The effects of sleep debt
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The point of this long winded intro: Don't take sleep for granted. If you sleep well, cherish it. Ever since this time I keep immaculate sleep hygiene. I go to bed on time, at the same time, get daily sunlight, don't eat before bed, and 9/10 times I'm asleep in minutes and sleep great. I still have occasional early wake insomnia, but for the most part sleep well.
Occasionally I think about things like mentioned in this article and what the long term effects will be, but mostly I just don't worry about it. There isn't anything I can do about it at this point except try to sleep as best I can from this point forward.
The thing about those two weeks, was with no sleep there is no "refresh" between days. If I asked myself the question of what I had for breakfast this morning, it would have multiple answers. The past several days were "today" in memory. It was very disconcerting. It did have a cool upside of reading several books in 2 weeks time, but the downside was feeling like everything in the world was wrong.
Thankfully when I went back on ship, I was able to sleep again -- best sleep I ever had with the rocking and white noise.
I wasn't as tired and craving of sleep as I would have expected. Probably physically tired a bit just because I was sitting up reading books all night instead of getting good rest. Individual tasks in the "now" didn't seem too bad, but everything else (and it turns out to be a lot) that depended on short term was messed up -- conversations with people, where I parked, what day it was, routine tasks which felt like they were already done but still needed to be done that day, etc...
I might need to do the laundry but felt like I had already done the laundry -- but that was 4 days ago. It took mental effort to observe what day it was, rather than waking up on Wednesday and knowing all day that it is Wednesday. Instead it I "knew" it was "Monday" and I also knew it was "Tuesday", and it certainly didn't feel like Wednesday. So I was spending mental effort for things that just flow naturally. Thankfully I didn't have much to do during those two weeks.
these results have been known for a long time for various problem solving tasks (your error rate and task completion time will skyrocket), physically focused things like weight lifting or cardio (you will lift less and not be able to run as long before hitting a wall etc.), reaction tests (you will become a slowpoke), memory tests, mood and other psychometrics. there are also fairly obvious outward physiological effects, like increased collagen production will give you baggy eyes, etc.
I also get really bad sleep anxiety/water anxiety. And you're right, articles like these are only good for scaring normal people who fight their own bodies from sleeping. They're pointless for people whose bodies are fighting them and can only generate more stress.
Best of luck. Not sleeping sucks. And I totally agree, all these articles do for those with sleep issues is add more stress. Very few people choose not to sleep.
I've been working with a sleep specialist recently and the thought did occur to me that she's more like a CPAP machine seller than anything.
Then again.. this thing has been improving my sleep I suppose. When the mask doesn't leak air or have any other issues.
I had no apnea, by the way. :P
I had similar problems when I used a Brita filter with a ketogenic diet, switching back to regular tap water fixed it. :)
[1] https://www.livestrong.com/article/447467-can-coffee-deplete...
I recommend everyone does their research on magnesium deficiency. Supposedly the vast majority of the nation is low in magnesium due to soil quality depletion. Vegetables these days just aren't packing the same punch that they once did.
I'd also ask about a benzo or other chemical help.
Lack of sleep also affects my stress/anxiety levels.
Though, personal anecdata: I sleep less during week-long water fasting (<7h instead of usual ~8h). I feel excellent but the total duration is less. Resistance training (barbell) increases the duration for me.
While it was happening, I'd describe the sensation as like skipping a stone - I'd have to go in steep by taking a valium and going to sleep at my most tired or else I'd need to resign myself to "bounce" off the sleep surface a bunch of times before I finally fell through.
Had a similar experience. I'm high anxiety and prone to sleep issues.
Once, I went so long with so little sleep that I started dissociating and having panic attacks.
Trying to sleep, I'd get close to dozing off then be convinced I'd stop breathing and die if I did + get a surge of adrenaline.
You can imagine the vicious cycle. I went to the ER and asked them to knock me out, once I had slept finally I was back to normal thankfully.
I can totally relate to your surge of adrenaline - my body gets really funky when I miss sleep. Most people get sleepy and more prone to doze off, but I have the exact opposite (I get wired but tired) and can often feel my heart beating in my ears and chest.
I also remember discussing with my wife if the hospital would sedate me beyond something like a bezo which was of limited use for me (I would sleep 1-2 hours per pill). Sounds like you had success - I'll keep that in mind if there is ever a next time :-)
Scary to think about what my future holds, I know my attention span / memory sucks much more compared to when I was younger... anyways, I hope studies like these are wrong.
I've always wondered about this advice. I find it very difficult to fall asleep on an empty stomach. And even then I wake up much earlier than usually and very hungry. Usually I try to eat something heavy about 3 hours before going to bed.
Dinner was if you had guests.
---
I have two strong personal takeaways at this post:
A)
* I have long had sleep issues, with the jerks and what not (I have them literally every other day, to this day)
* I recognize that many people ITT are high-IQ/thought-producing-workers
* The fact that REM does a basic "mental-wash" over your cortex and brain in gen, thus to solidify (calcify) memories into system. Such that if you experience poor sleep - you have a poor memory. This is TRUE for me.
B)
* Diet is a huge factor. And intuitively enough, just yesterday I was feeling that my internal sodium/potassium pump was off... I could feel it.
I eat a lot of bananas, but a close person to me is a Cellar Somm at TFL, who has 19,000 bottles of wine in the catalogue, and she constantly berates my poor memory ; but she literally eats a banana every single day on way to work, and has the ability to fall asleep in seconds, and when asleep - sleeps like a mummy.
The weird thing was I was literally thinking about the importance of the potassium sodium pump, and that I could feel an imbalance in my own body on such (my focus was on meditating on the health of my kidneys) but knowing that its also related to sleep and, more importantly for me, memory ; and the REM WASH - I am convinced this will be next step in restoring what was perviously a photographic memory when I was 15...
Another one you might not have considered is rosmarinic acid ("rosemary extract" or "lemon balm extract" or just a strong lemon balm tea). This reduces the metabolism of GABA and in my experience had a distinct but fairly mild effect on sleep that lasted a month or two of continuous use (unusually) but then took over a year to have any obvious effect again (possibly even longer, I haven't tried it much since and I can't remember if it ever really helped again). Unfortunately, I don't remember it having much effect on my movement issues but since alcohol and benzos affect your issue it might be worth a try rather than those if it happens again (hopefully not!). I was using 200mg rosemary extract standardized at 20% rosmarinic acid (from a no longer available source). I don't know if the chamomile does something similar, in which case it likely wouldn't help you due to the tolerance.
Once when I was operating a lathe someone told me to stop the machine after it passed ~300mm on the X axis, which takes maybe a minute, but before it reached that point I was already out of it, luckily the person was nearby and very quickly noticed what's happening and managed to stop the machine.
Modafinil helps me keep my eyes open and stay present in the real world. But I'm my country you can only get it via a prescription, so it's not really accessable.
Am I overly cautious?
Getting healthy sleep is a real issue many are battling with I believe.
Months later, I watched a couple of different movies that I thought I'd never seen. But I kept knowing the next couple of plot points. I didn't know how they'd end, but I'd clearly watched them in that dilapidated state because I always knew what was about to happen next in the next scene.
[deleted and reposted where I meant to reply after mis-click]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8891393/#:~:text=Negative%20....
Why not?
Musk tweeted this advice recently, along with his mistake that 3 inches is "about 5cm" for raising the bed head.
"Don't go to bed hungry" could also be valid advice.
I finally decided to try not eating in the late afternoon or evening, i.e. I'll try to have my last meal by 3 or 4 PM.
My sleep quality improved noticeably from doing that. I wake less often at night, and in the morning wake up feeling more refreshed. Definitely worth a try, though it may just be me.
I have this every now and then, for example I start dreaming that I'm walking and then I suddenly trip on something which wakes me up.
It also worsens if I'm already deprived of sleep. To me it feels like the longer I stay awake the more vivid my dreams are and they start earlier as I'm falling asleep.
For me it's not really an inconvenience as it doesn't happen that often, but it's annoying as I have to fall asleep again.
I know what your talking about and do occasionally get those kind as well. I will dream something like I'm walking down a sidewalk and suddenly the next step isn't there and I jerk awake. I usually get this if I fall asleep sitting vs laying, etc.
In case you haven't tested for it yet, maybe mention to your doctor to test your serotonin levels as hypnic jerks are a known symptom of low serotonin levels.
Any other things in your sleep hygiene toolkit? Or some small details you could flesh out that you believe are important?
- exercise. I lift weights and do some cardio. Ease into it as overdoing it can make it harder to sleep. Do in morning or afternoon, not evening.
- comfort. If your bed isn't comfortable get a new matress. It can make a world of difference.
- chamomile tea before bed. I drink two cups nightly.
- I supplement magnesium, and find that taking a big dose before bed both helps my sleep and mild jerks
- Make sure the room is dark. I use a sleep mask as otherwise I wake up at 5-6AM when the sun cracks thru the blinds
- Make sure the room is cool. My upstairs bedroom doesn't cool well via central air so I got a portable unit to assist
- Relax. One night of missed sleep won't kill you and if you can convince yourself of that, you are more likely to relax and fall asleep
- Deep breathing. If you can't fall asleep. Practice relaxation via deep, slow breathing in your belly, not your chest. It takes practice, but works great.
- Pzizz app. Awesome, awesome stuff. I like the relaxed breathing and sleep hypnosis sessions
- If your brain just won't stop, try some inositol. I take 3g (most pills are 500mg, so 6x) and that seems to work
- Some melatonin can help if you just can't get "sleepy". For something stronger, 50mg of benedryl knocks me out good. I try not to take either of these very often though.
Is this by choice or circumstance?
> Nevertheless, many scientists said that the new research should not be cause for panic. “It is possible that sleep deprivation damages rat and mouse brains, but that doesn’t mean that you should get stressed about not getting enough sleep,” said Jerome Siegel, a sleep scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did not contribute to the review.
> Dr. Siegel noted that neural injury comes in degrees, and that the extent of sleep deprivation’s effect on the human brain is still largely unknown. He also expressed concern that undue worry about the long-term effects of sleep deprivation could lead people to try to sleep more, unnecessarily and with medication.
The opinion of a single review paper on effects in mice is not conclusive science. So, in other words, there's no news here.
From the same article : “Sleep loss can injure the brain, and if it happens in mice, and it has been shown to happen in other species, then it probably does happen in humans,” Dr. Veasey said. “It always begs the question: How much sleep loss would cause injuries? But looking at all of this literature together, of around one week of chronic sleep loss, it really does suggest that you injured the brain to some extent.”
There is enough consensus in the scientific community about "some" connection between sleep deprivation, free radicals, oxidation stress and cell damage. Because of ethical issues since we are not allowed to directly force stress a Human (the article states: there is currently no ethical way to measure the degree and kind of cell damage caused by sleep deprivation in the locus coeruleus and hippocampus of a living human.) we do it on genetically well-matched species like Fruitfly, Mice etc. We then use statistical inference to extrapolate to Humans and see how well it matches with self-reported/observed data.
Importance of Fruitflies in Human Biology research : https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/0...
Sleep, Death and the Gut (very good article) : https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sleep-death-gut
This is a systemic issue. Society needs to learn that mental health needs to be the #1 priority. From there, people will prosper in many ways.
Sleep Deprivation over extended time periods negatively affects all of the above.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19961/
The public health consequences of sleep loss and sleep-related disorders are far from benign. The most visible consequences are errors in judgment contributing to disastrous events such as the space shuttle Challenger (Walsh et al., 2005). Less visible consequences of sleep conditions are far more prevalent, and they take a toll on nearly every key indicator of public health: mortality, morbidity, performance, accidents and injuries, functioning and quality of life, family well-being, and health care utilization. Some of these consequences, such as automobile crashes, occur acutely within hours (or minutes) of the sleep disorder, and thus are relatively easy to link to sleep problems. Others—for example, obesity and hypertension—develop more insidiously over months and years of chronic sleep problems. After decades of research, the case can be confidently made that sleep loss and sleep disorders have profound and widespread effects on human health.
Also see https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep-deprivation/effects-...
Nobody with sleep deprivation is doing this.
I've been sleeping less than 6-7h consistently for the past few weeks, and if that'll cause permanent damage to my brain/memory, I absolutely want to prioritize a fix more urgently.
I generally proscribe to satisficing, and wouldn't want to freak out if I missed 30-60min here or there, especially if I still pretty fine, but I value my faculties.
To me, it's like torture, I don't really need additional long-term risks to absolutely not want to do it.
Maybe just because I've been so busy/energized, maybe because I've been doing yoga every morning and exercising during the days, maybe something else.
There is no news for some virtual construct of an ideally informed individual - meanwhile, I often meet simple people that believe that sleep is optional and secondary. And the consequences are very visible.
> consensus
For practical reasons and purposes, waiting for """consensus""" is a bad idea.
> For practical reasons and purposes, waiting for """consensus""" is a bad idea.
It's a free country, do what you want, but don't call it a scientifically accepted fact until it's you know, accepted by the scientific community.
It is, sure, but to recalibrate the idea of "evidence" start asking the Man in the Street... You'll see that Terry Jones is now nowhere to be found, Carol Cleveland is not a man and - you'll be "at a loss".
> accepted by the scientific community
Sure, but my point was that we don't wait for it. (Were it, again, that simple.) "Ars longa, vita brevis" has another sense not restricted to the individual.
Yes, you need to be careful with your sleep patterns.
Yes, you absolutely do not need to be anxious now.
Sleep debt > Lack of Focus > Stress at work > Stress migrates home > Bad Sleep from Stress > Spirals
May i point out that nothing protects from stress migrating home. Nothing. Normal Homo Sapiens Fight or Flight response expects the stress to cease after the dangerous encounters. The role switching of modern society does not offer a mitigation for that. Meaning the lion hunts you home to the cave. Every day. Stressor handling strategys are plenty available (Rock climbing -> refocus the stress response to a fleeting danger) (Meditation -> Learn to control the stress producing body response), but the best one is to remove oneself from a stressfull environment.
Nothing is worth that payment reduction, after all you pay with your life, getting your system flooded with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol which significantly reduces your lifes lenght and quality.
Just dont do it. If somebody wants to stress you, throw it on the floor and quit. Do it, until they stop stressing you.
video games are filling this role for me (and i exercise separately void of danger). although i used to get caught in feedback loops of too much gaming leading to decreased performance of responsibilities leading to more stress leading to more video games to destress.
that said, i still recommend them. just be aware of the potential cycle and stay disciplined about using them as a tool! Also, dont get so caught up in what youre "supposed" to do in the game such that it becomes another source of stress.
games are the perfect environment to push a comfort zone, trust your gut, be wrong, suffer consequences, and bounce back from it. this seems to be critical for me. I think a lot of games would work. I love trying new games for this reason, and tend not to "complete" games unless it's convenient to.
i find the catharsis is heavily dependent on how i play the game. I try to challenge myself on my own terms, like shadow boxing, while maintaining a respect for the game and playing along. I try not to be stressed about performing my best, nor completely careless. I honestly rarely try to perform at my best, but do try to keep it rare rather than never.
It can be an exercise in and of itself to maintain an appropriate amount of care and effort throughout the entire experience. I slip up one way or the other at some point and it feels good to catch myself and reset mentally.
edit: it also helps that it is usually the last thing i do for the day and i go into it feeling satisfied about what ive done the rest of the day (closed work for the day, exercised, chores, hygiene)
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene/revenge-bedtim...
I go to sleep very early and when I wake up I'm full of energy to start to learn things or work on side projects.
I was doing it the other way around. I will stay awake until late and try to go to sleep with enough time to have rest. There reality is that I will always wanted up with the clock alarm and lacking rest.
But I failed to sleep because I just wanted to do that last thing. Now I know that I have 4 hours until I have to start working, that are very productive hours. And I always wake up before the alarm goes off, fully rested.
Jesus, an evenings-and-weekends startup plus a full time job and leetcode and 2hrs(!!!) at the gym per day?
One thing you're going to need to accept is that there isn't enough time for everything you want to do. In a day. In a life. Consider dropping some of this stuff. My god, you don't even have kids eating 20+ hours a week like lots of people do!
Days are never going to get longer, and your life is only getting shorter. Maybe you operate like this for a little while at the start, but you're going to have to prune at some point. You can't fit a gallon of water in a thimble.
Any suggestions?
Try shopping and meal prepping on the weekends.
Try to go to bed at the same time every day. Eventually it becomes a habit.
Try your best to get a good night's sleep, but don't let these kind of "recent studies show" articles distress you too much. There are all kinds of harms in our environment holding us back from hypothetical perfect health, and there always have been.
If "us" is mankind and its history, the "always have been" seems off. There are traditional harms, like the risk of being bitten by a tiger, but most of those harms are recent, something we are not yet genetically rewired for.
And as we've learned about them, we've been living much longer and healthier lives (until recently in the US).
Guidelines are needed to make policies and sweeping decisions at population level, but shouldn't be taken too seriously at individual levels.
Your neighbor was insensitive and should be more compassionate, but it doesn't mean their QOL is worse than yours (arguably they were in better shape than the sleep deprived you)
I mean it kinda makes sense as well, biologically, that there's a bell curve of both duration and falling asleep hour. It's dangerous and limiting for a group of people to be asleep all at the same time.
It's immensely frustrating when people push for their opinion of what a good sleep schedule looks like. We can unfortunately still see it in our school system and I can only hope that at some point our policies start following the research.
I be have always been very sensitive about my sleep, but after getting a child (and suddenly getting lots of interruptions every night) I stopped caring and found out that a few interruptions a night isn't really that big of a deal if I don't let myself get agitated about it.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sbcmACvB6DqYXYidL/counter-th...
[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/why-we-sle...
> Or get the instruments for a critical approach
What do you mean by that?
That in a "debate", you could value the proponents and rank the proposals accordingly, but it is a most difficult game for a number of reasons (that the proposals are complex; that the proponents are complex and encompassing strengths and weaknesses; that your judgement over them may be mislead; that circularly it is not clear how to (who will reliably) evaluate them etc.),
or that at some point you may want to shift the investment from the pieces of the debate to your ability to assess them critically and build the grounds for a more reliable judgement.
Just a general principle of distance from contents - heavyweights are hard to find so our ability to delegate judgement is restricted.
> ...it was read by hundreds of psychologists and neuroscientists who – I believe – also failed to find any serious issues [...] Some of the scientists wrote to me directly [including] a sleep scientist with >50 h-index who studied sleep for more than 40 years
Given that pop sci publications have a history of being slippery with the truth, and given the financial incentive to make millions off a pop sci book, and given that the claims made in the blog post are easily confirmed and checked, this appeal to authority that you've made is misplaced.
I also notice that napping is not good for me. Unless I can sleep the full 2 hour span, I'm better off waiting until bedtime. I suspect shorter naps disrupt a rem cycle and cause a fogginess upon waking, where the full rem cycle being 2-3 hours I wake up feeling like I've had a good coffee. You can train yourself to notice this as you pass through various stages of 'awareness' while you're sleeping. Each time you remember seeing your clock, that is usually one complete rem cycle.
If the day were 28 hours long, it would match my needs perfectly. Why is this?
It sounds like you might have non-24 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake... )
I also think I have this, though my lifestyle seems to play a big role.. if I'm very active I can stay on a 24-hour cycle; but the majority of the time my cycle is more like 24.5-26 hours, which slowly causes drift until I need to do a 2-3 day 'reset' (go to sleep at 6 AM one night, 12 PM the next, and 6 PM the next), which leads to me being really tired for the majority of those days.
Once I get to sleep at 6 PM I'm set for at least a couple of weeks though, I can slowly drift to sleeping at midnight - 2 AM which is pretty good for me.
> I think the great thing about our industry is that most of us can set our hours and work any block in a 24 hour period.
And the problem with this is, meetings.
Unfortunately, almost no one knows what non-24 is, including sleep therapists I've talked to.
Also recently diagnosed ADHD (in my 40s), and apparently sleep issues like non-24 are at least correlated to it.
When I was a teenager I discovered no end to this.
I do find I have an energy slump in the early evening and wonder if there is some way to take advantage of that, but haven't been able to push myself to try a sleep schedule change that drastic (and my hunch is that it'd just push that slump earlier and I'd start drifting again, just starting from an earlier point in the evening).
I just noticed specific intervals where I'd have a period of wakefulness categorized by the ability to remember the time on the clock when I'd see it. When you sleep your brain is cycling through phases between wakefulness and deep sleep. Between cycles of deep sleep where you're darting your eyes and twitching around, you have periods of semi wakeful sleep.
There are tools that allow you to try an experiment: Use a tool like sleepyti.me and input the time to wake up. Try to time out a single rem cycle for yourself by staying up late without a device in your hand or TV on, and wake up at the desired time. This isn't how I started, but when I saw the app I recognized the cycle immediately. When you wake up, you'll feel more rested than if you woke up at the midway point in one of the cycles, even if it is longer. In my case there's less fog, less agitated state, and quicker boot up time (my term for the time it takes to go from awake to writing code)
If you want to get weird, I'm happy to talk about another sleep cycle I had for a while, but I'm already rambling. The gist of it was many naps, many rems, less cumulative sleep.
Another way to try to wake at the proper point is an alarm that gradually increases in intensity - you can set it about 30-45 minutes before you have to get up, and if you are already in a wakeful state, you'll hear it when it's low, but at the end it will get loud enough to ensure you get up.
Lastly (and not a shill for Fitbit, it's just the one I use), Fitbit has an alarm feature that will try to detect when you've moved into a light sleep stage and go off then (again, you tell it the latest time you want to wake, and it'll start monitoring 30-45 minutes ahead of that time, and go off when it thinks is optimal).
Long story short, I feel like, while they aren't perfect, we are starting to get some awareness of the importance of sleep cycles and some tools built around that awareness, which is pretty cool.
Do you mean at the end of a cycle and before another one starts, or halfway through a cycle? I'd heard the former, not the latter.
When you first fall asleep, you move through a few stages of sleep until you reach the end at the REM stage. Interrupting this stage is what causes the issue for me. I wake up still dreaming or speaking as I wake up.
I was curious because what you wrote reminds me of what happened to me, but on a different time frame. I would "naturally" have the energy to stay up really late and often get 3-5 hours of sleep per night. I felt alright. Then once a month or so on a weekend I'd sleep ~12 hours. Over time that once-a-month longer sleep period turned into every other weekend, then every weekend, and then 12 hours turned into 15. It took me way too long to realize that I'd be basically walking around like a sleepless zombie all week even though I thought I felt "fine" and then completely crashing due to lack of sleep on the weekend. It's like my judgement of my own resting state was impaired, thinking I was OK and rested when I wasn't. Starting to get more sleep during the week felt like coming up from underwater.
Weekdays I don't sleep much, if I had to guess I average 4-5 hours. Weekend comes and since I don't have many obligations, my day is almost entirely free, and I'm willing to sleep in, usually 10-12 hours, occasionally made more miserable by a night a alcohol.
The sad thing is I can get 3 hours of sleep or 12 and I'll wake up and not feel rested. Usually this translates to a thick brain fog (any effective OTC "sleep aid" just makes this worse) and I can hardly think straight for some hours.
I felt the same way after doing my 15-hour-weekend-sleeps. I'd often feel _more_ tired than on weekdays, super groggy the whole weekend. The involuntary 15-hour "catchup" never actually caught me up, in retrospect it was just my body crashing but not properly recuperating. It was not until I put in a conscious effort to get 8 hours each night that things started improving in terms of actually beginning to feel properly rested.
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
[1]: which suffer from different biases, like recall bias (https://catalogofbias.org/biases/recall-bias/)
The "great unwashed public" is incapable of understanding Scientific Nuances. Hence it is better in the interests of Public Health and Safety to project a simplistic and alarmist message when needed to get them to fall in line. It has always been this way in any matter of importance. This is actually much more important with those complex multifaceted subjects like Sleep, Fasting, General Health etc. It is made worse by the fact that the negative effects of these are imperceptibly slow, gradual but accumulate toward a unknown point when the "sudden collapse" happens.
This is why the jobs of Scientists/Researchers like yourself is so critical and crucial to the "Policy Makers". Your Scientific Knowledge drives your Belief which you distill and simplify to convince the "unwashed policy maker" who can then put out a decree for the betterment of the "unwashed masses".
I'd imagine newborn parents would fall into that category for instance, and I never met anyone who just thought not sleeping isn't a big deal and it will all be fine.
Same for emergency services in any major city or manufacturing facility. 24 on 48 off pretty much guarantees an all-nighter every 3 days. Then you can't really go to sleep when you get off at 7AM the next morning, because you need to get a good nights sleep on the second night because your next shift starts at 7AM.
I don't know how that works for your brain, but after the first couple months you just seem to adapt and your not tired all the time like you were in the beginning.
That is precisely the point. The insidiousness of Sleep Deprivation is well known. Sleep has multiple stages and some of them (eg. REM) are more important then others; thus it is the Quality of Sleep rather than the Quantity which actually matters (this is the main reason people sleep over a spectrum of hours rather than any fixed point; the body decides the amount of "restorative sleep" needed and 8 hours is just a heuristic average). Ever since all sorts of "Visual Display Terminals(VDTs)" like TVs, Computer terminals, Electronic/Neon billboards, Smartphones, Tablets etc. became commonplace Sleep Quality has suffered drastically (there is a direct correlation between VDT exposure and Sleep Quality). Almost all IT workers (in particular; Programmers) are sleep deprived. With the explosion of Smartphone/Tablet ownership Sleep Deprivation has become commonplace. I am beginning to see young children as young as 10 years have dark circles under their eyes!
Our Society and Economic Systems needs to be changed to accommodate our current Scientific knowledge about our Mind/Body w.r.t. Sleep/Exercise. The Human organism is highly adaptable and resilient but only upto a point.
1. I thought I could "will" myself to overcome my insomnia, but realized quickly that for chronic insomnia (defined loosely as at least 3 nights a week for 3 months or more), symptoms typically worsens over time and becomes harder to resolve if left untreated.
2. People who suffer from insomnia are often painfully unaware of how disruptive it is to their everyday lives. I thought I was doing OK, but turned out that I've gotten so used to getting poor sleep that I have forgotten what life was like before. People who are sleep-deprived consistently underestimate how sleep-deprived they are.
I’ll be lying awake, thinking about that…
But this is one of those things that seems cruel for the sake of cruelty to me, rather than actually meaningfully advancing science.
Surely you meant to say "me" instead of "you".
In 2020 I started getting this weird perpetual minor unsteadiness. Like I could not stand still, I sort of swayed, or at least it felt like I was swaying. My doctor said it was too minor to really be anything, I was fine. I couldn't shake it. When this started I was going hard, 5ish hours of sleep, 3 miles on a treadmill, work, then 5ish hours working on a new deck on my house, then sleep, rinse repeat.
A few months ago I started doing one meal a day fasting. I noticed my weight slowly creeping up and wanted a change. A side effect has been my sleep has gotten much better. (I eat lunch typically) I sleep 7 hours easy and even when I wake up I feel like just laying there some like I am a teenager again.
A few weeks ago it occurred to me after nearly two years, the unsteadiness sensation was finally gone. Not sure if its the calorie restriction or more sleep, but I am not complaining.
I remain very sceptical of such analyses due to confounding variables (eg people who sleep less are also less healthy in other ways) and reverse causation (eg dementia causes poor sleep not the other way around). Not to mention the almost useless nature of self reported data. Mendelian randomisation studies are a much better way to look at these questions. I could only find one study and it is far from compelling for a link between sleep and dementia: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/3/817/5956327
The good news is that you can still be sleep deprived three years later! Source: me.
Just, brain damage all around.
Brain damage...
Doesn’t everything point to the opposite? People that are doing well generally do not have a huge family.
I try and not eat after 9pm, stop watching electrical devices 1 hour before bed, and no caffeine after 3pm, and aim for 8+ hours in bed. Im very happy that I can do this, and not have to worry about getting to work on time (I live close to office)
I was shocked when I found out that I as mid 20s active runner had severe sleep apnea.
Since I got diagnosed I'm very open about my CPAP use. I feel so much better, I talk about it often. You'd be surprised how often I explain what apnea is, only to have someone in the conversation laugh and say the symptoms match their partner or themselves. Even discounting the effects of sleep debt, I know plenty of couples who have difficulty co-sleeping due to snoring or frequent wakeups.
Considering an at-home sleep study is so simple and cheap to administer, I wonder how health outcomes would change on a large scale if we just checked people for apnea on a semi-regular basis, like once every 3 years, the same as we do for other common health issues.
If under my own will, I could go to an expert and say "hey let me pay for a sleep study". Unfortunately I don't have the energy to fight with a GP to get a referral.
They will probably give you a watchpat to start off with (take home test) which aren't great but if that doesn't turn up anything you'll get an in lab.
I know it's annoying to fight with doctors when you're tired but for this I promise it is so worth it.
Feel free to PM me if you need more specific advice.
I sleep 9 hours a night, sometimes slightly more, and I often worry that I might have conditioned my body into accepting more sleep than it needs - with potentially negative long-term consequences. But when I sleep less I feel off. I think of the quantitative length of my sleep as offsetting the qualitative hit it suffers from my daily caffeine.
I wouldn't worry too much, it is an absolute blessing that you have the conditions and the body to sustain 9h sleep cycles. As a father of two, with copious amounts of caffeine intake, I wouldn't mind having some nights with that quality of sleep myself! :)
You can die inside of a day without water if you're sweating enough. I definitely have gone longer than a day without sleep.
How much sleep is actually needed above that will heavily depend on the person and what they do
[0] "Dinges, D.F. et al. (1997) Cumulative sleepiness, mood distur- bance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night." mentionned in the research article references
https://michaelpollan.com/books/caffeine-how-coffee-and-tea-...
Avoid alcohol, period. Your body and mind will thank you.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/24/641618937/no-amount-of-alcoho...
Extremely apparent too. It'll put me out real fast, but I'll be awake in a few hours and then repeat a few more times till the sun is up and you gave a splitting headache.
I'm quite sensitive to caffeine and I struggle to sleep if I drink coffee any time after noon. It's a pity because I love the taste of coffee and Oolong tea :(
Edit: also not all cafes have decaf or they have limited options where I live.
I suppose it affects each person differently.
They've put out a number of interesting publications since my time there.
[1] Evidence of very large variability in sleep duration between flies, with limited consequences for very long duration sleep deprivation (wrt lethality)
[2] Evidence of context-dependent modulation of the effects of sleep deprivation. It appears the effects of sleep deprivation on males can be affected by sexual arousal/activity.
It makes me wonder if there are similar effects on humans. A night spent socialising too late does effect one differently to one spent working too late.
I guess that is at least a fairly decent time to have persistent inadequate sleep. At least if this is happening to you regularly then you really do have a specific issue to address and routine type insomnia (2-3 nights of less than adequate sleep) are probably not figuring into it strongly. For effects of that type, I would have thought there were cohorts of people with chronically disrupted sleep (airline workers, shift workers etc) that could make good validation sets to look for such effects. If that hasn't been done yet I'd be surprised so I feel like the more likely answer is that whatever these effects are, they at least require a substantial protracted period of poor sleep.
Completely anecdotal of course. I should probably go to bed earlier anyway.
There are also many alcoholics who do just fine day to day as well; right up until their livers fail, or they get early onset dementia etc.
The silver lining, I guess, is that the hippocampus is the one region of the brain where you can still generate new neurons well into adulthood.
Article does not mention how much sleep daily is considered sufficient (I'm aware it is individual matter). Also, if naps help or not.
There's no dispute there are deleterious effects of sleep deprivation and accruing sleep debt, and that people would be better off with a full 8 hours of sleep. Lack of sleep is harmful for cognition, the cardiovascular, digestive, and endocrine systems, mood regulation, etc. Memory and attention suffering as a consequence after sleep deprivation is undeniable, as we all know. Most of the claims of negative health impact are quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrated to a degree, no debates there.
However, it's the _magnitude_ and severity of the effect, and especially the claims around the mechanics of sleep debt, that warrant skepticism when considering large-sample observations in the real world. Sleep debt supposedly accumulates semi-indefinitely (the research on the "max" limit of sleep debt is lacking), allegedly takes 4+ days to recover per hour of deprivation, and cannot at all be repaid in "lump sums" by for example sleeping in on weekends regularly.
While this may be true to some degree consider someone who averaged 7 hours of sleep on average through high school and college, 6.5 hours in the first 4 years of their career, and 5 hours for the following two years, after getting married and having children before finally reading an article such as this and deciding to eliminate their sleep debt. If it truly accumulated semi-indefinitely, took multiple days per hour of debt, and had a ceiling on "repayment rate", this person (who honestly sounds quite typical and near the median) would either celebrate their 100th birthday, or declare bankruptcy so to speak before becoming debt-free. It's not great science to make these partial claims on the attributes of sleep debt which are incomplete.
Further, if you read Why We Sleep, the logical conclusion (from the case effectively being made) if sleep debt were really as bad as claimed would entail that the 40% of the population in modern society would have hardened arteries, moderate to severe hormonal and mood dysregulation and other significant mental and physical issues by middle-age. Yet we don't observe this in anywhere near 40% of the population; not even in the majority of those individuals averaging 5 hours of sleep or less nightly.
Conditions like severe obstructive sleep apnea, defined as 30+ hypoxic events per hour, are certainly correlated with hypertension and heart issues. But sufferers should be hardly functioning, cognitively or physiologically, were sleep deprivation to be as harmful as advertised* and you'd wonder how anyone with the condition could get a diploma or maintain a job according to the sleep researchers. Many OSA sufferers can literally go without a single sustained hour of sleep, ever, over the majority if not the entirety of their lives. It's true there's a higher incidence of cardiovascular issues in this population, but the condition is also comorbid with obesity, which has a greater impact on cardiovascular health.
And finally, the majority of studies and meta-analyses finding increases in general mortality rate amongst people who sleep under 7 hours a night, also produce the same finding amongst people averaging over 9 hours a night.
*The one claim which is well-supported and cannot be disputed is that sleep debt does result in significant sleepiness and delayed reaction time, as we sadly see on a yearly basis in many countries that practice daylight savings, with a spike in fatalities and severe bodily harm from car crashes like clockwork the Monday the clocks are shifted forward.
**Also, there is another claim that is true - prolonged, absolute sleep deprivation results in fairly rapid total system failure and inevitable death, much more quickly than the majority of chronic diseases, including heart, kidney, or lung disease (which people can live with for years or decades). It's on par with the most aggressive forms of cancer. Please don't mistake this post as stating sleep deprivation/debt is "not a big deal", it certainly is. However the science does not, in my opinion, appear to be nearly as robust, and has many more exaggerated claims than other areas of physiological/health research.
I question this, given that modern hunter gatherers only get about 6.5-7.0 (quality) hours of sleep.
Probably, most of us in the modern world have poor quality sleep, and this confounds epidemiological studies by creating the illusion that we need long duration of sleep.
There's also genetic variability in sleep duration needs. A small number of people are legitimately fine on 4-5 hours.
> also produce the same finding amongst people averaging over 9 hours a night.
Again, confounds. Depressed people, unemployed people, etc. The problems with empirical sleep research are largely methodological problems that all of epidemiology faces.
I recently finished reading “Why We Sleep” which is an interesting exploration of this topic for those that are curious. Written by a researcher in the area, with call-outs to the actual research and IMO a reasonably measured approach to clarifying the difference between “what we know”, “what we have correlation to believe, but…”, and “what intuition / studies in mice / others has suggested might be true, but…”.
It’s definitely given me a lot to think about with my own life choices.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sbcmACvB6DqYXYidL/counter-th...
Though it's not off to a great start because the very first claim "U-shaped relationship between length of sleep and longevity, i.e. both short- and long-duration sleep are associated with higher mortality" is actually stated in the book :/
Send kids to bed earlier.
Let them read if they want to stay up a bit later. If they complain that they want to stay up later, tell them that’s fine, but they just have to be awake in the morning if they like being up for more of the day. Teach them that they can use their internal clock to get up earlier if they really want, but don’t let them use an alarm clock.
They almost always choose to sleep in and it has hugely positive effects on their behavior and memory.
Even these days, people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump boast about not getting a lot of sleep
Google Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome
But you are correct that some people do not need as much sleep. This is genetic.