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How a good night's sleep became a status symbol
- dilemma 10y agoIf you're not sleep deprived you need to check your privilege.
- venomsnake 10y agoOne of the great bonuses of working from home. You will be surprised how easy it is to get your 8 hours if you don't commute.
- saiya-jin 10y agodepends on commute - my 15 mins don't mean anything, and once i leave work, all mental processes related to work topics go into hibernation till next morning. not so easy when I was working from home
- stinkytaco 10y agoI live pretty close to where I work, probably 20 minutes on foot. This is great for many reasons, but I also work in a public place (a library) and might have personal reasons to go there on days I'm not working. I do not do this because I just can't bring myself to hang out where I work. It's not that my coworkers are not respectful it's just that I don't want to. Working from home was like being at work all the time. It started to wear on me. Now that I'm more mature I might be able to handle it, but at the time I just couldn't sustain.
- elorant 10y agoThe problem with working from home is that it's very easy to procrastinate or just jerk off with the gazillion of things that attract your attention.
- venomsnake 10y agoAnd how being in an office prevents that?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- oarsinsync 10y agoHappens quite easily at the office too, with all the table tennis, foosball, free food and drink and regular meetings. Heck I'm doing it right now with just a web browser sat at my desk...
- DiabloD3 10y agoYou know, it's weird, but for me, not having the buzz of other people around me all the time makes it easy for me to concentrate.... as long as I stay off HN, Reddit, and Imgur. Seriously, HN is a gigantic delicious timesink that has probably cost all of us collectively millions.
- paulojreis 10y ago> Seriously, HN is a gigantic delicious timesink that has probably cost all of us collectively millions. It's possible, but what you get back from HN is also enormous; from jobs to interactions with very smart people. I mean, Alan Kay was involved in discussions here, just yesterday!
- kranner 10y agoIn other words, an opportunity to understand why you procrastinate and build good working habits.
- tehrei 10y agoUnless you work in some draconian monarchy where you're constantly monitored, you can jerk off at the office, too.
- thinkt4nk 10y agoRight. It can't possibly have anything to do with discipline.
- afarrell 10y agoOr being part of a culture where "sleep is for the weak". Certainly folks at the bottom of the economic ladder are sleep deprived due to needing to work multiple jobs and take care of kids. But there are a lot of high-status communities that put a positive value on sleep deprivation. I hear from multiple sources that this is true in medicine. I know from experience that this is true at MIT. Those cultures need to change. There is no good reason for an introductory computer architecture class to make its assignments due at 6am.
- tbrownaw 10y agoThere is no good reason for an introductory computer architecture class to make its assignments due at 6am "It needs to be turned in by the earliest time I might feel like starting work in the morning."
- afarrell 10y agoThe assignments were auto-graded
- majewsky 10y agoWhen I was an undergraduate TA in Computational Physics, we had a deadline of Monday 8am, which arised from a technicality: At Monday 8am, a cron job would download the submissions from the designated mailbox, and print them, so that we could pick them up for grading when we came into the office that morning. You're absolutely right though. It would be more sensible to have the cronjob run at Sunday 8pm instead, given that nobody is in the office until Monday morning anyway.
- dominotw 10y agonot having kids is a privilege i suppose.
- damptowel 10y agoIf you're sleep deprived you need to check the privileges around you. :)
- saiya-jin 10y agoI was waiting for some shocking revelation in the article, but she says what everybody doing sports knows damn well for centuries - sleep restores body and mind, and you should be clocking 8 hours consistently to get most of it. the end of the article is actually the most interesting. it just puzzles me how somebody like her can be so popular...
- maxerickson 10y agoShe's largely unknown. A few million people knowing who you are doesn't make you notably popular.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mmanfrin 10y agoShe sold a blog/news website named after her for nearly a billion dollars.
- Kristine1975 10y agoThe first picture is a still from the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's", btw. The sleeping woman with the cat is Audrey Hepburn. But this is fucked up: >According to the Times, most of the A-Team can only endure about 12 months of the work because it’s so taxing. The low pay also means many of them take second jobs. Basically, they don’t sleep so that Huffington can So she knows how important sleep is (even wrote a book about it), but she doesn't pay her employees enough so they can get a good night's sleep, too?
- tehrei 10y agoSilly Kristine, sleep is for people, not servants, hahaha.
- charlesdm 10y agoBeing able to get a proper night's sleep one of the things I love most about being a "solopreneur". I had a job for a while and days were just too short. I'd come home and before I knew it, it was 1-2am. I currently work 4-5 hours a day, yet get close to a full days work done because of increased productivity due to sleeping well.
- RUG3Y 10y agoMay I ask what business you're in? I want to do something like what you're doing. I only need to make 35 - 40k to sustain my current lifestyle.
- Raphmedia 10y agoWow, you should totally ruin your lifestyle and join the 80k club. You could be so much happier with the extra money than with time to sleep, have friends and have hobbies! At least, you wouldn't be a poor anymore...! /s
- cylinder 10y agoWhat's amazing is how much a full time long hours job costs you. Transportation at peak hours, clothing and shoes (biz casual or suits), dry cleaning, eating lunch out, vacationing around public holidays so everything is more expensive, childcare if applicable, and all the other things you might end up automating because you don't have time (dinner delivery, laundry drop off, house cleaning).
- majewsky 10y ago> the other things you might end up automating because you don't have time (dinner delivery, laundry drop off, house cleaning). That's not automating, that's outsourcing.
- joesmo 10y agoIndeed, but it clearly doesn't have to be this way. My company lets me work remotely and does not have set holidays but gives employees an extra ten days or so a year to take off as they see fit. Not all jobs can do this but I'd venture to guess most office jobs could, so it really comes down to that thing employers like to boast about that they almost never have: corporate culture. I'll take this any day over the stupidity that passes for corporate culture in many companies these days.
- dingo_bat 10y agoIf there is something I deeply wish for, it is for the power to ignore sleep. Every minute slept is a great loss. A good night's sleep means you're not working hard enough.
- majewsky 10y agoBy the same logic, you should regret the time spent eating, but the food ingestion provides you with the fuel to actually get these brain cells to work. Sleep is similarly important: During sleep, mandatory maintenance is performed on the brain cells (both on the biochemical and on the informational level), as far as science knows (or conjectures).
- Kristine1975 10y agoHere, have this /s you dropped.
- brixon 10y agoA bad night's sleep means you will have to work harder for the same result the next day.
- venomsnake 10y agoAre you sure? http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/insomnia-that-kills/384841/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/insomnia-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia
- nalllar 10y agoMissing the point. The power to ignore sleep would be pointless if it came with the downsides. If I could lose the need to sleep, without any adverse health effects? Awesome. It's a shame that that's not currently possible.
- goda90 10y agoIt'd be interesting if we genetically engineered or something, a way to sleep half our brain kind of like dolphins. 8 hours of half brainpower. Though honestly, if you are doing things that take a lot of thinking, your brain is often doing some work still while you sleep.
- chiph 10y agoI've been wondering what the margins are on mattresses. You see stores selling them all over the place. There's usually only one or two employees in there, and they're devoid of shoppers most of the week (weekends are big days for them). So they have to pay rent + utilities and presumably commission, but are selling these items one-at-a-time to only occasional customers. The mark-ups have to be insane to support that.
- dilemma 10y agoI know nothing about the mattress business, but many shops, especially those on fancy addresses, lose money and instead function as branding instruments. Its possible that the stores you've observed work as showrooms and have attached warehouses, servicing a wholesale operation where the money is actually made.
- beckler 10y agoJust depends. I believe the average is somewhere between 40-60% for most name-brand mattresses. However, off-brand mattresses probably have higher margins, due to them being cheaper in general.
- dilemma 10y agoUnbranded products are commodities and therefore should have lower margins.
- haukilup 10y agoSeems the parent used "off-brand mattresses" and you used "unbranded products", which is quite a bit different
- askldfhjkasfhd 10y agoCan you elaborate for me? I thought those two were synonyms.
- awinter-py 10y agohmm -- no mention here of the rising cost of silence. It is very expensive to purchase 8 hours of quiet in a major city.
- Tharkun 10y agoYou're right. You would think that insane housing prices would at least include a bit of soundproofing here and there.
- jwatte 10y agoYou pay for the location, not construction. And the US is infamous for being cost driven, not quality driven. Cheapest possible way to get at the given location means cheapest possible construction.
- rlonstein 10y ago> hmm -- no mention here of the rising cost of silence. It is very expensive to purchase 8 hours of quiet in a major city. Not really expensive if you are only considering sleep. http://www.howardleight.com/earplugs/laser-lite http://www.howardleight.com/earplugs/laser-lite I buy them by the 200 count for about $30, works out to $0.15 per pair. I started using these for motorcycling years ago then woodwork and blacksmithing or any time I use loud machines. For sleeping I use them a couple of times before throwing them away, for other activities they're single use. I also run a fan in my bedroom and have a cheap ($20) white-noise generator for use with a baby that I can use when traveling.
- patrickk 10y agoDepends on the city and the building materials used. After moving to Germany, I was blown away by the property prices (relative to comparable buildings internationally) and the building materials. This is a typical German door, with a bevel: http://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/AIA/UploadedImages/6e814608-4554-4eb0-b93b-ac088d84a808/9.27.DB%205%20wide%20door.jpg http://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/AIA/UploadedImag... Typically these have a matching rubber seal, which dramatically reduces noise and draughts: https://www.modern-doors.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/weather-seal-1.jpg https://www.modern-doors.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/... Additionally the apartment walls are like a bunker, which means you don't hear traffic, trains or your neighbours even if you live in a city centre.
- kazinator 10y ago"And when, some days afterwards, it was announced that from now on the pigs would get up an hour later in the mornings than the other animals, no complaint was made about that either." -- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- dirtyaura 10y agoAlthough getting enough sleep is important, it's surprisingly hard for people to get quality sleep. I work at ŌURA (https://ouraring.com https://ouraring.com), the wellness ring that is focused on analysing your sleep. It's pretty visible in people's sleep data that if they focused more on properly relaxing before they go to bed, they would sleep better. The time of the lowest heart-rate of the night is a good indicator how relaxed your body were when you went to bed. Alcohol, late workouts, stressful life situation all affect this.
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoWhat about sex? Is the morning the best time?
- tps5 10y agoI've never been able to figure out who Ariana Huffington is or why I should care what she thinks.
- tamana 10y agoShe was a popular newspaper pundit before she founded huffpo and newspapers died.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- racl101 10y agoIf you decide not to have kids you can have more good nights' sleep. All my married friends with kids try to extoll the virtues of having kids while they struggle to raise their children financially, emotionally and physically. They have the nerve to suggest I'm unfulfilled and unhappy. But last I checked I'm the one who can sleep in until 11AM on Saturdays or stay up till 2AM on a Friday night.
- hermannj314 10y agoIt is sad that your have such low morality that you would steal merely because you have the opportunity to do so. That says a lot about you. Fortunately, the world isn't full of people like you.
- bshimmin 10y agoIt's just possible I was joking. Or, I don't know, maybe I like to advertise my future criminal exploits on a web site I post to using my real name.
- hermannj314 10y agoAs someone that been the victim of theft, it is really not a joking matter. Your attitude marginalizes the behavior. Got any good rape jokes while you are at it?
- cloudjacker 10y agohow insurance policies became the ultimate status symbol
- thoughtpalette 10y agoMayhap's you would like to include all your other anecdotal experiences throughout your life to strangers on the internet? /gtfo
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y agoYou sound like an immature cunt that needs to leave the conversation then
- dang 10y agoPersonal attacks aren't allowed on HN, and we ban accounts that do this. Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread still worse.
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- gozur88 10y agoThe article takes the publication of a book and tries to spin it into a trend. It's not. People who could make the time still brag about getting very little sleep because it makes them feel important.
- kayman 10y agoI find the conclusion of the article that focus on sleep is a short lived fad is wrong. People have been trying to hack sleep for a long time, unsuccessfully. I hope one day we can, but I doubt it. At best you can trick your body into reaching your REM cycle faster via activities like meditation. Personally, plenty of sleep is my secret weapon along with exercise. As the world is trying to hack sleep and cut corners, I find resting and taking care of my body makes me much more effective than the sleepless zombies around me.
- jgalt212 10y agoYes, Arianna Huffington loves talk about sleeping. And other assorted nonsense. Anything to keep the rank and file dems from noticing that the liberal elites make 100X what the rank and file do. To these ends, the dems have stolen a page out of the GOP playbook. Run interference around defense and family values so you don't notice the CEO makes 100X what you do.