8 ms·
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: >
by 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 agoI 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).
- tudorconstantin 8y agoI use online chess tactics problems to assess how good my brain is that day. I estimate there's a 300+ ELO variance, perhaps even more, in my performance between when I'm tired and when I'm rested. 300 ELO points between 2 players means that the higher rates one wins about 9 out of 10 games against the lower rates one. A huge difference in performance.
- rock8y 8y agoFirst thing I do at my computer if I am groggy is to do chess tactics. Based on the results, I take a break or continue with my actual work. I should probably be looking at ELO as well, I just go by numbers at this time !
- 0x00000000 8y agoSleep seems to be very cyclical and internalized in the body, so it isn't surprising that a drastic change would have such a dramatic effect. I wonder if anyone could gain the ability to only need 6 hours of sleep by very slowly decreasing sleep over a long time (say 6-12 months). But your body will probably never adapt to this 6 hours on the weekdays, 10 hours on the weekends stuff that seems to be common. The people I know who sleep 5-6 hours a night consistently have been doing it for a very long time and describe the feeling of sleeping 8 hours the same way I would describe sleeping 13 hours. Just feeling slow and almost like being sleep deprived all day.
- garfieldnate 8y agoSpeaking a foreign language is that meter for me. If I don't get proper sleep, my tongue doesn't do what I want it to. I slip up more in my pronunciation and I forget words that I need. More sleep has always equalled higher fluency for me.
- helthanatos 8y agoI sleep 6 hours during the week and 10 hours on the weekend. I pretty much only remember my dreams on the weekend. I wonder how much that relates to sleep deprivation. I only lucid dream if I sleep for 10 hours on vacation.
- lallysingh 8y agoI've been this way since high school
- Waterluvian 8y agoItsy probably a valuable adaptation tool. When my son was born in went from 8-9 a night to 4-5 for a few months. At a certain point it started feeling like I adapted. I wasn't really miserable. I wasn't dragging myself through the day anymore. Then when my sleep went back up as my son got older, I had that moment of, "holy crap I forgot what rested felt like. This is amazing. I actually want to go for a pointless walk!"
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoI envy you. Going through it now.
- Nzen 8y agoIt almost sounds like, if-when I were to hear my significant other is pregnant, I should start decreasing my sleep. That way, in eight months, I'd be closer to 'adapted' than if I have to develop the new habit of responding to a human alarm _and_ less sleep.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI don't think adapting to it made me more functional. Just made it hurt less. No point lowering your functionality prematurely. If anything, prepare with more exercise and getting your sleep habits as consistent as possible.
- st26 8y agoNah, you want to be as fresh as possible when kid arrives. At the beginning, caring for them is a months-long marathon that slowly grinds down your reserves.
- ianlevesque 8y agoNo just enjoy the last days of sleeping you’ll ever have.
- Thriptic 8y ago>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. 100% this. If you habitually get poor sleep it becomes your new normal and you forget what it's like to be well rested. I used to get between 3 and 6 hours per night for years and my cognitive skills plummeted. At one point I switched to getting 8 hours per night and problems which previously seemed extremely difficult became trivially easy almost immediately.
- Silhouette 8y agoIf you habitually get poor sleep it becomes your new normal and you forget what it's like to be well rested. And this can be deceptive if the whole effect happens more than once. Suppose you really need 8 hours of sleep but have habitually been getting only 6 for a long time, and that has become your baseline for reference. Then something happens and you're only getting 4 or 5 hours instead for a while, and you feel obviously worse. After some time that effect reverts and you're back to getting 6 hours, and relatively speaking, you feel great! See what a difference it makes when you get enough sleep in a night! But in reality, you still aren't...
- st26 8y agoThe outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Except, people want to believe they are outliers. So no matter how rare you explain that it actually is- well, everybody else is delusional. But me, ME, I really am the outlier! I'm special!
- amelius 8y ago> The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Or you could look at them as people at the forefront of evolution, leading us to a future where we need less sleep.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rory096 8y agoHow? Are you planning to prohibit the rest of us from procreating?
- amelius 8y agoRelax, we can still procreate with the short-sleepers.
- falcolas 8y agoI would think that, given the capability to have light after the sun has gone down for hundreds of generations (candles have been around for ~5,000 years), any such trait would have become much more than an outlier by now. Even if it is a positive evolutionary trait, that doesn't help anybody today. The 4 hour sleepers are still outliers, and the rest of us still need that sleep to operate at full capability.
- eanzenberg 8y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if needing more sleep is a competitive advantage. Increased brain activity leads to increased garbage collection and resetting.
- amelius 8y agoPerhaps the short-sleepers have a concurrent garbage collector ;)
- AstralStorm 8y ago
- richforrester 8y agoI want 7 extra hours in a day. 4 for of those would be allocated to sleeping.