23 ms·

The Effect of Sleep on Happiness

542 points by Doncametic 8y ago

misterbowfinger 8y ago
Their "methodology" of tracking happiness https://www.trackinghappiness.com/about/method/ https://www.trackinghappiness.com/about/method/ Not knocking on the idea of sleeping more & general well-being, but "tracking happiness" seems so wildly out of touch with reality that it's hard for me to buy into this analysis.
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  Tracking happiness is simply about being mindful of your own emotional state. I'm genuinely interested to hear about why you think that's "wildly out of touch with reality"?
  - nwatson 8y ago
    Lifestyles, philosophies, religions can optimize for happiness or truth ... pick one. The HT theorem.
    - Ensorceled 8y ago
      Matt Ridley, the author of the Rational Optimist, disagrees.
    - PhaseLockk 8y ago
      Or you could optimize for happiness-truth product. This would lead you to lifestyles, philosophies, and religions which remove any negative correlation between happiness and truth (which I would argue have no inherent, unavoidable relationship with each other).
  - bossfoundmyacct 8y ago
    Not the person you responded to, but he/she may be referring to there being other factors (unrelated to sleep) that may most likely be contributing to one's happiness factor, such as pre-existing health conditions (e.g., depression), relationships (both romantic and non), etc. A person who's just starting a new relationship and is still in the "honeymoon phase" might rate their happiness higher despite a lack of sleep.
    - Ensorceled 8y ago
      The methodology the parent links explicitly tracks multiple positive and negative factors and isn't explicitly tied to sleep. Personally, sleep is a huge factor in my happiness, so tracking it is pretty important.
  - misterbowfinger 8y ago
    Being mindful of your own emotional state presumes that you understand it. And judging by years and years of psychology, we're pretty bad at understanding ourselves.
    - Ensorceled 8y ago
      Not really. If they take the time to observe their feelings, most people know they are happy, anxious, stressed, angry, irritable, manic. They don't know WHY. Being mindful of your emotional state allows you to try to dig into why you are currently feeling that way and what is the source of the emotion. That's what we are pretty bad at understanding :-)
      - ninkendo 8y ago
        As a counterpoint to this, I'm absolutely terrible at even knowing when I'm anxious, stressed, angry, etc. For me I end up externalizing my emotions by saying "I'm not in a bad mood, it's just this (annoyance/distraction/external factor) that's making things hard for me!" and failing to realize that it could be something that would normally not faze me, and it's really me that's blowing things out of proportion. This is something I used to be much better at back when I used to practice mindfulness meditation. Being able to stop in the middle of a situation and recognize that you may not be in the best state of mind is an important skill that I have totally lost over the past few years.
        Ensorceled 8y ago
        Yeah, practice really helps. I’m mindfulness meditating again for exactly this reason, to get back on top of mood. But externalizing is miss understanding the WHY as much as not understanding the root emotion.
- nradov 8y ago
  Is happiness really the right metric to optimize? Most people take for granted that we should all try to be happy, but why? I think a little more introspection would be useful here. Perhaps there are more important things in life.
sametmax 8y ago
Some HN comments recently recommanded the book "why we sleep". After having read it, I can't prevent my self from doing the same. It definitly changed my views on the topic, and while it has a bit of a melodramatic tone, it is a well written entertaining piece that feeds you with data backed evidences with ease.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  Thanks. I struggle with wanting to go to bed at night and getting out of bed in the morning. Just placed a hold on the audiobook at my library.
  - andai 8y ago
    I can fall asleep in the afternoon (3-7pm) but I usually decide to stay up later, so I don't wake up fully rested in the middle of the night. As a result, by the time I finally go to bed at a normal hour, I'm wide awake and can't sleep for ages.
    - dijit 8y ago
      This must be a common problem, I have exactly the same situation. Someone once told me that you get tired when the body warms up, which makes some sense if you are one of those who goes from a cold outside to a warm inside.
- Tomte 8y ago
  I‘ve just bought it on that recommendation, but have only read the table of contents, yet. I was a bit disappointed that he does not discuss some common sleep disorders, only others that I haven‘t recently been diagnosed with.
  - heurist 8y ago
    In the book he says he chose the most prevalent to avoid meandering too much. His discussion of those disorders and the more general discussion of what is happening in the body when we sleep have helped me pinpoint some issues I have been having, even though I don't have a sleep disorder. I highly recommend it.
dbatten 8y ago
I'm getting a Google Drive permission error on several (but not all) charts... not sure if that's a problem on your end or theirs, but you might want to look into it. Thanks for this! Very interesting stuff.
- Doncametic 8y ago
  Ah shit, that should not happen and I think that's on Google's end. Just in case, what device and browser are you on? Thanks for letting me know and the nice words!
  - arendtio 8y ago
    I have the same issue: Linux Desktop + Firefox 60 Chromium seems to display all charts without any problems (same computer). Btw. it looks like once a chart has been loaded successfully, it is cached so that you have to clear/disable the browser cache in order to see the issue again.
  - OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
    Did you really mean to say this: "...recorded nearly 1.000 days of sleep..."
Ensorceled 8y ago
I've been using "Sleep Cycle" since 2014 and learned a ton about myself in the process. Most importantly, I learned that I need almost 8 hours sleep to feel my best and that I'm just subpar on the days when I don't get that much. Less ability to focus, less emotional control, less desire to exercise, less ability to resist temptation. Less happiness. For me, it's optimal if I set the sleep cycle alarm for 8 hours and 15 minutes from time I lay down. If that all works out, I'm set up for a much more productive and happier day.
- orev 8y ago
  Sleep Cycle is amazing, and I also had a watch in the 00s that did the same thing. The concept of the alarm timing with your cycle is so revolutionary that I’m really surprised it has not caught on anywhere else. It should be a fundamental feature of all smart watches, but it’s nowhere to be seen. I don’t really care to just track sleep if such tracking does nothing but let you see some pretty charts.
  - weavie 8y ago
    My pebble has this feature.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Most people need to be somewhere at a specific time in the morning; a variable alarm clock doesn’t make much sense unless they also leave a huge buffer. But for childless tech workers who can roll into the office any time before 11am standup... absolutely.
    - orev 8y ago
      A 30 minute window really isn’t that big of a deal. You just set the end time to when you need to be up, and then if it goes off before that, then you wake up refreshed with a little extra time. Your choice is really whether you want to get up refreshed, possibly a little early, or wake up abruptly in the wrong cycle and be groggy all morning. Either way, the solution to getting more sleep is to go to bed earlier if you have a fixed time to wake up.
brink 8y ago
I can say from personal experience I've noticed that when I don't get enough sleep, the next day I'm noticeably more prone to stress, sentences are more difficult to construct, and my memory worsens. Proper sleep is a very high priority for me these days.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Same where. When I miss sleep the world becomes a very confusing dark place. Things that should be easy suddenly become difficult and I can get very short tempered.
- 121789 8y ago
  Your last two symptoms definitely resonate with me, with the addition of loss of self control, which I definitely notice while eating. The first symptom (more prone to stress) seems to have a tipping point with me. If I get between 4-8 hours it is certainly true, but below that I feel considerably less stress, more creativity, and an increase in humor. I'm not sure why.
amorphous 8y ago
I can't tell if sleeping well makes me happier, but I can confirm that not sleeping enough makes me unhappy. I need my eight hours, even one hour less and my mood becomes more fragile. Reduce it significantly less (let's say <5 hours) and the world turns dark on me. This has always been like that, but more with age. That made having kids a real challenge. Luckily, my SO is not as nearly dependent on sleep as I am.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  What about the 90-120 min periods ? Nowadays I don't wake up until I feel like a period is over. Sometimes I got woken up by something and my heart and mind feel weak as damn.
- nugator 8y ago
  I feel the same, the world gets dark if I get too little sleep. But having kids, and the loss of the sleep that means (if you help out in the household and work), did not affect me in the same way. I don't know if I'm chemically programmed to not seeing the world as dark when I have to take care of kids even if I'm really tired or if the kids brighten my world more than the sleep deprivation darkens it.
- hoschicz 8y ago
  I'm seventeen and need 10 hours of sleep to run at full capacity the next day. But with school I have to wake up at 7 and going to sleep at 21 is impossible, so I feel like a zombie very often and am only productive in the afternoon. I have always hoped this could get better with age. Are you saying this will get worse?
  - tomerv 8y ago
    If you feel that going to sleep at 21:00 is impossible, then your lack of sleep might get worse in adulthood. But if you decide that getting enough sleep is more important than other things, then maybe you can go to sleep earlier despite social norms.
  - doodhwala 8y ago
wpietri 8y ago
This is really interesting. I may have to start tracking on my own. But I'd do it a bit differently. One is that I don't think happiness is exactly the thing I'd track. I'd also want to track sleep cycle, not just sleep amount. My experience is that too little sleep or a disrupted sleep schedule has a negative effect on my mood stability. If I sleep enough and at roughly the same time every day, I'm more emotionally resilient. One sleep hack I recommend to everybody is to try to avoid waking up to an alarm. I now adjust my wake time mostly by adjusting my bedtime. This certainly makes my mornings better, but it also means I fret less about getting the right number of hours, in that I trust my body to generally self-regulate on the right amount of sleep.
- andai 8y ago
  How do you wake up when you need to, if the amount of sleep you need varies? I have the opposite approach, by waking up at the same time every day, my body makes me sleepy at the appropriate time (which varies by day). Once I get into a rhythm, I wake up on my own, slightly before the alarm goes off.
  - bradstewart 8y ago
    I had a fitness tracker/wearable (Jawbone I think) that would track your sleep, and vibrate to wake you up at the best point of your sleep cycle within +/- 15 minutes of your set alarm time. I really like the idea, but the thing would always fall off at night. Maybe I should try a new one...
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Mostly by going to bed earlier and by having a wake-up time that normally gives me plenty of time in the morning. Also by being comfortable with biphasic sleep, where I might be up for 90 minutes in the middle of the night. (That appears to be the natural human sleep cycle; an uninterrupted 8 hours became the standard only once electric light became common.) And occasionally by taking an afternoon nap. On the rare occasions when I have something pretty early that I absolutely have to be awake for, I'll use a sleep-cycle-sensitive alarm. I use the one in my Pebble, but there are plenty of others.
buckminster 8y ago
On the graphs a positive sleep deprivation number is actually a surfeit of sleep. This seems backwards. Nice article otherwise.
- goo 8y ago
  Thanks for clarifying that here -- it took some close reading to understand that. With an otherwise nicely detailed account, the mislabelling of the axes is jarring. I would definitely expect a positive number to correlate to more sleep deprivation, if the axis is labelled "Sleep Deprivation" or any variant thereof.
1996 8y ago
I sleep 10 to 11h per night. I may trim that to 6h one day but no more than once per month and if there is an absolute emergency - but then I know my productivity will be killed for at least 2 days. OTOH, my inspiration will be higher: I will have more creative ideas on how to combine stuff, but I will be too tired to do any of that. I will just take notes. With adequate sleep, I do not feel happier or sadder than anyone else. I feel more productive however. Sunday I had never done any python because I preferred perl, but for some specific task there was no option but a python library (well, it was also possible in another language I don't like either) So on Monday, I learned python, then asynchronous execution with asyncio, then parallelizing with joblib. Tuesday, I coded. Today I have a python3 daemon with error handling and other niceties ready to be deployed to test. It seems robust enough to require minimal oversight by systemd. In any case, it will be deployed on all POPs and in production on Friday - even if I must have a bad night. But that means I will not do much next day. But that means I will have other creative ideas!
- kradeelav 8y ago
  My schedule's similar to yours - designer echoing a need for a minimum of 9 hours, preferably 10, especially for any serious creative work. (Personally I also wonder if there's a link there, about needing increased hours for flexible creative thinking?) (Work wise, I currently balance 2 very demanding start-up-y jobs, and learned the hard way that even 8 hours doesn't cut the sheer amount of energy that's needed to handle fires that come from both of those places. Cutting out every inch of social or leisure life before sleep ironically gives me my best weeks ... and I know as an introvert that's probably easier for me than some, but good lord. Sleep's one of those things I don't compromise on anymore.)
  - 1996 8y ago
    I need increased hours for thinking, but for some reasons my creativity peaks on the rare days I am sleep deprived!! It is weird, as I do not compromise on sleep either! I wonder if others feel their creativity improved on sleep deprived days? I have never read anything about that.
olivermarks 8y ago
Surely there is not enough sleep because you are buzzing after a great experience and/or anticipation of events tomorrow, and then there is anxiety and bad sleep patterns because of stress? Spending too long in bed due to feeling lethargic and not wanting to get up doesn't result in happiness. I am a big fan of 8 hours of good sleep a night, and definitely need it to be on top of things, and on some occasions to ward off depression and fuzzy thinking...
gxs 8y ago
Sleep is one of those things that you don't really notice when it gets better. You feel good, you feel more energetic, you feel all the benefits that are well known, but you don't notice. You only notice it when you go back to shitty sleep and realize how much better off you are when you are sleeping the appropriate number of hours. I've struggled with sleep for years. I won't go into my long journey but it suffices to say that after all the supplements, different cpap machines, "sleep hack", etc., the only thing that actually worked was discipline. Go to bed early, wake up early, same time, everyday.
Shank 8y ago
This is a really cool process, but the author stops just short of completing the analysis. > It's impossible to determine any correlation at all based on this graph. I know my happiness is influenced by a lot of factors, but so far I cannot tell if sleep is one of them. Yeah, this is true. You can't just look at a graph and say that the job is done. This is the entire point for the statistics field. You need to do an actual statistical test for correlation -- not just plot a graph. Obvious trends are definitely visible in graphs, but more subtle correlations are often obscured and not visible. I'd be much more interested to see what statistical analysis on the data looks like, rather than just a graph at the end. With a huge focus on methods, I'm flabbergasted that some form of regression wasn't tried at all. It's probably worth chopping out obvious problem areas, like relationship stress, though. (You could also just add categorical traits to the model, though, and let relationship stress act as a factor on happiness directly.) ---- A tangent: it's pretty well known that sleep deprivation can actually improve symptoms in people who are depressed -- especially at extremes. I don't know if this has anything to do with a large scale analysis like this, though.
- 1996 8y ago
  It would still be fun to do a simple OLs multilinear regression. OP: start with a multiple regression, then do a PCA, to see which factors may have commonalities. If you don't know how, upload your data somewhere. Me or anyone else here could do that in 5 min. The conclusions would certainly be more interesting than the wall of text - even if it covers just 1 person, you have many datapoints!
vienno 8y ago
Very interesting project. Just a minor detail. > However, I have always recovered from those periods by catching up on sleep. This is actually a common misconception. In reality, it is not possible to "catch up" on missed sleeping hours. Source: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/you-cant-catch-sleep https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/you-cant-catch-sleep
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  That mentions (without citation) one study about a very extreme and weird version of catching up on sleep. I doubt this person was talking about sleeping an extra 10 hours in one night to make up for 28 hours of missed sleep over 2 weeks.
  - vienno 8y ago
    I can't seem to recall where I first read this, but I am confident I've read it in multiple articles and books (I have a keen interest in this topic due to serious personal sleep issues). But I seem to stand corrected[1]. Thanks for your comment. 1. http://time.com/5288704/can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/ http://time.com/5288704/can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/
- meiraleal 8y ago
  The reasonable conclusion is that the body knows how to catch up, you just need to get back to sleep normally. EDIT: otherwise everybody would be dead from the (negative) power of compound interest.
- sevagh 8y ago
  >This is actually a common misconception. In reality, it is not possible to "catch up" on missed sleeping hours. I find that the same sentiment is worded misleadingly in the book Why We Sleep. If you have a day of bad sleep (i.e. non-optimally consolidating the day's events), followed by a day of good sleep, it's not like your "health bar" is permanently lowered. You'll just never get to re-consolidate that lost day. So, today I read 20 pages of a book and sleep like crap - I "lose" the synthesis of those 20 pages in my memory/associative brain map/whatever. If I slept better, I'd remember way more from those 20 pages. What's lost forever by that poor sleep is the _opportunity_ to properly synthesize those 20 pages just on that one night. Not your "health", and you don't get a permanently increased level of cortisol. After a good night of sleep, you do physiologically recover and you're back to normal. Also, take everything in "Why We Sleep" with a grain of salt - sleep is hugely important and sleep deprivation sucks but he mentions several times in the book that "everybody sleeps badly once in a while, if it's not the norm then you're fine." Many times he's mentioning effects of chronic deprivation for long periods of time. And insomnia paranoia will probably make you sleep worse than if you stop worrying about t.
fencepost 8y ago
This kind of tracking (and the app) sound interesting, but seem to presuppose that you're sleeping alone. It's also kind of a shame that they don't have integration with Garmin (depending on device) and Fitbit - many of the devices from both of those companies track heartrate, movement and sleep without the need to leave your phone on the bed but there's not much integration there. It looks like Garmin has a lot of that raw data available to download, but it's per-day individual downloads of .fit files (https://forums.garmin.com/forum/into-sports/running/forerunner-920xt-aa/112758-is-there-a-fit-file-viewer-or-a-published-file-format https://forums.garmin.com/forum/into-sports/running/forerunn...) One thing worth noting for people considering one of the fitness trackers: Garmin's software doesn't recognize multiple sleep periods, so if you nap then go do something it either ignores one sleep period or just treats it as one long sleep period (with a big "awake" period in the middle). The vivosmart 3 at least does also track sleep phases.
- brlewis 8y ago
  https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/
- CedarMadness 8y ago
  There's a Garmin app that connects with Sleep as Android, although I haven't had good luck with it on my Fenix watch. https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/e80a4793-f5a3-44c7-bd7f-52a97f5d8310#0 https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/e80a4793-f5a3-44c7-bd7f-5...
  - fencepost 8y ago
    Yes, they list a beta ConnectIQ (Garmin device app) app, but Garmin has some nice and more compact devices with heart rate as well (e.g. vivosmart 3) and those don't run apps.
- Tharkun 8y ago
  YMMV but my vivosmart 3 is useless at sleep tracking. I read in bed, and my heart rate goes down while i'm doing this and the thing invariably thinks i'm sleeping, messing up the stats.
nosleeptill 8y ago
I'm both an insomniac and I have delayed sleep syndrome. When my parents brought me home from the hospital I was only sleeping 2-3 hours a day. I was a planned baby, but with two teenagers, and parents who were nearing 40 having a baby that didn't sleep, almost destroyed the family, so I'm told. When I did sleep it was usually from 7am to 9am. If you have children let that sink in for a minute. My insomnia was awful from 14 to 19, I was operating with on average 3 or 4 days of no sleep, a couple of days of 2-3 hours of sleep a day, and back to 3 -4 days of no sleep, wash rinse repeat. I had lots of 6,7,8 days of no sleep and once went 10 days. For me, then, I was just awake, I didn't force anything, I was just not sleepy, and I couldn't force myself to sleep. During my junior and senor year of college I started smoking pot, and I started sleeping on a regular basis, going to bed about 1-1:30 and getting 6/7 hours of sleep. I'm not really sure if I was happier, or more productive, I was definitely more relaxed, it was probably the pot not the sleep. Of course once I graduated and started getting drug tested I needed to give up smoking pot. I hope soon my state will legalize and maybe I can find a strain that helps. I did a couple of sleep studies two which lasted 5 days and for one I went sleepless for the study, they said I never once displayed any indication that my body wanted to sleep during those 5 days. They wanted to study me but sitting in a room hooked up to machines for days on end was not my idea of fun, since I didn't sleep they wanted to know what was going on with me during my constant "up" times and they wanted to see if they could understand what triggered my sleep when it did happen. As I got into my 30's my insomnia became less of an issue, but the delayed sleep issue went back to when I was a baby, my body wanted to sleep from 7am until 9/10am, putting a real kink in my life. While I didn't technically have insomnia, I usually wasn't getting any sleep during the work week, luckily I was wired for not sleeping much so it wasn't a career killer, it was tough on my wife and children, and still is. As I got into my late 40's my delayed sleep time move to back to about 4am, and my sleeping needs have increased, I now usually get 3-4 hours of sleep a day. So far things have remained the same into my mid 50's. If I want to I can still go a few day without sleep, I've worked on big projects and it can be wonderful to just knock out 72 hours of work in 3 days. When I get "sleepy" it's more like my body suggesting that it would accommodate sleeping if I so choose, if I ignore the offer the opportunity passes and I'm just awake. From talking to others the feeling of sleep comes over them and they have no choice but to succumb As a side note I don't take drugs prescription or otherwise, nor do I drink
gascan 8y ago
On this subject, if you're interested in these kinds of studies on happiness- I've been slowly working my way through the book "The Nature Fix". Tangentially pertinent. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/nature-fix-brain-happy-florence-williams/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/nature-fix-brain...
- andai 8y ago
  I'm getting my nature fix right now. I found visiting the park once a day does wonders for my sense of well being.
king_nothing 8y ago
If one were purely nihilistic, sleep-deprivation compromises judgement, creativity, reaction-time, stress-resilience, adds to oxidative stress and reduced net productivity. It may seem like a good idea for anyone under 25, but it’s unsustainable... source: undergrad 3x all-nighters a week. Don’t do as I did, it might even cause neurological damage that can’t be assayed or quantified in vivo yet.
toss1 8y ago
Interesting project; not entirely surprising that sleep deficit increases possibility of low happiness, but doesn't force it. Definitely correlates with my happiness levels being much more all over the map in the last 6mths of running an involuntary sleep deficit due to a shoulder injury that impairs sleep (&worse the week after the surgery). I've also noticed a definite thinking deficit as this wears on, and am thinking of doing a tracking project. Rather than just going by subjective 'feel like I'm (not) thinking well', does anyone know of a good site that has a deep library of correlated mind test questions such that one could take repeated tests but not encounter repeat questions?
- andai 8y ago
  Working memory is a decent proxy for overall brain function, and straightforward to test, eg. with a Dual N-Back game like http://brainscale.net/dual-n-back http://brainscale.net/dual-n-back You need to have a baseline score to compare with. Your score will improve pretty quick in the beginning and then start to level out. I also like typing speed tests, to test the effects of exhaustion, sleep deprivation and various states of mind. (In some cases, the speed is actually increased, but typically at the cost of accuracy.) For typing speed I use https://typeracer.com https://typeracer.com which has some excellent book and movie quotes to type.
  - toss1 8y ago
    cool, thanks! another one, w/ a somewhat different angle I'd found was a straight mental math trainer, discovered from another commenter here on HN: http://www.mental-math-trainer.com/ http://www.mental-math-trainer.com/
barking 8y ago
I'd be interested in people's views on the influence of sleep on aging. I've never been a great sleeper, possibly have sleep apnoea as well. 5 or 6 broken hours a night is normal for me and I feel that I am aging more quickly than average.
- degenerate 8y ago
  Sleep is when the brain 'repairs' itself, so you definitely need it. Do you snore? You may be waking up often due to lack of oxygen. I recommend you do a sleep study.
  - barking 8y ago
    I should do that all right. I snore and I've been told that I basically stop breathing at times which is as unpleasant as the snoring for the person listening!
    - outworlder 8y ago
      > I snore and I've been told that I basically stop breathing at times which is as unpleasant as the snoring for the person listening Snoring is fine. Forget about the inconvenience it causes on others. It's when you STOP snoring that you should be concerned. I have sleep apnea and I know what it is like. Go get yourself checked ASAP. You do NOT want to suffer long term side effects of sleep apnea, and not all of them are reversible.
tpinto 8y ago
so THIS is what's been keeping you awake lately...
qop 8y ago
There is no reason to sleep more than 8-9.5hrs. If you are sleeping more than this, see a doctor and see what kind of hormones are not balanced. It's probably not as bad as undersleeping to oversleep, but it's not how your body is supposed to work.
- tzar 8y ago
  More than 8, or more than 9.5? Which is it?
  - qop 8y ago
    It's a range depending on other aspects. Or do you think the human body ticks down 480 minutes exactly?
anotheryou 8y ago
the graph reads to me like usually it doesn't matter at all, but sometimes slight sleep deprevation makes a bad day worse. those few than are the overall worst days
vesak 8y ago
When I wrote Mastering Rust, I did most of the work during the only available productive hours of the day: 20-05. Amazing legal narcotics i.e. coffee helped quite a lot. I wasn't miserable, but that's mostly due to the excitement of progressing.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Why is late night programming / writing so darn productive? No distractions?
  - jjtheblunt 8y ago
    that's my experience for sure. it's not that we're night owls, but that we need coherent blocks of focus-compatible time, so when the rest of the world sleeps is one heuristic.
  - crawftv 8y ago
    In my experience, I think the momentum/flow and thrill helps. Also hacking turns into late-night-hacking as I try to dig myself out of hole. So it ends up being productive by trying to finish something before bed.
  - vesak 8y ago
    Well, I have theories. One, it breaks habits. You may have teached yourself over the years to procrastinate during the day, but not during the night. Two, you know it's painful enough that you'd rather not waste the time doing something stupid and worthless. Three, it lowers your mental state enough that you'll just drudge on like a robot.
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      For me its about anxiety, and that ability to drudge on. Certain parts of my brain fatigue and completely turn off. After an all-nighter my emotional resilience is off the charts the next day. I think a little slower, but so much more calmly, and logically. At my startup my co-founders actually requested I pull all-nighters before pitching VC's because the effect was so profound. Public speaking is so easy when you stop caring and treat everything like an item on a checklist instead of a potential catastrophe.
agumonkey 8y ago
Anybody using a physical approach ? that a person is a pendulum and keeping rhythms in check is the best way to save energy and avoir wear ?
slfnflctd 8y ago
Am I the only one who felt like that was a lot of charts, data and extrapolation for a sample size of 1? In my study I did on myself, I found it easier to fall asleep after drinking heavily and consuming large amounts of greasy food. [My usual anecdote here is actually that I appear to sleep better & more when I get a lot of exercise.] My point is, there is tremendous variation in 'natural' sleep patterns - and related behaviors - across the population. I need a larger study if I'm going to digest this much information.
- Timpy 8y ago
  Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but I don't think this was supposed to be a persuasive argument as to why everyone should change their sleep habits to match the author's. I read it as an interesting exploration of some data collected one person collected on their every day life.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
  And only one day's worth of data too: "...recorded nearly 1.000 days of sleep..."
graeme 8y ago
Anecdotally I've noticed I'm much less productive when I sleep too little. I try to get eight hours. But, I've been having trouble sleeping in recently. I want to sleep more, but can't. I'm not sure what causes it - I used to have the problem of staying up late then sleeping till 11-12ish naturally. (I never use an alarm) I have two observations: 1. A couple months ago I started going to my balcony for morning sunlight upon waking. I had read morning light resets sleep cycles 2. I notice I need to pee when I wake up, and have trouble falling asleep again after. It's summer in Canada, so some light gets in around 5 am or so I'm wondering if I reset my cycle, and now I "wake up" if there's morning light present, whereas I didn't before. Anyone have this experience? I never had trouble sleeping in before, so this confuses me.
- Damogran6 8y ago
  Waking up having to pee it often an indicator of other issues. For me, it's my allergy medication not working, leading to sinus inflammaion, leading to snoring, leading to waking up thinking I need to pee.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  i had troubles falling asleep which caused more time online, delaying the issue and making it worse I tried eating lighter, a bit earlier and jumping into bed at 10pm cutting everything so I would slip slowly but surely. I had positive results for a while but I'm back to unregular sleep schedule. Also tried the no-blue-light thing but didn't feel improvements.
- curun1r 8y ago
  I can't speak for you, but I know that for me, inability to sleep is always the product of some unresolved worry or other preoccupation. Dealing with that (in my case, that means spending time meditating) solves the problem of waking up feeling unrested. However that doesn't necessarily mean sleeping more, since I find that during periods of consistent meditation I generally need a couple hours less sleep to feel fully rested. YMMV, but ask yourself whether there's anything that might be preoccupying your subconscious that might be triggering your sleep issues.
rb808 8y ago
> I fall asleep quite easily. It usually doesn't take me more than 30 minutes. I generally fall asleep within a minute or two of head hitting the pillow. What should be normal?
- tartuffe78 8y ago
  I do the same, but I've been told that falling asleep that fast is a sign of exhaustion.
- DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
  I envy people like you. Through a lot of my teen years, it could take me up to an hour to fall asleep. Once I got to college and I was able to adjust my sleep schedule a bit (no longer had to be at school by 7:30am), I could do it in 30 minutes. Now (mid-20s) I can do it in as little as 10-15 sometimes, if I'm lucky. More often I think it's 15-20. I dunno what it is exactly. I feel like my brain just constantly wants to be thinking about things, like solving problems from my day or imagining fanciful scenarios or planning upcoming events. What do you think about when you lie down? Or are you able to just switch it off and not think about anything?
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I used to have very serious sleep issues. They are vastly better. A few thoughts: In order to readily get to sleep, you need to be both physically and mentally tired. This is part of why reading in bed or doing crossword puzzles is so popular -- it helps make you mentally tired. If you have any kind of health issues, working on that will improve sleep issues. A food and health journal can be an enormously useful tool for teasing out details peculiar to you. Exercise moves lymph. If you have been sedentary a long time, it would be wise to ramp up gradually. There can be a lot of fallout if you suddenly start working out hard. If you allergies or respiratory problems, switching to hypoallergenic bedding products, like buckwheat pillows, all cotton sheets, etc can make a big difference for some people. It can also help to generally keep you sleep area very clean, dust free etc. Co Q 10 in the morning about 12 to 14 hours before you want to sleep at night can help your circadian clock. It wakes you up and encourages the body to produce melatonin about 12vto 14 later. Most sources say 12 hours, but my firsthand experience suggests 12 to 14 hours.
tenpaiyomi 8y ago
Interesting read. I suffer from psychosomatic insomnia so am no stranger to that constant fatigue and drag of lack of sleep. One thing I have noted is that, on the days that I actually do get a considerable amount of sleep and feel rested, I am overall happier, more motivated, and just in a better mood overall. Likewise, on the really rough days where I don't get much to no sleep, I'm irritable and all but useless at work and around the house. I've come to manage these days over the years, but I do note that things still bubble up and I am easily agitated. Interestingly enough, medicine to help me sleep does not result in a better mood, only that natural sleep.
kentosi 8y ago
I like sleeping on time and waking up early(ish). I'm slowly shifting from a night-owl into a morning person in my 30s. I love the productivity I feel and knowing that I can do a bunch of things in the morning before work, then get home in the evening and relax. But my problem is that that I'm a single guy who needs to date and have a social life. And try as I might, all such social constructs require you to stay out late and drink a little. All of which eventually chips into the sleep, and hence how productive you are the next day. It's really annoying having to force myself to be social at the cost of only being, say, 70% as productive the next day. Is anyone else facing this conundrum, or can impart any hints?
- ColanR 8y ago
  early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise... early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and socially dead. -- Ben Franklin, who had similar difficulties.
  - schuke 8y ago
    How can a socially dead guy be healthy and wealthy though?
    - krageon 8y ago
      Even though I can't imagine this is a serious question: If you apply yourself at work and cook your own (varied!) meals, you will be (moderately) wealthy and (moderately) healthy. I did not mention any social time here, which makes this hypothetical person socially dead.
    - slaunchwise 8y ago
      A really good job with the postal service
  - rimliu 8y ago
    Early to bed, early to rise: a lark. Late to bed, late to rise: an owl. Late to bed, early to rise: an angry bird.
jumpinalake 8y ago
Those of you who are getting lots of sleep and also consume caffeine during the day you probably don’t realize that if you cut caffeine you would require much less sleep. Try it sometime for at least a month.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > Try it sometime for at least a month. I choose life.
onemoresoop 8y ago
I noticed that when I rush the waking up process I get more energy I have happier mood throughout the day. The more quick the transition from waking up to being caught up in an activity(and that could even be the commute) the more energy I have throughout the day. Any lingering in bed affects the whole day negatively. Does anybody else experience this?
- JackMinello 8y ago
  Yes, if I wake up too early it's better form to start the day than staying in bed another hour
yani 8y ago
Many factors influence our mood. Yes, sleep is one of them. So is our diet, social life, work life. The key is to try and balance everything.
TimJRobinson 8y ago
Tangentially related: I'm looking for an app that will ask me how happy / tired / productive I'm feeling randomly throughout the day, and allow me to export this data, so that I can correlate this with my sleep and diet.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mansilladev 8y ago
Averaging about 4.5h of sleep per night (down at around 2A up at 6:30A without fail — #noSnooze). I’m in my 40s, and was the kid that l watched David Letterman at 1AM in junior high, and an avid coffee drinker by early high school. Every time I read an article/study on sleep I get inspired to tack on a few hours to reap said benefits, but never follow through. Based on what I’ve read, I’m writing waking hour checks that science says I can’t cash. And apparently, after this study, will do so unhappily.
Philomath 8y ago
To me what really matters is not how many hours of sleep I get but how difficult it is for me to wake up. I've found that there is a direct relation between this and my happiness. In periods where I am very productive, I have a reason to wake up, I know what I want and need to do. Then I'm very happy, life has a purpose. It doesn't matter how many hours I sleep. In the other hand, when I amb lost and don't know what I should be doing that day, I have a very hard time waking up.
- phito 8y ago
  Makes sense, if you wake up properly, it's easier to get productivity momentum going
ChristianGeek 8y ago
TLDR: Author has no idea if there’s a correlation based on personal data.
palerdot 8y ago
Tangential and shameless plug: I created my own offline app[1] for a very simplistic tracking of my sleep habits. It helped me to be more disciplined in getting the right amount of sleep (atleast for most of the days). Any feedbacks on this is appreciated. [1] - https://sleepeasyapp.com https://sleepeasyapp.com
techbio 8y ago
Stopped reading after I saw the chart drew lines to extrapolate from extremes relatively close to the mean hours of sleep, and accounted not for such things as degrees of standard deviation, rather (mis)leading to the conclusion that these happiness results were dependent entirely on the one measured variable and not that other factors would contribute to outliers. Your anecdotal evidence, and analysis, are flawed, though I lack the terminology to adequately improve them. Will someone please translate my hunch to appropriate statistical tools? I would like to replicate this data collection in my own life and learn something of value from it. My comment may find itself below a vast wall of anecdotal text, however, I’m hopeful, HN.
- doomjunky 8y ago
  "Anecdotal evidence" is now part of my vocabulary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
jxy 8y ago
If my own anecdotal experience says anything, I can easily slash two to three hours of sleep, when I run four to five miles in the morning. During snowy winter weeks I am mostly sedentary, I need eight to nine hours to feel refreshed, and I need coffee to stay awake after lunch. When weather is good and I run four to five miles in the morning everyday, I only need to sleep from midnight to 6 AM. I wake up at that time automatically without alarm. I feel 40 minutes of running can equal two hours of extra sleep. Perhaps running increases blood flow and also helps clean up trashes in the brain, as what people claim sleeping does to your brain. And yes, I feel so happy after running.
- inanutshellus 8y ago
  Note that "During snowy winter weeks" it's also the darkest part of the year, which also has a known correlation to (un)happiness. So it may be "just" the light or it could be both your lifestyle change and the lack of light siphoning happiness.
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Tom_2 8y ago
So, I slept great the first 25 years of my life, but I've had a ton of sleep problems as a start-up founder over the years. They developed over 10+ years building a $200MM plus company from the ground up. I was traveling all over the world, in different time zones and working 7 days a week. I would recommend treating sleep really seriously and not 'breaking' your ability to sleep. I have learned ways to get some sleep again, but basically haven't been able to 'fix these issues' for the past 15 years. I have learned to manage the sleeplessness - and am finally back up to 7 hours or so a night on average most weeks (8 is my sweet spot). During this entire time I thought I was healthy, but sleep and lack thereof concerns me. I have read a ton on the subject, tried everything (CBT / Behavioral therapy, Hypnosis, Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Sleeping pills, Herbal remedies, etc). Haven't tried Cannibis. I am currently working with 4 leading sleep researchers with decades each in helping people sleep. We're building a personal 'sleep assistant' to use modified CBT program in an automated fashion. We are in second trial this summer. First trial showed 45 minute average sleep improvement (in people sleeping < 7 hours a night to start). Most people do better with 7-8 hours / night even if they think they don't need it. I need it, but need help 'calming down' my mind enough to get it. If you're interested in taking part in any alpha studies (after this current research round of 200 people) or learning more or getting on mailing list, email me at tom.talytica@gmail.com. Having two daughters was rough on my sleep, but we also did co-sleeping (Asian wife who breastfed).

542 points by Doncametic 8y ago

Their "methodology" of tracking happiness https://www.trackinghappiness.com/about/method/ https://www.trackinghappiness.com/about/method/ Not knocking on the idea of sleeping more & general well-being, but "tracking happiness" seems so wildly out of touch with reality that it's hard for me to buy into this analysis.

Ensorceled 8y ago
Tracking happiness is simply about being mindful of your own emotional state. I'm genuinely interested to hear about why you think that's "wildly out of touch with reality"?
- nwatson 8y ago
  Lifestyles, philosophies, religions can optimize for happiness or truth ... pick one. The HT theorem.
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    Matt Ridley, the author of the Rational Optimist, disagrees.
  - PhaseLockk 8y ago
    Or you could optimize for happiness-truth product. This would lead you to lifestyles, philosophies, and religions which remove any negative correlation between happiness and truth (which I would argue have no inherent, unavoidable relationship with each other).
- bossfoundmyacct 8y ago
  Not the person you responded to, but he/she may be referring to there being other factors (unrelated to sleep) that may most likely be contributing to one's happiness factor, such as pre-existing health conditions (e.g., depression), relationships (both romantic and non), etc. A person who's just starting a new relationship and is still in the "honeymoon phase" might rate their happiness higher despite a lack of sleep.
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    The methodology the parent links explicitly tracks multiple positive and negative factors and isn't explicitly tied to sleep. Personally, sleep is a huge factor in my happiness, so tracking it is pretty important.
- misterbowfinger 8y ago
  Being mindful of your own emotional state presumes that you understand it. And judging by years and years of psychology, we're pretty bad at understanding ourselves.
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    Not really. If they take the time to observe their feelings, most people know they are happy, anxious, stressed, angry, irritable, manic. They don't know WHY. Being mindful of your emotional state allows you to try to dig into why you are currently feeling that way and what is the source of the emotion. That's what we are pretty bad at understanding :-)
    - ninkendo 8y ago
      As a counterpoint to this, I'm absolutely terrible at even knowing when I'm anxious, stressed, angry, etc. For me I end up externalizing my emotions by saying "I'm not in a bad mood, it's just this (annoyance/distraction/external factor) that's making things hard for me!" and failing to realize that it could be something that would normally not faze me, and it's really me that's blowing things out of proportion. This is something I used to be much better at back when I used to practice mindfulness meditation. Being able to stop in the middle of a situation and recognize that you may not be in the best state of mind is an important skill that I have totally lost over the past few years.
      - Ensorceled 8y ago
        Yeah, practice really helps. I’m mindfulness meditating again for exactly this reason, to get back on top of mood. But externalizing is miss understanding the WHY as much as not understanding the root emotion.
nradov 8y ago
Is happiness really the right metric to optimize? Most people take for granted that we should all try to be happy, but why? I think a little more introspection would be useful here. Perhaps there are more important things in life.

sametmax 8y ago

Some HN comments recently recommanded the book "why we sleep". After having read it, I can't prevent my self from doing the same. It definitly changed my views on the topic, and while it has a bit of a melodramatic tone, it is a well written entertaining piece that feeds you with data backed evidences with ease.

loco5niner 8y ago
Thanks. I struggle with wanting to go to bed at night and getting out of bed in the morning. Just placed a hold on the audiobook at my library.
- andai 8y ago
  I can fall asleep in the afternoon (3-7pm) but I usually decide to stay up later, so I don't wake up fully rested in the middle of the night. As a result, by the time I finally go to bed at a normal hour, I'm wide awake and can't sleep for ages.
  - dijit 8y ago
    This must be a common problem, I have exactly the same situation. Someone once told me that you get tired when the body warms up, which makes some sense if you are one of those who goes from a cold outside to a warm inside.
Tomte 8y ago
I‘ve just bought it on that recommendation, but have only read the table of contents, yet. I was a bit disappointed that he does not discuss some common sleep disorders, only others that I haven‘t recently been diagnosed with.
- heurist 8y ago
  In the book he says he chose the most prevalent to avoid meandering too much. His discussion of those disorders and the more general discussion of what is happening in the body when we sleep have helped me pinpoint some issues I have been having, even though I don't have a sleep disorder. I highly recommend it.

dbatten 8y ago

I'm getting a Google Drive permission error on several (but not all) charts... not sure if that's a problem on your end or theirs, but you might want to look into it. Thanks for this! Very interesting stuff.

Doncametic 8y ago
Ah shit, that should not happen and I think that's on Google's end. Just in case, what device and browser are you on? Thanks for letting me know and the nice words!
- arendtio 8y ago
  I have the same issue: Linux Desktop + Firefox 60 Chromium seems to display all charts without any problems (same computer). Btw. it looks like once a chart has been loaded successfully, it is cached so that you have to clear/disable the browser cache in order to see the issue again.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
  Did you really mean to say this: "...recorded nearly 1.000 days of sleep..."

Ensorceled 8y ago

I've been using "Sleep Cycle" since 2014 and learned a ton about myself in the process. Most importantly, I learned that I need almost 8 hours sleep to feel my best and that I'm just subpar on the days when I don't get that much. Less ability to focus, less emotional control, less desire to exercise, less ability to resist temptation. Less happiness. For me, it's optimal if I set the sleep cycle alarm for 8 hours and 15 minutes from time I lay down. If that all works out, I'm set up for a much more productive and happier day.

orev 8y ago
Sleep Cycle is amazing, and I also had a watch in the 00s that did the same thing. The concept of the alarm timing with your cycle is so revolutionary that I’m really surprised it has not caught on anywhere else. It should be a fundamental feature of all smart watches, but it’s nowhere to be seen. I don’t really care to just track sleep if such tracking does nothing but let you see some pretty charts.
- weavie 8y ago
  My pebble has this feature.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Most people need to be somewhere at a specific time in the morning; a variable alarm clock doesn’t make much sense unless they also leave a huge buffer. But for childless tech workers who can roll into the office any time before 11am standup... absolutely.
  - orev 8y ago
    A 30 minute window really isn’t that big of a deal. You just set the end time to when you need to be up, and then if it goes off before that, then you wake up refreshed with a little extra time. Your choice is really whether you want to get up refreshed, possibly a little early, or wake up abruptly in the wrong cycle and be groggy all morning. Either way, the solution to getting more sleep is to go to bed earlier if you have a fixed time to wake up.

brink 8y ago

I can say from personal experience I've noticed that when I don't get enough sleep, the next day I'm noticeably more prone to stress, sentences are more difficult to construct, and my memory worsens. Proper sleep is a very high priority for me these days.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Same where. When I miss sleep the world becomes a very confusing dark place. Things that should be easy suddenly become difficult and I can get very short tempered.
121789 8y ago
Your last two symptoms definitely resonate with me, with the addition of loss of self control, which I definitely notice while eating. The first symptom (more prone to stress) seems to have a tipping point with me. If I get between 4-8 hours it is certainly true, but below that I feel considerably less stress, more creativity, and an increase in humor. I'm not sure why.

amorphous 8y ago

I can't tell if sleeping well makes me happier, but I can confirm that not sleeping enough makes me unhappy. I need my eight hours, even one hour less and my mood becomes more fragile. Reduce it significantly less (let's say <5 hours) and the world turns dark on me. This has always been like that, but more with age. That made having kids a real challenge. Luckily, my SO is not as nearly dependent on sleep as I am.

agumonkey 8y ago
What about the 90-120 min periods ? Nowadays I don't wake up until I feel like a period is over. Sometimes I got woken up by something and my heart and mind feel weak as damn.
nugator 8y ago
I feel the same, the world gets dark if I get too little sleep. But having kids, and the loss of the sleep that means (if you help out in the household and work), did not affect me in the same way. I don't know if I'm chemically programmed to not seeing the world as dark when I have to take care of kids even if I'm really tired or if the kids brighten my world more than the sleep deprivation darkens it.
hoschicz 8y ago
I'm seventeen and need 10 hours of sleep to run at full capacity the next day. But with school I have to wake up at 7 and going to sleep at 21 is impossible, so I feel like a zombie very often and am only productive in the afternoon. I have always hoped this could get better with age. Are you saying this will get worse?
- tomerv 8y ago
  If you feel that going to sleep at 21:00 is impossible, then your lack of sleep might get worse in adulthood. But if you decide that getting enough sleep is more important than other things, then maybe you can go to sleep earlier despite social norms.
- doodhwala 8y ago

wpietri 8y ago

This is really interesting. I may have to start tracking on my own. But I'd do it a bit differently. One is that I don't think happiness is exactly the thing I'd track. I'd also want to track sleep cycle, not just sleep amount. My experience is that too little sleep or a disrupted sleep schedule has a negative effect on my mood stability. If I sleep enough and at roughly the same time every day, I'm more emotionally resilient. One sleep hack I recommend to everybody is to try to avoid waking up to an alarm. I now adjust my wake time mostly by adjusting my bedtime. This certainly makes my mornings better, but it also means I fret less about getting the right number of hours, in that I trust my body to generally self-regulate on the right amount of sleep.

andai 8y ago
How do you wake up when you need to, if the amount of sleep you need varies? I have the opposite approach, by waking up at the same time every day, my body makes me sleepy at the appropriate time (which varies by day). Once I get into a rhythm, I wake up on my own, slightly before the alarm goes off.
- bradstewart 8y ago
  I had a fitness tracker/wearable (Jawbone I think) that would track your sleep, and vibrate to wake you up at the best point of your sleep cycle within +/- 15 minutes of your set alarm time. I really like the idea, but the thing would always fall off at night. Maybe I should try a new one...
- wpietri 8y ago
  Mostly by going to bed earlier and by having a wake-up time that normally gives me plenty of time in the morning. Also by being comfortable with biphasic sleep, where I might be up for 90 minutes in the middle of the night. (That appears to be the natural human sleep cycle; an uninterrupted 8 hours became the standard only once electric light became common.) And occasionally by taking an afternoon nap. On the rare occasions when I have something pretty early that I absolutely have to be awake for, I'll use a sleep-cycle-sensitive alarm. I use the one in my Pebble, but there are plenty of others.

buckminster 8y ago

On the graphs a positive sleep deprivation number is actually a surfeit of sleep. This seems backwards. Nice article otherwise.

goo 8y ago
Thanks for clarifying that here -- it took some close reading to understand that. With an otherwise nicely detailed account, the mislabelling of the axes is jarring. I would definitely expect a positive number to correlate to more sleep deprivation, if the axis is labelled "Sleep Deprivation" or any variant thereof.

1996 8y ago

I sleep 10 to 11h per night. I may trim that to 6h one day but no more than once per month and if there is an absolute emergency - but then I know my productivity will be killed for at least 2 days. OTOH, my inspiration will be higher: I will have more creative ideas on how to combine stuff, but I will be too tired to do any of that. I will just take notes. With adequate sleep, I do not feel happier or sadder than anyone else. I feel more productive however. Sunday I had never done any python because I preferred perl, but for some specific task there was no option but a python library (well, it was also possible in another language I don't like either) So on Monday, I learned python, then asynchronous execution with asyncio, then parallelizing with joblib. Tuesday, I coded. Today I have a python3 daemon with error handling and other niceties ready to be deployed to test. It seems robust enough to require minimal oversight by systemd. In any case, it will be deployed on all POPs and in production on Friday - even if I must have a bad night. But that means I will not do much next day. But that means I will have other creative ideas!

kradeelav 8y ago
My schedule's similar to yours - designer echoing a need for a minimum of 9 hours, preferably 10, especially for any serious creative work. (Personally I also wonder if there's a link there, about needing increased hours for flexible creative thinking?) (Work wise, I currently balance 2 very demanding start-up-y jobs, and learned the hard way that even 8 hours doesn't cut the sheer amount of energy that's needed to handle fires that come from both of those places. Cutting out every inch of social or leisure life before sleep ironically gives me my best weeks ... and I know as an introvert that's probably easier for me than some, but good lord. Sleep's one of those things I don't compromise on anymore.)
- 1996 8y ago
  I need increased hours for thinking, but for some reasons my creativity peaks on the rare days I am sleep deprived!! It is weird, as I do not compromise on sleep either! I wonder if others feel their creativity improved on sleep deprived days? I have never read anything about that.

olivermarks 8y ago

Surely there is not enough sleep because you are buzzing after a great experience and/or anticipation of events tomorrow, and then there is anxiety and bad sleep patterns because of stress? Spending too long in bed due to feeling lethargic and not wanting to get up doesn't result in happiness. I am a big fan of 8 hours of good sleep a night, and definitely need it to be on top of things, and on some occasions to ward off depression and fuzzy thinking...

gxs 8y ago

Sleep is one of those things that you don't really notice when it gets better. You feel good, you feel more energetic, you feel all the benefits that are well known, but you don't notice. You only notice it when you go back to shitty sleep and realize how much better off you are when you are sleeping the appropriate number of hours. I've struggled with sleep for years. I won't go into my long journey but it suffices to say that after all the supplements, different cpap machines, "sleep hack", etc., the only thing that actually worked was discipline. Go to bed early, wake up early, same time, everyday.

Shank 8y ago

This is a really cool process, but the author stops just short of completing the analysis. > It's impossible to determine any correlation at all based on this graph. I know my happiness is influenced by a lot of factors, but so far I cannot tell if sleep is one of them. Yeah, this is true. You can't just look at a graph and say that the job is done. This is the entire point for the statistics field. You need to do an actual statistical test for correlation -- not just plot a graph. Obvious trends are definitely visible in graphs, but more subtle correlations are often obscured and not visible. I'd be much more interested to see what statistical analysis on the data looks like, rather than just a graph at the end. With a huge focus on methods, I'm flabbergasted that some form of regression wasn't tried at all. It's probably worth chopping out obvious problem areas, like relationship stress, though. (You could also just add categorical traits to the model, though, and let relationship stress act as a factor on happiness directly.) ---- A tangent: it's pretty well known that sleep deprivation can actually improve symptoms in people who are depressed -- especially at extremes. I don't know if this has anything to do with a large scale analysis like this, though.

1996 8y ago
It would still be fun to do a simple OLs multilinear regression. OP: start with a multiple regression, then do a PCA, to see which factors may have commonalities. If you don't know how, upload your data somewhere. Me or anyone else here could do that in 5 min. The conclusions would certainly be more interesting than the wall of text - even if it covers just 1 person, you have many datapoints!

vienno 8y ago

Very interesting project. Just a minor detail. > However, I have always recovered from those periods by catching up on sleep. This is actually a common misconception. In reality, it is not possible to "catch up" on missed sleeping hours. Source: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/you-cant-catch-sleep https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/you-cant-catch-sleep

daveFNbuck 8y ago
That mentions (without citation) one study about a very extreme and weird version of catching up on sleep. I doubt this person was talking about sleeping an extra 10 hours in one night to make up for 28 hours of missed sleep over 2 weeks.
- vienno 8y ago
  I can't seem to recall where I first read this, but I am confident I've read it in multiple articles and books (I have a keen interest in this topic due to serious personal sleep issues). But I seem to stand corrected[1]. Thanks for your comment. 1. http://time.com/5288704/can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/ http://time.com/5288704/can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/
meiraleal 8y ago
The reasonable conclusion is that the body knows how to catch up, you just need to get back to sleep normally. EDIT: otherwise everybody would be dead from the (negative) power of compound interest.
sevagh 8y ago
>This is actually a common misconception. In reality, it is not possible to "catch up" on missed sleeping hours. I find that the same sentiment is worded misleadingly in the book Why We Sleep. If you have a day of bad sleep (i.e. non-optimally consolidating the day's events), followed by a day of good sleep, it's not like your "health bar" is permanently lowered. You'll just never get to re-consolidate that lost day. So, today I read 20 pages of a book and sleep like crap - I "lose" the synthesis of those 20 pages in my memory/associative brain map/whatever. If I slept better, I'd remember way more from those 20 pages. What's lost forever by that poor sleep is the _opportunity_ to properly synthesize those 20 pages just on that one night. Not your "health", and you don't get a permanently increased level of cortisol. After a good night of sleep, you do physiologically recover and you're back to normal. Also, take everything in "Why We Sleep" with a grain of salt - sleep is hugely important and sleep deprivation sucks but he mentions several times in the book that "everybody sleeps badly once in a while, if it's not the norm then you're fine." Many times he's mentioning effects of chronic deprivation for long periods of time. And insomnia paranoia will probably make you sleep worse than if you stop worrying about t.

fencepost 8y ago

This kind of tracking (and the app) sound interesting, but seem to presuppose that you're sleeping alone. It's also kind of a shame that they don't have integration with Garmin (depending on device) and Fitbit - many of the devices from both of those companies track heartrate, movement and sleep without the need to leave your phone on the bed but there's not much integration there. It looks like Garmin has a lot of that raw data available to download, but it's per-day individual downloads of .fit files (https://forums.garmin.com/forum/into-sports/running/forerunner-920xt-aa/112758-is-there-a-fit-file-viewer-or-a-published-file-format https://forums.garmin.com/forum/into-sports/running/forerunn...) One thing worth noting for people considering one of the fitness trackers: Garmin's software doesn't recognize multiple sleep periods, so if you nap then go do something it either ignores one sleep period or just treats it as one long sleep period (with a big "awake" period in the middle). The vivosmart 3 at least does also track sleep phases.

brlewis 8y ago
https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/
CedarMadness 8y ago
There's a Garmin app that connects with Sleep as Android, although I haven't had good luck with it on my Fenix watch. https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/e80a4793-f5a3-44c7-bd7f-52a97f5d8310#0 https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/e80a4793-f5a3-44c7-bd7f-5...
- fencepost 8y ago
  Yes, they list a beta ConnectIQ (Garmin device app) app, but Garmin has some nice and more compact devices with heart rate as well (e.g. vivosmart 3) and those don't run apps.
Tharkun 8y ago
YMMV but my vivosmart 3 is useless at sleep tracking. I read in bed, and my heart rate goes down while i'm doing this and the thing invariably thinks i'm sleeping, messing up the stats.

nosleeptill 8y ago

I'm both an insomniac and I have delayed sleep syndrome. When my parents brought me home from the hospital I was only sleeping 2-3 hours a day. I was a planned baby, but with two teenagers, and parents who were nearing 40 having a baby that didn't sleep, almost destroyed the family, so I'm told. When I did sleep it was usually from 7am to 9am. If you have children let that sink in for a minute. My insomnia was awful from 14 to 19, I was operating with on average 3 or 4 days of no sleep, a couple of days of 2-3 hours of sleep a day, and back to 3 -4 days of no sleep, wash rinse repeat. I had lots of 6,7,8 days of no sleep and once went 10 days. For me, then, I was just awake, I didn't force anything, I was just not sleepy, and I couldn't force myself to sleep. During my junior and senor year of college I started smoking pot, and I started sleeping on a regular basis, going to bed about 1-1:30 and getting 6/7 hours of sleep. I'm not really sure if I was happier, or more productive, I was definitely more relaxed, it was probably the pot not the sleep. Of course once I graduated and started getting drug tested I needed to give up smoking pot. I hope soon my state will legalize and maybe I can find a strain that helps. I did a couple of sleep studies two which lasted 5 days and for one I went sleepless for the study, they said I never once displayed any indication that my body wanted to sleep during those 5 days. They wanted to study me but sitting in a room hooked up to machines for days on end was not my idea of fun, since I didn't sleep they wanted to know what was going on with me during my constant "up" times and they wanted to see if they could understand what triggered my sleep when it did happen. As I got into my 30's my insomnia became less of an issue, but the delayed sleep issue went back to when I was a baby, my body wanted to sleep from 7am until 9/10am, putting a real kink in my life. While I didn't technically have insomnia, I usually wasn't getting any sleep during the work week, luckily I was wired for not sleeping much so it wasn't a career killer, it was tough on my wife and children, and still is. As I got into my late 40's my delayed sleep time move to back to about 4am, and my sleeping needs have increased, I now usually get 3-4 hours of sleep a day. So far things have remained the same into my mid 50's. If I want to I can still go a few day without sleep, I've worked on big projects and it can be wonderful to just knock out 72 hours of work in 3 days. When I get "sleepy" it's more like my body suggesting that it would accommodate sleeping if I so choose, if I ignore the offer the opportunity passes and I'm just awake. From talking to others the feeling of sleep comes over them and they have no choice but to succumb As a side note I don't take drugs prescription or otherwise, nor do I drink

gascan 8y ago

On this subject, if you're interested in these kinds of studies on happiness- I've been slowly working my way through the book "The Nature Fix". Tangentially pertinent. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/nature-fix-brain-happy-florence-williams/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/nature-fix-brain...

andai 8y ago
I'm getting my nature fix right now. I found visiting the park once a day does wonders for my sense of well being.

king_nothing 8y ago

If one were purely nihilistic, sleep-deprivation compromises judgement, creativity, reaction-time, stress-resilience, adds to oxidative stress and reduced net productivity. It may seem like a good idea for anyone under 25, but it’s unsustainable... source: undergrad 3x all-nighters a week. Don’t do as I did, it might even cause neurological damage that can’t be assayed or quantified in vivo yet.

toss1 8y ago

Interesting project; not entirely surprising that sleep deficit increases possibility of low happiness, but doesn't force it. Definitely correlates with my happiness levels being much more all over the map in the last 6mths of running an involuntary sleep deficit due to a shoulder injury that impairs sleep (&worse the week after the surgery). I've also noticed a definite thinking deficit as this wears on, and am thinking of doing a tracking project. Rather than just going by subjective 'feel like I'm (not) thinking well', does anyone know of a good site that has a deep library of correlated mind test questions such that one could take repeated tests but not encounter repeat questions?

andai 8y ago
Working memory is a decent proxy for overall brain function, and straightforward to test, eg. with a Dual N-Back game like http://brainscale.net/dual-n-back http://brainscale.net/dual-n-back You need to have a baseline score to compare with. Your score will improve pretty quick in the beginning and then start to level out. I also like typing speed tests, to test the effects of exhaustion, sleep deprivation and various states of mind. (In some cases, the speed is actually increased, but typically at the cost of accuracy.) For typing speed I use https://typeracer.com https://typeracer.com which has some excellent book and movie quotes to type.
- toss1 8y ago
  cool, thanks! another one, w/ a somewhat different angle I'd found was a straight mental math trainer, discovered from another commenter here on HN: http://www.mental-math-trainer.com/ http://www.mental-math-trainer.com/

barking 8y ago

I'd be interested in people's views on the influence of sleep on aging. I've never been a great sleeper, possibly have sleep apnoea as well. 5 or 6 broken hours a night is normal for me and I feel that I am aging more quickly than average.

degenerate 8y ago
Sleep is when the brain 'repairs' itself, so you definitely need it. Do you snore? You may be waking up often due to lack of oxygen. I recommend you do a sleep study.
- barking 8y ago
  I should do that all right. I snore and I've been told that I basically stop breathing at times which is as unpleasant as the snoring for the person listening!
  - outworlder 8y ago
    > I snore and I've been told that I basically stop breathing at times which is as unpleasant as the snoring for the person listening Snoring is fine. Forget about the inconvenience it causes on others. It's when you STOP snoring that you should be concerned. I have sleep apnea and I know what it is like. Go get yourself checked ASAP. You do NOT want to suffer long term side effects of sleep apnea, and not all of them are reversible.

tpinto 8y ago

so THIS is what's been keeping you awake lately...

qop 8y ago

There is no reason to sleep more than 8-9.5hrs. If you are sleeping more than this, see a doctor and see what kind of hormones are not balanced. It's probably not as bad as undersleeping to oversleep, but it's not how your body is supposed to work.

tzar 8y ago
More than 8, or more than 9.5? Which is it?
- qop 8y ago
  It's a range depending on other aspects. Or do you think the human body ticks down 480 minutes exactly?

anotheryou 8y ago

the graph reads to me like usually it doesn't matter at all, but sometimes slight sleep deprevation makes a bad day worse. those few than are the overall worst days

vesak 8y ago

When I wrote Mastering Rust, I did most of the work during the only available productive hours of the day: 20-05. Amazing legal narcotics i.e. coffee helped quite a lot. I wasn't miserable, but that's mostly due to the excitement of progressing.

chrisco255 8y ago
Why is late night programming / writing so darn productive? No distractions?
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  that's my experience for sure. it's not that we're night owls, but that we need coherent blocks of focus-compatible time, so when the rest of the world sleeps is one heuristic.
- crawftv 8y ago
  In my experience, I think the momentum/flow and thrill helps. Also hacking turns into late-night-hacking as I try to dig myself out of hole. So it ends up being productive by trying to finish something before bed.
- vesak 8y ago
  Well, I have theories. One, it breaks habits. You may have teached yourself over the years to procrastinate during the day, but not during the night. Two, you know it's painful enough that you'd rather not waste the time doing something stupid and worthless. Three, it lowers your mental state enough that you'll just drudge on like a robot.
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    For me its about anxiety, and that ability to drudge on. Certain parts of my brain fatigue and completely turn off. After an all-nighter my emotional resilience is off the charts the next day. I think a little slower, but so much more calmly, and logically. At my startup my co-founders actually requested I pull all-nighters before pitching VC's because the effect was so profound. Public speaking is so easy when you stop caring and treat everything like an item on a checklist instead of a potential catastrophe.

agumonkey 8y ago

Anybody using a physical approach ? that a person is a pendulum and keeping rhythms in check is the best way to save energy and avoir wear ?

slfnflctd 8y ago

Am I the only one who felt like that was a lot of charts, data and extrapolation for a sample size of 1? In my study I did on myself, I found it easier to fall asleep after drinking heavily and consuming large amounts of greasy food. [My usual anecdote here is actually that I appear to sleep better & more when I get a lot of exercise.] My point is, there is tremendous variation in 'natural' sleep patterns - and related behaviors - across the population. I need a larger study if I'm going to digest this much information.

Timpy 8y ago
Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but I don't think this was supposed to be a persuasive argument as to why everyone should change their sleep habits to match the author's. I read it as an interesting exploration of some data collected one person collected on their every day life.
OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
And only one day's worth of data too: "...recorded nearly 1.000 days of sleep..."

graeme 8y ago

Anecdotally I've noticed I'm much less productive when I sleep too little. I try to get eight hours. But, I've been having trouble sleeping in recently. I want to sleep more, but can't. I'm not sure what causes it - I used to have the problem of staying up late then sleeping till 11-12ish naturally. (I never use an alarm) I have two observations: 1. A couple months ago I started going to my balcony for morning sunlight upon waking. I had read morning light resets sleep cycles 2. I notice I need to pee when I wake up, and have trouble falling asleep again after. It's summer in Canada, so some light gets in around 5 am or so I'm wondering if I reset my cycle, and now I "wake up" if there's morning light present, whereas I didn't before. Anyone have this experience? I never had trouble sleeping in before, so this confuses me.

Damogran6 8y ago
Waking up having to pee it often an indicator of other issues. For me, it's my allergy medication not working, leading to sinus inflammaion, leading to snoring, leading to waking up thinking I need to pee.
agumonkey 8y ago
i had troubles falling asleep which caused more time online, delaying the issue and making it worse I tried eating lighter, a bit earlier and jumping into bed at 10pm cutting everything so I would slip slowly but surely. I had positive results for a while but I'm back to unregular sleep schedule. Also tried the no-blue-light thing but didn't feel improvements.
curun1r 8y ago
I can't speak for you, but I know that for me, inability to sleep is always the product of some unresolved worry or other preoccupation. Dealing with that (in my case, that means spending time meditating) solves the problem of waking up feeling unrested. However that doesn't necessarily mean sleeping more, since I find that during periods of consistent meditation I generally need a couple hours less sleep to feel fully rested. YMMV, but ask yourself whether there's anything that might be preoccupying your subconscious that might be triggering your sleep issues.

rb808 8y ago

> I fall asleep quite easily. It usually doesn't take me more than 30 minutes. I generally fall asleep within a minute or two of head hitting the pillow. What should be normal?

tartuffe78 8y ago
I do the same, but I've been told that falling asleep that fast is a sign of exhaustion.
DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
I envy people like you. Through a lot of my teen years, it could take me up to an hour to fall asleep. Once I got to college and I was able to adjust my sleep schedule a bit (no longer had to be at school by 7:30am), I could do it in 30 minutes. Now (mid-20s) I can do it in as little as 10-15 sometimes, if I'm lucky. More often I think it's 15-20. I dunno what it is exactly. I feel like my brain just constantly wants to be thinking about things, like solving problems from my day or imagining fanciful scenarios or planning upcoming events. What do you think about when you lie down? Or are you able to just switch it off and not think about anything?
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I used to have very serious sleep issues. They are vastly better. A few thoughts: In order to readily get to sleep, you need to be both physically and mentally tired. This is part of why reading in bed or doing crossword puzzles is so popular -- it helps make you mentally tired. If you have any kind of health issues, working on that will improve sleep issues. A food and health journal can be an enormously useful tool for teasing out details peculiar to you. Exercise moves lymph. If you have been sedentary a long time, it would be wise to ramp up gradually. There can be a lot of fallout if you suddenly start working out hard. If you allergies or respiratory problems, switching to hypoallergenic bedding products, like buckwheat pillows, all cotton sheets, etc can make a big difference for some people. It can also help to generally keep you sleep area very clean, dust free etc. Co Q 10 in the morning about 12 to 14 hours before you want to sleep at night can help your circadian clock. It wakes you up and encourages the body to produce melatonin about 12vto 14 later. Most sources say 12 hours, but my firsthand experience suggests 12 to 14 hours.

tenpaiyomi 8y ago

Interesting read. I suffer from psychosomatic insomnia so am no stranger to that constant fatigue and drag of lack of sleep. One thing I have noted is that, on the days that I actually do get a considerable amount of sleep and feel rested, I am overall happier, more motivated, and just in a better mood overall. Likewise, on the really rough days where I don't get much to no sleep, I'm irritable and all but useless at work and around the house. I've come to manage these days over the years, but I do note that things still bubble up and I am easily agitated. Interestingly enough, medicine to help me sleep does not result in a better mood, only that natural sleep.

kentosi 8y ago

I like sleeping on time and waking up early(ish). I'm slowly shifting from a night-owl into a morning person in my 30s. I love the productivity I feel and knowing that I can do a bunch of things in the morning before work, then get home in the evening and relax. But my problem is that that I'm a single guy who needs to date and have a social life. And try as I might, all such social constructs require you to stay out late and drink a little. All of which eventually chips into the sleep, and hence how productive you are the next day. It's really annoying having to force myself to be social at the cost of only being, say, 70% as productive the next day. Is anyone else facing this conundrum, or can impart any hints?

ColanR 8y ago
early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise... early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and socially dead. -- Ben Franklin, who had similar difficulties.
- schuke 8y ago
  How can a socially dead guy be healthy and wealthy though?
  - krageon 8y ago
    Even though I can't imagine this is a serious question: If you apply yourself at work and cook your own (varied!) meals, you will be (moderately) wealthy and (moderately) healthy. I did not mention any social time here, which makes this hypothetical person socially dead.
  - slaunchwise 8y ago
    A really good job with the postal service
- rimliu 8y ago
  Early to bed, early to rise: a lark. Late to bed, late to rise: an owl. Late to bed, early to rise: an angry bird.

jumpinalake 8y ago

Those of you who are getting lots of sleep and also consume caffeine during the day you probably don’t realize that if you cut caffeine you would require much less sleep. Try it sometime for at least a month.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
> Try it sometime for at least a month. I choose life.

onemoresoop 8y ago

I noticed that when I rush the waking up process I get more energy I have happier mood throughout the day. The more quick the transition from waking up to being caught up in an activity(and that could even be the commute) the more energy I have throughout the day. Any lingering in bed affects the whole day negatively. Does anybody else experience this?

JackMinello 8y ago
Yes, if I wake up too early it's better form to start the day than staying in bed another hour

yani 8y ago

Many factors influence our mood. Yes, sleep is one of them. So is our diet, social life, work life. The key is to try and balance everything.

TimJRobinson 8y ago

Tangentially related: I'm looking for an app that will ask me how happy / tired / productive I'm feeling randomly throughout the day, and allow me to export this data, so that I can correlate this with my sleep and diet.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mansilladev 8y ago

Averaging about 4.5h of sleep per night (down at around 2A up at 6:30A without fail — #noSnooze). I’m in my 40s, and was the kid that l watched David Letterman at 1AM in junior high, and an avid coffee drinker by early high school. Every time I read an article/study on sleep I get inspired to tack on a few hours to reap said benefits, but never follow through. Based on what I’ve read, I’m writing waking hour checks that science says I can’t cash. And apparently, after this study, will do so unhappily.

Philomath 8y ago

To me what really matters is not how many hours of sleep I get but how difficult it is for me to wake up. I've found that there is a direct relation between this and my happiness. In periods where I am very productive, I have a reason to wake up, I know what I want and need to do. Then I'm very happy, life has a purpose. It doesn't matter how many hours I sleep. In the other hand, when I amb lost and don't know what I should be doing that day, I have a very hard time waking up.

phito 8y ago
Makes sense, if you wake up properly, it's easier to get productivity momentum going

ChristianGeek 8y ago

TLDR: Author has no idea if there’s a correlation based on personal data.

palerdot 8y ago

Tangential and shameless plug: I created my own offline app[1] for a very simplistic tracking of my sleep habits. It helped me to be more disciplined in getting the right amount of sleep (atleast for most of the days). Any feedbacks on this is appreciated. [1] - https://sleepeasyapp.com https://sleepeasyapp.com

techbio 8y ago

Stopped reading after I saw the chart drew lines to extrapolate from extremes relatively close to the mean hours of sleep, and accounted not for such things as degrees of standard deviation, rather (mis)leading to the conclusion that these happiness results were dependent entirely on the one measured variable and not that other factors would contribute to outliers. Your anecdotal evidence, and analysis, are flawed, though I lack the terminology to adequately improve them. Will someone please translate my hunch to appropriate statistical tools? I would like to replicate this data collection in my own life and learn something of value from it. My comment may find itself below a vast wall of anecdotal text, however, I’m hopeful, HN.

doomjunky 8y ago
"Anecdotal evidence" is now part of my vocabulary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

jxy 8y ago

If my own anecdotal experience says anything, I can easily slash two to three hours of sleep, when I run four to five miles in the morning. During snowy winter weeks I am mostly sedentary, I need eight to nine hours to feel refreshed, and I need coffee to stay awake after lunch. When weather is good and I run four to five miles in the morning everyday, I only need to sleep from midnight to 6 AM. I wake up at that time automatically without alarm. I feel 40 minutes of running can equal two hours of extra sleep. Perhaps running increases blood flow and also helps clean up trashes in the brain, as what people claim sleeping does to your brain. And yes, I feel so happy after running.

inanutshellus 8y ago
Note that "During snowy winter weeks" it's also the darkest part of the year, which also has a known correlation to (un)happiness. So it may be "just" the light or it could be both your lifestyle change and the lack of light siphoning happiness.

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Tom_2 8y ago

So, I slept great the first 25 years of my life, but I've had a ton of sleep problems as a start-up founder over the years. They developed over 10+ years building a $200MM plus company from the ground up. I was traveling all over the world, in different time zones and working 7 days a week. I would recommend treating sleep really seriously and not 'breaking' your ability to sleep. I have learned ways to get some sleep again, but basically haven't been able to 'fix these issues' for the past 15 years. I have learned to manage the sleeplessness - and am finally back up to 7 hours or so a night on average most weeks (8 is my sweet spot). During this entire time I thought I was healthy, but sleep and lack thereof concerns me. I have read a ton on the subject, tried everything (CBT / Behavioral therapy, Hypnosis, Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Sleeping pills, Herbal remedies, etc). Haven't tried Cannibis. I am currently working with 4 leading sleep researchers with decades each in helping people sleep. We're building a personal 'sleep assistant' to use modified CBT program in an automated fashion. We are in second trial this summer. First trial showed 45 minute average sleep improvement (in people sleeping < 7 hours a night to start). Most people do better with 7-8 hours / night even if they think they don't need it. I need it, but need help 'calming down' my mind enough to get it. If you're interested in taking part in any alpha studies (after this current research round of 200 people) or learning more or getting on mailing list, email me at tom.talytica@gmail.com. Having two daughters was rough on my sleep, but we also did co-sleeping (Asian wife who breastfed).