Engineering Sleep
minjunes.ai
minjunes.ai
Sleep deprivation is one concern, but there’s a more subtle impact on cognitive functions (working memory, creativity, deep focus), overall health (particularly the endocrine and immune systems), and long-term health outcomes (such as an increased risk of dementia).
When I was younger, I was fascinated by various optimized sleep schedules. However, I noticed a stark contrast: many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day. They needed that—not just to function in daily life but to achieve the deep focus required for their work. Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
Some suggest that one of sleep's key roles is to help the brain regenerate. Chronic sleep deprivation, in turn, is linked to a higher risk of dementia. For anecdotal evidence: Churchill and Thatcher, known for boasting about sleeping only 4–5 hours a night, experienced significant cognitive decline later in life.
I definitely underperformed academically due to sleep deprivation and I probably benefited greatly during my revision period because I had a very strong sleep routine.
That said, I entered my final exam having only slept probably less than two hours and that was 100% the right call because the extra cramming was necessary and drove the needle significantly.
I was also fascinated with alternate sleep schedules when I was younger. Some of the books and biohackers of the time made them sound like magical ways to get more hours out of the day.
Then every single experience report I found that was not coming from someone trying to sell me a book or get me to subscribe to their newsletter, YouTube, or other social media was extremely negative. Nobody who tried these had continued them very long. After going back to regular sleep schedules they felt significantly better. A common report was that they didn’t realize how badly sleep deprived they were until they stopped the alternate sleep schedule and went back to normal sleep.
A lot of the sleep biohacking reports follow a similar trend: People who try alternate methods of minimizing sleep don’t realize the negative effects until they quit. This is also true for people who rely on stimulants (caffeine or stronger) which mask feelings of sleep deprivation but can’t actually reverse the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Indeed the article discusses this thoroughly, noting that since it’s a very small sample you can’t rule out anything but very strongly negative fitness impact.
There’s simply not enough data to rule out the hypothesis that folks with this condition are slightly sleep-deprived vs their theoretical without-mutation genotype baseline.
I'm curious, in order to reach this duration, did they need to do some kind of exercise at some point in the day, to gain physical fatigue ? Or could they sleep this long whilst being (I exaggerate here) couch potatoes ?
I need 10 hours every day, so even if I go to bed at 10pm, I'd wake up at 8am, which is "late" for most people.
I'd love to be able to wake up at 6am, but just can't. It doesn't feel like an advantage.
What does "just can't" mean, exactly? Just curious, because I felt that way, too, until I had a newborn and was forced to wake up with less sleep and discovered it was physically possible. Still felt awful all day, but it was possible.
(All this to say that you sleeping 6h flat is plausible, but times-of-day are a human, social construct, and it's impossible for your body not to be able to adapt to going to bed earlier and waking earlier)
My entire point is that it's likely sociological for you: you either drink your last coffee at 7pm and this keeps you awake for another 6h, or you get into a routine at a particular time, or... As in, your original claim that you "simply can't wake up at 6am" seems unrealistic since "6am" is a thing that means different things in different locations.
Moreover, when I sleep more, I notice that I'm sharper and I find it easier to take on tough challenges: this means that sleeping longer makes me happier for the rest of the day. So I'm also willing to live a tougher life. So there's also a trade off with: yea, you have less time, but the less time that you have, you're happier. Or at least, that's my experience.
And not only are you happier, you're also more capable. So it's more easy to live according to your own rationality and it's easier to not live according to your emotions and instincts.
Again, just my experience.
Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.
> Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
You are making a mistake in thinking the aforementioned genetic variation “enables people to get by on less”. They just literally sleep less. I have a brother in law with this, and it’s a bit annoying for him as his wife needs the normal 8 hours a night. He cannot sleep 7-8 hours, only 6. He just reads in the bed for 2 hours a night. If he has too much to do, he skimps like we all do, but for him this is 4 hours a night during the week (needing to catch up on the weekend).
Other than sleeping less than others, he’s regular in every way. Very successful engineer, if it helps, certainly requires “deep thought” on the regular.
It is unfair, but so many genetic advantages are equally unfair.
This stuff? Orexin receptor antagonists? They work. Holy crap, do they ever work. Sleep quality better than the Z-drugs, great tolerability, no massive disruption going off them... when these things go off-patent they're going to be massive. Sleep quality was not perfect (maybe 80% of "normal"? I don't know) but that is absolutely minor compared to the alternative.
(And for the record, I'm off them now due to other stuff clearing up such that I don't need this level of sleep assistance anymore. Not because I can't afford them.)
I guess that's a long-winded way to say that if you're going to do questionably-advised sleep biohacking, orexin receptors are probably the place to start.
If it was available over the counter for, say, $50/month -- do you think you would be taking it just for the improved sleep quality?
Also, what was the specific name of the drug you had such a good experience with?
> Sleep quality was not perfect (maybe 80% of "normal"? I don't know)
I know it sounds ridiculous, but ~1-2 nights of absolute terror per week is totally worth it compared to how it used to be (getting maybe ~1 good night of sleep every couple weeks.)
They work very well for me and I've noticed no side effects.
I've been taking them about 2-3 years now.
FWIW, I found Dayvigo to work better than Quviviq but they both do the job.
I can think of a few reasons I might have avoided it, but who knows for sure. I wasn't on it that long (about a year? not going to look it up), I as a general rule do not remember my dreams unless I'm interrupted, the underlying cause of my total insomnia was pharmalogical, I've always had some level of sleep disorder, I've been on every other sort of sleep aid, I used it with melatonin... who really knows.
Expensive is always relative to one's income. But, to put that number into perspective relative to another medication given for a good night's sleep:
I'm the parent of a narcoleptic. The meds to get a good night's sleep, Xyrem, are in the $15k / month range. The recently approved generics are 1/2 that.
Xyrem is basically GHB? A 500 ml bottle of GBL used to be what, 50 euros?
I know the medication is pharmeceutical grade, but are these people insane?
If you sleep 30% of the time, that's 30% of the time you aren't eating, mating, etc. Also, during sleep you are more vulnerable to predators. One would expect evolution to get rid of sleep in creatures who don't rely on sunlight cycles.
So, there must be some really good evolutionary reason for sleep.
Is this how evolution works? Might it be that animals sleeping is good on the macro level but bad for the animal?
E.g. rabbit population being culled by predators may prevent the rabbits from eating their feed plants to extinction.
But sleep can be partially bad for some animals, they can be more prone to becoming prey while sleeping (though Google tells me sleep also prevents nighttime activity where predators have the advantage). There are definitely evolutionary adaptations around sleep to make it safer, sleeping in trees, sleep patterns & duration, hypnic jerk, etc.
Marine mammals sleep unihemispherally [1]. Land mammals can burrow, et cetera, which explains why predation and injury risk decrease during sleep. (Counterfactual: "large animals that are not at risk for predation, such as big cats and bears, can sleep for long periods, often in unprotected sites and appear to sleep deeply" (Id.).
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4948738/
[2] https://www.semel.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...
I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”.
“Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”.
Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.
I years ago saw a research talk by someone doing, IIRC, regional-sized evolutionary-time-duration multi-scale ecosystem simulation - they made the same call.
That's a really nice phrase - thank you.
Hmm, searches for `"heritable metabolizing"` have like no hits, *bolism only a few.
Another way to ask this would be how much of a benefit would be not sleeping? It's difficult to preserve food, but I guess there is no limit on how much energy you can expend pursuing a mate.
I'm guessing proximity to sensory organs.
Just one, but partitioning activities in time allows for further specialization. For example, instead of having generalist eyeballs that are okay at seeing in light and dark, you can have specialist ones that are really good at one or the other. Then another species in the same area that utilizes similar resources can specialize in the opposite, reducing competition between the two species (this is called resource partitioning).
Then, once there's a chunk of the day that is less productive than the other, it makes more sense for the body to devote that time to various recovery mechanisms. Then that chunk of time is even less productive, making using that time for recovery even more attractive.
Only focusing on the amount of time asleep is a significantly limited viewpoint, but I believe this will change in the coming years as we gather more knowledge of sleep and access to EEG data about our brain activity during sleep increases.
Only measuring sleep time is like measuring the health of a persons diet is by measuring how much time they spent eating, but of course, looking at macronutrients, calories, is the right way of doing it.
I'll be writing more about this in the coming months, but my current thinking is that the concept of "can we sleep less" isn't the correct approach, and can be dangerous. At AffectableSleep.com - we increase the efficiency of deep sleep, and much of the research (https://affectablesleep.com/research) focuses on enhancing deep sleep in sleep deprived individuals (I'll post more research soon). This doesn't mean we should be sleeping less. A lack of quality sleep is already an epidemic in society, and massively underreported because the focus of the sleep industry has been the amount of time asleep, not the restorative functions of sleep.
Our goal isn't to help you sleep less, and we will need to be very clear in our marketing, but rather to ensure the sleep you get is as restorative as possible.
Of course, like any technology, some people will use it for negative purposes, which I believe would be to just "get by" on less sleep, rather than optimize your health through better sleep.
You can find out more at https://affectablesleep.com
It seems your company produces a deep sleep headband. I'm interested in these sorts of products because I want more deep sleep (for myself, and for family) while lifestyle factors (mostly kids) make that very difficult.
The last product I tried was the Philips deep sleep headband (which, unfortunately, never appeared in Netherlands, I had to import it from the US even though Philips is a Dutch company).
The main problem I had was that the headband is not compatible with ear plugs. Without ear plus, I get woken up very easily, either by outside traffic or by people in the household going to the toilet. The sound insulation in my house is terrible, and it cannot be improved short of tearing down all the walls and rebuilding them. So now I use a pair of really good ear plugs, and I also put a noise cancelling head phone over that to block out extra sounds.
Would it be possible to combine a deep sleep headband with a good ear plug? Or better: would it be possible to combine with that, and also noise cancelling headphones?
Sorry for the wrong link, the page is "science" not "research", I'll create a redirect, I often type that wrong. https://www.affectablesleep.com/science
I'd be keen to hear about your experience with the Philips product. We've spoken to some of their researchers, but I've never met a consumer who had one. We've spoken with many people who had the Dreem headband which had similar technology in some markets (not the US).
You can reach me at pete[at] you know the domain - if you're willing to share your experience.
Thanks
Custom made specifically for your ear shape. They provide the highest level of isolation that I've seen.
Sometimes that by itself is not enough, and so I also wear a Sony noise-cancelling headphone. The ones by Bose are also good.
The headband has eeg sensors which monitor brain activity looking for slow-waves (synchronous firing of neurons which define deep sleep).
30 degrees from the peak of a slow-wave we "interrupt" the brain with a brief 50ms pulse of sound. In response to this interruption, your brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. Resulting in more restorative deep sleep without changing the sleep time.
Is that the sort of description you were looking for?
Affectable isn't only measuring. We actively alter your brain activity in real time which increases the restorative function of sleep. You don't sleep longer, it's not about falling asleep faster. Research has shown a 14% increase in HRV during stimulation, we've had 3 positive alzheimer's studies (1 - MCI, 1 - removal of Amyloid, 1 - increasing deep sleep in people with ALZ).
Does that make sense?
You can sign-up for the waitlist on our website (https://affectablesleep.com)
In narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), patients have severely diminished orexin levels. This appears to cause them to inappropriately enter REM sleep.
OP notes that the mutation lowering the sleep requirement causes an increase in orexin. I wonder whether the increased orexin could be inhibiting REM and perhaps facilitating a more restful architecture of sleep. Alternatively, perhaps elevated orexin levels during the day cause wakefulness such that you just don't need as much sleep, regardless of how efficient the sleep is.
It would be interesting to compare sleep tracking data of people with and without this mutation to see if there are significant differences in time spent in different sleep stages.
As noted elsewhere ITT, there is a strong biological need for sleep, and its main role is very likely to reduce reactive oxygen species (though the amount needed vary by genetics) Orexin levels increase the noradrenaline ones, which is one of the few antioxidants able to reach neurons (along with melatonin) and by this way also increase slow wave sleep, making it more efficient. So yes, this could be a way they would need less sleep.
"The company ( FitBiomics ) has already commercialized two products. Their flagship offering, V•Nella, helps metabolize lactic acid and reduce fatigue, while Nella targets sleep health - a crucial market considering that 100 million Americans suffer from insomnia. "Within 10 to 14 days of daily consumption, consumers feel the difference," Scheiman notes. "They have less daily fatigue interfering with their daily life, more energy, and some people are tracking cardiovascular benefits on their wearables. We hear really cool anecdotal feedback like, 'Hey, I no longer have to take a nap in the middle of the day, or I no longer need coffee in the middle of the day.'"
Night shifts that anyone can do are still needed if you need tribal watchers, and normal 8hr sleeping people can wake upnand fight when needed.
In terms of the gene, I am suprised how rare it is (90 families?) given I have met someone who needs only 4hr sleep.
Another point is less sleep doesn't mean you can do 2 more hours work a day. That is another vector: how much work per day (physical, mental) can be done.
That is, though sleep might have physiological requirements, it doesn't mean that the amount of sleep is not influenced by non physiological effects.
I'm constantly amazed by the ability of biologists to be amazed by the reach and ingenuity of evolution.
Because you're more likely to hurt yourself while doing anything in the dark?
“All organisms occupy a niche, and the better adapted to that niche, the more ‘fit’ and the more likely that organism will reproduce, passing on the characteristics that fit that particular niche. While we may simplistically think of each organism occupying a single niche, realistically nearly all occupy at least two. Daytime and nighttime are different and distinct niches, creating an evolutionary push and pull that would make a perfect ‘fit’ impossible. Evolutionarily, being forced to evolve into two separate niches at the same time forces an organism to develop structures and functions that fit neither fully” [1].
We didn’t evolve for a world with artificial lighting.
Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active. We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
Decent for us. Great for our predators and prey.
> We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
The point of the article, which granted is a hypothesis, is that the adaptations it would take to be good at night would make us no more than good during the day. Nature has clearly selected against jack of all trades species.
Reading the article I thought there should be more weight given to behaviors different from sleep to adapt to the other niche, and also that being perfectly adapted to a niche doesn't sound like a benefit in the first place. My understanding is that most species have an evolution process slow enough that they never completely fit a niche but also have enough versatility to move around.
I'm thinking dogs, bears, crows, racoons, migratory birds etc. where adaptation happens, but not to a degree they can't move out from their niche.
Cats are crepuscular. The niche hypothesis predicts they'd sleep most of the day and night.
> not to a degree they can't move out from their niche
No animal I know of can't survive outside its time niche.
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
Is it entirely possible that yes you can get 2 hours less sleep, but you're at higher risk of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc.? I don't see anything discussing long term effects of less sleep in comparison in TFA.
> Which calls this out but says we don't have enough data to know
I don’t know if that is true, that section to me reads as we don’t know if there are long term effects with FNSS therapy because they haven’t been study yet, specifically to the therapy. Not necessarily how FNSS or FNSS therapy is related to other sleep health studies.
"preemptive administration of low-dose aspirin during sleep restriction reduced pro-inflammatory responses. Specifically, aspirin reduced interleukin-6 expression and COX-1/COX-2 double positive cells in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated monocytes, as well as C-reactive protein serum levels."
"aspirin-induced reduction of inflammatory pathway activity in sleep-restricted participants was paralleled by decreased wake after sleep onset and increased sleep efficiency during recovery sleep"
But, bleeding and strokes :(
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-dose-aspirin-inflamma...
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/low-dose-aspirin/about-low-dose...
I think most people aren't trying to squeeze the maximum amount of time efficiency from their day. They don't like sleep because they need it, they like sleep because its synonymous to relaxing. So less sleep means less relaxing.
Of these, only dreaming strictly needs sleep, however, I think the healing that occurs in deep sleep should be added as a need.
And according to my smartwatch, I spend around 2 hours dreaming and 1 hour in deep sleep each night, although this varies quite a bit night to night. I don't think trying to reduce these is a good idea.
That means light sleep is the candidate for reduction. However, I have researched this before and the most consistent answer I get is that we don't really know what the 5 hours spent in light sleep is for. It seems unlikely that it's just for conserving energy, the body rarely does things for only one reason.
So my bet is that we might find a way to reduce light sleep by around 2 hours a night, which is what this article is suggesting. But it's unlikely that we'll go much further without causing problems. And even if someone does discover a way, there's no way I'd try it without at least a few decades of evidence that it doesn't cause Alzheimer's or some other old age disease.
It's not that I don't like to sleep. It's that I also like me-time, autonomy, lack of other people's demands or expectations, and the only time to get that is when most people are sleeping, so the house is quiet and I can be sure no one will randomly want something from me[2]. Relaxation, unwinding, deep thinking, self-actualization are all competing with sleep for that limited amount of time. Everyone else not sleeping would cut into that for me.
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[0] - Any generally available trick or change that allows someone to get ahead economically, quickly becomes a requirement. See e.g. working longer, coffee, cars, double-income households, increasingly also stimulant meds. It's a textbook Red Queen's Race[1]. "Less sleep" would be so profound a win that it would turn from "hack" into global standard pretty much in an instant.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
[2] - Because of strong societal expectations of behavior, such as not calling or bothering people past 20:00-22:00.
It seems to improve over time, and I don't have any trouble napping during the day. However, my main issue is fragmented sleep: I wake up a few times at night but can fall back asleep easily. I used to sleep continuously, so I’m curious about what part of the brain this could be affecting and how can this be changed. I tried melatonin [1] in different dosages, from extra low to relatively high.
I’m fairly certain COVID was the cause since the symptoms coincided with the infection. Of course, statistically speaking, it could be a coincidence involving other factors, but I’m not planning to dive into a PhD analysis of it, yet!
https://circadiansleepdisorders.org/treatments.php#melatonin
I have had issues waking up more frequently when taking melatonin. It sounds like while not common this side effect is not that rare either. Based on my severe sleep issues (primarly circadian) I suspect that one part of "sleep issues" for many people is actualy waking up issues and that the detailed process around waking up has a bigger influence than is currently appreciated. I suspect one reason that melatonin is helpful is that it sets the stage for a better wake up, however if something causes this wake up procedure to start after not enough sleep it can be more difficult to get back to sleep. The delayed release seems to help quite a bit to limit the chance of this happening for me, although it does still happen at times. I'm not sure if melatonin is a particularly good option for staying asleep.
Unfortunately, there aren't particulary good options. Magnesium is the easiest and as effective as anything for me but unfortunately a high enough dose to be effective will also make me tired the next day. However, if your diet is low on magnesium then just increasing that some might help or possibly you won't have the issue with tiredness the next day. baclofen helps me but has issues and I certainly would not recommend it for your case.
A short (few minutes) nap mid day helps the circadian rhythm but longer naps can make it harder to stay asleep at night. If you nap for longer periods, multiple times, or later in the day that is the first thing I would suggest changing. I'm not sure what length causes more trouble but I think getting to sleep but staying asleep as briefly as you easily can is the ideal (though if you will naturally wake up after a bit longer that might be better than an alarm).
I also noticed covid made my already bad sleep worse when I had it (most likely covid, not confirmed by test; cold or flu usually give me better sleep for a day or two). However, I didn't notice any lasting issues (I still have severe sleep issues but it was just that first week of covid that they seemed to be different from usual). I wonder if it could be just your memory of how you sleep that changed after you noticed it due to the disruption. As long as you can easily get back to sleep and aren't staying awake for long it should not cause trouble and is not uncommon. If you feel rested there is nothing to fix while worrying about it or trying to change it could case worse trouble.
These are my thoughts anyway, hopefully something in there is helpful :).
Speak for yourself. I love sleep and wish I could sleep more. Sometimes I think the only purpose of being awake is to get food and shelter for more sleep.
So, one possible line of investigation would be a table of mammals, their sleep cycles, their orexin levels, and the numbers of copies of orexin and it's regulators in their genomes. For example: compared to humans, elephants have a lower cancer risk. Turns out they have significantly more copies of p53, a tumor supressor gene (1).
Perhaps a similar, somewhat parallel construct exists: elephants sleep 3-4 hours a night. Maybe they have more orexin? Maybe they have different copy numbers or mutations of the relevant genes in the pathway?
Both my parents go to bed around 1am and wake up at 7am, and so did all of my grandparents. My kids on weekends go to bed around 1-2am as well but do sleep in, and my average is about 4-5 hours a night…
As for me, I’ve had sleep issues all my life and found the only way to fall asleep within 20 minutes is to stay up until exhaustion. But lately I’ve been gaining back my time and pushing even further - once every one or two weeks I’ll skip a night of sleeping, staying up around 36 hours straight. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and have zero side effects so far. In fact I end up sleeping over 10 hours the next day without waking up in the middle (which /never/ happens otherwise).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
That one sleeps 4-5h per night also sounds like one light/deep/REM sleep cycle, of which there would typically be two in an idealised 8h-ish "night".
There are hypotheses out there that a single 8h block of sleep is a myth - possibly socially induced by industrialisation and 3x8 shifts - and that waking up in the middle of these 8h is a normal thing.
"waking up" here may mean anything from near-consciousness sleep to actually waking up and possibly do shit for an hour then going back to bed; or even for some, splitting sleep in two 4-hour blocks spread around the 24h day.
In parent's post it may be that one 4h block is done, then social pressure (work/child schedules) pushes one to continue with this one-block schedule.
It may even look appealing as triggering sleep through exhaustion superficially appears to help with sleep in the short term. Long term it gets exhausting but this perceptually becomes the new normal, especially when the symptoms of this kind of sleep deprivation aren't that obviously tied to sleep habits, the naively expected ones being masked by external pressure (schedule), habit bias (normalisation of deviance through repetition), exogenic (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) or endogenic (adrenalin, cortisol, dopamine).
The main problem is then that by the time symptoms are impacting the situation is deeply anchored; worse, because the root cause is non-obvious it is often misdiagnosed.
Don't ask me how I know.
Also, not a physician, just saying: take care.
I don’t think 8 hours is a myth, but more like that was what was observed in the 60s when the Stanford Sleep Research Centre by William Dement ran their first experiments on keeping people in white rooms without stimulation until their bodies found a natural rhythm.
It would be interesting to know if those experiments have been replicated and if there were any deviations!
What's interesting is my daughter has similar symptoms as you and has been diagnosed with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD). She's recently been prescribed a dose of melatonin which she takes an hour before the time she wants to go to sleep.
That appears to have helped somewhat.
But for me, 5mg does tend to knock me out and I can barely stay awake after an hour of taking it.
Taking more than 20 minutes to get to sleep is not that unusual as I understand it. I think 30 minutes minutes is quite common even in people who sleep fine. 4-5 hours is very short though. One of my parents also slept little and there is also dementia on that side of the family (I have some memory issues as well already). I don't know how much previous gnerations slept but I suspect there may be not so benign genetic short sleep issues as well. At least some issues may have susceptibility and a triggering event, with tech making the triggering event more likely. That would be another question about benign familial short sleep, if it increases the susceptibility to more severe issues.
Interesting on the dementia and sleep... though all my grandparents lived to old age, and my dad who I know hardly sleeps is in his 80s and doesn't really have memory issues. Hopefully that keeps up!
But thanks - I'll keep an eye on that one
I was like that, and among other remedies (like actually fixing the problems in my life that bother me), my latest last-resort is brisk walking to exhaustion, even very late in the evening. If it's 10:30 and I know I'm in a bad mood to sleep, I just go for a walk in the park for 2 hours and I fall asleep very fast when I return.
It's not ideal and I plan to switch to running, but I'm at a bad place where my cardiovascular fitness is not good enough and if I run for 30 minutes to exhaustion my heart rate stays elevated for more than one hour and running is just too activating.
Walking for 2 hours seems very wasteful right now, but it's what it takes to calm me down enough to fall asleep.
If we were able to be awake 20 hours a day we may still be miserable because of factors like the sun being down for ane even longer time while we’re awake.
I feel like this is one of those inane pursuits for productivity where that doesn’t fit at all, at least not for the thinking jobs. Maybe in a dystopia big companies like amazon would use inventions like this to be able to let their employees work 20 hour work days or something.
Of course this shouldn’t discredit the linked article of being interesting or anything, just sharing my thoughts on the endless pursuit of productivity.
Its main raison d'etre is we're all sleep deprived so engineering less sleep may provide health and wellness benefits.
Now that I'm working a job where I do overnight deployments, often work 12-14 hours days, and have a couple of kids who don't sleep well, I hate my past self for not sleeping while he could. You never know when circumstances will drive you into unplanned sleep deprivation. Doing it to yourself for low-to-mid-level time gains isn't worth it.
Back when I studied (15 years ago), if I knew that I'd have the short-term memory issues that I do now, I'd never have done what I did just in order to study longer.
I did try polyphasic sleep when I was younger but it didn't work out. Having my sleeping patterns so far off the standard made me really unhappy.
but also let's go, if a giraffe can sleep 2 hours so can I
In the words of John Lennon, let it be.
Sleep when you're tired, work and play when you're not. The constrination and worrying about it, how much time you have for what, etc. is the single biggest driver for the stress and loss of sleep. Let go of that, let if flow, it will.
I'm not saying this at all.
Have an alarm clock, have a schedule. But don't stress about it or "optimize" it. Just do it.
It's like telling someone who is lactose intolerant to "just" eat their cereal with milk.
What I am saying is adding another layer of stress and yet another thing to optimize on top of all that does nothing but make it worse.
In terms of the analogy you gave: I'm not saying drink milk, I'm saying stop worrying about it and drink oat milk. Spend that energy elsewhere in your life in things that are more easily effected by your efforts.
I don’t get tired on a good cadence so this doesn’t work for me. I have to follow a schedule that’s independent of how awake, motivated, or tired I feel.
Lots of people can’t do that, we need to manage our sleep. The thing that helped me not worry about sleep was the routine. But that needs to be maintained and tweaked. I don’t worry about it, but have to think about it.
Do you have a health condition that requires you to manage your sleep? Pragmatically how does that shake out?
I was not speaking to those with medical conditions or similar. It was more general advice that helped me in the past for those who don't have sleep conditions, but are giving themselves one because they're needlessly worrying about or optimizing it.
Some combination of the title and the submission domain triggered my tick even more than usual around the use of “AI”.
It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll regard any artifact as artificially intelligent if the broader context fails a pretty low bar for intelligence of any kind.
So a bit of a false positive for your mental model.
> However, too much deep sleep is dangerous. REM is the stage of sleep in which we experience dreams, so our muscles become paralyzed to avoid acting out these dreams. In his “social sleep hypothesis,” Samson suggests that our ancestors mitigated the risk of deep sleep by sleeping in large groups with at least one person on guard.
> “Human camps are like a snail’s shell. They can pick it up and move it around with them,” Samson says. Our ancestral hunter-gatherers might have slept in groups of 15 to 20 around a campfire, taking turns staying awake and watching over the others.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-strange-sl...
If I sleep eight hours, I feel groggy, jet-lagged, and generally have a day where I’m slogging through molasses to get from one task to the next.
My wife has raised concerns about my sleep pattern, so I started using sleep-tracking tools like Fitbit and, more recently, an Apple Watch. She tracks her sleep too, and the big difference we’ve noticed is that I fall asleep within about two minutes, and my “sleep efficiency” using these tools is 98%. If I’m traveling and feel a bit jet-lagged, I can take a 20-minute nap (often without an alarm) and wake up feeling refreshed. She also seems to wake up a lot, most nights I "sleep like a log" and I only wakeup in the morning.
My mother has the same pattern but stays up later and sleeps about six hours into the morning. I used to do this too, but around age 23, I switched to an earlier bedtime and a consistent daily routine. When I became a “morning person,” I found I could code like crazy in the morning before “starting” my day, and this rewarding experience reinforced the habit.
I’ve tested this pattern in many ways, including not using an alarm (I still wake up around the same time for weeks at a time) and using a “light clock” I built with a Raspberry Pi to slowly brighten the room. Again, I wake up after roughly 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I use my Apple Watch to vibrate as a gentle reminder to start the day. On weekends, I keep the same schedule and use the extra time to read or hack away at side projects, often coding until the late afternoon when my wife protests enough that I need to stop and hang out or do my honey-do's.
About 10 years ago, during my annual checkup, my wife asked my doctor about this sleep pattern. The doctor asked me several questions, seemingly looking for signs of sleep deficit or dysfunction. In the end, he said I could do a sleep study but concluded, “If it works, don’t break it.”
As for productivity, I’ve found I can code effectively from 4:30 am to 8:30 am, then shower and work from 9 am to 6 pm without much trouble. I also practice intermittent fasting, typically eating only at 6 pm, with a protein shake around noon. This habit happened by accident—I realized breakfast slowed me down, and eating lots of carbs impaired my cognitive function and ability to code or handle complex tasks in the morning.
Before you ask, I generally don’t use caffeine or other stimulants. Occasionally, I’ll have one cup of coffee around 9 am as a social habit, but I recently stopped that again and actually feel better. I’ll most likely drop it again for a while until it sneaks back in again.
This is a super interesting question!
I think one ironic possibility is that people would still sleep deprive themselves, but with even fewer hours of sleep.
Maybe it's similar to the idea that we can just eradicate mosquitos with no negative effects. Is that really true?
1) Neuroscience of Sleep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sleep
2) Sleep Epigenetics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_epigenetics
3) Sleep deprivation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation
4) Familial natural short sleep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep
Are there any good sci fi stories or novels on reducing or eliminating sleep through better chemistry?
Given the impetus of the article is we're all chronically sleep deprived, I wonder what kind of (Swiftian?) political solution there might be to collectively improving sleep health.
Certainly the current commercial solution is drugs and lots of them.
Things like apnea and even a bad pillow/mattress combination can make someone's sleeping hours pretty miserable, and that's much easier to control and spread awareness than promoting gene therapy
Wonder if we could engineer multiple sleep intervals through out the single day (e.g. power napping, siesta's). There is plenty of dead time for me during the day that could be swapped out for sleep.. the question is at what cost to the body & mind?
Just a thought.
The average day for me has huge differences in terms of my productivity at any given moment. I need downtime anyway, if I didn't sleep I believe that I'd end up vegging out in some way because I'm not doing 24 hours of flashcards.
The discussions on here also always seem to centre around a very stereotypical "I am a vat for my brain" way of thinking. Realistically whilst sleeping other things are going on, muscles are recovering, digestive processes are going on, other forms of growing, etc, it's not just the brain.
There are also things like circadian rhythm, sunshine, etc. I woke up early today and had a few hours of darkness, I can feel my mood and brainpower improving as the sun rises.
We are not bots, this stuff is analogue.
Times when it's not possible to get enough sleep: you'd be less sleep-deprived.
And, if it's truly without negative side effects: maybe you get 20 minutes more useful time per day and increase your ratio of conscious relaxation to useful time. I'd call that a pretty big win.
It feels a bit like - well could I engineer myself to require 1500 calories a day instead of 2000. Maybe. But as a result there would definitely be some downside, maybe I'd be less physically strong, or have less endurance, or have a bit less processing power, or have to rest more, etc. If we straight up designed a more efficient body, then I'd rather keep eating 2k and be "more powerful", or maybe I'd go to 4k!
Maybe I can sleep for 2 fewer hours and retain the same or more productivity. Or maybe I could sleep for the full amount of hours but be more well rested and as a result be more productive in the awake time. That sort of thing.
> There is no free lunch.
Selective pressure and evolution are pretty good at optimizing... but not perfect. What they optimized for, also, is not quality of life in the modern world. It's likely there are a whole lot of free lunches available, or at least big wins with relatively low opportunity costs.
It's certainly not great to discard potential improvements because of an assumption that what we have must be optimum.
I guess what would be cool is being able to play with the sliders. People already do this in other ways, for example people at the extreme end of bodybuilding or strongman are almost certainlhy explicitly shortening their lifespans for a shorter term benefit, calorie restriction looks like it lets you go the other way, etc.
Maybe you could even fiddle and have 16 hours of sleep and overclock your brain for the other 8 being super-intelligent, lol.
It's not like "Natural Selection" was given an ecological niche and optimized from scratch the being for that niche. That mental model implies there's not much to be done and any changes would produce a less useful product.
A more apt term would be "Refactored" or even "Patched".
It's more like a giant ugly legacy software system was added to, and the result was just enough to keep going in the new system.
I like that analogy better because it implies: 1. There is room for optimization, and 2. Any minor change is likely to break things far away due to the continuous re-patching and legacy cruft. Both of which seem correct.
I think you are conflating natural selection the process with organisms that are a result of natural selection.
Natural selection isn’t a process that is intentionally made by anyone, but a way we describe a simplified model slew of complex processes.
Also conflated is what you are optimizing for. The only thing natural selection optimizes for is survival. That’s it. Nothing else matters expect which individuals survive long enough to pass their genes to the next generation. As a result niches develop and as each generation survives compared to their peers their survival strategies are optimized.
Optimization perfectly describes what is happening to the survivability and reproduction of certain genes.
You appear to be working backwards. That there was a niche and evolution somehow crafted an organism to fit that niche. That is misleading. Genes replicate, and in a certain context some genes survived and replicated better than in some other context. So genes evolved in that new context creating a niche.
I'd like to deprecate that mental model.
I can't relate at all. Where I live the days are consumed by darkness in the winter and I see no effect on my mood or brainpower.
From the name I assume you are from Finland, which I am not, but supposedly Finnish people are the happiest in the World - which I'm not sure if it's actually true. The joke is that every Finnish person after seeing the study wonders why they are the only unhappy one.
Like I'll settle for "tired but no accruing sleep debt".
I suppose you can full dystopia it, go the other way, make them need 12-16 hours a sleep a day whilst you only need 4 ;)
Teenagers stay up too late anyway so I'd say this sort of thing would be a good way to hopefully reduce the effects of sleep deprivation.
Also, whoever came up with the idea of nap hour in kindergartens has a special circle of hell reserved for them.
After all, we live in the age of abundance.
(Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
This isn't some kind of box ticking behaviour with its roots originating from toxic hustle culture, simply the adverse effects of sleep deprivation don't outweigh my enjoyment of things. And when my sleep debt finally catches up with me, I sleep my heart's delight.
From experience, I have friends who share in my world view and threshold for sacrificing sleep for pleasure and I have met people who think are mortified by this behaviour. My immediate family are all willing to sacrifice sleep on the drop of the hat notably - waking up at the crack of dawn to send/accompany someone to the airport is simply modus operandi. My wife is very keen to protect her sleep on the flipside and so when we travel together our decision frameworks need to accommodate both MOs
Ironically sometimes I'm most protective of my sleep during the weekly grind (and also training for fitness) because then my performance matters. If my only short term downside is discomfort from fatigue, I'll regularly trade that for more "uptime"
Are not all of those things that could be optimized away an opportunity to let yourself feel, relax and simply be?
The examples you bring up (like waking early to do something for someone you care about) has nothing to do with the topic of engineering for consistently reduced sleep, imho.
"Fun" is usually defined as something providing instant gratification (through hormonal response), though there is fun in retrospect too ("I was scared like shit, that was fun"). And while it's nothing to sneeze at and we should always have some, you can achieve the similar with different medications or narcotics (if the goal is "have more fun").
But I wouldn't optimize for that: we can achieve plenty in our lives, including having plenty of fun, by just being ourselves.
As in, get the sleep you need. Do the work you must and the work you enjoy. Have the fun you want.
While our lifetimes are short, they are not that short. Even if we got 10% more of the waking hours, that won't be the thing that makes your life worthwhile or not. If you spent the other 90% making it worthwhile, that'll do.
But if you must, go for it!
https://medium.com/@yinonweiss/the-four-types-of-fun-a745ec5...
Next solve going to the toilet and we're all set.