9 ms·

Things to know about sleep as the clocks go back

155 points by usgroup 9y ago

JepZ 9y ago
> 2. What happens in your body when you don't sleep enough? You happen to create blurry charts ;-)
kzrdude 9y ago
Last chart: UK and Spain have a 1 hour time zone difference, but apparently only 15 minutes difference in bed time. (On approximately same longitude)
- sdfjkl 9y ago
  It also neglects to mention the entirely different lifestyle in Spain, different attitude towards work, not to mention the siesta, which one would think worth noting in a sleep related article :)
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Siestas are pretty much only taken by old people and kids, even in Spain. Multiple polls have shown the average working-age adult never or rarely takes one.
stinos 9y ago
Hmm, had no idea long sleep is also linked to developing more diseases. Also makes one wonder in what way the causal effect (if any?) works, i.e. do those people tend to sleep more because of the diseases or is it the other way around?
- KenanSulayman 9y ago
  That’s because the chart is simply misleading: they collected information on how long the participants slept, and then put the „probability of developing diseases“ next to it. That’s a fallacy, because most people are in the 7 to 9 hour range, thus the overall probability is lower. The other ranges are usually people with non-nominal lifestyles, which can also very likely impact disease probability. You can’t just turn around a graph like a mathematical equation... unless it’s sensationalism.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    There's also the issue of longer sleepers likely //needing// it for some reason (I hypothesize to fight off a disease). The sound of the study is retrospective (looking back) instead of controlled; so they probably didn't do anything to account for if someone was already healthy or sick before enforcing a sleep duration.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  I can give one concrete example of where it definitely is causal. There was a short BBC documentary series about sleep a few years ago, and one of the episodes focused on a man who slept for ten hours a day and still felt drowsy and without energy. After going through a sleep clinic with all kinds of tests, the conclusion was that he should try to sleep only six hours. The basic issue was that because he spent ten hours a day in bed, trying to catch up on what he thought was a lack of sleeping causing his tiredness, his body never got tired enough to enter deep sleep. Because he missed his deep sleep cycles, his sleep did not recover his energy properly. So this was a vicious cycle. After a few weeks of forcing himself to wake up after six hours of sleep his problems were basically solved. So the thing to remember is that duration of sleep tells you nothing about the quality of sleep. EDIT: While we're here, I've had a lot of sleeping problems in the past, so here some other tips that I remember from this series, and from my sister who studied chronobiology (the science of internal clocks in biological systems, including sleep cycles): - Note emphasized enough by this article: the deep sleep cycle is necessary for cleaning your brain from neurodegenerating toxins[0]. Getting that stage three deep sleep is essential for your mental health! - Don't use alcohol to induce sleepiness: yes, it makes you fall asleep faster, but it also prevents you from the deep sleep. You end up not being refreshed afterwards. - Train your brain to associate your bed with sleeping. If you can't sleep, leave the bed, do something that's not so stimulating that it keeps you awake like reading a book (avoid that mobile phone at all cost) until you feel sleepy enough to go back. This article singles out teenagers here, which is ridiculous: adults are just as guilty of doing this to themselves. - Because of the previous point, make sure you don't use your laptop/phone in bed, nor have a TV in the bedroom. - The reason warm baths can help with falling sleep: a fast drop from a high core temperature to a low temperature triggers drowsiness. So what the bath does is heath you up until you are warm. If you then leave that bath and enter a cold bed that needs to be warmed up this triggers a sleep response. Hot milk probably gives a similar trigger, but I'm sure about that one. - Fasting can help with jet lag. Specifically: don't eat for at least sixteen hours (drinking water is fine), then eat your first meal at breakfast (tangent: "break fast"). This resets the body clock. [0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flus...
  - 9y ago
- drdeadringer 9y ago
  I can offer only the anecdotal, though I'm sure an internet search should produce for you more scientific backing. I've experienced this myself and have witnessed it in coworkers and in my father, all of us having worked the different shifts at one point or another. For me, whenever I was on 2nd or 3rd shift my health, state of mind, and life in general suffered. I also never felt rested or clear-headed no matter how much or how little sleep I got. Should you live near a school with an 8am marching band out in practice, or maybe you live in or near an apartment complex with a yard service peaceably armed with a lawnmower and leaf blower at 9am, then good luck to you. Setting up the equivalent of a photographic dark room gets me only so far. Nowadays I avoid shift work as much as possible. The money isn't worth it for me.
- _0ffh 9y ago
  I'm afraid you didn't quite catch that. The article says "both short sleepers and long sleepers are more likely to have a range of diseases", and that's also how I read that elsewhere. There is no claim that long sleep was a cause of disease. The opposite seems, to me at least, more likely.
- sn9 9y ago
  There was a recent book about sleep by a leading sleep researcher that ought to be quite good (if his NPR interview is anything to go by): http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-Walker/9781501144318 http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-W...
webscalist 9y ago
Damn PagerDuty
- fideloper 9y ago
  and newborns
  - codycraven 9y ago
    And 4 year olds...
    - DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
      And kids between kindergarten and their last year of highschool who need to be pushed to get ready for school, sometime by 6:50 a.m.
    - drdeadringer 9y ago
      You're not kidding. Way back when, my younger sister went through a phase of waking me up at 4am to play right around that age. Saw some of my first sunrises out of it, but I'm glad it stopped happening.
  - ak39 9y ago
    And snoring spouse.
- edem 9y ago
  PagerDuty is a crime against humanity.
vanderZwan 9y ago
That morning/evening chart at the end is kind of worthless in how vague it is. I mean, it's very low-resolution approximation of a normal distribution, without telling me anything about what it means to be a morning or evening person, or what distinguishes "moderate" from "extreme".
k__ 9y ago
I stopped setting an alarm most times of the week and sleep for 10h every day (2-12). After over a month I noticed that I would wake up earlier. I wake up after 7-9 hours and feel rather refreshed. Most of the time I still sleep 10h because I staying in bed so much.
- zanny 9y ago
  Very similar. If I try to force a sleep schedule I'm just miserable. If I drop alarms I sleep for 10 hours for a while before getting a natural 8 hour sleep cycle back. That being said, I loathe those days I sleep 10 hours. Hell, I'm super jealous of people that can function on 6 hours. Every hour spent sleeping is an hour of life I miss out on. I really hope in our lifetimes we can engineer something to dramatically reduce the need for sleep.
83457 9y ago
I'd be interested in seeing a study about how having many timezones in a region affects sleep. For example in the US there are activities that are geared towards the west coast that keeps the east coast up later. Some that come to mind are sports. Between NFL games, UFC events and esports matches I have stayed up many nights for two or three hours later than someone on the west coast would have to for the same purposes.
- dtech 9y ago
  Europe is also interesting, but the other way around. Most of mainland Europe is on the Central European Timezone (UTC+1), despite the difference in solar time between western Spain and eastern Poland being about 2 hours. Solar time wise western spain should be at ~UTC-0:40, and eastern poland at ~UTC+1:30
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  Why couldn't you just watch it the next day? I haven't watch "live TV" in years, get all my content from the internet, it actually feels weird that in 2017people still let events and TV programs dictate their schedules.
  - petecox 9y ago
    If you have the discipline not to peek at the scores... My neighbour watches soccer from his home country at odd hours of the night, going to work a couple of hours later. Says he'd otherwise only watch a replay knowing his team had won and then it takes away the suspense. His wife makes him sleep in the guest room!
    - dorfsmay 9y ago
      I'm not into sports, so I guess that helps. I remember as a kid, you had to listen to the radio or watch TV at a certain specific time if you wanted to know what happened in the world. It's weird to think about it now, how radio and tv stations had so much power over people schedules and lives.
    - 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
One tiny but helpful trick i got by reading about sleep is the ~2h cycle. I know if I wake up and I can't fall asleep right away, I'll just have to do something for 90minutes and it will come again. It's stress free.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aesclepius 9y ago
I like that I'm reading this while coming off night shift (medical resident). I wholeheartedly agree that sleep is essential to life and healthiness.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  I like that people making life and death decisions for others are sleep deprived.
- djohnston 9y ago
  It's a sad irony that medical training forces students to adopt such unhealthy sleep habits.
- drdeadringer 9y ago
  My father is a retired ER doctor and had worked pretty much every shift imaginable -- or for you, probably that you're experiencing as well despite whatever speciality you're after. He agrees.
Pxtl 9y ago
Aside, whatever political party calls for ending the time changes and switching to permanent DST gets my vote. My kids are positively feral for the week after a time change.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  "permanent DST" Which would mean it would be dark when school starts. It's hard enough to get them out the door on time as is. I fully support getting rid of the time change, but not by making DST permanent.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    If it's possible to change everybody's timezone twice a year, surely it's possible to leave most people alone and just change the school schedule.
    - tzs 9y ago
      The school schedule does not stand alone. If you start school later then households where all parents are employed and the children are not old enough to handle getting ready and out the door in the morning on their own might need to have their work schedule pushed back. If work schedules in general then get pushed back to accommodate the school schedule change, pretty much everything else follows because work is such a big and inflexible block of time on most people's schedules nearly everything else has to schedule around it.
      - Filligree 9y ago
        What households would that be? I took the bus to school, on my own, since day two of primary school. It wasn't hard, and I don't recall anyone ever getting lost. Even if they had, it's not the end of the world; they'll find their way back eventually. It's a peculiar American-ism to assume that children are incapable of handling themselves, and one that's been repeatedly proven false.
Bromskloss 9y ago
Ha! Clocks have no influence over my sleep if I don't change my schedule with the clock!
sowbug 9y ago
To avoid confusion for anyone in the US reading the linked article, the parts of the US that observe Daylight saving time will change in a week (November 5), not tomorrow (October 29).
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
China lacks DST, and I swear the sun is out at 4AM in the summer. I guess the problem is that the time zone is already biased so that the sun is out at 6:30ish even in the winter, it just rises earlier in the summer. And that’s just for Beijing of course, the whole country is under one giant time zone.
- shagie 9y ago
  China's timezone is calibrated for Shanghai. The western border is about two hours off of solar time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti... ). Compare China's +8:30 which border's India's +5:30.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Urumqi is about 1.5 hours off, and stores/schools have localized schedules to compensate. I guess Kashgar is even more worse off.
djhworld 9y ago
I was reading this yesterday http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/its_four_in_the_morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/its_four_in_the_m... about people who wake up at 4am The yoga teacher baffled me the most, only taking 4 hours or so of sleep a night. I really can't imagine that working for me, 7.5 - 8 hours just seems to hit the sweet spot.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  The brain needs sleep more than the body. If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. Of course, different people are wired differently but as a rule of thumb it appplies. Slightly off topic (i.e., it's about the brain and not sleep) but the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is a personal fave.
  - chillwaves 9y ago
    > If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. How could you possibly measure these values?
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      I'm not sure how you'd measure it for this example. But I can tell you "Your Brain at Work" explains how and why thinking (as abstract as that sounds here) is a finite resource.
methodover 9y ago
Gosh I wish I could sleep like I used to when I was a teenager. I constantly wake up throughout the night. Can't sleep in if I wanted to. Probably get 6 hours of sleep a night if you subtract wakeful interruptions. Not sure why. I'm not overweight at all, 10% body fat. Exercise every day for at least half an hour, usually more, running, weightlifting, sports. Work isn't stressful. I don't get it.
- christkv 9y ago
  do you consume a lot of caffeine?
  - methodover 9y ago
    One or two cups of coffee a day before lunch. I've tried quitting caffeine. No effect. Could try again, that experiment was many years ago.
    - ncavig 9y ago
      Anecdote from my experience; having a cup of decaf tea with a spoonful of unfiltered honey leads to some of my most restful nights of sleep. My tea of choice is chamomile. My other, debatably healthy crutch is a fan which manages a cool temp while providing a constant noise.
- unabridged 9y ago
  Small noises will wake me up instantly, I have to have a fan or white noise filling the room to sleep soundly. Also if you haven't already try to make your room pitch black, tape any leds on electronics and get blackout curtains.
  - methodover 9y ago
    Hmm, I wonder if small noises is it. The upstairs neighbors had a kid a few years back. He's loud. During the day, though. I don't often find myself waking up to the kid's noise -- I just find myself waking up. Maybe I'm waking up to the kid and just don't realize it. Hmm.
ivanhoe 9y ago
There's nothing more depressive to me then waking up in the morning and it's both cold and pitch dark outside. So, unlike so many people in this thread, I happen to like the DST.
etatoby 9y ago
For many years (decades even) starting during childhood or adolescence, I used to wake up exactly 4 hours after falling asleep. One moment I was sleeping soundly, the moment right after I was wide awake. It was so precise that I used to look at the clock, subtract 4 hours, and know exactly the time I managed to fall asleep the night before. It was not stressful at all. I would get up, go to the bathroom, drink some water. Maybe read a book, a manga, study an algorithm, or write something. It was a very peaceful time of the day—rather, the night—to do something with a clear mind; no noise or other people around. I was not sleepy nor groggy and I could choose when to go to sleep again. But I knew I should not drag that time forever, because I still needed to get around 4 hours of sleep before finally getting up in the morning, or I would have a miserable day. I never thought much about it, until reading about 'biphasal' sleep and how people of times past used to sleep like that. These days my sleep is more troubled than in my teens and twenties and I have a tighter sleep schedule—probably because I've always been a night owl and I don't have anybody nagging me about going to bed early, so I don't. Somewhere along the way, I lost the habit of biphasal sleep. I cannot say whether it's correlation or causation (let alone which way), but I used to sleep much better during my biphasal sleep years. PS. articles like this describe me to a T, dunno if it has anything to do with it: https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/ https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/
DrScump 9y ago
I've found the free Sleep Cycle[0] app to be very useful visualizing my sleep patterns, plus it lets you set a 30' window (free version; perhaps other options in the paid version) for waking at a near-waking point naturally. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.... or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id32...

155 points by usgroup 9y ago

JepZ 9y ago

> 2. What happens in your body when you don't sleep enough? You happen to create blurry charts ;-)

Last chart: UK and Spain have a 1 hour time zone difference, but apparently only 15 minutes difference in bed time. (On approximately same longitude)

sdfjkl 9y ago
It also neglects to mention the entirely different lifestyle in Spain, different attitude towards work, not to mention the siesta, which one would think worth noting in a sleep related article :)
- icebraining 9y ago
  Siestas are pretty much only taken by old people and kids, even in Spain. Multiple polls have shown the average working-age adult never or rarely takes one.

stinos 9y ago

Hmm, had no idea long sleep is also linked to developing more diseases. Also makes one wonder in what way the causal effect (if any?) works, i.e. do those people tend to sleep more because of the diseases or is it the other way around?

KenanSulayman 9y ago
That’s because the chart is simply misleading: they collected information on how long the participants slept, and then put the „probability of developing diseases“ next to it. That’s a fallacy, because most people are in the 7 to 9 hour range, thus the overall probability is lower. The other ranges are usually people with non-nominal lifestyles, which can also very likely impact disease probability. You can’t just turn around a graph like a mathematical equation... unless it’s sensationalism.
- mjevans 9y ago
  There's also the issue of longer sleepers likely //needing// it for some reason (I hypothesize to fight off a disease). The sound of the study is retrospective (looking back) instead of controlled; so they probably didn't do anything to account for if someone was already healthy or sick before enforcing a sleep duration.
vanderZwan 9y ago
I can give one concrete example of where it definitely is causal. There was a short BBC documentary series about sleep a few years ago, and one of the episodes focused on a man who slept for ten hours a day and still felt drowsy and without energy. After going through a sleep clinic with all kinds of tests, the conclusion was that he should try to sleep only six hours. The basic issue was that because he spent ten hours a day in bed, trying to catch up on what he thought was a lack of sleeping causing his tiredness, his body never got tired enough to enter deep sleep. Because he missed his deep sleep cycles, his sleep did not recover his energy properly. So this was a vicious cycle. After a few weeks of forcing himself to wake up after six hours of sleep his problems were basically solved. So the thing to remember is that duration of sleep tells you nothing about the quality of sleep. EDIT: While we're here, I've had a lot of sleeping problems in the past, so here some other tips that I remember from this series, and from my sister who studied chronobiology (the science of internal clocks in biological systems, including sleep cycles): - Note emphasized enough by this article: the deep sleep cycle is necessary for cleaning your brain from neurodegenerating toxins[0]. Getting that stage three deep sleep is essential for your mental health! - Don't use alcohol to induce sleepiness: yes, it makes you fall asleep faster, but it also prevents you from the deep sleep. You end up not being refreshed afterwards. - Train your brain to associate your bed with sleeping. If you can't sleep, leave the bed, do something that's not so stimulating that it keeps you awake like reading a book (avoid that mobile phone at all cost) until you feel sleepy enough to go back. This article singles out teenagers here, which is ridiculous: adults are just as guilty of doing this to themselves. - Because of the previous point, make sure you don't use your laptop/phone in bed, nor have a TV in the bedroom. - The reason warm baths can help with falling sleep: a fast drop from a high core temperature to a low temperature triggers drowsiness. So what the bath does is heath you up until you are warm. If you then leave that bath and enter a cold bed that needs to be warmed up this triggers a sleep response. Hot milk probably gives a similar trigger, but I'm sure about that one. - Fasting can help with jet lag. Specifically: don't eat for at least sixteen hours (drinking water is fine), then eat your first meal at breakfast (tangent: "break fast"). This resets the body clock. [0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flus...
- 9y ago
drdeadringer 9y ago
I can offer only the anecdotal, though I'm sure an internet search should produce for you more scientific backing. I've experienced this myself and have witnessed it in coworkers and in my father, all of us having worked the different shifts at one point or another. For me, whenever I was on 2nd or 3rd shift my health, state of mind, and life in general suffered. I also never felt rested or clear-headed no matter how much or how little sleep I got. Should you live near a school with an 8am marching band out in practice, or maybe you live in or near an apartment complex with a yard service peaceably armed with a lawnmower and leaf blower at 9am, then good luck to you. Setting up the equivalent of a photographic dark room gets me only so far. Nowadays I avoid shift work as much as possible. The money isn't worth it for me.
_0ffh 9y ago
I'm afraid you didn't quite catch that. The article says "both short sleepers and long sleepers are more likely to have a range of diseases", and that's also how I read that elsewhere. There is no claim that long sleep was a cause of disease. The opposite seems, to me at least, more likely.
sn9 9y ago
There was a recent book about sleep by a leading sleep researcher that ought to be quite good (if his NPR interview is anything to go by): http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-Walker/9781501144318 http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-W...

webscalist 9y ago

Damn PagerDuty

fideloper 9y ago
and newborns
- codycraven 9y ago
  And 4 year olds...
  - DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
    And kids between kindergarten and their last year of highschool who need to be pushed to get ready for school, sometime by 6:50 a.m.
  - drdeadringer 9y ago
    You're not kidding. Way back when, my younger sister went through a phase of waking me up at 4am to play right around that age. Saw some of my first sunrises out of it, but I'm glad it stopped happening.
- ak39 9y ago
  And snoring spouse.
edem 9y ago
PagerDuty is a crime against humanity.

vanderZwan 9y ago

That morning/evening chart at the end is kind of worthless in how vague it is. I mean, it's very low-resolution approximation of a normal distribution, without telling me anything about what it means to be a morning or evening person, or what distinguishes "moderate" from "extreme".

k__ 9y ago

I stopped setting an alarm most times of the week and sleep for 10h every day (2-12). After over a month I noticed that I would wake up earlier. I wake up after 7-9 hours and feel rather refreshed. Most of the time I still sleep 10h because I staying in bed so much.

zanny 9y ago
Very similar. If I try to force a sleep schedule I'm just miserable. If I drop alarms I sleep for 10 hours for a while before getting a natural 8 hour sleep cycle back. That being said, I loathe those days I sleep 10 hours. Hell, I'm super jealous of people that can function on 6 hours. Every hour spent sleeping is an hour of life I miss out on. I really hope in our lifetimes we can engineer something to dramatically reduce the need for sleep.

83457 9y ago

I'd be interested in seeing a study about how having many timezones in a region affects sleep. For example in the US there are activities that are geared towards the west coast that keeps the east coast up later. Some that come to mind are sports. Between NFL games, UFC events and esports matches I have stayed up many nights for two or three hours later than someone on the west coast would have to for the same purposes.

dtech 9y ago
Europe is also interesting, but the other way around. Most of mainland Europe is on the Central European Timezone (UTC+1), despite the difference in solar time between western Spain and eastern Poland being about 2 hours. Solar time wise western spain should be at ~UTC-0:40, and eastern poland at ~UTC+1:30
dorfsmay 9y ago
Why couldn't you just watch it the next day? I haven't watch "live TV" in years, get all my content from the internet, it actually feels weird that in 2017people still let events and TV programs dictate their schedules.
- petecox 9y ago
  If you have the discipline not to peek at the scores... My neighbour watches soccer from his home country at odd hours of the night, going to work a couple of hours later. Says he'd otherwise only watch a replay knowing his team had won and then it takes away the suspense. His wife makes him sleep in the guest room!
  - dorfsmay 9y ago
    I'm not into sports, so I guess that helps. I remember as a kid, you had to listen to the radio or watch TV at a certain specific time if you wanted to know what happened in the world. It's weird to think about it now, how radio and tv stations had so much power over people schedules and lives.
  - 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

One tiny but helpful trick i got by reading about sleep is the ~2h cycle. I know if I wake up and I can't fall asleep right away, I'll just have to do something for 90minutes and it will come again. It's stress free.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

aesclepius 9y ago

I like that I'm reading this while coming off night shift (medical resident). I wholeheartedly agree that sleep is essential to life and healthiness.

DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
I like that people making life and death decisions for others are sleep deprived.
djohnston 9y ago
It's a sad irony that medical training forces students to adopt such unhealthy sleep habits.
drdeadringer 9y ago
My father is a retired ER doctor and had worked pretty much every shift imaginable -- or for you, probably that you're experiencing as well despite whatever speciality you're after. He agrees.

Pxtl 9y ago

Aside, whatever political party calls for ending the time changes and switching to permanent DST gets my vote. My kids are positively feral for the week after a time change.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
"permanent DST" Which would mean it would be dark when school starts. It's hard enough to get them out the door on time as is. I fully support getting rid of the time change, but not by making DST permanent.
- jstanley 9y ago
  If it's possible to change everybody's timezone twice a year, surely it's possible to leave most people alone and just change the school schedule.
  - tzs 9y ago
    The school schedule does not stand alone. If you start school later then households where all parents are employed and the children are not old enough to handle getting ready and out the door in the morning on their own might need to have their work schedule pushed back. If work schedules in general then get pushed back to accommodate the school schedule change, pretty much everything else follows because work is such a big and inflexible block of time on most people's schedules nearly everything else has to schedule around it.
    - Filligree 9y ago
      What households would that be? I took the bus to school, on my own, since day two of primary school. It wasn't hard, and I don't recall anyone ever getting lost. Even if they had, it's not the end of the world; they'll find their way back eventually. It's a peculiar American-ism to assume that children are incapable of handling themselves, and one that's been repeatedly proven false.

Bromskloss 9y ago

Ha! Clocks have no influence over my sleep if I don't change my schedule with the clock!

sowbug 9y ago

To avoid confusion for anyone in the US reading the linked article, the parts of the US that observe Daylight saving time will change in a week (November 5), not tomorrow (October 29).

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

China lacks DST, and I swear the sun is out at 4AM in the summer. I guess the problem is that the time zone is already biased so that the sun is out at 6:30ish even in the winter, it just rises earlier in the summer. And that’s just for Beijing of course, the whole country is under one giant time zone.

shagie 9y ago
China's timezone is calibrated for Shanghai. The western border is about two hours off of solar time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti... ). Compare China's +8:30 which border's India's +5:30.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Urumqi is about 1.5 hours off, and stores/schools have localized schedules to compensate. I guess Kashgar is even more worse off.

djhworld 9y ago

I was reading this yesterday http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/its_four_in_the_morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/its_four_in_the_m... about people who wake up at 4am The yoga teacher baffled me the most, only taking 4 hours or so of sleep a night. I really can't imagine that working for me, 7.5 - 8 hours just seems to hit the sweet spot.

chiefalchemist 9y ago
The brain needs sleep more than the body. If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. Of course, different people are wired differently but as a rule of thumb it appplies. Slightly off topic (i.e., it's about the brain and not sleep) but the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is a personal fave.
- chillwaves 9y ago
  > If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. How could you possibly measure these values?
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    I'm not sure how you'd measure it for this example. But I can tell you "Your Brain at Work" explains how and why thinking (as abstract as that sounds here) is a finite resource.

methodover 9y ago

Gosh I wish I could sleep like I used to when I was a teenager. I constantly wake up throughout the night. Can't sleep in if I wanted to. Probably get 6 hours of sleep a night if you subtract wakeful interruptions. Not sure why. I'm not overweight at all, 10% body fat. Exercise every day for at least half an hour, usually more, running, weightlifting, sports. Work isn't stressful. I don't get it.

christkv 9y ago
do you consume a lot of caffeine?
- methodover 9y ago
  One or two cups of coffee a day before lunch. I've tried quitting caffeine. No effect. Could try again, that experiment was many years ago.
  - ncavig 9y ago
    Anecdote from my experience; having a cup of decaf tea with a spoonful of unfiltered honey leads to some of my most restful nights of sleep. My tea of choice is chamomile. My other, debatably healthy crutch is a fan which manages a cool temp while providing a constant noise.
unabridged 9y ago
Small noises will wake me up instantly, I have to have a fan or white noise filling the room to sleep soundly. Also if you haven't already try to make your room pitch black, tape any leds on electronics and get blackout curtains.
- methodover 9y ago
  Hmm, I wonder if small noises is it. The upstairs neighbors had a kid a few years back. He's loud. During the day, though. I don't often find myself waking up to the kid's noise -- I just find myself waking up. Maybe I'm waking up to the kid and just don't realize it. Hmm.

ivanhoe 9y ago

There's nothing more depressive to me then waking up in the morning and it's both cold and pitch dark outside. So, unlike so many people in this thread, I happen to like the DST.

etatoby 9y ago

For many years (decades even) starting during childhood or adolescence, I used to wake up exactly 4 hours after falling asleep. One moment I was sleeping soundly, the moment right after I was wide awake. It was so precise that I used to look at the clock, subtract 4 hours, and know exactly the time I managed to fall asleep the night before. It was not stressful at all. I would get up, go to the bathroom, drink some water. Maybe read a book, a manga, study an algorithm, or write something. It was a very peaceful time of the day—rather, the night—to do something with a clear mind; no noise or other people around. I was not sleepy nor groggy and I could choose when to go to sleep again. But I knew I should not drag that time forever, because I still needed to get around 4 hours of sleep before finally getting up in the morning, or I would have a miserable day. I never thought much about it, until reading about 'biphasal' sleep and how people of times past used to sleep like that. These days my sleep is more troubled than in my teens and twenties and I have a tighter sleep schedule—probably because I've always been a night owl and I don't have anybody nagging me about going to bed early, so I don't. Somewhere along the way, I lost the habit of biphasal sleep. I cannot say whether it's correlation or causation (let alone which way), but I used to sleep much better during my biphasal sleep years. PS. articles like this describe me to a T, dunno if it has anything to do with it: https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/ https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/

DrScump 9y ago

I've found the free Sleep Cycle[0] app to be very useful visualizing my sleep patterns, plus it lets you set a 30' window (free version; perhaps other options in the paid version) for waking at a near-waking point naturally. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.... or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id32...