> The regression highlighted a positive association between normal sleep duration (7–9 hours) and cognitive scores... while extended sleep duration negatively impacted scores across both cohorts
> intermediate and evening types, were linked to superior cognitive function
propaganda by big insomnia ;)
> Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol, conflicting with previous research that has connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment. Weekly and monthly alcohol consumption, as opposed to daily drinking, was found to somewhat correlate with lower cognitive scores.
> Fillmore was concerned about possible misleading variables in the studies: To start, they included ex-drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant they were failing to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
I'm more inclined to think intelligence often times comes with a good dose of social anxiety and alcohol helps with managing it.
Back then I knew the problem was the *quality* of the alcohol/drinks.
Now, some years later. "My homie Jamal's" liquor costs 5-10 times that much and he puts effort into the mixtures, trying recipes, playing around with accent ingredients and modifiers and stuff. If we drink--we still drink quite a bit. But there's no month long binges no more and the immediate negative side effects on cognition are *GONE*.
Personally I don't drink alcohol, but I would never say that I am abstaining from drinking alcohol. I just don't do it. Same as eating green olives.
Meanwhile, as you're pointing it out, people who say that they are abstaining from alcohol are likely to be former alcoholics.
And say, people who's faith forbid them from drinking alcohol would probably fit in both : some just don't do it, others have to make a conscious effort to not do it.
The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search – https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892)
and that need grows exponentially with your understanding of the world until a certain point.
That need can be reduced to a healthy "Mom said everything is fine in moderate amounts" once you choose to not live by conflicting standards, or rather: when you choose to not support implicitly AND explicitly conflicting causes ( many on the left, finboys & fingirls, law enforcement, ... but unemployed who don't work on themselves or their environment as well )
Alcohol is one of the worst ones, you just blunt yourself while still realizing all failures, just temporarily a bit downtuned, next morning back to misery. No solution or even improvement is happening, just basically giving up (or a bit of complaining which is just group psychological therapy).
Sports, meditation, maybe even occasional psychedelics steered in right direction, active vacations, good food, good sleep. Life is much easier in such mode.
That is California sobriety at a level I’ve never seen before.
There are studies that show alcohol consumption is associated with greater novelty seeking, learning capacity, etc.
However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors.
This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.
"Long total sleep time may suggest prior sleep deprivation, medical conditions, or effects of medications."[1]
Show me one employed person with a life that manages to get 8 hours sleep on average. Most commuters would have to go to bed at 2100 to get a breakfast and enough time to get to work. I only get 8 hours when I know I am sleep deprived and go to bed at 2100. However, this is not "normal", and I bet it isn't normal for most. So why do we call it normal, then?
I get at least 8 hours every night. My “must be home and in bed” time on a weeknight is by 12:30AM, and I sleep in until 8:45AM. I am normally woken by my alarm.
Weekends I simply set an alarm for 9 hours after I get in bed, which sometimes means sleeping until 2PM.
I don’t eat breakfast, and I basically never commute in the morning, but if I do, my office is about 15 minutes away.
More than lack of time, I'm usually too tired after a full day of work (8 or 9 till 6 or 6:30) to do anything else.
The EU records this for pretty much all member states, and Ireland shows an average of 28 minutes.[0]
> In 2019, more than half (61.3%) of employed people in the EU traveled less than 30 minutes from home to work.
You are correct that Ireland is part of the group of countries which has a larger subset of people with long commutes, but hovering around 10% is not what I'd call "normal".
> The largest shares of the longest commuting times were observed in Latvia (13.5%), Ireland (11.2%), Belgium (10.7%) and Hungary (10.6%), where more than 10% of employed people had to travel from home to work for 60 minutes or more.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
Meanwhile in the real world...
People travelling daily longest for work are usually living in the (poorer) rural side, where yes, they have to get up early and take the (limited) public transport available, sometimes having only 2 buses per day.
Now, does my body do that?... no, usually it wakes me up after 6-7, but whatever.
It doesn't matter what time I go to bed, my eyes pop open at 05:30 and I have to get up (a) to micturate (did I mention I'm over 60?) and (2) feed the cats. The latter have trained me using medieval methods. When I was younger I would sleep as late as I could: my record was sleeping in until 16:00, and boys oh boys did that cause me to feel wretched.
So I go to sleep around 12:30 AM each night (sometimes even after 1 AM), and I wake up at 5:50 AM.
That's not enough sleep at all. I do sleep till very late during the weekend.
I've been doing this for 20 years now, and some day it's probably going to catch up on me.
("Normal" also depends on age: babies sleep a lot more than 8 hours a day, teenagers also typically need more sleep than they actually get.)
This "8 hours of sleep" is just a made up number.
Most adults (with responsibilities) don't sleep for 8 hours daily. They sleep far less.
And sleeping less than that is enough to live a very healthy life. If you feel your body/mind didn't rest well because you didn't get your 8 hour sleep, it's likely because you've been exposed to, and came to believe all these articles saying you do need 8 hrs min sleep. It's simply not the case. You can function very well on 6.5/7 hrs of sleep. I'm nearing 40 and I do.
2 worthy links:
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ - debunks the popular "why we sleep" book
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqlzQMB1fN8 - this guy is a S&C coach who's 30 and strong. He too believes sleep is overstated.