Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

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You are cherry-picking and being unnecessarily dismissive.

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

Folks, we are all going to die. Live life well, make sensible decisions, eat well, get outside, exercise, socialize. The rest is noise. Do you want to be min-maxing every facet of your life?

While the importance of getting enough good sleep has recently become mainstream, we are still living in a culture where just striking a balance between work and a personal life is an unattainable goal for many people. We should really be talking about work/life/sleep balance, since excelling at the former two easily come at the cost of the latter. As the article highlights, sleep seems like a facet that is important to optimize above most others.

> we are still living in a culture where just striking a balance between work and a personal life is an unattainable goal for many people

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.

>Live life well, make sensible decisions, eat well, get outside, exercise, socialize.

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-...

I've met people who pride themselves on only sleeping 4 hours a night because they're too busy "working hard" for 18hours at the office. This article could really help them.

> Live life well

Nobody with sleep deprivation is doing this.

No, but we want to reduce risks of terrible conditions such as Alzheimer's wherever possible, especially if we can do so by simply getting more sleep.

> Do you want to be min-maxing every facet of your life?

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.

Regardless of long-term effects, do you suffer when you sleep like that?

To me, it's like torture, I don't really need additional long-term risks to absolutely not want to do it.

Usually yes, for some reason the past few weeks I've felt fine.

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.

Also, discomfort is usually your body giving you a hint: stop doing that. If the amount of sleep you get leaves you feeling good, there is very little chance you are hurting yourself.

Six hours is definitely not something that makes me uncomfortable over the mid term (multiple years) but eventually catches up. Four hours doesn't feel uncomfortable for me until about a month or two of sustained low sleep.

This.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/7d/fe/057dfe195dd1b207ee4e...

Seems like sleep, which is a third of your life and has a impact on the other two-thirds, is a very big factor to "live life well". Do you really consider it noise?

If you spend 1/3 of your life sleeping, I don’t think it’s min-maxing. If it was something else, would totally agree with your point.

Nothing you quoted disagrees with the parent post.

Ooc, do we study sleep deprivation in pigs or monkeys?

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