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I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep"

by b_b 8y ago

I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or less to get some work or studying done and to get more hours in the day. Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. If you are curious about some common causes of ailments or what the function that consumes pretty much 1/3 of your lifetime does, I'd absolutely whole-heartedly recommend this book.

craigcannon 8y ago
Walker also covered many of the ideas in the book on Joe Rogan's podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
westoncb 8y ago
> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be called a 'hard fact'. I tend to depend more on the force of overall coherence in an argument, as well as its fidelity with my own experiences. Of course this is a problematic heuristic in its own right, since it by definition limits your ability to believe counter-intuitive but true results—but I'm not sure what's better. I think with enough reproductions of results in varied contexts, unintentional reappearance of results in overlapping or unrelated studies, applications being developed on top of results (treatments, engineering applications, other fields of study)—then you can start considering the result to be 'factual'. But from the above description, the impression I get of the book is that it's probably one of these taking a bunch of new studies which can be read a certain way to push a hypothesis the author is in favor of, but it'll take a decade or more before we have a good sense of whether the whole thing was BS (or at least badly exaggerated) or not.
- psyklic 8y ago
  I prefer references so I have more information available to assess the validity myself. If an author makes assertions without evidence to back them up, then they are much less credible. Having many recent studies available to back up a hypothesis at least informs us that it is credible, given our knowledge at the time.
  - westoncb 8y ago
    Sure, all things being equal, it's better to have the references than not. That said, as a practical matter, if the author cites 100 papers, and each paper takes half an hour to judge the reliability of it (assuming you have good command of statistics and scientific methodology, and some domain knowledge, and access the the required journals), we're talking on the order of 50 hours to validate the argument (of course this is a crazy rough estimate)—who is going to do that? You may as well just take the list of papers, try and validate them, and skip reading the book (and this is largely ignoring the fact that most likely your ability to validate is probably not that great in the first place). Instead, for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument. Not sure what the solution is aside from waiting longer, then coming with maybe a handful of extremely reliable authoritative results that the reader can reasonably verify on their own. I'm not sure. I just know reading a book grounded in 'hard facts' because a study is cited on every page is not at all appealing to me.
    - retsibsi 8y ago
      There is a middle ground: spend a few hours verifying a small sample of the citations. This still takes more time, effort, and ability than most readers will have to spare, but it is feasible and would be enough to expose the worst offenders. Of course it can't guarantee that every study cited in the book is reliable, but it can give you a sense of how accurately the author characterises the studies and how carefully (s)he has chosen them. And if you choose your sample carefully, you can directly verify the claims that you care most about. (Even better if this is done collaboratively, for a larger sample and less time spent per person.) > for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument Agreed, but an author's authority can still be undermined or reinforced by expert opinion. In an ideal world where book reviews were written by qualified, careful people with time to do a thorough job, the existence of citations would be extremely important, even if hardly any ordinary readers looked at them. Obviously we don't live in that world, but sloppy scholarship is often exposed eventually.
fossuser 8y ago
I've seen this recommended a lot and I heard him on NPR. His comment of not being able to recover from sleep deficit because you don't sleep 16 hours the night following a night with less than 8 hours of sleep made me wary of everything else he might have to say. That seems like an obviously wrong assumption to make and suggests that there's limited understanding of the underlying system.
pdn 8y ago
I actually read this book after seeing a glowing recommendation here, probably from you TBH. And I must say I was disappointed. Most self-help and business books have the same structure: 1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem. 2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem. 3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution. 4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effectiveness of the author's solution. I read about 25% of Why We Sleep and skimmed the rest, it's all just the first step. I think sleeping is a lot like exercising: Most people agree that they need to do more of it. The problem is that we don't actually do it. So, the most important book on sleeping should be about teaching you how to sleep better and longer, which tend to include: 1. Make sure your bedroom is only for sleeping (and related), not "watching TV room" or "internet browsing before sleeping room". 2. Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Not even one single LED light. 3. If you actually wonder whether you need a short afternoon nap, yes you do. 4. Track your sleep with a device. Remember, the point is to sleep better, not just longer. You can sleep for 8 hours but the tracking will show that you may turn a lot while sleeping resulting in very short REM sleeps. 5. Collect and analyze the tracking data. Everyone is different. Thanks to tracking, I know that I always sleep better if I do some light walking or running prior in the evening.
- nemetroid 8y ago
  Thanks for your thoughts on the book. They actually make me quite a bit more interested in reading it.
Kiro 8y ago
I sleep 4 hours a night and feel great after I started doing that instead of my normal 7. Never tired when waking up anymore. Should I be worried?
- n4r9 8y ago
  I don't think it's a cause for concern but I would look at seeing if there's a way to feel refreshed with a longer sleep. It might just be that your natural sleep cycle is almost exactly two hours long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle). Therefore at four hours you have completed a cycle, whereas at seven hours you are halfway through one. Perhaps try eight hours and see what happens? Out of curiosity do you use an alarm to wake yourself up, and did you before? I'd be quite surprised if someone could sustain four hours sleep a night without an alarm. I've often heard that if you need an alarm to wake up then you're not sleeping sufficiently.

by b_b 8y ago

craigcannon 8y ago

Walker also covered many of the ideas in the book on Joe Rogan's podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

westoncb 8y ago

> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be called a 'hard fact'. I tend to depend more on the force of overall coherence in an argument, as well as its fidelity with my own experiences. Of course this is a problematic heuristic in its own right, since it by definition limits your ability to believe counter-intuitive but true results—but I'm not sure what's better. I think with enough reproductions of results in varied contexts, unintentional reappearance of results in overlapping or unrelated studies, applications being developed on top of results (treatments, engineering applications, other fields of study)—then you can start considering the result to be 'factual'. But from the above description, the impression I get of the book is that it's probably one of these taking a bunch of new studies which can be read a certain way to push a hypothesis the author is in favor of, but it'll take a decade or more before we have a good sense of whether the whole thing was BS (or at least badly exaggerated) or not.

psyklic 8y ago
I prefer references so I have more information available to assess the validity myself. If an author makes assertions without evidence to back them up, then they are much less credible. Having many recent studies available to back up a hypothesis at least informs us that it is credible, given our knowledge at the time.
- westoncb 8y ago
  Sure, all things being equal, it's better to have the references than not. That said, as a practical matter, if the author cites 100 papers, and each paper takes half an hour to judge the reliability of it (assuming you have good command of statistics and scientific methodology, and some domain knowledge, and access the the required journals), we're talking on the order of 50 hours to validate the argument (of course this is a crazy rough estimate)—who is going to do that? You may as well just take the list of papers, try and validate them, and skip reading the book (and this is largely ignoring the fact that most likely your ability to validate is probably not that great in the first place). Instead, for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument. Not sure what the solution is aside from waiting longer, then coming with maybe a handful of extremely reliable authoritative results that the reader can reasonably verify on their own. I'm not sure. I just know reading a book grounded in 'hard facts' because a study is cited on every page is not at all appealing to me.
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    There is a middle ground: spend a few hours verifying a small sample of the citations. This still takes more time, effort, and ability than most readers will have to spare, but it is feasible and would be enough to expose the worst offenders. Of course it can't guarantee that every study cited in the book is reliable, but it can give you a sense of how accurately the author characterises the studies and how carefully (s)he has chosen them. And if you choose your sample carefully, you can directly verify the claims that you care most about. (Even better if this is done collaboratively, for a larger sample and less time spent per person.) > for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument Agreed, but an author's authority can still be undermined or reinforced by expert opinion. In an ideal world where book reviews were written by qualified, careful people with time to do a thorough job, the existence of citations would be extremely important, even if hardly any ordinary readers looked at them. Obviously we don't live in that world, but sloppy scholarship is often exposed eventually.

fossuser 8y ago

I've seen this recommended a lot and I heard him on NPR. His comment of not being able to recover from sleep deficit because you don't sleep 16 hours the night following a night with less than 8 hours of sleep made me wary of everything else he might have to say. That seems like an obviously wrong assumption to make and suggests that there's limited understanding of the underlying system.

pdn 8y ago

I actually read this book after seeing a glowing recommendation here, probably from you TBH. And I must say I was disappointed. Most self-help and business books have the same structure: 1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem. 2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem. 3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution. 4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effectiveness of the author's solution. I read about 25% of Why We Sleep and skimmed the rest, it's all just the first step. I think sleeping is a lot like exercising: Most people agree that they need to do more of it. The problem is that we don't actually do it. So, the most important book on sleeping should be about teaching you how to sleep better and longer, which tend to include: 1. Make sure your bedroom is only for sleeping (and related), not "watching TV room" or "internet browsing before sleeping room". 2. Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Not even one single LED light. 3. If you actually wonder whether you need a short afternoon nap, yes you do. 4. Track your sleep with a device. Remember, the point is to sleep better, not just longer. You can sleep for 8 hours but the tracking will show that you may turn a lot while sleeping resulting in very short REM sleeps. 5. Collect and analyze the tracking data. Everyone is different. Thanks to tracking, I know that I always sleep better if I do some light walking or running prior in the evening.

nemetroid 8y ago
Thanks for your thoughts on the book. They actually make me quite a bit more interested in reading it.

Kiro 8y ago

I sleep 4 hours a night and feel great after I started doing that instead of my normal 7. Never tired when waking up anymore. Should I be worried?

n4r9 8y ago
I don't think it's a cause for concern but I would look at seeing if there's a way to feel refreshed with a longer sleep. It might just be that your natural sleep cycle is almost exactly two hours long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle). Therefore at four hours you have completed a cycle, whereas at seven hours you are halfway through one. Perhaps try eight hours and see what happens? Out of curiosity do you use an alarm to wake yourself up, and did you before? I'd be quite surprised if someone could sustain four hours sleep a night without an alarm. I've often heard that if you need an alarm to wake up then you're not sleeping sufficiently.