Consider reading the last section of the post.
285 karma · joined March 21, 2017
https://newscience.org / https://guzey.com
>1. There’s no good medical reason to sleep more than the minimum you can sustain.
>Not this one! Fight me.
>probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an ADRB1 mutation can sleep less" and "a single individual that underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with "Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects".
So, you are saying that when you don't get enough sleep, you feel fine most of the day, except for the first 2-3 hours after waking up? This is pretty weird and I don't have a good explanation for you.
I wholeheartedly agree. Similarly, people outside of astrology shouldn't be criticizing astrology.
I made 5 points in that section (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#decreasing-sleep-by-1-2-h...):
> 1. A sleep researcher who trains sailors to sleep efficiently in order to maximize their race performance believes that 4.5-5.5 hours of sleep is fine.
> 2. 70% of 84 hunter-gatherers studied in 2013 slept less than 7 hours per day, with 46% sleeping less than 6 hours.
> 3. A single-point mutation can decrease the amount of required sleep by 2 hours, with no negative side-effects.
> 4. A brain surgery can decrease the amount of sleep required by 3 hours, with no negative-side effects.
> 5. Sleep is not required for memory consolidation.
You cited (3) and (4) but ignored (1), (2), and (5) all of which are based on studying dozens and hundreds of people.
>Now, what if the only sleep available to you was modern sleep?
> 1. If you don’t sleep at all, you go crazy, because some amount of sleep is necessary.
> 2. If you sleep just enough to be awake during the day, you’ll be dreaming of getting a nap at the sight of a bed and will be distracted and sleepy all the time. Importantly, I claim, in this situation, the feeling of sleepiness does not mean that you should sleep more – it’s your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored.
3. I claim that if you sleep as much as you want, you’ll probably sleep too much and become more susceptible to depression. [by analogy to eating too much]
- And if you sleep way too much at once, you’ll be feeling terrible afterwards, however pleasant the sleep was.
>1. Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means you are probably eating too much.
>2. Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.
>Do you believe in power-posing? In ego depletion? In hungry judges and brain training? [1]
>If the answer is no, then your priors for our knowledge about sleep should be weak because “sleep science” is mostly just rebranded cognitive psychology, with the vast majority of it being small-n, not pre-registered, p-hacked experiments.
>I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables of interest [2] (the authors changed analysis post-hoc and fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put the post-hoc results into the abstract but decided not to mention the null-preregistered results there or anywhere else in the paper explicitly).
>So why has sleep research not been facing a severe replication crisis, similar to psychology?
>First, compared to psychology, where you just have people fill out questionnaires, sleep research is slow, relatively expensive, and requires specialized equipment (e.g. EEG, actigraphs). So skeptical outsiders go for easier targets (like social psychology) while the insiders keep doing the same shoddy experiments because they need to keep their careers going somehow.
>Second, imagine if sleep researchers had conclusively shown that sleep is not important for memory, health, etc. – would they get any funding? No. Their jobs are literally predicated on convincing the NIH and other grantmakers that sleep is important. As Patrick McKenzie notes [3], “If you want a problem solved make it someone’s project. If you want it managed make it someone’s job.”
>Even in medicine, without pre-registered RCTs truth is extremely difficult to come by, with more than one half [4] of high-impact cancer papers failing to be replicated, and with one half of RCTs without pre-registration of positive outcomes being spun [5] by researchers as providing benefit when there’s none. And this is in medicine, which is infinitely more consequential and rigorous than psychology.
And here's my critique of Why We Sleep, which the author of the comment above decided to omit for some reason:
>Here are just a few of biggest issues (there were many more) with the book.
>1. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer”, despite there being no evidence that cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no RCTs on this, and, in fact, there’s not even a correlation between general cancer risk and sleep duration. [6]
>2. Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the book. [7]
>3. Walker outright fakes data to support his “sleep epidemic” argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the graph below simply does not exist [8]
[1] https://www.gleech.org/psych
[2] https://economics.mit.edu/files/16994
[3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1223695673742151680
[4] https://www.science.org/content/article/more-half-high-impac...
[5] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[6] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#also-no----sleeping-le...
[7] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...
[8] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#ok-even-if-the-who-nev...
I work on the thing I love & care deeply about (newscience.org) and I'm most happy when I work 10, 12, 16 hours straight, 60, 80, 100 hours a week.
What wrong with that?
- https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/ - https://guzey.com/science/sleep/14-day-sleep-deprivation-sel...
The general idea of the book is literally -- sleep 7-8 hours or you'll get some terrible disease -- is clearly not true.
It is clearly true that we need sleep and that it's super important. But it's still not clear how much of it we actually need.
Update: fixed this. Thank you!
I think I tried to communicate this when suggesting asking for outrageous advice, but I think you're making this point better. Anyway, I added you comment to https://guzey.com/advice/#best-comments :)
This in particular I think are very different things. You can start a lot of things and be always doing something yet give up as soon as any difficulties appear. This is high energy, low persistence.