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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

This frightens me. I have been working at reducing my time of watching videos in bed, and all I have to tempt me is a phone and a laptop. It's such an easy trap to fall into.

Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart, and many other systems in your body.

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> Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart.

Never heard of this before, any references?

I will try to find some references, but the basic concept is that your heart will atrophy when it doesn't have to work against gravity, as in pumping blood from foot to head, while vertical.

This is why standing desks are a thing, why an astronaut will lose 30% of his heart-mass after one year on the ISS, and why patients after a long coma have a hard time doing cardio.

edit:

"Cardiac atrophy after bed rest and spaceflight"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11883764_Cardiac_at...

"Cardiac atrophy in women following bed rest"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17379748/

Seems like it should be easy enough to offset with exercise though? Like if you’re doing cardio a few days a week you’re not going to suffer too much by chilling in bed a couple evenings.

Yeah, this seems possible. I was thinking of someone more generally increasing their horizontal time without doing anything to make up for it. This is my own projection, as it is what I have been guilty of doing.

I fell into the trap ages ago, and spend as much time horizontally as possible without actively dying.

You’re absolutely right that it’s bad for you.

> Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart.

Why is this?

To be clear, it's not that sleeping while horizontal is better than being awake while horizontal. We all need solid sleep, but being horizontal should otherwise be minimized as it is the ultimate sedentary lifestyle.[0] This causes heart atrophy.

[0] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/the...

see my other comment for other references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40549893

I think you’re incorrectly jumping to correlations/causations.

Your references are due to sedentary, not laying down. You can have a sedentary life standing in place most of the day. Likewise, the problem is being sedentary, not what position your sedentary in.

Look at the logic in my comment link, does this not make sense? This seems like basic physics and cardio to me.

The less time that your heart has to fight against pressure/gravity, the weaker that muscle will become. This is pure causation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40549893

It’s a reasonable hypothesis, but you’d need to experiment to validate it. It’s easy to imagine how prolonged exposure to bed rest or microgravity may trigger heart muscle remodelling in a way that intermittent bouts of lying down would not.

I read the second paragraph as a euphemism for having sex. I was confused because consensual sex is generally considered a healthy activity.

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