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Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist

437 points by prostoalex 8y ago

quickpost 8y ago
In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it: Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
- wilkystyle 8y ago
  Great episode! I just posted another comment about Matthew Walker on the Kevin Rose podcast. There was definitely overlap with JRE #1109, but some new things, too. Link: https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker
  - sk1pper 8y ago
    Also overlaps with JRE and probably the one you linked, but I really liked this Rhonda Patrick podcast with Dan Pardi too. https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dan-pardi https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dan-pardi Also can be found on Rhonda's Apple Podcasts channel.
- sk1pper 8y ago
  The bit that really stuck with me from this podcast was how overworked some medical professionals are, especially those in residency. Which ends up contributing to them making mistakes with their patients, including deadly ones. Shift work is already extremely taxing on the human body, on top of the large amounts of stress nurses and doctors are already under; but on top of that, we're working the newbies 80 hours a week!? According to Matthew Walker, this phenomenon started with one influential guy who thought it was important for the residents to "prove themselves" by working these insane hours, and it's just kind of stuck since then. Scary stuff, and basically no reason for it.
  - Bombthecat 8y ago
    I think the same about consulting. Most people work insane hours there. I'm pretty sure they could provide the same output in better quality if they learn to work 6 to 8 hours on one thing. ( And learn how to priotize)
  - perilunar 8y ago
    Medical residents do stupid work hours, and medicine is the one profession ought to know better. Pilots and truck drivers are legally restricted in the number of hours they can work, and doctors should be also. We know the effects of sleep deprivation, but doctors are 'special'. There is no reason for it that I can see, apart from a general shortage of cheap, early-career doctors, due to their stupid guild-like methods of limiting inputs. That and their stupid machismo of proving themselves, as you say.
    - prostoalex 8y ago
      > William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s and a founder of modern medical training, required his residents to be on call 362 days a year (only later was it revealed that Halsted fueled his manic work ethic with cocaine), and for the next 100 years the attitude of the medical establishment was more or less the same. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-menace-of-sleep-deprived-doctors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-mena...
mamurphy 8y ago
Great article. Sleep is important. I liked that the article went out of its way to dispel several of the "but four hours is fine" myths. Two of my favorites: >some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep. Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Congratulations if you're one of them, but your genetic gift doesn't make the need for sleep any less real for the rest of us, and talk about these outliers is mostly a distraction. >I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level? >Right. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived. To me that's a great analogy. Most people can grasp the concept of having a problem and dealing/coping/adapting so long that they don't realize they have the problem. It makes sense that this phenomenon can apply to sleep as well. Intellectually, I know I need to consistently sleep longer. If only knowing that and then acting on it were an easier gap to bridge (as I write this just past midnight...).
- cowmoo728 8y ago
  I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me. After a 6 hour night of sleep I noticed my rating would drop significantly the next day, and after several low sleep nights in a row it would take days to recover completely. A graph of my bullet rating over time clearly showed the periods of low sleep. Most people don't have a measurement that objective. After I stopped playing chess so much in college, I even caught myself trying to excuse my poor sleep habits by telling myself I wasn't falling asleep in lectures and I could still finish my homework.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me 60-minute games made the same apparent to me. Instantaneous drops and rises, solely resulting from sleep (or the lack thereof).
rosstex 8y ago
>A professor I collaborate with at Penn State named Orfeu Buxton says that 8.5 hours of sleep is the new eight hours. In order to get a healthy eight hours of sleep, which is the amount that many people need, you need to be in bed for 8.5 hours. So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours. That said, this article has plenty of good insight and is well-written.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours. No, the title is not misleading. Sleep is not just the time you're actually asleep. It's the whole time that you're in bed. If you are in bed for only 8 hours a night, do you account for the times you woke up mid-sleep and went to have a piss, for example?
  - rosstex 8y ago
    Ah, I assumed that was obvious.
wilkystyle 8y ago
I think we are only beginning to understand the importance of a good night's sleep. I just recently listened to a fantastic episode of the Kevin Rose podcast featuring sleep scientist Matthew Walker [0], and found it very enlightening. [0] https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker
sus_007 8y ago
Previously Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491
anxiousguy 8y ago
I believe I'm one of the "short sleepers" they mention in the article. I've bought wirstband mostly to track my sleep patterns. Even though article says that devices like fitbit are not accurate enough in tracking different phases of sleep, my goal was largley to see how much time do I spend sleeping. In the last four months, I average out at 6,1hrs. 90% of the time I will wake up before the alarm and will sleep the same amount of time over the weekends, when I usually don't go to bed as early as I do during the working part of the week. The thing that I constantly think about is - could I benefit from those 2 extra hours to get to that magic number 8? I would really like to try it, but I keep waking up after 6 hrs. :) I've started to think it's because of not so healthy lifestile - no exerxice, sub optimal diet, irregular bed time. Is it possible that my poor lifestyle results in me waking up after only 6 hrs of sleep and while feeling OK (it became normal to me), I could feel better if I slept longer? That was always something I pondered about. How to know if you really are a short sleeper, or you're just a person that gets by with sleeping less than recommended while not feeling as good as they could if they slept longer?
- scrollaway 8y ago
  You mention you bought a wristband. Tracking my sleep is one of those things I want to start doing. Do you have any recommendations? I don't particularly want to remember to put it on every night. I know Nokia launched a mattress pad recently (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep) but I'm concerned about how reliable this is if I don't sleep exactly on top of it. (Plus I don't know how this could actually tell anything like sleep cycles and what not, or even detect that I'm asleep vs. watching TV in bed)
  - jfim 8y ago
    Not the parent, but I've been using the Oura ring (https://ouraring.com/ https://ouraring.com/) for almost a year and it works very well for sleep tracking. It's a sleep tracker above all, and has rather limited exercise tracking. It tracks resting heart rate, sleep phases, body temperature, and breathing. There's also an API to download data from their cloud service, although I haven't tried it. I haven't yet received the newer model, but it seems to solve the issue of limited battery life in the previous model and the ring is also significantly smaller.
graeme 8y ago
Small quibble: the headline should be "in bed for more than eight hours" The expert says 8.5 hours in bed (trying to sleep) to sleep 8, since we don't sleep the whole time. So, if you have an accurate sleep tracker, "8" is still the number.
- Izkata 8y ago
  Was ready to say the same. Over 8 hours of sleep starts reaching into the "hell no" territory for me, typically resulting in a headache all day. But I'm usually in bed before then, so it does work out much closer to what I actually go for.
T-Winsnes 8y ago
>Jobs used to be very manual, but as jobs are becoming more and more cognitive, I think caring for your cognition is going to become increasingly important for the work. That's an interesting point, it will become less about not sitting in the same position for a long period of time, and more about making sure you don't strain your brain
- hago1234 8y ago
  your muscles wont grow and your body goes kaput if you sleep insufficiently and do physical labor.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Employees didn't care about that though, as they could get another cheap hired hand to do your work went you went kaput. Plus it didn't take much clarity or muscle to do most factory, farm etc work, just tedious persistence -- so you could be overtired all the time and they would still get productive work out of you. With mental work it's not so simple (e.g. there are bigger costs in training you and in employee churn).
Nomentatus 8y ago
The article understates how important pure darkness is, just a crack of light under a door can whack lab animals' melatonin levels. Also for constant biphasic sleep (which you want) 8.5 hrs isn't really enough, certainly not year 'round (I do skimp a bit during summer, near equinox.)
shabbyrobe 8y ago
I wonder if there are any studies of the effect on the quality and quantity of people's sleep and their general wellbeing since this recent surge of "sleep shaming" in the press started. It's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't.
- hago1234 8y ago
  you get used to feeling bad. i suppose we've worn out the usefulnes of the word now.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >It's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't. The article already mentions that sleep deprived people, up to a certain point at least, don't feel bad. Their inferior performance and clarity becomes their "new normal" -- like people who have shortsightedness and don't know it, and think everybody just sees that way.
hoodwink 8y ago
Is there some way I can test if I have this short sleeper gene? I have a hard time sleeping more than 5 to 6 hours and these articles all make me think I’m going to die early, lose memories, and every other affliction possible.
- syassami 8y ago
  check 23andme
telesilla 8y ago
If there is one thing in this world I'd like to see, it's the worker's right for an afternoon nap: I really would become highly anxious if deprived long-term of my siesta. I've been lucky in most of my environments to find somewhere to close my eyes and sleep for 10-15 minutes - I just need somewhere to lie down or recline and something to block the light: if I'm tired enough sound doesn't bother me. Some people tell me they just don't fall asleep quickly enough and don't bother to take any time to rest, so it's good to see the scientist here mention quiet-time and meditation as options.
- f_allwein 8y ago
  Quite common in China, actually.
  - wichert 8y ago
    Not just China: in Vietnam it is completely normal to see people take a short nap at their desk after lunch.
  - vagab0nd 8y ago
    Yes. I remember in the 90s when I was in kindergarten, a 1-hour afternoon nap is "mandatory". I hated it.
- fiblye 8y ago
  I'd like to think afternoon naps would be a good thing at work, but my worry is that employers would mandate 30-60 minutes of unpaid nap time at the workplace. Thus we'd end up extending the already bad 9-6 days (because 9-5 is now seemingly a thing of the past) and pushing it up to 9-7.
  - telesilla 8y ago
    You're right: in general, corporate structures do not trust the worker to independently handle her own time and energy.
- throwawayqdhd 8y ago
lerie82 8y ago
I know tons of people who rely on 5 hours or less of sleep and are fine. Life is too short to spend a third of it asleep.
f_allwein 8y ago
> Bose just released an earbud that you can sleep with, for example Wait, what? These are 249.95$. Why not just use simple earplugs? In Germany, we have Ohropax, made from wax, which sell for less than 3€ for a set of 12: http://www.ohropax.de/en.html http://www.ohropax.de/en.html
- Teeer 8y ago
  We have cheap earplugs too. These are earbuds, as in they play music through them
- JeanMarcS 8y ago
  Haven’t followed the link in the article but I guess those are noise canceling.
  - exodust 8y ago
    Noise masking, not cancelling. As in, you will hear waves, rivers, rain etc.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Attenuation isn’t nearly as effective as masking with white noise.
- wazoox 8y ago
  Ohropax are the best. I discovered them in Vienna. Thanks to the internet, you can now get them anywhere :)
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  Because earplugs also tune out the sounds of an alarm clock. This isn't an issue if I never have to wake before 11 or noon. A 6am waking time means I continually run the risk of simply not hearing the alarm, even with good sleeping habits and not sleeping in on weekends. Of course, most of the earbuds that say they are designed for sleep only hold a charge for an average of 6 hours, and at the most 8. These actually have 16 hours, but unfortunately it seems they won't stream music instead of their pre-set sounds.
forapurpose 8y ago
Does anyone know much about the source, Daniel Gartenberg? The credentials in the article are not great for a "leading" scientist, but perhaps others know more: "assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State" "one of the world’s most-talked-about sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about? "entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps"
- coldtea 8y ago
  There's this place called Google, and it's literally a click on his name away: http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/ http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/ http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/ http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/ http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/ http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/ >"assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State" (...) "one of the world’s most-talked-about sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about? (...) "entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps" Basically: "someone we saw at TED and which has several videos of him attempting a career as a popularizer".
hago1234 8y ago
man, do i have a funny... despite being a genius i just couldn't do skool. Eventually i concluded that the topics just bored me. It just now struck me that they bored me because i barely slept before school. in the weekends i would sleep 14 hours then did things mentally that blew my own mind. to borrow an example from the discussion: i could look at a chessboard and explore openings without moving a piece, all the way to the end game then the next variation. there was this huge inconsistency with my one ear in other ear out school performance.
- fouc 8y ago
  I've always felt there was a dramatic difference in my mental performance/IQ/genius-level thinking when I got a full 9 hours of sleep versus just 7-8 hours. Very noticeable in school or the early years of work.
bsenftner 8y ago
I must be a genetic short sleeper: 4 hours and I'm awake, as in my eyes won't stay shut. 5 hours and I'm groggy. Been this way for quite a while, and I used to stress about it, but now I just get up and get things done. I do take a nap here and there, but maybe once a month? However, I am somewhat of a health nut, crunches and core stuff during compiles, and a hard cardio mid afternoon. All this while coding 10 to 14 hours a day. Working from home, no commute, and a boss 12 time zones away, I've been able to get pretty extreme because I really like my work.
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rdiddly 8y ago
Zeitgeber isn't "like totally this weird German word OMG." (Foreign languages aren't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just because you don't speak them.) It just means "time-giver" - a cue (like the sunrise) that tells your body what time it is.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Foreign languages aren't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just because you don't speak them No, but German kinda is. It almost always sounds like someone in authority is screaming at you :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    It really doesn't. If anything German is a fairly soft, camp-sounding language. The whole shouting thing seems to be based on World War II stereotypes.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      There is a characteristic gentle sound when many German people speak English as well. They also tend to enunciate more carefully than many native English speakers, so they are usually very easy to understand. I find that same careful enunciation means German spoken by natives often has a slightly sharper sound than English, but that could just be because many everyday German words use sounds like ch, ck, b, d and z, and as a native English speaker and non-native German speaker I notice those more. As you say, this has nothing to do with shouting, though.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >It really doesn't. If anything German is a fairly soft, camp-sounding language Not for us non-Germans listening to it (though the video exaggerates of course). There's a reason behind the stereotype, and that's not WWII. Even the mere written form of the words is more somber and threatening looking: schmetterling vs butterfly or farfala for example, or Wissenschaft vs science. Can't compare with something like Italian or French.
limezeister 8y ago
What if one always finds oneself waking up spontaneously, in a moderately alert state, after about 5-6 hours' sleep and can then only achieve fitful, unrefreshing sleep for the rest of the night? In my youth, in the absence of an alarm, I would consistently get 8-9 hours of deep, unbroken sleep, but since my early 20s, I've found it impossible to get more than about six hours in one block. If I do succeed in returning to sleep after a premature awakening, I'll wake up again no more than 30 minutes later from what feels like a very non-restorative light sleep. Schedule permitting, what seems to work best for me is a biphasic routine where the bulk of my sleep, typically about 5-6 hours, is had at night together with a short siesta in the afternoon, usually after lunch.
- trophycase 8y ago
  How is your exercise? Are you limiting your intake of artificial light?
  - limezeister 8y ago
    I've experimented with all the commonly suggested stuff: blue-light blocking, sublingual melatonin (dosed appropriately and timed according to the phase response curve), exercise, meditation, etc., simultaneously and in isolation, and nothing extended my sleep significantly. I suspect if I went through a grueling few weeks of sleep restriction, I would eventually see an increase in the duration of my sleep, but I'm content for now to stick with my biphasic protocol.
lostmsu 8y ago
Where can we get the actual research paper?
pokemongoaway 8y ago
"What I study is important and everyone else should value it more too"
gh1 8y ago
The article claims that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn't work. This is most likely wrong information, as shown in this very recent study [0]. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712
- 101km 8y ago
  As far as I can tell your linked study says that "possibly, long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep" in terms of mortality but says nothing about qualify of life. You can catchup/reset but the days you don't sleep enough you'll do worse.
  - gh1 8y ago
    Yes, different priorities lead to different results. If you are looking at life satisfaction, then 8 hours a day is claimed to be optimal [0]. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1
- coldtea 8y ago
  The "very recent study" is just a recent study. It needs to be repeated, critiqued by other researchers and studies, and so on to be verified. Until then it's worth nothing. The processor, on the other hand, summarized our research knowledge so far, in other words, tons of study results and a large body of knowledge.
jaimex2 8y ago
I get along just fine on 6.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Probably missed the part of the interview where they explained that people that get less sleep become less able to tell whether they're sleep deprived or not. Their new, less than perfect, functioning, becomes "the new normal". (That, or you're one of the outliers with the genes for "short sleeping").
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Lightsabers? >> Zeitgebers! It’s this weird German word. There’s a lot of cool words in sleep: like the photo receptors control the release of melatonin by sending signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, just like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. See kids? Science is this really cool thing with all those cool words. And stuff. Science!
givan 8y ago
It's about quality not quantity. "You people do not sleep correctly ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ-CwPo&t=65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ-CwPo&t=65
tinco 8y ago
Ever since my teens I considered sleep the most difficult thing in my life, and the most detrimental to my health. For me falling asleep has been a difficult assignment that usually takes 1-3 hours. It's been a negative feedback loop where when I am tired I lose discipline and stay awake longer, which makes me even more tired the next day, which makes me stay awake even longer. It makes no sense at all and frequently throws me in bouts of grogginess that last days. It's been that way for more than ten years now, and I've read and talked a lot about sleeping but nothing ever made me get rid of this problem of not being able to fall asleep. A couple of weeks ago however I read two HN articles that together seem to have finally given me some grip on falling asleep more quickly (i.e. in less than 1 hour). Reading back that last paragraph makes me feel like I'm about to introduce a "doctors hate this one trick" product.. Anyway, the first article is the one about WW2 pilots having to fall asleep in two minutes: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/ The key takeaway from that is kind of obvious, but it's nice to be made conscious of it, and that is that it's important to actively make yourself relax. Relax both your muscles, and your mind. I can't seem to find the second article, maybe it didn't have sleep in the title or something, but it was the missing link for me. The article was a little bit controversial because it had a linkbaity title implying sleep is not important. The main point of that article was that since stress and stressful thinking inhibits sleep, you sleep better if you don't worry about sleeping. It's the old ice bear problem, you have to sleep, but you're not allowed to think about having to sleep. I combined those two articles into a simple strategy that seems to be fairly succesful so far. First step is to get into a position where all my limbs are relaxed, and I actively relax my body. The next step is to stop my mind from racing through the realization and acceptation that the most important thing right now is to sleep. That means that my ideas are unimportant, that my organization of tomorrows tasks are unimportant, that sudden realizations are unimportant, that nothing matters, not even falling asleep. I kill any brain activity with "it doesn't matter", almost as a mantra. When something pops up in my brain, I force myself to think "it doesn't matter" and cease working on the idea. Maybe it sounds a bit silly, but I think it might help someone in the same situation as me. I think I let myself feel my thoughts were important for too long. I really enjoy thinking about how to do things, and apparently it's become a point of discipline to make myself stop thinking about things.
beeforpork 8y ago
> ...misconceptions... Even that eating cheese before snoozing causes nightmares. Stilton definitely does cause weird dreams -- the fungus in it is psychoactive, I am absolutely sure of it.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  Man... some Rarebit an hour or two before going to bed (eggs, cheese, mustard, Worcestershire and a couple other spices)... that is a guaranteed way for me to have totally messed up dreams. They’re generally not nightmares so much as super vivid and weird. At least I’m not the only one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend
pendenthistory 8y ago
How someone with no sleep issues can choose to sleep less than 8 hours is beyond me. I would be in heaven if I could consistently pull off more than 8 hours.
sleepysheep 8y ago
I suffer from nocturia (diagnosed as non pathological after many rounds of tests all turning up negative). In a typical night I get five hours max of contiguous sleep and have started sleeping (by that I mean the in bed duration) nine to ten hours as an attempt to compensate for not being able to stay asleep. I've always been curious about the difference between time spent in bed and actual time in deep sleep and their equivalence. Also for anyone with an Android phone that is interested in tracking sleep the app Sleep As Android is really great.https://sleep.urbandroid.org/ https://sleep.urbandroid.org/
taeric 8y ago
This headline couldn't have been worse. People always overstate the importance of what they study. Pretty much period. Obviously doesn't mean there isn't something to this; but "topic x is something everyone neglects, according to person studying x" is enough to set me on defensive. Hard.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> There’s this new finding where playing sounds at a certain frequency when your brain is in deep sleep actually increases the percentage of time spent in deep sleep. We’re publishing this paper in Society for Neuroscience Conference in a couple of weeks, and it’s basically what my TED talk is about. Playing these pulses at the same frequency as your deep-sleep brainwaves primes more deep sleep. Scientifically speaking, it’s a similar process as transcranial direct-current stimulation, except it doesn’t use electricity—just sound. Sound gets transmitted into electricity because you’re picking up on the auditory cortex while you’re sleeping. I've tried the open source app Binaural Beats[0] a few days ago, mainly just as a noise blocker, but I was surprised to notice it working quite well with getting me into a deep sleep too. I don't know if it uses these frequencies though. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeats/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeat...
- jambutters 8y ago
  Do you use phone speaker or sleep with headphones?
  - e40 8y ago
    If headphones, I'd be curious which ones. All the ones I've tried give me a headache after a few hours.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      I've slept with LG Tone headphones as well as Beats X. I'd say the LG Tone was more comfortable to sleep with, since the connection to the neck part is very thin and moves around easily, and the neck part is free to move around loosely as you move. It never seems to get in the way, and the buds aren't ripped out. The BeatsX had a bigger problem with their stiffer neck part, if I moved they'd be pulled from my ears. Plus their at-best 8 hour battery life doesn't always last a full night, so I've been woken up by the sudden lack of white noise. Then again, when the Tone dies, it screams "LOW BATTERY PLEASE CHARGE NOW" at you over and over again, which might wake you up :)
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dschuetz 8y ago
Sleep is a twilight zone where personal problems get either amplified so that they become tangible or even get solved. He's right about one thing: it's not only 8 hours minimum you need, you should care about the quality of sleep you get. Especially that tendency of some people being completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch is a thing you should solve the right way. Though, the facts that he's a TED talks resident and that he's selling apps doesn't do much damage to his actual research, but it definitely explains why he's "the most talked about sleep scientist". I must admit that I don't trust a scientist who deliberately draws attention to their work instead of being just that good to generate buzz.
- smt88 8y ago
  If you think that coverage of scientific work can come entirely from merit and require no advocacy work on the part of the scientist, you must be very new to science or human society. There's a lot of noise, misinformation, and advertising that real science has to punch through. It doesn't happen by accident.
- tmpb 8y ago
  > completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch That's totally me. At that point I have no choice than to entirely skip lunch to be productive in the afternoon. Even eating a little can make me dramatically less productive. > you should solve the right way. What's the way to solve this? Sleeping more helps me but only a bit and I still get K.O. after lunch. I've researched this many times but never found any solution. Would love so much to fix that. Thanks!
  - mlrtime 8y ago
    Same here, I get so tired after lunch. I did a full blood panel and nothing abnormal. I eat low carb, healthy lunches and I still get tired. The only thing that helps is a strong coffee or a nap.
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werber 8y ago
I never use an alarm clock and rarely sleep more than six hours. I've been trying to sleep eight for as long as I can remember and it never seems to happen
mancerayder 8y ago
I'm jealous of folks who have the luxury of being able to have their bodies let them sleep 8 or more hours. I'm not sitting there with a phone next to my pillow, and I have no problems falling asleep. But I always wake up too early, before the alarm, meaning I can't get more than 6.5-7.5 hours because my body is too sensitive to light, noise and everything else: I'm cursed genetically as a light sleeper. Worst part is, I'm in an unsympathetic world of non-light sleepers who play music, stomp around at odd hours, etc.
- tbmh 8y ago
  You should try earplugs and/or sleeping masks. They both take a little getting used to but they will definitely improve your sleep quality if external stimulation is your main problem.
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    I use earplugs almost every night. Earplugs don't block thumping from bass music or footsteps or slamming doors unfortunately. :-(
    - daniel_software 8y ago
      move to another place
    - asfasgasg 8y ago
      I live in Manhattan next to an intersection where people are beeping all night long. White noise machine on = I don't hear anything.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
But is it worth the time? I've seen the studies showing how people who get more sleep live longer, but I always wonder, if you were measuring "total number of waking hours lived", would they come out to more or less equal? (My curiosity has never been strong enough to make me actually do the calculation.)
- _Tev 8y ago
  From my experience* yes, it is worth it. But not in "total number of waking hours lived", but in performance in those waking hours - every hour cut from my optimal 8-8.5h sleep reduces my awareness / perf at work / social skills by 10% or more. * I worked both in menial jobs and as a programmer, both with periods of short & long sleep. EDIT: I can of course force myself to perform at higher level even with shorter sleep, but that very often leads to need for even longer sleep or health issues.
jonnytran 8y ago
"You actually have genes that dictate whether you’re a morning person or an evening person." The workplace constantly discriminates against night owls. How long will it take for cultures to finally catch up in this respect?
mlrtime 8y ago
Has anyone seen research into letting your body sleep as long as it wants by not setting an alarm? I don't set an alarm anymore and reason that my body will wake up when it wants to. However doctors have told me that just because I don't "artificially" wake up, I might not be getting enough sleep.
- dagw 8y ago
  my body will wake up when it wants to. That only works if you can completely control your external environment. Even when I don't set an alarm clock I often wake up at least partially due to external light/noise/temperature.

437 points by prostoalex 8y ago

In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it: Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

wilkystyle 8y ago
Great episode! I just posted another comment about Matthew Walker on the Kevin Rose podcast. There was definitely overlap with JRE #1109, but some new things, too. Link: https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker
- sk1pper 8y ago
  Also overlaps with JRE and probably the one you linked, but I really liked this Rhonda Patrick podcast with Dan Pardi too. https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dan-pardi https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dan-pardi Also can be found on Rhonda's Apple Podcasts channel.
sk1pper 8y ago
The bit that really stuck with me from this podcast was how overworked some medical professionals are, especially those in residency. Which ends up contributing to them making mistakes with their patients, including deadly ones. Shift work is already extremely taxing on the human body, on top of the large amounts of stress nurses and doctors are already under; but on top of that, we're working the newbies 80 hours a week!? According to Matthew Walker, this phenomenon started with one influential guy who thought it was important for the residents to "prove themselves" by working these insane hours, and it's just kind of stuck since then. Scary stuff, and basically no reason for it.
- Bombthecat 8y ago
  I think the same about consulting. Most people work insane hours there. I'm pretty sure they could provide the same output in better quality if they learn to work 6 to 8 hours on one thing. ( And learn how to priotize)
- perilunar 8y ago
  Medical residents do stupid work hours, and medicine is the one profession ought to know better. Pilots and truck drivers are legally restricted in the number of hours they can work, and doctors should be also. We know the effects of sleep deprivation, but doctors are 'special'. There is no reason for it that I can see, apart from a general shortage of cheap, early-career doctors, due to their stupid guild-like methods of limiting inputs. That and their stupid machismo of proving themselves, as you say.
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    > William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s and a founder of modern medical training, required his residents to be on call 362 days a year (only later was it revealed that Halsted fueled his manic work ethic with cocaine), and for the next 100 years the attitude of the medical establishment was more or less the same. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-menace-of-sleep-deprived-doctors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-mena...

mamurphy 8y ago

Great article. Sleep is important. I liked that the article went out of its way to dispel several of the "but four hours is fine" myths. Two of my favorites: >some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep. Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Congratulations if you're one of them, but your genetic gift doesn't make the need for sleep any less real for the rest of us, and talk about these outliers is mostly a distraction. >I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level? >Right. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived. To me that's a great analogy. Most people can grasp the concept of having a problem and dealing/coping/adapting so long that they don't realize they have the problem. It makes sense that this phenomenon can apply to sleep as well. Intellectually, I know I need to consistently sleep longer. If only knowing that and then acting on it were an easier gap to bridge (as I write this just past midnight...).

cowmoo728 8y ago
I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me. After a 6 hour night of sleep I noticed my rating would drop significantly the next day, and after several low sleep nights in a row it would take days to recover completely. A graph of my bullet rating over time clearly showed the periods of low sleep. Most people don't have a measurement that objective. After I stopped playing chess so much in college, I even caught myself trying to excuse my poor sleep habits by telling myself I wasn't falling asleep in lectures and I could still finish my homework.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me 60-minute games made the same apparent to me. Instantaneous drops and rises, solely resulting from sleep (or the lack thereof).

rosstex 8y ago

>A professor I collaborate with at Penn State named Orfeu Buxton says that 8.5 hours of sleep is the new eight hours. In order to get a healthy eight hours of sleep, which is the amount that many people need, you need to be in bed for 8.5 hours. So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours. That said, this article has plenty of good insight and is well-written.

coldtea 8y ago
>So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours. No, the title is not misleading. Sleep is not just the time you're actually asleep. It's the whole time that you're in bed. If you are in bed for only 8 hours a night, do you account for the times you woke up mid-sleep and went to have a piss, for example?
- rosstex 8y ago
  Ah, I assumed that was obvious.

wilkystyle 8y ago

I think we are only beginning to understand the importance of a good night's sleep. I just recently listened to a fantastic episode of the Kevin Rose podcast featuring sleep scientist Matthew Walker [0], and found it very enlightening. [0] https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker

sus_007 8y ago

Previously Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491

anxiousguy 8y ago

I believe I'm one of the "short sleepers" they mention in the article. I've bought wirstband mostly to track my sleep patterns. Even though article says that devices like fitbit are not accurate enough in tracking different phases of sleep, my goal was largley to see how much time do I spend sleeping. In the last four months, I average out at 6,1hrs. 90% of the time I will wake up before the alarm and will sleep the same amount of time over the weekends, when I usually don't go to bed as early as I do during the working part of the week. The thing that I constantly think about is - could I benefit from those 2 extra hours to get to that magic number 8? I would really like to try it, but I keep waking up after 6 hrs. :) I've started to think it's because of not so healthy lifestile - no exerxice, sub optimal diet, irregular bed time. Is it possible that my poor lifestyle results in me waking up after only 6 hrs of sleep and while feeling OK (it became normal to me), I could feel better if I slept longer? That was always something I pondered about. How to know if you really are a short sleeper, or you're just a person that gets by with sleeping less than recommended while not feeling as good as they could if they slept longer?

scrollaway 8y ago
You mention you bought a wristband. Tracking my sleep is one of those things I want to start doing. Do you have any recommendations? I don't particularly want to remember to put it on every night. I know Nokia launched a mattress pad recently (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep) but I'm concerned about how reliable this is if I don't sleep exactly on top of it. (Plus I don't know how this could actually tell anything like sleep cycles and what not, or even detect that I'm asleep vs. watching TV in bed)
- jfim 8y ago
  Not the parent, but I've been using the Oura ring (https://ouraring.com/ https://ouraring.com/) for almost a year and it works very well for sleep tracking. It's a sleep tracker above all, and has rather limited exercise tracking. It tracks resting heart rate, sleep phases, body temperature, and breathing. There's also an API to download data from their cloud service, although I haven't tried it. I haven't yet received the newer model, but it seems to solve the issue of limited battery life in the previous model and the ring is also significantly smaller.

graeme 8y ago

Small quibble: the headline should be "in bed for more than eight hours" The expert says 8.5 hours in bed (trying to sleep) to sleep 8, since we don't sleep the whole time. So, if you have an accurate sleep tracker, "8" is still the number.

Izkata 8y ago
Was ready to say the same. Over 8 hours of sleep starts reaching into the "hell no" territory for me, typically resulting in a headache all day. But I'm usually in bed before then, so it does work out much closer to what I actually go for.

T-Winsnes 8y ago

>Jobs used to be very manual, but as jobs are becoming more and more cognitive, I think caring for your cognition is going to become increasingly important for the work. That's an interesting point, it will become less about not sitting in the same position for a long period of time, and more about making sure you don't strain your brain

hago1234 8y ago
your muscles wont grow and your body goes kaput if you sleep insufficiently and do physical labor.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Employees didn't care about that though, as they could get another cheap hired hand to do your work went you went kaput. Plus it didn't take much clarity or muscle to do most factory, farm etc work, just tedious persistence -- so you could be overtired all the time and they would still get productive work out of you. With mental work it's not so simple (e.g. there are bigger costs in training you and in employee churn).

Nomentatus 8y ago

The article understates how important pure darkness is, just a crack of light under a door can whack lab animals' melatonin levels. Also for constant biphasic sleep (which you want) 8.5 hrs isn't really enough, certainly not year 'round (I do skimp a bit during summer, near equinox.)

shabbyrobe 8y ago

I wonder if there are any studies of the effect on the quality and quantity of people's sleep and their general wellbeing since this recent surge of "sleep shaming" in the press started. It's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't.

hago1234 8y ago
you get used to feeling bad. i suppose we've worn out the usefulnes of the word now.
coldtea 8y ago
>It's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't. The article already mentions that sleep deprived people, up to a certain point at least, don't feel bad. Their inferior performance and clarity becomes their "new normal" -- like people who have shortsightedness and don't know it, and think everybody just sees that way.

hoodwink 8y ago

Is there some way I can test if I have this short sleeper gene? I have a hard time sleeping more than 5 to 6 hours and these articles all make me think I’m going to die early, lose memories, and every other affliction possible.

syassami 8y ago
check 23andme

telesilla 8y ago

If there is one thing in this world I'd like to see, it's the worker's right for an afternoon nap: I really would become highly anxious if deprived long-term of my siesta. I've been lucky in most of my environments to find somewhere to close my eyes and sleep for 10-15 minutes - I just need somewhere to lie down or recline and something to block the light: if I'm tired enough sound doesn't bother me. Some people tell me they just don't fall asleep quickly enough and don't bother to take any time to rest, so it's good to see the scientist here mention quiet-time and meditation as options.

f_allwein 8y ago
Quite common in China, actually.
- wichert 8y ago
  Not just China: in Vietnam it is completely normal to see people take a short nap at their desk after lunch.
- vagab0nd 8y ago
  Yes. I remember in the 90s when I was in kindergarten, a 1-hour afternoon nap is "mandatory". I hated it.
fiblye 8y ago
I'd like to think afternoon naps would be a good thing at work, but my worry is that employers would mandate 30-60 minutes of unpaid nap time at the workplace. Thus we'd end up extending the already bad 9-6 days (because 9-5 is now seemingly a thing of the past) and pushing it up to 9-7.
- telesilla 8y ago
  You're right: in general, corporate structures do not trust the worker to independently handle her own time and energy.
throwawayqdhd 8y ago

lerie82 8y ago

I know tons of people who rely on 5 hours or less of sleep and are fine. Life is too short to spend a third of it asleep.

f_allwein 8y ago

> Bose just released an earbud that you can sleep with, for example Wait, what? These are 249.95$. Why not just use simple earplugs? In Germany, we have Ohropax, made from wax, which sell for less than 3€ for a set of 12: http://www.ohropax.de/en.html http://www.ohropax.de/en.html

Teeer 8y ago
We have cheap earplugs too. These are earbuds, as in they play music through them
JeanMarcS 8y ago
Haven’t followed the link in the article but I guess those are noise canceling.
- exodust 8y ago
  Noise masking, not cancelling. As in, you will hear waves, rivers, rain etc.
closeparen 8y ago
Attenuation isn’t nearly as effective as masking with white noise.
wazoox 8y ago
Ohropax are the best. I discovered them in Vienna. Thanks to the internet, you can now get them anywhere :)
Broken_Hippo 8y ago
Because earplugs also tune out the sounds of an alarm clock. This isn't an issue if I never have to wake before 11 or noon. A 6am waking time means I continually run the risk of simply not hearing the alarm, even with good sleeping habits and not sleeping in on weekends. Of course, most of the earbuds that say they are designed for sleep only hold a charge for an average of 6 hours, and at the most 8. These actually have 16 hours, but unfortunately it seems they won't stream music instead of their pre-set sounds.

forapurpose 8y ago

Does anyone know much about the source, Daniel Gartenberg? The credentials in the article are not great for a "leading" scientist, but perhaps others know more: "assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State" "one of the world’s most-talked-about sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about? "entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps"

coldtea 8y ago
There's this place called Google, and it's literally a click on his name away: http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/ http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/ http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/ http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/ http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/ http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/ >"assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State" (...) "one of the world’s most-talked-about sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about? (...) "entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps" Basically: "someone we saw at TED and which has several videos of him attempting a career as a popularizer".

hago1234 8y ago

man, do i have a funny... despite being a genius i just couldn't do skool. Eventually i concluded that the topics just bored me. It just now struck me that they bored me because i barely slept before school. in the weekends i would sleep 14 hours then did things mentally that blew my own mind. to borrow an example from the discussion: i could look at a chessboard and explore openings without moving a piece, all the way to the end game then the next variation. there was this huge inconsistency with my one ear in other ear out school performance.

fouc 8y ago
I've always felt there was a dramatic difference in my mental performance/IQ/genius-level thinking when I got a full 9 hours of sleep versus just 7-8 hours. Very noticeable in school or the early years of work.

bsenftner 8y ago

I must be a genetic short sleeper: 4 hours and I'm awake, as in my eyes won't stay shut. 5 hours and I'm groggy. Been this way for quite a while, and I used to stress about it, but now I just get up and get things done. I do take a nap here and there, but maybe once a month? However, I am somewhat of a health nut, crunches and core stuff during compiles, and a hard cardio mid afternoon. All this while coding 10 to 14 hours a day. Working from home, no commute, and a boss 12 time zones away, I've been able to get pretty extreme because I really like my work.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rdiddly 8y ago

Zeitgeber isn't "like totally this weird German word OMG." (Foreign languages aren't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just because you don't speak them.) It just means "time-giver" - a cue (like the sunrise) that tells your body what time it is.

coldtea 8y ago
>Foreign languages aren't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just because you don't speak them No, but German kinda is. It almost always sounds like someone in authority is screaming at you :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  It really doesn't. If anything German is a fairly soft, camp-sounding language. The whole shouting thing seems to be based on World War II stereotypes.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    There is a characteristic gentle sound when many German people speak English as well. They also tend to enunciate more carefully than many native English speakers, so they are usually very easy to understand. I find that same careful enunciation means German spoken by natives often has a slightly sharper sound than English, but that could just be because many everyday German words use sounds like ch, ck, b, d and z, and as a native English speaker and non-native German speaker I notice those more. As you say, this has nothing to do with shouting, though.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >It really doesn't. If anything German is a fairly soft, camp-sounding language Not for us non-Germans listening to it (though the video exaggerates of course). There's a reason behind the stereotype, and that's not WWII. Even the mere written form of the words is more somber and threatening looking: schmetterling vs butterfly or farfala for example, or Wissenschaft vs science. Can't compare with something like Italian or French.

limezeister 8y ago

What if one always finds oneself waking up spontaneously, in a moderately alert state, after about 5-6 hours' sleep and can then only achieve fitful, unrefreshing sleep for the rest of the night? In my youth, in the absence of an alarm, I would consistently get 8-9 hours of deep, unbroken sleep, but since my early 20s, I've found it impossible to get more than about six hours in one block. If I do succeed in returning to sleep after a premature awakening, I'll wake up again no more than 30 minutes later from what feels like a very non-restorative light sleep. Schedule permitting, what seems to work best for me is a biphasic routine where the bulk of my sleep, typically about 5-6 hours, is had at night together with a short siesta in the afternoon, usually after lunch.

trophycase 8y ago
How is your exercise? Are you limiting your intake of artificial light?
- limezeister 8y ago
  I've experimented with all the commonly suggested stuff: blue-light blocking, sublingual melatonin (dosed appropriately and timed according to the phase response curve), exercise, meditation, etc., simultaneously and in isolation, and nothing extended my sleep significantly. I suspect if I went through a grueling few weeks of sleep restriction, I would eventually see an increase in the duration of my sleep, but I'm content for now to stick with my biphasic protocol.

lostmsu 8y ago

Where can we get the actual research paper?

pokemongoaway 8y ago

"What I study is important and everyone else should value it more too"

gh1 8y ago

The article claims that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn't work. This is most likely wrong information, as shown in this very recent study [0]. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712

101km 8y ago
As far as I can tell your linked study says that "possibly, long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep" in terms of mortality but says nothing about qualify of life. You can catchup/reset but the days you don't sleep enough you'll do worse.
- gh1 8y ago
  Yes, different priorities lead to different results. If you are looking at life satisfaction, then 8 hours a day is claimed to be optimal [0]. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1
coldtea 8y ago
The "very recent study" is just a recent study. It needs to be repeated, critiqued by other researchers and studies, and so on to be verified. Until then it's worth nothing. The processor, on the other hand, summarized our research knowledge so far, in other words, tons of study results and a large body of knowledge.

jaimex2 8y ago

I get along just fine on 6.

coldtea 8y ago
Probably missed the part of the interview where they explained that people that get less sleep become less able to tell whether they're sleep deprived or not. Their new, less than perfect, functioning, becomes "the new normal". (That, or you're one of the outliers with the genes for "short sleeping").

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Lightsabers? >> Zeitgebers! It’s this weird German word. There’s a lot of cool words in sleep: like the photo receptors control the release of melatonin by sending signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, just like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. See kids? Science is this really cool thing with all those cool words. And stuff. Science!

givan 8y ago

It's about quality not quantity. "You people do not sleep correctly ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ-CwPo&t=65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ-CwPo&t=65

tinco 8y ago

Ever since my teens I considered sleep the most difficult thing in my life, and the most detrimental to my health. For me falling asleep has been a difficult assignment that usually takes 1-3 hours. It's been a negative feedback loop where when I am tired I lose discipline and stay awake longer, which makes me even more tired the next day, which makes me stay awake even longer. It makes no sense at all and frequently throws me in bouts of grogginess that last days. It's been that way for more than ten years now, and I've read and talked a lot about sleeping but nothing ever made me get rid of this problem of not being able to fall asleep. A couple of weeks ago however I read two HN articles that together seem to have finally given me some grip on falling asleep more quickly (i.e. in less than 1 hour). Reading back that last paragraph makes me feel like I'm about to introduce a "doctors hate this one trick" product.. Anyway, the first article is the one about WW2 pilots having to fall asleep in two minutes: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/ The key takeaway from that is kind of obvious, but it's nice to be made conscious of it, and that is that it's important to actively make yourself relax. Relax both your muscles, and your mind. I can't seem to find the second article, maybe it didn't have sleep in the title or something, but it was the missing link for me. The article was a little bit controversial because it had a linkbaity title implying sleep is not important. The main point of that article was that since stress and stressful thinking inhibits sleep, you sleep better if you don't worry about sleeping. It's the old ice bear problem, you have to sleep, but you're not allowed to think about having to sleep. I combined those two articles into a simple strategy that seems to be fairly succesful so far. First step is to get into a position where all my limbs are relaxed, and I actively relax my body. The next step is to stop my mind from racing through the realization and acceptation that the most important thing right now is to sleep. That means that my ideas are unimportant, that my organization of tomorrows tasks are unimportant, that sudden realizations are unimportant, that nothing matters, not even falling asleep. I kill any brain activity with "it doesn't matter", almost as a mantra. When something pops up in my brain, I force myself to think "it doesn't matter" and cease working on the idea. Maybe it sounds a bit silly, but I think it might help someone in the same situation as me. I think I let myself feel my thoughts were important for too long. I really enjoy thinking about how to do things, and apparently it's become a point of discipline to make myself stop thinking about things.

beeforpork 8y ago

> ...misconceptions... Even that eating cheese before snoozing causes nightmares. Stilton definitely does cause weird dreams -- the fungus in it is psychoactive, I am absolutely sure of it.

tonyarkles 8y ago
Man... some Rarebit an hour or two before going to bed (eggs, cheese, mustard, Worcestershire and a couple other spices)... that is a guaranteed way for me to have totally messed up dreams. They’re generally not nightmares so much as super vivid and weird. At least I’m not the only one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend

pendenthistory 8y ago

How someone with no sleep issues can choose to sleep less than 8 hours is beyond me. I would be in heaven if I could consistently pull off more than 8 hours.

sleepysheep 8y ago

I suffer from nocturia (diagnosed as non pathological after many rounds of tests all turning up negative). In a typical night I get five hours max of contiguous sleep and have started sleeping (by that I mean the in bed duration) nine to ten hours as an attempt to compensate for not being able to stay asleep. I've always been curious about the difference between time spent in bed and actual time in deep sleep and their equivalence. Also for anyone with an Android phone that is interested in tracking sleep the app Sleep As Android is really great.https://sleep.urbandroid.org/ https://sleep.urbandroid.org/

taeric 8y ago

This headline couldn't have been worse. People always overstate the importance of what they study. Pretty much period. Obviously doesn't mean there isn't something to this; but "topic x is something everyone neglects, according to person studying x" is enough to set me on defensive. Hard.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> There’s this new finding where playing sounds at a certain frequency when your brain is in deep sleep actually increases the percentage of time spent in deep sleep. We’re publishing this paper in Society for Neuroscience Conference in a couple of weeks, and it’s basically what my TED talk is about. Playing these pulses at the same frequency as your deep-sleep brainwaves primes more deep sleep. Scientifically speaking, it’s a similar process as transcranial direct-current stimulation, except it doesn’t use electricity—just sound. Sound gets transmitted into electricity because you’re picking up on the auditory cortex while you’re sleeping. I've tried the open source app Binaural Beats[0] a few days ago, mainly just as a noise blocker, but I was surprised to notice it working quite well with getting me into a deep sleep too. I don't know if it uses these frequencies though. [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeats/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeat...

jambutters 8y ago
Do you use phone speaker or sleep with headphones?
- e40 8y ago
  If headphones, I'd be curious which ones. All the ones I've tried give me a headache after a few hours.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I've slept with LG Tone headphones as well as Beats X. I'd say the LG Tone was more comfortable to sleep with, since the connection to the neck part is very thin and moves around easily, and the neck part is free to move around loosely as you move. It never seems to get in the way, and the buds aren't ripped out. The BeatsX had a bigger problem with their stiffer neck part, if I moved they'd be pulled from my ears. Plus their at-best 8 hour battery life doesn't always last a full night, so I've been woken up by the sudden lack of white noise. Then again, when the Tone dies, it screams "LOW BATTERY PLEASE CHARGE NOW" at you over and over again, which might wake you up :)
  - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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dschuetz 8y ago

Sleep is a twilight zone where personal problems get either amplified so that they become tangible or even get solved. He's right about one thing: it's not only 8 hours minimum you need, you should care about the quality of sleep you get. Especially that tendency of some people being completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch is a thing you should solve the right way. Though, the facts that he's a TED talks resident and that he's selling apps doesn't do much damage to his actual research, but it definitely explains why he's "the most talked about sleep scientist". I must admit that I don't trust a scientist who deliberately draws attention to their work instead of being just that good to generate buzz.

smt88 8y ago
If you think that coverage of scientific work can come entirely from merit and require no advocacy work on the part of the scientist, you must be very new to science or human society. There's a lot of noise, misinformation, and advertising that real science has to punch through. It doesn't happen by accident.
tmpb 8y ago
> completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch That's totally me. At that point I have no choice than to entirely skip lunch to be productive in the afternoon. Even eating a little can make me dramatically less productive. > you should solve the right way. What's the way to solve this? Sleeping more helps me but only a bit and I still get K.O. after lunch. I've researched this many times but never found any solution. Would love so much to fix that. Thanks!
- mlrtime 8y ago
  Same here, I get so tired after lunch. I did a full blood panel and nothing abnormal. I eat low carb, healthy lunches and I still get tired. The only thing that helps is a strong coffee or a nap.

deleted 8y ago

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werber 8y ago

I never use an alarm clock and rarely sleep more than six hours. I've been trying to sleep eight for as long as I can remember and it never seems to happen

mancerayder 8y ago

I'm jealous of folks who have the luxury of being able to have their bodies let them sleep 8 or more hours. I'm not sitting there with a phone next to my pillow, and I have no problems falling asleep. But I always wake up too early, before the alarm, meaning I can't get more than 6.5-7.5 hours because my body is too sensitive to light, noise and everything else: I'm cursed genetically as a light sleeper. Worst part is, I'm in an unsympathetic world of non-light sleepers who play music, stomp around at odd hours, etc.

tbmh 8y ago
You should try earplugs and/or sleeping masks. They both take a little getting used to but they will definitely improve your sleep quality if external stimulation is your main problem.
- mancerayder 8y ago
  I use earplugs almost every night. Earplugs don't block thumping from bass music or footsteps or slamming doors unfortunately. :-(
  - daniel_software 8y ago
    move to another place
  - asfasgasg 8y ago
    I live in Manhattan next to an intersection where people are beeping all night long. White noise machine on = I don't hear anything.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

But is it worth the time? I've seen the studies showing how people who get more sleep live longer, but I always wonder, if you were measuring "total number of waking hours lived", would they come out to more or less equal? (My curiosity has never been strong enough to make me actually do the calculation.)

_Tev 8y ago
From my experience* yes, it is worth it. But not in "total number of waking hours lived", but in performance in those waking hours - every hour cut from my optimal 8-8.5h sleep reduces my awareness / perf at work / social skills by 10% or more. * I worked both in menial jobs and as a programmer, both with periods of short & long sleep. EDIT: I can of course force myself to perform at higher level even with shorter sleep, but that very often leads to need for even longer sleep or health issues.

jonnytran 8y ago

"You actually have genes that dictate whether you’re a morning person or an evening person." The workplace constantly discriminates against night owls. How long will it take for cultures to finally catch up in this respect?

mlrtime 8y ago

Has anyone seen research into letting your body sleep as long as it wants by not setting an alarm? I don't set an alarm anymore and reason that my body will wake up when it wants to. However doctors have told me that just because I don't "artificially" wake up, I might not be getting enough sleep.

dagw 8y ago
my body will wake up when it wants to. That only works if you can completely control your external environment. Even when I don't set an alarm clock I often wake up at least partially due to external light/noise/temperature.