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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Sleep is a whole-body process of repair and optimization. Many cultures chastise sleepers as lazy, but every time you sleep, it's like a big reconstruction process in your body.

I think that sleep and allowing adequate time for it is the lowest hanging fruit for most people's health. Us site readers usually get enough to eat, and sometimes more, yet when was the last time you allowed yourself to sleep as much as you want to, without limit?

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> Many cultures chastise sleepers as lazy, but every time you sleep, it's like a big reconstruction process in your body.

The morning alarm is society telling you "stop reconstructing yourself, start working on our problems."

Not using an alarm clock 90% of the time is one of the greatest privileges I experience in life. One which I wish more people were fortunate to share.

As a parent of a young child, I'd welcome the routine tyranny of an alarm clock

Oh man. You aren’t kidding.

Eventually the human alarm clocks do grow up.

Part of the problem is that children occupy a lot of your time. After you get them in bed, it's tempting to stay up later than one usually would in order to have some personal time. This doesn't change the time that the human alarm clocks go off, though, and it can quickly spiral out of control.

It gets better. When they are older you can include them into your passion projects, or whatever sort of hobbies you have. This part is great because you are both teaching them and having fun at the same time.

I say this all the time because it showcases how little time you have with them, but you only have about 1,000 weekends with them until they are adults. It all happens so fast. I enjoy the time that I spent with them, especially over the last year when we were all together as a family for so many months. I, myself, am nearing the end of those 1,000 weekends with my oldest and I miss some of those human alarm clock days when they were up early and just wanted to play together.

On a similar note:

"It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time."

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html

Even if you just have a pet, many of them are very excited for you to get up in the morning and feed them. And worse, they don't even understand DST!

A lot of us get a taste of this on weekends or days off, but what have you personally noticed the difference to be? Maybe in terms of productivity, fatigue, mood, health, etc.

I went from waking up at 6AM every day for 6 years (US mil) to not setting an alarm in the last 6 (remote employee). The main thing I notice in the rare event where I have to set an alarm these days is this 15-30 minutes of heavy brain fog after waking up. In my experience it feels very similar to the sensation in your head shortly after you've taken a dose of melatonin, which I guess makes sense. It's hard to put into words but obviously we've all experienced it. I don't ever experience this sensation waking up naturally.

The end result is early morning grumpiness, in my case. I'm just in a foul mood for the first hour or two after being ripped from sleep via an alarm. I otherwise don't feel more productive or healthy.

I'm curious why this is; I assume it has to do with the natural sleep cycle. Do those chemicals metabolize in some way shortly before you wake up naturally vs waking up by an alarm where they're still present?

I find it to be almost universally positive. I'm a freelancer and I work practically "full time" but I don't start work until I naturally wake up unless I happen to have a meeting scheduled.

One of first things I noticed is hunger. When I wake up to an alarm I generally feel sluggish and immediately hungry. If I wake up to my alarm at 8 then I need to eat almost immediately. If I naturally wake up at 9 I might potter about and eat breakfast at 10 without thinking much about it. Alarms seem to induce stress and stress induces hunger.

I generally find that only having weekends alarm free provides just enough respite and replenishment for taking on the work week but not enough to reduce mental stress across the board. Being able to have a lay in on any given day that requires it makes a world of difference to mid week slumps.

Do you find your sleep skews? Any longer (2-3 week) vacations I've taken I've found that my waking up time keeps skewing even if I'm not going to bed later. Maybe I've never seen the end where it stabilizes.

My wake up time is a 2 hour window between 7:30 and 9:30 but usually around the middle of that. It varies day to day. Whether it's earlier or later mostly depends on how much exercise I do the day before. My training has large spikes where I go out rock climbing all day and then have multiple "rest" days so I let my body get whatever sleep it needs.

My waking times definitely skew, but for me I think it happens because my bed time pushes it later and later until my night owl habits and my guilt over sleeping late reach an equilibrium.

When I was in college I'd pretty quickly drift to a 4:00AM to noon sleep schedule on holidays. Even today (in my mid 20's) I find I'm happiest sleeping from roughly 2:00AM to 10:00AM.

At the beginning of the pandemic, no one in our family had any fixed time obligations other than my afternoon meetings, so we basically stopped enforcing any bedtimes or wake up times for the kids (and ourselves).

Pre-pandemic we were all waking around 8am to get my daughter to pre-school. Within a week of foregoing bedtimes, we were all going to bed between 2am and 4am and waking up around 11am. So the kids still got their 9 hours and the adults got their 7, but it did stabilize.

(Not the parent)

My sleep cycle naturally drifts infinitely by some 30 minutes a day on average.

It makes life strange at times, especially on this latitude. Imagine waking up at night through a whole winter, not seeing the Sun for months.

I've tried to hold steady cycle but I just grow more and more tired every day until finally the alarm fails to wake me. School was hell. Was absent a lot simply for sleeping.

I was exactly the same, a lot of reading about sleep and strict sleep hygiene fixed it. There are lots you can do but briefly just go out for a jog when you wake up. You need the exposure to blue light to help set your circadian rhythm. The exercise increases body temp which helps bring forward your circadian rhythm. Basically your habits are probably shifting your circadian rhythm back 30min a day, and if not you can have habits which bring forward your circadian rythm

There are so many variables involved, once you start listening, the schedule will never be a schedule again.

Sometimes I want to sleep a few extra hours. Sometimes I'm so excited for the day, I get up early and go to sleep late. Sometimes I need to stay up for a while, and next time I sleep it's for 20 hours straight. Sometimes it's just a nap here and there for a few days.

The most important thing I've learned is to listen to my tiredness level, and not get too carried away with productivity.

Sleep is basic resource management: it takes too much resources to both run all macro systems, and also all microsystems (on cellular level). So they take turns and interleave through the sleep/wake cycle. As you say, microsystems take over during sleep.

From a cell's perspective, they sleep while "we" are awake.

This means sleep is advantageous to all multicellular organisms, unless there's great pressure for them to evolve hybrid alternatives (such as sleeping dolphins or migrating birds).

It's a bit discouraging that in the mainstream we keep asking "but why sleep tho" or even worse, we keep propagating the wrong answers, when the principles lay before our eyes.

It's not just resource management. In humans, during sleep there is a cleanup program that gets rid of waste in your brain. My pet theory is that this is because running cleanup during the day would impair the function of the tissue too much, so it's ran during the sleep phase.

Yes. Basically we're 2-in-1, we have two modes (macro and micro, or from macro perspective: operation and maintenance), and they're largely incompatible together for many reasons, but both are needed in order for the organism to exist within parameters.

This pattern emerges in complex artificial systems as well. "Stop the world" garbage collection in some programming languages.

Or the fact most stores prefer to not be open 24/7 not simply to save on salaries and power bills, but also to restock, reorganize shelves etc.

The workweek/weeekend cycle is another trivial example. And so on.

It's a bit like an OS that distributes time-slices of a single CPU core between a set of "background services" and "the main application".

Your reduction is, I think, too simplistic. Some bacteria appear to also have some basic passive/active cycle, for example. It's really fascinating and there's tons of functions interleaved.

edit it's not just multi/unicellular modes - REM is very close to awake state, cell activity wise (looking from PoV of brain waves emerging), with source of sensory input being switched to internal; and in deep sleep NREM, large parts of the brain (depends on the animal, hemispheres take turns in some) are in a sort of slow-mo sine wave "sync" (kinda amazing!) Etc. etc.

My reduction strives to drive home the core of an idea that extends both at higher levels (i.e. we have passive/active cycles as a society as well, the most simple example being workweek/weekend), and lower levels, like your bacteria example.

And yes, it's not about "one cell" vs. "all the cells", more generally it's about "higher-level systems" vs. "lower-level systems" where also some functionality serendipitously adapts/fits/evolves into one of those modes without specific regard about where it semantically sits in this hierarchy of complexity.

Regarding REM sleep, I think our methodology and terminology is a bit too crude, electrical "activity" means very little about the state of the brain. For ex. you have no access to most of your memories while in REM sleep, you can't even determine you're sleeping most of the time, and when you do, you usually forget in a minute or two, your cognitive function is that low.

Honestly the way you described REM sleep, it started sounding a bit like unit testing (inputs/outputs come from the repository, not from the user, and this process goes through the entire brain in order). :-) Which... actually might not be far from truth (in some aspects of it).

> where also some functionality serendipitously adapts/fits/evolves into one of those modes without specific regard about where it semantically sits in this hierarchy of complexity.

That did make sense, I oversimplified your reduction on first pass :D yea, I agree, nice generalization. And I like this idea re: it not caring where it sits. edit how to even place it on a linear complexity scale anyway...

> it started sounding a bit like unit testing

In the book I mentioned elsewhere in the thread (Why we sleep), there are some interesting theories related to this... sifting through memories, colliding them together, decisions being made on what to keep, and so on. I sometimes wonder if REM sleep as we experience it is, in part, the phenomenological perception of a kind of encoding and compression process, looking from the inside, as it were. Well, in a way I didn't say much I guess, because you can model so many things as a type of compression :D but anyway. Yea, cool stuff...

> Sleep is a whole-body process of repair and optimization.

This is what I felt when I watched the Netflix documentary "My Octopus Teacher".

At some point, the octopus was vigorously attacked by a shark, which cost her a tentacle. She was bleeding and retreated to her den.

The attack made her very weak. She could no more change colors, nor get out of the den, even to get food.

After a week or so in the den, presumably sleeping, she started recovering and her arm started to regenerate.

I slept for 10 hours last night and felt great today. It really is a great way to stay healthy (or regain health). I burned the candle a bit much last year building a side project and now I decided not to launch it because it really messed me up health wise and I can’t commit to day job, family AND side project without it making me ill.

> when was the last time you allowed yourself to sleep as much as you want to, without limit?

I was told premature optimization was the root of all evil.

Isn't it the case that physical height growth occurs during sleep? That's more evidence that sleep is a whole body process.

That part in particular is as simple as... you get higher because you're laying down, so there's no vertical pressure on your back.

Not the nightly half-inch, but like your growth from 18" to 6' over the course of your life happens while you sleep.

How would you measure 8 hours of that?

I think the basic answer to that is: by measuring height before and after, controlling for laying down still but not sleeping, perhaps also with some intermediate measurements.

If most of human height growth occurs in the first 20 years of life, that's about 200 microns per 24 hours. Can you measure that accurately? What sort of fluctuating errors would be introduced by for example, temperature and hydration?

That may be the average, but it happens in spurts, and you can probably get some decent measurements if you put your mind to it.

Ah yeah, growth occurs mostly during sleep. Vast majority of it. Growth hormone is actually released mostly during sleep.

When a cell has to function as part of a higher-level system, "dividing" is kind of disruptive. So this happens while we sleep.

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