> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
You really should do more reading honestly. Sleep is when the wear and tear of activity is repaired and reversed, and is to a large extent regulated by molecules that amount to metabolic waste, which accumulate during consciousness, and are cleared away during sleep.
As far as my deep dives into the science of sleep have suggested, any deficits in sleep, either qualitative or quantitative, result in essentially minuscule quantities of irreversible kinda-neurodegeneration. "kinda" because it's not neuronal death, just the failure to maintain important connections and peak performance properly.
The important connections ... are important. By definition they will not be affected that much.
Without much drama (like the "kinda-neurodegeneration" wording), this can be easily summarized as: optimal amount of sleep = you're at peak performance, otherwise you're working at less than peak mental performance.
> How does your essay explain that I feel horrible for 2-3 hours after waking up if I don't get enough sleep?
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.
hey this is me too. never found a solution to it and for me I require more sleep to maximize my time because otherwise i feel terrible and am unable to function, especially in the first half of my day.
On a whole, I feel like there is another side of this coin which is that being hungry might not be bad for you, but if you're hungry enough it can be very unpleasant.
Are you seriously arguing that sleeping out in the nature, potentially with dangerous animals around you, on bear skins, with several friends (on the same bear skin?) is as comfortable as sleeping on a modern mattress in your home?
There have been studies that confirm sleeping outside results in sounder and healthier sleep.
I think about it in terms of germs. Yes, on paper it's more safe to sanitize everything, but in doing so we prohibit our ability to build defenses, and actually become less healthy.
In the same vein, maybe by sleeping on mattresses indoors all the time, we fail to build a tolerance to adverse sleeping conditions, and maybe get more sensitive to them too.
I knew of an old thai man who's face looked like he was 80 and his body looked cut and jacked. He also preferred to sleep with a thin mat on a hard tile floor with his wife in a house where there were multiple clean, usable beds to easily sleep on instead.
So if your body adjusts to it, it's definitely possible to actually prefer it.
Hard perfectly flat sleeping surfaces with just a simple blanket for warmth can stimulate the lymphatic system much like a massage can.
The worst is when you have an uneven surface, like when camping and there is a rock which even your (inflatable) roll mat cant dampen out, that makes sleep difficult.
My anecdote is that when I get migraine headaches, I have to lay down and try to sleep. I have to lay on hard ground. I can't stand being on a mattress for some reason. Maybe it's about feeling more control over the position of my body.
To me there is something deeply comforting about inertness. I hate the springyness in matresses so much I got a natural latex mattress, which I found out most people get because of allergies, but to me its like a kinetic sensory deprivation chamber- just absorbs all movement and doesn’t reflect it back.
Okay, and the sensory deprivation helps you sleep? I suppose that's generally what we're headed for. Turn off the lights. Set the temp to a certain level.
The hard ground isn't giving either, but you feel it. ;)
I also can't deal with pillows when I have a migraine. Though I can't sleep without something under my head. I usually just roll up a towel or something. As I said before, I think it's about having precise control over body position.
>Yes, please, do continue to slam a whole field that you are not yourself in. Love hearing from people who love to just cherry pick a couple of articles to support their claims. eye roll
I wholeheartedly agree. Similarly, people outside of astrology shouldn't be criticizing astrology.
So what you are saying is that, just like me, in your 20s you were optimize for getting shit done and now, being older, you optimize for feeling good and don't care about doing as much and think that optimizing for doing earlier was a mistake for you. This is reasonable!
No. I am able to do much more now, now that I respect the signals my body is sending. Sometimes I have to force things, reality demands it, but generally I work with my body on any given day, not against it. The increase quality and amount of work is undeniable, generally and on average.
I can only imagine how much more capable I would be if I had had a better relationship with sleep and my body in general when I was younger, so the benefits of those behaviors could have compounded over a longer time frame.
>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.
And here's an excerpt where you repeatedly say that modern sleep is unnatural.
> Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and comfort (note: I’m not saying that it’s bad, simply that being in bed today is much more pleasurable than being in “bed” in the past.)
> Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal’s skin, or on the ground. The temperature will probably drop 5-10°C overnight, meaning that if you were comfortable when you were falling asleep, you are going to be freezing when you wake up. Finally, there’s moon shining right at you and all kinds of sounds coming from the forest around you.
> In contrast, today: you sleep on your super-comfortable machine-crafted foam of the exact right firmness for you. You are completely safe in your home, protected by thick walls and doors. Your room’s temperature stays roughly constant, ensuring that you stay warm and comfy throughout the night. Finally, you are in a light and sound-insulated environment of your house. And if there’s any kind of disturbance you have eye masks and earplugs.
Ouch. Ambient sounds of the forest are a lot better than the modern equivalent of loud neighbors and drilling. He also seems to have forgotten that humans built fires. Caves have great sound insulation and I'm pretty sure our ancestors knew how to choose their caves.
I have spent years being a sleep deprived student because the dorms were super noisy with random parties and paper thin walls so I really can't relate to the implied utter comfortable sleeping habits of modern people. I'm sure there are people complaining about noise pollution in NY as well.
No one in my circle sleeps on an overpriced mattress. Mostly it's just the bed the place that we rent has. I never could connect with articles implying modern people live in these utterly comfortable utopias when it's really not the case. People are depressed. Especially males are doing horribly.
A few years ago I bought a mattress for less than $100 from Amazon to sleep on.
While it was funny to complain about how uncomfortable this cheap mattress was, it was still an extremely luxurious piece of technology unfathomable to any cave dweller.
It doesn't seem so crazy to me to wonder whether modern mattresses like these are incentivizing us to sleep longer than what is optimal.
People have research modern pre-industrial societies and while they do have fires and nicer sounds than drilling they don't sleep in caves. Also birds are really loud sometimes.
I don't think you'd want to sleep in their circumstances over yours, but maybe you would. I for one like camping quite a bit even though I do usually get much less sleep while camping because I'll stay up late around a fire and then wake up at sunrise. I'm sure that'd change if I were out in the woods for more than a week.
Also, maybe your not-utterly-comfortable utopia is making people, maybe especially males, depressed!
>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.
You may attempt to apply the same analogy to drinking water, and see that it doesn't work.
If you drink as much as you want, then you'll probably drink too much (with whatever negative consequences arising as a result).
But, except for some extreme circumstances, I don't think people drink much more than is necessary to quench their thirst.
That is your conclusion might still be correct, but it doesn't follow from the analogy with eating.
The thing is, the experience of drinking water has not changed much compared to before. However, if you take all beverages, you'll see that lots of people drink too much soda, and it's not to quench their thirst.
Water has changed dramatically. Think of all that goes into modern sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection - not to mention treatments for hard water or additives like fluorine. The taste is better because of the mineral content, and we can even add carbonation!
You are conditioned to overeat because your body can store the excess energy in the event of future needs.
The body is expecting such a future need as in our past there were often periods of food scarcity. Since in our modern society this food scarcity doesn't exist, the body overconsumes, preparing for a future that will never come.
We do not have such a mechanism for storing infinite water, so we do not crave an overabundance of water.
I think you are thinking about sleep on the wrong axis. It is not whether it is a superstimulus; it is whether your body can store an abundance of it for a future anticipated need.
I would argue in this case, sleep is much more like water than food in this way in that there is a very small amount of sleep (possibly zero) your body can effectively stockpile.
The opposite is generally more true, where the inability to feel satiety or feeling constant hunger will be the main factor in some of the problems that cause overweight.
I'm curious - what do you believe I should've done? How do you discredit a p-hacked small-n experiment, aside from noting that it should not be trusted a priori due to the extreme bias of the results expected from such kind of studies?
Is all sleep science based p-hacked small-n experiments?
To your point - I probably would have tried to rely on research that supports your points (which you've got me interested in now). I probably wouldn't have included a handful of anecdotes in the the appendix (including your own and Elon Musk's!), as well as 8 replies from a reddit thread as a supporting section. I 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". I wouldn't include any arguments that say modern sleep is "unnatural", which doesn't have any real meaning or basis in reality (is modern medicine natural? what about sanitation?). The analogy to hunger is a justification rather than any type of proof, and taking the analogy further, it would suggest I should go back to sleep in the morning since I usually wake up sleepy, just as I would eat more when I'm hungry. I would be careful about saying sleep duration is a cause of depression/mania rather than considering both might be driven by a confounding variable (stimulants will certainly cause both mania and wakefulness!). I also probably wouldn't make claims like:
> Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.
Without considering that you might be wrong about lifespan (not to mention healthspan) since you might very well be convincing others to effect a behavior change with your post.
>I 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".
> 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.
I'm not arguing you should not have included (1), (2), and (5), I'm arguing you should not have included (3) and (4) because they do not support the point of the passage.
No, you are. You specifically wrote that I "equate" (3) and (4) to my conclusion. You wrote:
>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".
>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]
