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Comment by yazzku | Hacker News Reader

Who would've thought that sleep is good for you, right? Apparently we needed several million dollars in research to find out.

> The findings, published today in Nature, could help to guide care for people after a heart attack,

This is just hilarious. Remember to get enough sleep after a life-threatening heart attack, folks!

But your comment resonates very much with me. I am tired of this capitalist culture that reduces the human essence to value output and shames people for not pretending to be working hard enough. Part of the reason I like working from home is that I can take that fucking 20-minute nap after lunch and be infinitely more productive throughout the rest of the day.

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I do think it is sad that people are so out of touch with their bodies and the idea of self ownership that they need an authority figure to instruct such simple tasks.

I think there is a huge component of trained helplessness resulting from consumerist culture and social subservience.

So how do you know to convince a person who doesn't feel it and yet needs it, without the research? If it's a treatment plan, it needs to have clear reasons behind.

Im not sure I understand your question. Who is trying to convince who?

Ultimately, individuals are responsible for managing their own health. Thinking it is the doctors job and responsibility to keep them healthy, and not their own is the root of most problems.

How am I supposed to make informed decisions without the research? How is a doctor supposed to choose and present options without it?

I think that 99% of the bottleneck is not research for basic health, and the value of research is vastly over stated for things like nutrition, health, and exercise.

A new study isn't going to convince people people to stop being obese, exercise, and take care of themselves. A study that shows that sleeping longer or eating a Mediterranean diet has a 5% improvement in some metric has almost no specificity to you.

Research is important for the 1% of the time your health is already in crisis, When you are picking between medications or interventions after.

Even then, personal data on what works for you should always trump the research, because it is statistical in nature, usually with extremely high variability. If drug A works 51% of the time drug B works 49% of the time, the difference between them is almost meaningless. You want to know which drug your body responds to. In the clinical context, I think people and doctors overvalue how much time and effort to spend figuring out where to start, and undervalue how much effort to spend responding to personal data if it works or not.

> the value of research is vastly over stated for things like nutrition, health, and exercise.

Well said! People talk as if all empirical health practices that different cultures all over the world have developed are worthless without "modern research" while the researchers themselves are looking at it for inspiration and study.

Who talks like that? Yes, researchers want to know why the empirically developed practices work. That's a great thing in my book.

The point was that you shouldn't have to wait for some research to confirm what has actually been empirically proven health practices over generations. That can come when it comes.

A good example are practices from Yoga/Ayurveda/Qigong/Acupuncture etc. Their worldview, model of anatomy/physiology is very different than modern science but many of their techniques (not claiming all) do work even if we don't fully understand how as yet. That is why many Hospitals/Healthcare centers are adopting them for use in a controlled manner today.

Sure. But if you want a doctor to recommend and use it, there needs to be research - for both their and the patients' protection.

But the point is; Doctors are recommending and using them now in spite of incomplete research on them.

You seem to have a wrong idea of "Scientific Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and how policies are actually enacted based on incomplete knowledge/research.

Yeah, sure. But this research is about treatment of serious injury, not about basic healthy life stuff.

It is still pretty basic stuff. You shouldn't need a bunch of mouse studies to tell you to rest after a heart attack. The article is literally about the body's natural drive to rest and sleep so that it can heal after major injury.

You need it to be sure that's a good thing, and to be able to evaluate and measure it. While not this time, we definitely did find out counterintuitive stuff in other research.

Sure, but that shouldn't paralyze your action in absence of detailed scientific data.

> I think there is a huge component of trained helplessness resulting from consumerist culture and social subservience.

Very True. For example, when i ask people why they need that huge cup of starbucks coffee in the morning i get every excuse but the truth that they have been conditioned by the environment and the body has maladjusted to it so that they are in a downward health spiral.

> This is just hilarious. Remember to get enough sleep after a life-threatening heart attack, folks!

Is it better to prioritize low-impact exercise or sleep after a heart attack? There's plenty of interesting angles to investigate.

Not specific to "after a heart attack" but IME while both are important Sleep is much more important than Exercise.

Anecdata: I spent a decade as caregiver/caretaker for my late Mother who refused to do any exercises except the absolute necessary ones which a doctor would ask her to do for a specific cause eg. back pain, breathing exercises etc. As soon as that symptom alleviated she would abandon the exercises. So i encouraged her to take long naps whenever she felt sleepy and it helped keep her mental faculties sharp and physically feel spry (within limits of course).

You Asked: Is It Better to Sleep In Or Work Out? - https://time.com/3914773/exercise-sleep-fitness/

Quote: But when pressed to choose one that’s more important, Mah grudgingly decides on sleep. “Sleep is foundational,” she says.

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