
When does the garbage man, the builder, the mechanic get up? The blue collar man? It isn't 8am, that's for sure. People I know in these professions of start work at 7am. Or earlier. I see them get to sleep by 9pm.
Get to sleep sooner, discipline yourself, as with anything else, it's just that easy.
Or that hard?
Stealing hours later is a lot easier, because any amount of sleep will still break up the day compared to none.
The other reason of course is that the real trick is just staying up longer then your parents: that's the only truly unsupervised freedom you have as a kid.
Eating too much, borrowing more money than you should, eating junk food, staying up too late, being addicted to your phone, texting whilst driving, perhaps these are all the same problem?
And like any animal, we need to be trained to control ourselves, when young, for our own good?
Do they, though?
You shouldn't, and a great many in the US don't.
In terms of salary a school teacher would make less or the same as McDonalds worker.
For example, McDonalds Ukraine pays an entry level worker -14 000 UAH ($500) monthly for 40 hours per week. School teacher makes minimum 5000 UAH ($180), +bonus(10-60%). Teacher who was awarded a "highest category" certification (that would be a very experienced one) and who will get all the possible bonuses and raises will make around 14 000 UAH, roughly.
Workers, cleaning personnel would make in the same ballpark 9000 - 14000 UAH ($300-500) at least in Kyiv. Selling phones in the store, work at supermarket also has a similar remuneration.
Average doctor salary (not nurse) is 9000 UAH, at least officially.
The reason is - most those highly skilled and highly educated workers that I've mentioned are paid by the government which does not have funds and desire honestly to treat these people well. They are remnants of decaying public infrastructure - Ukraine has de jure free universal health care and a very big amount of government-funded seats at state universities. Still it is better to work at school than at the factory probably.
You just have a stereotype of how certain things work, everything is not like US/Western Europe structurally. Higher education is not a ticket to a better life everywhere.
How's the new president doing? At first it seemed like a joke, but the little concrete things i've read about him post-election seemed OK.
New president I think is a bit better than the previous three but the whole situation kind of shows two things: 1) There is not much you can do in the country where oligarchs control everything. 2) There is still not much ideas for the future except some sort of a neoliberal 'reaganomics', further privatization and generally disengagement of the state from any meaningful public good iniatives.
As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.
The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?
Anyway, I get by through a combination of sneaking naps, trying not to sabotage myself by eating/living poorly, and catching up when I can.
I suspect the people in this study do the same. They probably doze when on public transportation, or trying to get the kids to sleep, you'll lay down with them and sleep a little. These stolen moments add up. Also, learning to recognize the signs of mental fatigue - if you can't get rest, then, you have to slow down and double check everything, not get irritable, and defer major decisions.
I can write new applications (atrociously) on basically no sleep, so I'm pretty skeptical "sit at this desk and enter these things" swings one way or the other (or even has much of an ability to quality check - at least the compiler will yell at me when I'm egregiously wrong).
I'd be far more interested if these people could be trusted to run heavy machinery on that schedule, or engage in a creative or hands on task like carpentry or welding. I suspect the results would be quite different.
Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.
What is the expected amount of sleep for a healthy person that spends 8 hours in bed?
It means that the TV is in the bedroom.
- Noise pollution
- Air pollution and ventilation (PM2.5 and CO2)
- Bed comfort
- Temperature and humidity
Its possible that the home environment is so bad, that any increase in sleep yields no improvement. By contrast the workplace might be comparatively better controlled.
Getting rid of fossil-fueled cooking, power generation and transport solves some of these issues.
This indicates to me that they found something better to do, than this study.
> When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
Or is it “When I temporarily find myself in an environment with stress-levels similar to those of the people in the study I a) start to perform like them on modern day tasks and b) start to sleep like them.”?
Same. I have a hard line at 6 hours. Over 6 and I'm good, less than 6 and I'm dead all day. I don't use an alarm and wake up naturally after around 7 hours of sleep, but that last hour I'm normally aware of the lighter sleep stage I'm in.
> ... only 5.5 hours per night ...
> ... increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night ...
>In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.
If you consider taking 30 minutes of a 6 hour shift to nap, that means they have to be 10% more productive for the 5.5 hours after the nap. I'd suspect hawthorne here, even though it didn't show up in the night treatment group, but it would be interesting to see if this productivity increase is sustained in the long run.
>In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.
Time spent napping >> time in bed. They're sufficiently exhausted by mid-day to get higher quality rest than they would by spending the same time in bed.
If you're tired, you're better off getting up at your normal wake time, then taking a nap later.
If we had the technology to force people to work 24/7 but proved to it was detrimental to people’s health, somehow I know deep down that society would just bite the bullet and people would burn the midnight oil for a few more dollars.
This is actually why economics is called the "dismal science", it's not because everyone hates economists, a slave-owner gave it that name because he was mad economists didn't like slavery.
As for literature backing this up, Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations talks in detail about slavery in the American colonies.
He gives examples where slavery was only viable in the southern states where they grew tobacco. Maybe one of the reasons why the South were so opposed to the end of slavery vs the North where slavery was expensive
There's a reason why overall income didn't really go down in 2020 (and even increased in some places), and thats because poor people don't actually make that much money, nor do they provide any significant value.
I’d love to see this reasoning or study behind this, and the context of “poor people”.
The causes of the interruptions could be manifold but i would hazard a guess that the primary cause would be interruption from young children in small domiciles and lack of could social responsibility within the neighbourhood.
I've experienced both having a young family and currently living in relatively low social economic neighbourhood. Just last night I was disrupted by someone deciding to burn something rather noxious at 0100 in the morning.
Although not completely relevant to the topic, it's not outside the realm of possibility for what was stated to become a reality. And it's very much an important idea to explore, because to not do so would help those willing to exploit such "zombie workers" actually go through with it.
For these to work most often one needs to denigrate the peoples concern to the point where they are no longer even perceived as the same level of human. Sure all of that is possible but we wont have useful conversations or strategies if we're constantly elevating every instance of stratified to a slave like scenario.
I'm not convinced that there is really any other make up of society. The only way would be for us all to live as isolated self sufficient hermits.
It doesn't require anyone to subjugate or enslave anyone else.
Nor think of them as "sub-human" or try to convince a larger population that their exploitation is warranted. All it takes is for the substance or technology that allows for this 24/7 waking state to become legal and you're done.
The moment it's legal, warehouses, factories, the service industry, will start looking for people who can pull 10 hour shifts. If you can't do that then you can't have a job (or you lose an existing one.)
Then it goes from 10 to 15 hours. If you can't keep up, perhaps be cause you refuse to "augment" yourself, then you're unable to find work or loose your existing one.
This really isn't that far stretched.
Do you really think Bezos and his lot wouldn't be willing to invest in technologies that allowed an already underpaid workforce to go from 8 hour shifts to 15, 18 or 24 hours?
Of course they would.
It's not inflammatory because it's an accurate description of the capitalist mindset. You wouldn't get a CEO to admit it out loud, but they all believe that in their heart, otherwise they would be replaced by someone who does.
This study used cognition, productivity, decision-making, and well-being as outcomes. It did not discuss the economic effects related to deleterious health from long-term sleep deprivation. Is higher productivity and output from increased time at work and decreased sleep time outweighed by the burden taken on by society from the other effects? I worry that some people will see this research and use it to feel better about making their employees work more hours and exploiting low income labor.
short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an
overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard
deviations, with significant increases in
productivity, psychological well-being, and
cognition
For me it's easier if I was sleep deprived after several nights, and when I've not exercised for long.
Yes. If you have to look after an infant you too may discover how wonderful 12 minutes, or seven, of closing your eyes can be. Did I sleep? Maybe, but I definitely feel better.
Sometimes I'd have had too much coffee or been overstimulated through work or something, I found [these tips from the military](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-trick-soldiers-use-...) really helpful. Even now, I pretty much only need to relax my jaw and do a few rounds of 4-7-8 breathing and I can have a nap on demand!
I started out finding a comfortable position and relaxing with a timer set for 15 minutes. After years of practice, I now hit REM almost immediately and wake up feeling rested without a timer in 15-20 minutes.
It's easier for your body to learn if you have a specific place (e.g. a coach), time (e.g. immediately after lunch), and position (I cross my ankles and steeple my hands on my chest). These make it feel qualitatively different from night sleeping and easier to wake up naturally.
You also want to pay attention to sound and light. I use noise-cancelling headphones at work and earplugs + white noise at home. I choose a well-lit area, preferably with natural lighting, and then cover my eyes with a cloth or sleep mask. It's easier to feel refreshed when you uncover your eyes to bright sunshine, rather than waking up in a fully dark room.
Honestly, the main challenge is feeling self-conscious when napping at work. Originally I would lock myself in a shower room or go out to my car, but I'm finally self-confident enough to sleep on a public coach.
Sleep at a desk might not be the most comfortable thing, but it's not bad at all once you're used to it. Or get a small bed around if you can. Sleep masks are surprisingly helpful, too.
Just relax and don't be upset if you cannot fall asleep fast, even if you can't fall asleep you'll find yourself more productive in the afternoon - it's like an implicit meditation. There are also times that people only actually sleep like 5 minutes out of 20, but it usually subjectively feels much longer than '5 minutes' because time feels longer when sleeping and it's very refreshing.
As time goes by it will become a habit and you'll fall asleep fast. The downside is you are likely to feel worse if you have things to do at noon and miss the nap.
IMO the best thing about taking nap at noon is it reduces the fear of sleeping too little at night because you know you can more or less take a nap and get a partial reset at noon.
Maybe I'm wrong on the causation but I feel more sleepy if I eat more carbohydrate.
> Could it also be something else, like the cooking oil used with the veggies and meat/tofu?
Anything would do, it's just simply harder to sleep with empty stomach =P
Thinking specifically of Card and Krueger (1994) finding zero impact of the minimum wage on employment
Also the period of improvement was merely days. Maybe benefits take longer to begin to show.
It's not sufficient to even reduce interest in improving sleep quality because it doesn't measure most of the effects and the methodology is questionable: did participants accept, e.g., lower-quality meals in order to find more time to sleep?
It does show that rich people telling poor people what to do rarely produces any improvement — we've seen that before.
1. Their interventions increased sleep time only by increasing time in bed, not sleep efficiency. In other words, without interventions, if participants were sleeping for 5.5 hours with 8 hours in bed, after their interventions, they slept 6 hours after 8.5 hours in bed.
2. This means that the night sleep they measured post-intervention was still extremely disturbed. I doubt if it was restorative in any way.
3. The nap time at work WAS probably of much higher quality because the environment was much better.
4. A word on the interventions; I cannot figure out why they didn’t give out mosquito nets or repellant given that they correctly identified mosquitoes as a major problem (reported by 70% of participants). The best way of getting a good night’s sleep with mosquitoes around is with nets and the second best is some kind of repellant.
5. I think the real conclusion should be that sleep quality matters. Not just amount of sleep, especially if it’s disturbed.
I feel like the conclusions are slightly post facto. As in, they set out to test their interventions and didn’t end up proving them so they switched to nap time.
In addition it should be noted that the study relies on actigraphy, yet the shortcomings of actigraphy are waved away. This doesn't mean we can get good before-after estimates, but they should not be compared to estimates from PSG.
It's complicated.
Matt Desmond's "Evicted" was a profound moment for me. Similar to this study on sleep, he highlights how areas of higher eviction rates ultimately destabilize the broader community. That feeds back into the disease and the cycle perpetuates, like a virus.
Most of the restorative benefits of sleep happen during long stretches of uninterrupted sleep. If the sleep efficiency problem is due to multiple interruptions to the nights sleep, that is a very different thing than people having a hard time getting to sleep, but staying asleep once they are out.
If the underlying sleep efficiency issue isn't addressed, it's not really all that surprising that there wasn't a measurable improvement in productivity.
Noise proofing interior walls costs almost nothing (something like 1% the price of construction), but has a huge impact on quality of life.
I’m continually shocked at the systematic discrimination built into California housing.
Maybe I'm weird, but I hate sleep. If I had the option to function off of 3-less hours a day, that would be like getting back 45 days worth of my time every year.
Edit: adding the link to an article I happened to have open: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...
The abstract of the article doesnt say this. It finds that the intervention managed to increase their average sleep length by 27 minute from 5.5 hours to ~6 hours. Thats still way bellow the recommended length. It also finds that this intervention didn’t improve their work performance.
This might be because “less sleep doesnt seem to affect them much”, but it might equally well be that it affects them tremendously and the 27 extra minutes were not enough to help them.
In the past while driving long distances, if I started getting fatigued, pulling over to a Motorway services I could fall asleep for 20 minutes and that freshened me up enough to finish any journey.
As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.
Recent consensus statement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434546/
In addition it should be note that it's distributed like a Gaussian distribution, so there will be plenty of people outside this range.
Actual studies are much less conclusive (see the one we are commenting on for example) and the evidence for 8 hours of sleep is shaky and the difference from 6 to 8 is rarely especially big even when it is supported with anything under 6 and over 8 having negative effect.
Check this systematic review (first result of my search[0]) which seems extremely sympathetic to 8 hours, yet the actual results are:
>compared with 7 h of sleep per day, a 1-h decrease in sleep duration was associated with 6% increased risk of all-cause mortality and a 1-h increase in sleep duration was associated with a 13% increased risk of all-cause mortality (N = 241 107 adults in 43 articles)
So, going from 7 to 8 hours increases risk more than going from 7 to 6!
Further
>Itani et al. (2017) reported that short sleep duration (<6 or ≤7 h/day) was not significantly associated with the incidence of depression compared with normal sleep duration (N = 16 257 adults in 2 articles)
>Lo et al. (2016) reported that extreme sleep durations (both short and long) were associated with cognitive decline compared with the reference sleep of 7 to 8 h/day (N = 97 264 adults in 18 articles)
But again it's only at the extremes that there is decline, which seems to be more like 3+ hours less than 8 a day.
>Health-related quality of life No systematic review was identified that examined the association between sleep duration and health-related quality of life.
etc. If you go through actual studies and systematic reviews it is really hard to make much of a case that 6 hours is much worse (if at all) than 8, yet alone anything more than that.
0. https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/apnm-2020-0034
> If you go through actual studies and systematic reviews it is really hard to make much of a case that 6 hours is much worse (if at all) than 8, yet alone anything more than that.
The absence of evidence that 6 is much worse than 8 hours is not evidence that 6 is not much worse than 8 hours. It doesn't matter that much in this case because we already agree that it's worse - the question is how much worse.
Better or worse is measured in averages, on a population level, and here we see exactly the adverse health outcomes you cited (and a lot more that you didn't cite) from [1].
Here is where things get tricky for two reasons:
1) Population studies don't translate into personal health advice - there are plenty of folks striving on 4 hours a night (but they are rare in relative terms).
2) Overly long sleep durations are also associated with adverse health outcomes, and we don't know why! We believe we have a good understanding why short sleep is linked to some health outcomes linked to certain metabolic pathways, e.g. obesity or diabetes. And also we can take one individual, restrict their sleep, and see that their cognitive performance is impaired, and from here, it is reasonable to assume we understand the link between short sleep and accidents and injuries.
For the overly long sleep however, we have no idea (as far as I'm aware of).
It's not absense of evidence as in hasn't been tested - they have been compared and it doesn't really come off as worse or at best only a little worse (and in some cases better than 8).
>It doesn't matter that much in this case because we already agree that it's worse - the question is how much worse.
Who is this 'we'? My whole point is that people have this assumption and keep looking for ways to justify it even when confronted with evidence that it might not be the case as in the study posted here or the systematic review I posted.
>and here we see exactly the adverse health outcomes you cited (and a lot more that you didn't cite) from [1].
But we don't see that. What I cited was that the evidence doesn't even suggest worse outcomes at 6 vs 8 hours in the biggest analyses out there.
* Mortality
* Incident cardiovascular disease
* Incident type 2 diabetes
* Mental health (incident depression)
* Brain health (incident cognitive disorders)
* Cognitive function
* Falls
* Accidents and injuries
and six other outcomes. The authors conclude:
> Conclusion
> A comprehensive body of evidence supports the presence of a U-shaped association between sleep duration and health outcomes in adults. Dose–response curves showed that the sleep duration that was most favourably associated with the health outcomes that were examined was around 7–8 h per day in adults, with no apparent modification of the effect by age in the few studies that looked at it.
Yes, of course sleeping, say, 2 hours a night is too little. My claims and quotations were about 6 hours, which is roughly what the people in OP slept, too.
> My claims and quotations were about 6 hours, which is roughly what the people in OP slept, too.
It's not clear how comparable the numbers are. The study from OP [2] reports sleep as measured by actigraphy (5.5h), time in bed (8h) and self-reported sleep (7.2h). What the meta-analyses most likely have studied (I haven't checked) is self-reported sleep.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/JAHA.117.005947
You are proving my point - even when presented with data against the 8 hours myth you try to twist it in every way to confirm your prior belief and wouldn't even consider if the data might just be correct.
If sleep studies show that 6-hour sleepers do better than 8-hour sleepers on a variety of metrics... that definitely counts as evidence.
It doesn't matter that much in this case because we already agree that it's worse
The parent comment literally cites a study that suggests 8 is worse than 6.
There are people who insist that actually, 5-6 hours is fine, and that I must be lying, lazy, or deluding myself. These people are trying to make me stupid and miserable.
It's an issue that provokes a lot of strong emotions, especially on the side of people who feel pressured to sleep less than they need.
Perhaps you feel like it is much worse for the side you perceive yourself to be on. I, and plenty of other people have had very negative experiences and sleep-related anxiety because of all the people insisting that getting less than 8 hours of sleep is bad for you on flimsy evidence.
However I really do maintain that the anti-sleep attitude is much more common. There is always huge pressure in schools, the workplace, social life to cut into sleep.
I think the reason "Why We Sleep" became so popular without facing much scrutiny is because many people were facing these pressures and desperate for some countervailing authority to point to.