5 ms·

In general, most people (in the United States, the country I live in) need more sleep than they are getting. One way this is put to the test is by letting peopl

In general, most people (in the United States, the country I live in) need more sleep than they are getting. One way this is put to the test is by letting people relax in a comfortable reclining chair in a quiet, dark room during daylight working hours. Many people fall asleep in this condition, signaling that they are sleep-deprived, even if they have no regular habit of taking a nap in the daytime. I have lived in a country (Taiwan) where a siesta, a mid-day nap, is quite a regular practice. The first time I lived there (1982-1985), I was only unlearning my American habit of sleeping only at night near the end of my stay. The second time I lived there (1998-2001), I was better able to adapt to napping in the middle of the day like my co-workers, perhaps because I had become a care-giving parent of young children in the meanwhile. As the submitted blog post mentions, there is a research basis for thinking that symptoms of what is characterized as "lack of executive function" or "ADD" can be relieved just by getting sufficient sleep. It appears that one of the roles of sleep is letting the brain have opportunity to restructure based on new experiences while awake, so sleep seems to aid learning, planning, and attention control. I had a friend back in my college days who was a very hard-working research scientist trying to find a cure for diabetes. Her claim, which she read somewhere back in the 1970s, was that an hour of sleep before midnight is just about as beneficial as two hours of sleep after midnight. It does seem to me that I wake up especially rested on the rare occasions when I am fully asleep for the night before 11:00pm. As my own lifestyle changes over the next decade (= as my children grow up and live on their own), I will be eager to try the experiment of better matching my hours of sleep with the actual hours of darkness in my time zone. AFTER EDIT: The top level comment by rayiner mentions allergies and writes I jack up a humidifier and I agree with his statement that it is worthwhile to figure out what helps sleep be deeper and less disturbed, including breathing without obstruction during sleep. Depending on what a person is allergic to, DE-humidifying may be the way to go. Dust mite allergies, for example, will be worse for a person who lives in a humid room. Good luck to all in your experiments.

btilly 14y ago
I wonder how much symptoms of what is characterized as "lack of executive function" or "ADD" can be relieved just by getting sufficient sleep. If you're a person who reads the description of ADD and says that it sounds like you, maybe a lot. If you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away.
- criley 14y ago
  >If you're a person who reads the description of ADD and says that it sounds like you, maybe a lot. I feel this unfairly divides ADD between "people who think they have" and "people who have" but in my experience this is a horrible line to draw. Many doctors will listen for a stock phrase and hand out a one page questionnaire and diagnose you with adult on-set ADD on the spot. Bam, then you "have" it, doctor verified and everything. And yet, that person who "has" it may be no different than the one who read what is basically the same questionnaire online.
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    Yes, there are bad doctors, and there are cursory or improper diagnoses, but that does not make the valid diagnoses any less valid, or the invalid diagnoses any more valid. All doctors, from radiologists to orthopedic surgeons, are told not to self-diagnose, and psychiatric conditions are the easiest to improperly self-diagnose, even for trained professionals (which most people on HN are not). On top of that, ADHD is one of the most difficult conditions to properly diagnose. Unlike more overt disorders, like schizophrenia, the symptoms are less clear-cut, and unlike more visible disorders, like (true) OCD[0], the symptoms usually lie two or three layers deep, making it easy to confuse the cause of the symptoms if you're not careful. There exist differential diagnoses for this purpose (disambiguating the cause of the symptoms); most people just don't have them done, because they're incredibly expensive (several thousands of dollars), as they're very time-intensive on the part of the doctor. That said, the entire claim which precipitated this discussion - that ADHD is somehow related to sleep deprivation - is completely preposterous. ADHD is perhaps inappropriately named, yes, but that suggestion is like saying that the cure to depression is to "stop being sad". [0] I say "true" to distinguish clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder from the casual use of the term (eg, "oh man, my OCD kicked in when I saw Comic Sans mixed with Papyrus").
    - randallsquared 14y ago
      > Yes, there are bad doctors, and there are cursory or improper diagnoses, but that does not make the valid diagnoses any less valid, or the invalid diagnoses any more valid. It calls into question, somewhat, whether there actually are any valid diagnoses, if a disease is well-known to be very commonly diagnosed improperly.
greggman 14y ago
> One way this is put to the test is by letting people relax in a comfortable reclining chair in a quiet, dark room during daylight working hours. Many people fall asleep in this condition, signaling that they are sleep-deprived, even if they have no regular habit of taking a nap in the daytime. That is not a valid way to test that people are sleep deprived. Most people will fall asleep with plenty of sleep. Put them in a warm room with little noise and nothing to keep their attention and they'll fall right asleep no matter how much sleep they've previously had.
- philip1209 14y ago
  Indeed - isn't this essentially a nap?
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  I know someone who is an extreme example of this. My wife will go to bed at 11 on a Friday night, wake up around 8, go out to the living room, then fall right back to sleep. I thought it might be that I was snoring but she claims she is sleeping through the whole night. On top of that, she's not a particularly long sleeper in the week (7.5 or so hours). I don't get it to be honest. In any case, just want to reaffirm that the test proposed in the top comment is way off target.

btilly 14y ago

I wonder how much symptoms of what is characterized as "lack of executive function" or "ADD" can be relieved just by getting sufficient sleep. If you're a person who reads the description of ADD and says that it sounds like you, maybe a lot. If you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away.

criley 14y ago
>If you're a person who reads the description of ADD and says that it sounds like you, maybe a lot. I feel this unfairly divides ADD between "people who think they have" and "people who have" but in my experience this is a horrible line to draw. Many doctors will listen for a stock phrase and hand out a one page questionnaire and diagnose you with adult on-set ADD on the spot. Bam, then you "have" it, doctor verified and everything. And yet, that person who "has" it may be no different than the one who read what is basically the same questionnaire online.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Yes, there are bad doctors, and there are cursory or improper diagnoses, but that does not make the valid diagnoses any less valid, or the invalid diagnoses any more valid. All doctors, from radiologists to orthopedic surgeons, are told not to self-diagnose, and psychiatric conditions are the easiest to improperly self-diagnose, even for trained professionals (which most people on HN are not). On top of that, ADHD is one of the most difficult conditions to properly diagnose. Unlike more overt disorders, like schizophrenia, the symptoms are less clear-cut, and unlike more visible disorders, like (true) OCD[0], the symptoms usually lie two or three layers deep, making it easy to confuse the cause of the symptoms if you're not careful. There exist differential diagnoses for this purpose (disambiguating the cause of the symptoms); most people just don't have them done, because they're incredibly expensive (several thousands of dollars), as they're very time-intensive on the part of the doctor. That said, the entire claim which precipitated this discussion - that ADHD is somehow related to sleep deprivation - is completely preposterous. ADHD is perhaps inappropriately named, yes, but that suggestion is like saying that the cure to depression is to "stop being sad". [0] I say "true" to distinguish clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder from the casual use of the term (eg, "oh man, my OCD kicked in when I saw Comic Sans mixed with Papyrus").
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    > Yes, there are bad doctors, and there are cursory or improper diagnoses, but that does not make the valid diagnoses any less valid, or the invalid diagnoses any more valid. It calls into question, somewhat, whether there actually are any valid diagnoses, if a disease is well-known to be very commonly diagnosed improperly.

greggman 14y ago

> One way this is put to the test is by letting people relax in a comfortable reclining chair in a quiet, dark room during daylight working hours. Many people fall asleep in this condition, signaling that they are sleep-deprived, even if they have no regular habit of taking a nap in the daytime. That is not a valid way to test that people are sleep deprived. Most people will fall asleep with plenty of sleep. Put them in a warm room with little noise and nothing to keep their attention and they'll fall right asleep no matter how much sleep they've previously had.

philip1209 14y ago
Indeed - isn't this essentially a nap?
jamesaguilar 14y ago
I know someone who is an extreme example of this. My wife will go to bed at 11 on a Friday night, wake up around 8, go out to the living room, then fall right back to sleep. I thought it might be that I was snoring but she claims she is sleeping through the whole night. On top of that, she's not a particularly long sleeper in the week (7.5 or so hours). I don't get it to be honest. In any case, just want to reaffirm that the test proposed in the top comment is way off target.