I've read a lot about sleep over the years (and wrote a bit [2]), but I just finished reading the book mentioned in the article ("Why We Sleep" [1]) and found it fascinating.
The author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
If read only one book this year, let me strongly recommend you consider this one.
ps: if you prefer audio, the narrated version from Audible is also very good. There are just a few non-essential graphs, that you can download from their side in PDF.
Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, was on the Joe Rogan Experience recently.
I've been in material cognitive decline over the past year or so and I'm nearly certain it's due to my abhorrent sleep patterns. This episode really helped me prioritize a fix over other things that would normally result in a night of 3-5 hrs in bed or on the floor (who knows how much actual sleep).
that was the last podcast I listened to, and it was so informative. As I've grown older I've definitely been prioritising my sleep more. While in school I was getting maybe 6h on average for 4y, but now I aim for 8 or 9h of sleep.
Looks really interesting; I've just started listening to the audiobook.
Also, while I obviously haven't listened to this audiobook yet, it's read by Steve West, and I have listened to him narrate audiobooks before. He's great; very easy to listen to in my experience. Obviously tastes can vary (e.g. he has an English accent, which I'm sure some people won't like).
>Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this: We know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night — take away eight hours — and then in the subsequent night I give you all of the sleep that you want, however much you wish to consume, you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment, as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep that you've been lumbering it with during the week in terms of a debt.
What does "never" here means though? Obviously you could get back to your normal self after a few days of sleeping well, no?
This seems to contradict recent study that I came across [1]:
The mortality rate among participants with short sleep during weekdays, but long sleep during weekends, did not differ from the rate of the reference group. Among individuals ≥65 years old, no association between weekend sleep or weekday/weekend sleep durations and mortality was observed. In conclusion, short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased mortality in subjects <65 years. In the same age group, short sleep (or long sleep) on both weekdays and weekend showed increased mortality. Possibly, long week- end sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep.
It may be important to distinguish between (A) long-term mortality versus (B) impaired cognition and mood on a daily basis.
To use an analogy, you might be able to maintain a car so that its lifetime mileage isn't reduced, but that doesn't mean that it can't suffer in terms of handling, speed, comfort, etc.
I'm someone who often gets insufficient sleep during the week and, anecdotally, sleeping 12 - 16 hours on Friday and Saturday night seems to rejuvenate me. I've always felt like I could pay off sleep debt if I really get a lot of sleep on the weekends in proportion to how much I lost during the week.
Yeah this quote sounds like something that someone would say when they don’t actually understand the underlying system.
It doesn’t follow that if you miss eight hours of sleep you’d need 16 to catch up - maybe some processes take a standard amount of time and don’t need to be repeated, it might be more efficient when you’re already asleep to fix things in an extra two hours than an entire extra eight.
Something is fishy with the quote’s assumptions. It strikes me as something probably untrue that we’d understand with more information about what sleep is actually doing.
I'm glad other people are talking about this, because this part of the article really irritated me as well.
Building off what you said:
>It doesn’t follow that if you miss eight hours of sleep you’d need 16 to catch up
It might also be that if you miss eight hours, you can never catch up 100%, you can never fully pay off the lost sleep. It would still stand to reason that you'll be better off with X amount of "catch-up" hours, such as the extra 2 a night you were suggesting, following lost sleep than if you didn't have any catch-up hours.
So knocking down the straw man of "you can't fully repay your sleep balance" seems to be an equivocation that's just wasting everyone's time. I don't know that people necessarily think that exact thing. It's still probably better to sleep more after going without it, even if you don't literally gain 100% of the benefits back, and that's probably what most people mean.
What is meant is that there are long term health consequences of sleep deprivation and you can’t cancel those effects by oversleeping the next couple days after an all nighter.
I'm not a sleep scientist but it sounds pretty logical to me. If I'm chopping vegetables for dinner and I cut myself with the knife, it takes time to heal. But chances are it's never going to be completely healed. There will be a scar. If I cut myself with a knife then for the next few days I don't cut myself with a knife, the wound will heal but the scar will remain. I can't cut myself one day and then go several days without cutting myself and expect that it somehow cancels out the day I got cut, and I certainly can't say "eh I'll only cut myself on the weekdays and make up for it by not getting cut on the weekends". I'll still have that scar.
Brain injuries are too often discounted because you can't see them. If someone was purposefully cutting themselves with a knife we wouldn't think they were cool, we wouldn't celebrate them as heroes in our society, we would try to help them stop injuring themselves. So why do we celebrate people who actively injure their brains? Because we can't see the damage.
We actually do celebrate athletes' physical sacrifices. Think marathon runners pushing across the finish line, or a running back selling out for the touchdown. It's probably something wired into us as human beings. Just a side note. Your analogy is on point and helpful.
> We actually do celebrate athletes' physical sacrifices.
I'm not certain that's quite accurate. It seems that what's celebrated are their accomplishments and "sacrifices" in the sense of effort and self-denial, but not injuries.
The sentiment around brain injuries that professional boxers (and, more recently, American Football players) suffer from isn't what I would characterize as celebratory, for example.
Even temporary injuries can be met with disdain by fans of team sports, as it could take the whole team out of the running for that entire season.
However, I'm far from intimately familiar with athletics, so I'd genuinely welcome being shown counter-examples.
That concussion sentiment is very, very recent. Hard hits in football and boxing were absolutely celebrated as a show of dominance. They still are, just with obligatory lip service paid to hoping the player is ok.
I don't think disdain is the right word. Disappointment can certainly come into play, but look at any serious injury on the court or the field. What happens when the player is able to limp off, or is even carried off? Applause, sometimes a standing ovation, for the player's physical sacrifice.
I believe this is tied into the same primal urges that make us love a compelling war movie (we used to celebrate war much more than we now do as well), or want to work 16 hour days for the chance at striking it rich.
If we're talking about "celebrating", lip service is all I can think of that fits the bill. People enjoying it in the privacy of their own thoughts isn't the same thing.
> look at any serious injury on the court or the field.
That's why I was asking for counter-example. I don't have this experience. I was hoping for, possibly, media coverage or maybe fan blog posts or videos.
> Applause, sometimes a standing ovation, for the player's physical sacrifice.
If I were to witness this from afar, I would have no idea what the applause is for, so, again, I'm looking for that evidence. A more charitable interpretation would be that the applause is due to relief that the injury could be walked away from or even gesture of support in recovery.
If you lose a piece of an old memory from sleep deprivation, you are not going to magically get it back once you catch up on your sleep. It has happened to me when I pulled all-nighters. I just couldn't remember that friend's name or that old password.
Some information can be relearned. Some cannot. It would be relatively easy to discover the name of someone from your past (ask a coworker, check a yearbook). I think the better example in the parent’s comment is a lost password.
I changed the pin on my phone while I was in a sleep deprived state and had to erase it to recover from not knowing the pin after I finally slept.
I don't think you're relearning your friend's name so much as reminding yourself. You haven't lost the memory, you just can't bring it up in that moment. And given time you might remember. But it's a bad example like you said.
I think there are two things: the short-term effects of missing a night of sleep persist for several days even if you get plenty of sleep later and the chronic effects of missing a day of sleep accumulate even if you "make up" the hours later on.
I'm guessing the second one is what the article is trying to say here. If you don't get enough sleep during the week, you can't make it up on the weekend, even if the total hours slept per week adds up. You'll still suffer the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation.
This sounds like a confused retelling of the actually true fact that you can't sleep sixteen hours on the first night, then go without sleep entirely on the second night without any ill effects (on the theory that you have 8 hours of sleep "saved up"). Sleep is not like a bank in that sense.
Yeah this is one of those oft repeated pieces of advice that has never made sense to me. It's always worded such that it sounds like the effects of any sleep deprivation ever are permanent.
You'll learn less in your sleep deprived states, Which are days you aren't going to get back. Your sleep deprived self will also be better at creating tech debt, which takes away time from the future.
That is an odd perspective. That's like saying that the damage from a twisted ankle is permanent, since you'll never get back the two days of lost activity.
From that point of view, all injuries are permanent.
Well, yes. But the difference comes in the nature of the deficit you can't get back.
By not sleeping, you magically turn some fraction of the previous day's learning into wasted time, just throw it away.
The appropriate analogue in the twisted ankle case would be if the twist magically "un-walked" the 4 miles you walked the day before, and that increment of weight loss and cardio health were lost to you. This is of course not the case.. :)
I guess what they mean is that if you don't sleep for 24 hours and the next day you sleep for 16 (to make up for the lack of sleep in the previous day), after you wake up you still wont be as good (mentally, immune-wise, etc) as you'd be if you've slept properly on both days.
Obviously that can be corrected over a few days period and you get back to normal (except if you had abused yourself will lack of sleep over many years, in which case you might have indeed incurred some permanent damage).
Every single day is a unique and precious moment in time; spending that day sleep deprived has many disadvantages from a human's perspective. You might have caught a cold you otherwise wouldn't have, or been slightly less emotionally stable during an argument with loved ones and been overly harsh, or any other number of things where if you'd been well-rested, you would have been Better. Oversleeping the next night and undoing causal effects of that short sleep day can never be reversed, both external and internal to the body.
The benefits and effects of sleep are many and I highly recommend reading his book, after which you too will probably agree, you can truly never get it all back, not even close. One fine example that blew my mind was that getting your flu vaccination the same day as getting short sleep will effectively short circuit your immune system's ability to integrate the vaccination, making it much less effective that you're vaccinated for that strain(s)!
His book represents to me a paradigm shift in understanding of what sleep even is. We sleep so that we may live, not the other way around.
Even that article says that, though catching up on the weekend is better than not trying to catch up at all, consistency (i.e. not falling behind in the first place) is best.
Do you need 16 hours the next night after losing 8 the first night? What happened to "Sleep is not like the bank?" If it's unlike the bank in your ability to pay back, maybe it's also unlike the bank in the bank's need to be paid back. Seems weird of them to frame the point using a bank analogy they just said was inapplicable.
You can be in an "underslept state" even if you get 8 hrs a night. I usually am. I snore. Most of the time and very loudly. So do maybe a billion other people. It negatively impacts the quality and quantity of your sleep (and that of the people around you). It can greatly increase the risk of a whole slew of nasty diseases. And yet there is no cure and no effective treatment. As near as I can tell, no one is working on magic potion to fix it either.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really. There's surgery which is invasive and has poor long term outcomes. There's CPAP (and variants) which many people don't tolerate well, and many more people stop using as time goes on.
There are sleep studies in hospital, which are an expensive hassle and only a snapshot. There are apps which track your snoring, but they can't diagnose the cause or tell you what to do to fix it.
With such a huge potential user base, why isn't anyone working on an effective solution (not that I know what that would look like)? I would glady give up my Netflix subscription and gym membership and pay the equivalent amount to get better quality sleep.
I suffered from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and snoring, and the two things that helped were sleeping on my side and weight loss. The latter was difficult to achieve but was the most high-leverage thing I ever did.
I had no idea at the time, but my OSA was contributing to a slew of health problems like hypertension etc., and when I removed the cause, my overall health got better.
That's all fine and well when OSA is the problem, but many people suffer from central sleep apnea and that has nothing to do with weight. Saying weight loss can mitigate the need "almost always" is an exaggeration at best.
As far as I've read, weight loss almost always helps (assuming a person is obese, which is common with OSA because it's also a symptom), but it's unusual for it to totally eliminate the need for CPAP.
I experienced the reverse: using a CPAP finally gave me enough energy to start exercising, which helped me lose weight. I imagine if I stopped using the CPAP I would slowly start losing energy again and probably stop exercising and gain the weight back. The few nights I've gone without CPAP have left me feeling awful, even without as much weight.
Everyone's physiology differs, but I've learned that weight control is 80% diet and 20% physical activity. (this assumes normal metabolism)
I went to the gym for years and my weight fluctuated a couple of pounds. Cardio was especially ineffective for any kind of weight loss.
Weights were much more effective because they increased my resting metabolism. I drastically reduced carbs from my diet, increased protein and vegetables, and the needle on the scale started moving. I ate about the same amount, but I changed the composition of my food -- no simple sugars or simple carbs.
I don't want to be prescriptive, since everyone's different, but for anyone who finds it hard to adopt an exercise routine, I would encourage them to consider changing their diets and see if that makes a difference.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really.
This is a very broad statement, and it's very very misleading.
There is, today, "an effective solution" for many people. You mentioned it. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, CPAP for short. It has helped literally millions of people to get better sleep. I'm one of them. I was a very heavy snorer before CPAP. I don't snore any more. Not at all.
The reason you don't see great emphasis on "magic potion to fix it" is because, for many people, CPAP does fix both snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. Yes, it's a gadget, but it's the exact opposite of gimmicks.
CPAP costs perhaps $1000 for a machine that lasts 5 years. Consumables (masks, hoses, etc) are perhaps $200 per year. That's retail price. Insurance coverage should reduce those numbers considerably.
Today's CPAP machines produce a daily report that shows, literally breath by breath, how you sleep. By analyzing your breathing the machine is able to adjust its operation to keep you from snoring and to keep your body from doing respiratory arousals (which is where you partially awaken to restart your breathing when snoring closes your airway).
Unfortunately, CPAP is inexpensive. Absurdly inexpensive. That's why doctors don't really give a shit about it. Yes, you can get an ENT to put you through a sleep test, and then prescribe a machine. And then, that's it. Problem solved. The ENT will see you perhaps once a year for monitoring. Your yearly expense is under $400 (as mentioned above), so the CPAP manufacturers aren't going to send doctors on free trips to conferences in Hawaii to discuss things. They aren't going to pay the doctors large honorariums to give quick BS presentations before everyone heads out for 36 holes of golf at the resort.
For some people CPAP works out of the box, but for others it needs to be fine tuned. There's really no money in this, so the medical establishment has set a criteria of AHI < 5.0 to say "problem solved".
So people need to put a little effort into fine tuning their therapy. Mostly by adjusting CPAP settings. But also by changing masks, changing sleeping positions, changing bedtime routine, etc. My AHI is 0.0 on most nights, because I was willing to do my own tweaks without help from the medical establishment.
And I've seen measurable, quantitative improvement. For example, before CPAP my hematocrit level (red blood cells) was above normal. My body was producing more cells to help transport as much oxygen as it could from my lungs. Since CPAP, my hematocrit has dropped steadily and is now in the normal range. That's just one simple measurement. Many people have dramatic improvement with much more serious health problems.
There is a wonderful piece of free open source software. It's called SleepyHead. It reads data from the SD card in your CPAP machine and produces beautiful breath-by-breath charts. Highly recommended.
Two places to go for CPAP support are cpaptalk[0] and apneaboard[1]. There are people willing to help interpret your SleepyHead results and help you tweak your therapy. They are better than probably 99% of doctors, who, once you have a CPAP machine, have no financial incentive to continue to care about you.
For a few years I was sleeping about 4 hours a day on weekdays. I thought I was fine until I started sleeping 8 hours a day and realized I had been almost in a permanent bad mood for years due to bad sleep. My life completely changed.
Now even though I can still get through the exceptional sleepless night/day, the difference is so evident that my daily life is planned/scheduled to make sure I get plenty of sleep. Life feels a lot happier and fulfilling now.
Apart from quantity, quality of sleep is also important.
I just realized how much a little light can disturb sleep. My blinds are opaque but hung 1-2 cm from the window frame, letting in just a few unwanted photons. I temporarily taped the blinds to the frame, leaving the room in almost complete darkness. I haven't felt this rested in years. Do try this at home!
I've never understood how this could be the case, evolutionarily speaking. Even in the absence of electrical light, there is rarely complete darkness. Did our remote ancestors just sleep extremely poorly whenever there was a lot of moonlight?
Sleeping in cover, if just a rock outcropping or under some brush, is much safer than sleeping out in the open. Maybe that’s what happens, your mind maintains extra readiness at some cost.
Away from cities it gets very dark at night, unless there is a full moon. But near cities there is a lot of light pollution, so we're always in a state of near-twilight.
That's not very true. Usually yes, but sometimes moonlight is actually very light and I find it pretty comparable to city lights. In cities, you don't realize how bright moon can get, and it's clearly not bright every single night, but about 2 nights every month it gets pretty bright.
Our ancestor's sleep might not have been optimal due to the fact we had other things to care about, like shelter. But that does not imply there is nothing to gain from feeling perfectly rested.
Yeah it's sometimes hard to understand that evolution is not a perfection machine, it's not survival of the fittest, and it does not select the "best" outcome and discard the second best. It's survival of the least unfit, and it selects any option that doesn't cause the individual to die before reproducing. Just because our ancestors did something and nature didn't punish them with death because of it does not mean it's the optimal way to go about life. It merely means that doing that thing didn't cause our ancestor to die before their kids were born. Evolution doesn't select for perfection, just reproduction.
Same argument when someone says "when I was a kid we did X and we lived". Doesn't mean sleeping on the back dashboard of the car on the freeway is a good idea, just that you in particular did not die from doing so.
The point of that argument is never "This is perfect." It's exactly as you say - "This is not bad enough to cause serious harm and therefore" (they're saying) "not bad enough to get worked up over it."
"It survived evolution" = "It won't kill you" = "It's good enough"
My understanding is that different wavelengths effect sleep hormones differently. My less than educated guess would be that evolutionarily speaking there are different optimal sleep environment cycles based on wavelength, intensity, and temperature variables depending on location and habits of ancestors.
You're absolutely right, our body most definitely reacts in different ways to different wavelengths of light.
A specific green has been shown to help reduce pain. [1] 525 nm seems to be the magic wavelength in this particular case.
I'm a chronic acute pain sufferer. I'd love for something as simple as an array of green LEDs to help with my pain. I keep meaning to get a large breadboard, a bunch of LEDs, and make such a device.
I wonder what effects other wavelengths might have? Would lights help sleep if they matched sunset darkening to night time through purple and indigo? It's fascinating stuff.
I have an amibilight built around WS2812 LED strip and esp8266. I use it to display a colorful rotating gradient during a day and as a night light with red color.
Small Haskell program using reactive-banana-automation feeds simple nodemcu firmware every second with UDP packets. It's quite easy to build RGB light this way as only one signal wire is required.
Light can impact sleep to a smaller or greater extent depending on the person. My research group studies this and has developed an app (Android-only for now) to let people test what affects their sleep the most, since sleep outcomes are so different for everyone (depending on chronotype, etc.). We use a form of Bayesian statistics to compute certainties and effect sizes after each night of sleep.
I’ve started throwing a black t shirt over my eyes at night. Looks stupid, but it works.
1) I thought I had lost my ability to sleep in when needed because of my age. Turns out I’m just more sensitive to light.
2) It even helps in the middle of a dark night. It’s a little darker, a little quieter, a little warmer. There was a paper recently about how maybe REM sleep warms the brain. Maybe there was something to nightcaps as well.
Buff headwear (http://www.buffwear.co.uk/) is great for this as it’s a really soft material, much more comfortable than an eye mask I find, and will stay in place unlike a towel or whatever. Blocks out a pretty good amount of light too.
Quality of sleep is critical. It also gets an amazing lack of...shall I say "respect".
Most people have neighbors. Houses are often built poorly insulated. City regulations often have a very tight window of "quiet" hours (eg: 11pm to 7pm), that are only barely enforced, if at all. Stuff like you mentioned, lights and such, don't help. So you have a ton of undersleeping people, which is likely to affect society as a whole quite drastically.
Another solution to a too-bright room is those eye-covering masks like airlines give out. I try to use them at this time of year otherwise the 5AM sunrise wakes me up earlier than I'd like.
I'm currently in my 20s and I've been a type 1 chronic insomniac my whole life. Physically, I'm healthy and fit and I have been my whole life, but mentally my mind feels slower and foggier than my peers and I struggled through high school and college because of it. I know this might sound morbid, but I am fully expecting to die early despite doing everything in my power to live a healthy, balanced lifestyle. I can't see getting 2-3 hours of sleep a night with all-nighters ~once a week being sustainable as I age and I wouldn't be surprised if my brain has already deteriorated in function significantly.
I'm curious have you ever tried working out in the early hours after waking up? This alone determines if I'm getting good sleep or not. I'll end up staying up way later into the night unless I worked out that morning.
Throughout college my routine was to go to the gym every weekday at 6 AM before class. In my case, my insomnia is diagnosed as insomnia in the absence of other external factors. Lifestyle choices like proper light exposure, getting consistent exercise, melatonin, not drinking caffeine, not using electronics before bed, etc. don't affect my quality of sleep.
As a teenager who would play games often into the early morning hours (I remember I'd just be going to bed as my father went off to work) feeling like complete garbage and just mentally slower for a few days because of it. I couldn't imagine this all the time...
Waking up early and doing a workout for an hour or two helps me to sleep very well for next 3-4 hours after the workout -- or keeps me sleepy for half the day. Works totally differently in the evening. Brain just goes at double speed after an evening workout.
People with chronic insomnia have generally tried everything and it’s unhelpful and annoying to offer your suggestions, I realize you’re trying to help but yeah.
Also pretty obnoxious to jump in as a third party and sass someone for trying to be helpful to someone else. Puer can speak for himself if this is bothering him, and since he's posting about it on a public forum, I actually doubt that it does.
No, I've never really used any recreational drug, including alcohol. I don't mean to sound judgmental, but for me personally the long-term effects of THC aren't understood well enough for me to try it yet. If you don't mind me asking, does your wife have to take it on a consistent (ie nightly) basis to sleep well?
Maybe when I'm older with less to lose I'll experiment more and see if things like that work.
This seems like an odd stance to take, especially when what is known about the long-term effects of THC rate them as considerably more benign than the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation.
Sorry for not replying sooner. She took it nightly yes (we are no longer somewhere with legal cannabis), but on the order of 5mg of THC (via edibles). It's not really enough to get her high, but it does help her stay asleep. The effect is more or less immediate and stopping takes away the effect more or less immediately.
I'd suggest a tiny pinch (<0.05g) of dry herb in a vaporizer, a couple hours before bedtime. Recurring costs are <$20/month in a legal state.
The immediate effect is quite interesting: routine tasks become less-accessible while imagination becomes more-accessible, so you think more about what you're doing, which often spawns new ideas (e.g. the desire to exercise or play an instrument, understanding both as a cyclical muscle control problem.) Afterward, the transition to sleep feels trivial.
The article mentions meditation as a sleep aid. I have no idea if it could help someone with a sleep disorder, but I’m just curious if you’ve explored that option.
The doctor will almost certainly have recommended "sleep hygiene" (including things like a dark and quiet room at night, not staying in bed when your mind is racing, don't use your bed for non-sleeping activities, try to wake up at the same time every day), light therapy, and melatonin. That helps some pople, but many (maybe most) people it doesn't help and in that case you are considered untreatable. The vast majority of sleep medicine is focused on sleep apnea at this point and it sounds like this is unlikely to change any time soon.
For anyone with circadian issues, the Circadian Sleep Disorders Network is a patient advocacy group that has some helpful info:
There is also an independent mailing list mentioned on that site for people with circadian disorders. I'm not sure what similar resouces are available for just insomnia.
Edit: Oh, there is also "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia", which is a structured approach to "sleep hygiene".
Edit2: My overall impression with insomnia is that things like racing thoughts or caffine keeping you awake can be treated but if you deal with all of that stuff and still can't sleep, there is no treatment (and often circadian issues are involved).
CBT for insomnia helped me quite a lot, but it took months to get off a waiting list and in to a class. Mine was (I think, in retrospect) heavily linked to some specific work stresses, though, rather than a generalized life condition.
There are other choices - night shifts, part time work, freelance work where you don't have to be on a regular schedule, working somewhere with really good flex time...
Just a word of warning to any insomniacs on here thinking of reading Matthew Walkers book, Why We Sleep: it is probably one of the least helpful books I have ever read in terms of helping you sleep well. It mostly explains the many ways you are damaging your health by not sleeping well, and reading it while I had insomnia just made me anxious and made it more difficult to sleep. The one good thing that came out of reading it was a suggestion for CBT for sleep, and I would highly recommend that as that did actually help me sleep.
We have had industrial shift hours for nearly two centuries, and before that in the Army and Navy. Yet large organizations are still implementing new shift/watch schedules to (or sometimes purportedly to) improve health and alertness based on scientific results. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/10/28/this-lif...
What is the problem with science here? Without being an expert it seems like there are three possibilities:
1) Sleep studies are too difficult to discern results and control.
2) We have culturally been focused on the wrong results, organizational efficiencies rather than individual health.
3) Humans actually adapt to new conditions faster than expected.
Everyone is at least mildly interested in this topic and mildly an expert. Its easier to see problems than remedies and there are conspiracy theories too: http://rotateshift.blogspot.com/
4) No one gives a shit about the long term health effects.
There are lots of pieces of knowledge that have obvious practical implications that aren’t acted upon because it’s inconvenient and the function of a system is different from what people say it’s for. School is more childcare than education and using the same buses for elementary and high school is cheaper so all high school students are sleep deprived and learn less than they would if they could get up at a natural hour. Psychological research on learning like the forgetting curve that works is ignored while crap like learning styles comes and goes in fads. Direct instruction works wonderfully but is boring to teach so it isn’t adopted anywhere.
School isn’t about learning. Politics isn’t about policy. Healthcare isn’t about health.
The purpose of a thing is what it does, not what someone says it’s for.
Forgetting curve means it's better to learn about independent topics (in lets say philosophy) A B C in the order ABCABCABC, but almost in every school it would be AAABBBCCC.
In a bit more detail, the basic idea is that forgetting is a regular, valuable occurance to have better access to the useful information and the way that useful information is determined is use over time. If you use particular information intensely over a short period of time then stop using it at all, that is a signal that you are done with that information and it will be forgotten fairly quickly. But if you use it again after a while then that is a signal that it might be useful even further into the future. Spaced repetition is another application of this idea.
I've always liked B.F. Skinner's ideas about learning, where the forgetting curve is paired with the idea that making mistakes is quite harmful since then we also have the memory of the incorrect answer (that will decay more slowly than random information due to being close to the thing we want to actually use). So it is better to refer to the correct answer until you can recall it correctly, which happens automatically as a standard brain optimization when we do something repeatedly.
I don't really know anything about direct instruction, but it sounds like a core idea is heavily scripted teacher student interaction, which sounds even more dystopian to me than the current system (like being raised by an automated call center in human form). But IMO a bit further in that direction would be great. Remove teachers from the normal learning loop and provide a variety of learning materals (books, video, audio). Teachers can then assist students individually and spend more time being social workers or whatever else is needed so that kids are in a place to be able to learn. Currently the whole school experience tends towards performance art by teachers where the presence or absence of students is a secondary concern. If learning was the important part then the experience would be centered around learning with the presence or absence of teachers a secondary concern.
In the UK we have a fantastic service called Radio 4 which has remarkable sleep-inducing powers. Much better than any narcotic sleep aid, in my experience.
I've found podcasts to be incredible tools to induce sleep. It's very difficult to stay awake for me while listening to any podcast or audiobook. I really don't know how people do it.
I like podcasts a lot for this purpose. My mind tends to race a lot when I get in bed and it would take me at least an hour to fall asleep usually. Podcasts my brain just that little bit of focus and engagement that I need to drift off.
I usually set a sleep timer and drift off. The thing that I haven't found a solution for yet though with it is needing to use my phone right before I fall asleep. I inevitably fall into the trap of checking email or looking up something.
The Sleep With Me podcast has been incredibly helpful for falling asleep during times when I'm stressed or otherwise can't sleep. It's the right amount of goofy and rambling that just lulls me to sleep.
I'm not sure about that, it tends to be more interesting than anything else around. Well, except for The Archers, Thought of the Day or when they have a bunch of people talking about an artist or poet from over a century ago.
I've been amazed by how much sunlight affected my sleep quality - a year or two ago I purchased a curtain rod and a pair of black-out curtains to put in front of my bedroom window.
I can't emphasize how much better I sleep with it. When I forget to close them some nights, the next day I feel significantly less rested and my sleep quality after sunrise is a lot worse (I often wake up several times as well).
Check it out especially if your room gets lots of sunlight in the morning.
Oh I wanted to ask this but then I was thinking that it is just my situation (child less than 1 year who wakes up sometimes once per hour).
Actually I am almost scared to read the book. I am afraid that I will agree with the book and then be left with the feeling that the only logical conclusion is that there is no solution and my health will just vanish forever.
Articles like this scares me greatly. About 2 years ago, I went about 3 weeks with maybe less than 3 hours of sleep. I am sure it is hard to believe, even I can't believe it myself, it was a crazy experience, where my mind was just passed the point of exhaustion that I could not feel tiredness at all. After that my sleeping have never been the same, went through almost a 2 years of waking up every 3 hours or so. It's just about a month ago where I was able to finally sleep without waking up every couple hours. I am so grateful these days but I still fear the day where I may just start waking up again in middle of the night, it was a living hell, no other way to describe it.
I don't think waking up every 3 hours or so is necessarily that bad if you can get back to sleep easily, since that is about the length of a sleep cycle (they get shorter later in the night). Although in your case it might be a symptom of your brain being more active at night and you might not be getting enough deep sleep when it happens.
I've found finding stuff to help stay asleep has been easier than finding stuff to help get to sleep. The articles always talk about sleep drugs being more harmful than helpful, but I think that is mostly stuff that helps you get to sleep (and even those might sometimes be better than not taking them, especialy for brief usage). Certainly I've found a few things that help me stay asleep and significantly improve my sleep quality.
If you have trouble again here are a few things you could try. Short list in order of longer description below (NR = not recommended for various reasons even though it did help, see longer desciption for details): baclofen, phenibut (NR), l-citrulline, l-theanine, magnesium (NR), rosemary extract (NR) or lemon balm (NR), taurine (NR), uridine monophosphate, melatonin patch.
I've found baclofen to be very helpful with staying asleep and getting better quality sleep. I showed some studies I found on pubmed to my primary care doctor who was willing to prescribe it. The downside is that tolerance builds exceptionally quickly and it is generally a good idea to not take it for at least two days a week. I've tried more complicated dosing but 10mg every other day works well (10mg for two days and then a day off works ok too but any longer than that will need two days off to reset in my experience). You can't go up or down by more than 10mg per day (and shouldn't go down by 10mg multiple days in a row) or risk seizures and when I am in a particularly disrupted state it only helps stay asleep for maybe two days at a particular dose. Lately my sleep has been less disrupted even when I don't take it and I've been using for maybe a week or more at 10mg and it still seems to improve my sleep quality.
Phenibut is similar, halfway between baclofen and gabapentin (which I've heard can also help sleep, although I have never tried it since the side effects seem worse than with baclofen). Phenibut has an overlaping set of side effects with baclofen, possibly a somewhat lower seizure risk but some people find it highly addictive. I also suspect it may cause retinal taurine depletion (that leads to permanant retinal damage that is not obvious at first) with heavy continuous use (although that wouldn't be very helpful for sleep since it has the same issue as baclofen). It is available without a prescription and I've found it works better for sleep than baclofen but it causes my light therapy visor to hurt my eyes even on the low setting (it normally does some on high but not on low). 10mg baclofen then 600mg phenibut then a day off seems to work well for me. However, phenibut affects brain dopamine (another fragile part of the body) more than baclofen so between that and retinal issues and the potential for addiciton I would highly recommend just using baclofen.
L-citrulline is another one that I have found very helpful, although I haven't used it as much. It seems to have conflicted with another medication I am on (that I think was building up to too high levels at the time) to cause easy bleeding and a bright pink rash. After lowering the dose of that medication it hasn't caused trouble, but keep an eye out for such things if you try it. I add 3g l-citrulline powder to almond milk at around 6 or 6:30pm when aiming to be in bed at 11pm. It tastes good so you don't necessarily need much to go with it and taking it with water should be fine too. I haven't tried the more common citrulline mallate, so no idea if that would work. I initially tried it because my circulation is not very good so that could be related to why it helps me (or possibly not, nitric oxide and glutathione are sleep promoting substances). I get the "doctor's best" brand l-citrulline powder from vitacost. It is fairly expensive (you can get baclofen for less even if you pay the full cost). N-acetyl-l-cysteine did not seem to do anything for me taken with or without the citrulline.
100mg L-theanine also helps me stay asleep, although not as much as other things and I haven't used it that much. I had an asthma reaction when using it with phenibut, which is another reason I worry about phenibut (although I haven't used it with baclofen so it is possible the same could happen). It is inexpensive and widely available. 400mg or more magnesium is very effective for me but makes me too tired the next day and less doesn't seem to help my sleep. But I'm not sure how common that is so it might be worth a try.
I don't think I've found anything else in typical herbal sleep formulas to be helpful at all except rosmarinic acid (rosmary extract or lemon balm leaves) that helped quite a bit when I first took it but quickly stopped helping and took several months off to have an effect again. It might also potentially cause retinal taurine depletion if you use it for too long, so overall it is not a great option but an occasional lemon balm tea might be helpful (the rosemary extract is also a great flavor with soy or almond milk). Taurine helps me stay asleep but the sulfur makes it not a great choice for extended use if you have digestive issues (and maybe even if you don't).
Another thing that has helped me is 150mg sublingual uridine monophosphate. It seemed to have a circadian effect as well when I first used it (I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm), but less so after using it for a while. I've lately taken it about 7pm when aiming for 11pm bed time and that seems to work well, although right before bed can work too. It isn't that well known but has been studied some and a different form and much higher dose has been FDA approved as a prescription drug for a couple of conditions. There is some chance it may cause or speed the growth of cancer, although this hasn't been noticed in humans taking the much higher dose yet to my knowledge and hopefully is unlikely at 150mg. The only reputable source I know of for uridine monophsphate powder is nootropicsdepot.com.
While oral or sublingual melatonin wakes me up at night, the first thing I found that really helped me stay asleep was a melatonin patch. The first place I got it from went out of business and the last time I looked the only place I could find that I was willing to buy from was "Respro Labs" on Amazon, but they are quite expensive (I get the 10mg, cut them in quarters, and use one or two quarters a night; the backing is a bit annoying to cut). Also, they last longer than 8 hours (previous patches did too) and make me really tired the next day if I forget to take them off in the morning, which happens quite a bit. But it is still a decent option and I wish they were more widely available and not so expensive.
If you‘re feeling tired over the day, maybe in the afternoon or early evening when you get home from work, go to a doctor and have your sleep monitored. You get a portable machine that reads your breathing, your oxygen level in the bloodstream and your sleeping position.
There is a chance you have sleep apnoea, and you stop breathing a few times over the course of your sleep at night, lowering your oxygen levels until your body has a suffocation reaction, over and over again. That can happen dozens of times every night and you won‘t remember any of it.
I've tried the take home mask, and it was very uncomfortable to sleep with. I did wake up once in a way I normally don't, so I felt the study was invalid at that point. Surely the technology has changed in 5 years, but for light sleepers like myself, sleep studies with equipment attached to your body don't feel like fair trials. MRI sleep studies can be an option, and if I had to do it again I think that would be optimal for me.
I'm no expert but I thought that the whole 8 hour a night thing was not true, at least not for everyone. If I force myself to get 8 hours of sleep, by forcing myself to stay in bed after I wake up, I get a headache. If I let myself wake up on its own without an alarm, it averages around 6.5 hours. If I get below that, then at some point I will sleep more than the 6.5 hours, and maybe even 8 hours.
So from personal experience it seems like some of the things in this article do not mesh well with personal experience. I'm just confused at this point as to what to do. Am I suppose to stay sleeping for 8 hours even though I am awake? If for some reason I can't sleep at night and get less hours of sleep than expected, am I suppose to call in late to work and miss my morning meetings? You want to do the right thing here but getting 8 hours of sleep for some people just seems unpractical and there must be countless people who never get 8 hours and live long fruitful lives (I have no evidence for this but it seems like it would be true due to me not remembering anyone who told me they get 8 hours of sleep). I guess I require more evidence that 8 hours is what everyone should be getting. If maybe some people need 8 and others do not, then maybe they need to word it that way.
The author mentions in the book, it is as rare as being hit by a lightning to find a person who needs less than 8 hours of sleep.
I used to feel the same way before reading this book that I need only 6 hours of sleep. I was wrong. I started eating healthy and getting exercise (cardio) regularly - Bam, now I need more than 8 hours of sleep and my sleep quality improved tremendously.
You're asking different questions and mixing different reasons. Is it a problem of what's better for your health or what's more practical for work? The article anyway talks about 6.5 hours average and defines deprivation as less than six. If 6.5 is enough for you, good.
As for you need to wake up at certain time... you still can go to sleep earlier. Yes, I know. That's difficult and you miss other things instead of work, but you should know what you're trading sleep for.
His book (Why We Sleep) is full of studies and evidence backing up what he claims. It's quite an enjoyable read and I'd recommend reading it if you have doubts or want to know more.
That's what was unclear about the article for me. The recommendation is 8 hours, but under 6 hours is considered sleep deprivation. So... there seems to be a wide amount of flexibility between 6 and 8 hours, and it's likely person-dependent. Perhaps there's deleterious effects below 8 hours for everyone, but once you're at ~6 hours or below, the negative impact increases significantly.
The best thing to do is probably to sleep as much as your body tells you to, which in your case happens to be 6.5 hours (It can depend on genetics), and in my case ends up being more than 8 hours. Forcing yourself to sleep longer probably isn't a good idea.
"Legalize Siestas" sounds funny but I think it would change all our lives for the better. It's likely never to happen under our current economic system though.
I find Siestas the absolute worst thing possible for my sleep schedule. Even 20 minutes of noon naps completely nuke my sleep schedule and it takes days to make it normal again. I actually tried Siestas pretty hard for at least 2 years when my insomnia was worst, but eventually I realized without naps my sleep schedule is much more predictable.
Book sales aside, the point about the brain being an associative device, and the advice to avoid lying in bed awake & instead going to another room until you're sleepier, is really valuable imho. Entrainment is very real and happens rapidly, and this advice is not given often enough.
I still think that the optimal amount of sleep really depends on the person and you can't paint everything with a broad stroke or advise everybody to "have 8.5 hours of sleep". I've found myself the most concentrated and productive the next day when I don't sleep too much, e.g. when I just sleep for 6 to 7 hours. When I sleep a lot I usually just feel too relaxed/hyperactive for some reason and can't properly direct my attention at tasks. I think there should be people with similar experiences out there.
Those statements might be good for raising more public awareness so that they're not chronically extremely underslept, e.g. consecutively for 4-5 hours a day. But to only advocate sleeping a lot is too partial IMHO.
Chances are that if your employer demands you give up your rest time to satisfy some business need they have, they don't care about your well-being at all; and showing them this article won't change their mind. You'd be better off working somewhere else.
No, unless you live to work, you should demand your right to a balanced life without having to point to scientific literature on the benefits of sleep.
Even if it wasn't stolen sleep (say we needed no sleep, and the day had only 16 hours), constantly overworking would still be lost time (with family and friends and me-time) that you would never recover.
It is when its imposed upon people. It's not like everybody self-elects to "work to live". Especially when they're just a cog doing a BS job just to pay the rent and feed their family, not full-filling their entrepreneurial or creative or other dreams through it...
(And the culture and glorification around working to live has a lot of employer influence in it).
> "Unfortunately the current set or classes of sleeping pills that we have do not produce naturalistic sleep. So they are all a broad set of chemicals that we call the sedative hypnotics, and sedation is not sleep, it's very different. It doesn't give you the restorative natural benefits of sleep. ... If you look at the electrical signature of sleep that you have when you're taking those medications, it's not the same as a normal night of sleep."
Most of the literature I've read reports otherwise, that Zolpidem actually can increase the quality of your sleep. Of course, it's not without it's disadvantages as well.
I'll likely do my own more in depth looking.. but, in the meantime, do you recall if this was true for the other "Z-drugs" (zaleplon, zopiclone/eszopiclone)? Is there any convenient summary or meta-analysis you could link?
> You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly it doesn't.
But it does somewhat, just not fully.
Thought experiment for the author. Say he slept 6 hours every day during the week, and come the weekend, is he going to say that there is no benefit to sleeping more than 8 hours, or will that 10+ hour sleep do any good over 8 hours? I strongly suspect that, yes, "catch up sleep" is useful, but just not 100% restorative. But the original claim sounds more like the former, "catch up sleep isn't useful".
In his podcast, he talks about that with Seth Rogen. Turns out that marihuana as well as alcohol induces sedation rather than sleep.
This causes the brain to withhold REM sleep until the sedative has worn off, then suddenly catches up. So lots of people report very vivid dreams at the end of the night.
Since the amount of REM sleep was less, the quality of the sleep is also lower (he said only half or so).
Tried that, and the "text only" version had no relevant text. It's not just eye candy we give up for privacy, it's the entire content. GDPR might have a say about that.
I don’t doubt that hat the people don’t get enough sleep, but the biggest health problem in the western world is Obesity. It has huge health, environmental, and social costs.
Lack of sleep can definitely contribute to weight gain. Probably in more than one way, but I know specifically of studies that found lack of sleep makes you crave more unhealthy high calorie foods.
The author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
If read only one book this year, let me strongly recommend you consider this one.
ps: if you prefer audio, the narrated version from Audible is also very good. There are just a few non-essential graphs, that you can download from their side in PDF.
[1] Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker - https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams-ebook... [non affiliate link]
[2] Quora - How do CEOs who sleep for only 4-5 hours daily manage to function and run multi-million dollar companies for years? http://qr.ae/TUpOrd
I've been in material cognitive decline over the past year or so and I'm nearly certain it's due to my abhorrent sleep patterns. This episode really helped me prioritize a fix over other things that would normally result in a night of 3-5 hrs in bed or on the floor (who knows how much actual sleep).
It's a great episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
Incidentally a previous podcast covered a lot of the same ground, plus much more: https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/Serge-Faguet
Also, while I obviously haven't listened to this audiobook yet, it's read by Steve West, and I have listened to him narrate audiobooks before. He's great; very easy to listen to in my experience. Obviously tastes can vary (e.g. he has an English accent, which I'm sure some people won't like).
What does "never" here means though? Obviously you could get back to your normal self after a few days of sleeping well, no?
The mortality rate among participants with short sleep during weekdays, but long sleep during weekends, did not differ from the rate of the reference group. Among individuals ≥65 years old, no association between weekend sleep or weekday/weekend sleep durations and mortality was observed. In conclusion, short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased mortality in subjects <65 years. In the same age group, short sleep (or long sleep) on both weekdays and weekend showed increased mortality. Possibly, long week- end sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712
To use an analogy, you might be able to maintain a car so that its lifetime mileage isn't reduced, but that doesn't mean that it can't suffer in terms of handling, speed, comfort, etc.
It doesn’t follow that if you miss eight hours of sleep you’d need 16 to catch up - maybe some processes take a standard amount of time and don’t need to be repeated, it might be more efficient when you’re already asleep to fix things in an extra two hours than an entire extra eight.
Something is fishy with the quote’s assumptions. It strikes me as something probably untrue that we’d understand with more information about what sleep is actually doing.
Building off what you said:
>It doesn’t follow that if you miss eight hours of sleep you’d need 16 to catch up
It might also be that if you miss eight hours, you can never catch up 100%, you can never fully pay off the lost sleep. It would still stand to reason that you'll be better off with X amount of "catch-up" hours, such as the extra 2 a night you were suggesting, following lost sleep than if you didn't have any catch-up hours.
So knocking down the straw man of "you can't fully repay your sleep balance" seems to be an equivocation that's just wasting everyone's time. I don't know that people necessarily think that exact thing. It's still probably better to sleep more after going without it, even if you don't literally gain 100% of the benefits back, and that's probably what most people mean.
Brain injuries are too often discounted because you can't see them. If someone was purposefully cutting themselves with a knife we wouldn't think they were cool, we wouldn't celebrate them as heroes in our society, we would try to help them stop injuring themselves. So why do we celebrate people who actively injure their brains? Because we can't see the damage.
I'm not certain that's quite accurate. It seems that what's celebrated are their accomplishments and "sacrifices" in the sense of effort and self-denial, but not injuries.
The sentiment around brain injuries that professional boxers (and, more recently, American Football players) suffer from isn't what I would characterize as celebratory, for example.
Even temporary injuries can be met with disdain by fans of team sports, as it could take the whole team out of the running for that entire season.
However, I'm far from intimately familiar with athletics, so I'd genuinely welcome being shown counter-examples.
I don't think disdain is the right word. Disappointment can certainly come into play, but look at any serious injury on the court or the field. What happens when the player is able to limp off, or is even carried off? Applause, sometimes a standing ovation, for the player's physical sacrifice.
I believe this is tied into the same primal urges that make us love a compelling war movie (we used to celebrate war much more than we now do as well), or want to work 16 hour days for the chance at striking it rich.
If we're talking about "celebrating", lip service is all I can think of that fits the bill. People enjoying it in the privacy of their own thoughts isn't the same thing.
> look at any serious injury on the court or the field.
That's why I was asking for counter-example. I don't have this experience. I was hoping for, possibly, media coverage or maybe fan blog posts or videos.
> Applause, sometimes a standing ovation, for the player's physical sacrifice.
If I were to witness this from afar, I would have no idea what the applause is for, so, again, I'm looking for that evidence. A more charitable interpretation would be that the applause is due to relief that the injury could be walked away from or even gesture of support in recovery.
Some information can be relearned. Some cannot. It would be relatively easy to discover the name of someone from your past (ask a coworker, check a yearbook). I think the better example in the parent’s comment is a lost password.
I changed the pin on my phone while I was in a sleep deprived state and had to erase it to recover from not knowing the pin after I finally slept.
I'm guessing the second one is what the article is trying to say here. If you don't get enough sleep during the week, you can't make it up on the weekend, even if the total hours slept per week adds up. You'll still suffer the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation.
You'll learn less in your sleep deprived states, Which are days you aren't going to get back. Your sleep deprived self will also be better at creating tech debt, which takes away time from the future.
From that point of view, all injuries are permanent.
By not sleeping, you magically turn some fraction of the previous day's learning into wasted time, just throw it away.
The appropriate analogue in the twisted ankle case would be if the twist magically "un-walked" the 4 miles you walked the day before, and that increment of weight loss and cardio health were lost to you. This is of course not the case.. :)
I saw this analogy upthread, and it's changed how I consider sleep deprivation. Brain injuries may not be different from physical injuries.
Most significant injuries I've sustained since my early 20s have not let me completely forget them, in spite of them being "fully healed".
That's not what a description of what the professor says in the article, or the way we mean it.
Of course you won't get "chances to learn" or "tech debt" back. This is not about it. TFA talks about a physiological debt that you can't repay.
Obviously that can be corrected over a few days period and you get back to normal (except if you had abused yourself will lack of sleep over many years, in which case you might have indeed incurred some permanent damage).
The benefits and effects of sleep are many and I highly recommend reading his book, after which you too will probably agree, you can truly never get it all back, not even close. One fine example that blew my mind was that getting your flu vaccination the same day as getting short sleep will effectively short circuit your immune system's ability to integrate the vaccination, making it much less effective that you're vaccinated for that strain(s)!
His book represents to me a paradigm shift in understanding of what sleep even is. We sleep so that we may live, not the other way around.
People put themselves through hell all the time; I'd be dead if you could 'never repay the sleep debt'.
They should focus on how miserable sleep deprived people become - that's a real, un-repayable cost.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really. There's surgery which is invasive and has poor long term outcomes. There's CPAP (and variants) which many people don't tolerate well, and many more people stop using as time goes on.
There are sleep studies in hospital, which are an expensive hassle and only a snapshot. There are apps which track your snoring, but they can't diagnose the cause or tell you what to do to fix it.
With such a huge potential user base, why isn't anyone working on an effective solution (not that I know what that would look like)? I would glady give up my Netflix subscription and gym membership and pay the equivalent amount to get better quality sleep.
I had no idea at the time, but my OSA was contributing to a slew of health problems like hypertension etc., and when I removed the cause, my overall health got better.
I went to the gym for years and my weight fluctuated a couple of pounds. Cardio was especially ineffective for any kind of weight loss.
Weights were much more effective because they increased my resting metabolism. I drastically reduced carbs from my diet, increased protein and vegetables, and the needle on the scale started moving. I ate about the same amount, but I changed the composition of my food -- no simple sugars or simple carbs.
I don't want to be prescriptive, since everyone's different, but for anyone who finds it hard to adopt an exercise routine, I would encourage them to consider changing their diets and see if that makes a difference.
Such an assumption is likely to be false in cases of chronic sleep disruption [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2830474/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14512265
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3476879/
This is a very broad statement, and it's very very misleading.
There is, today, "an effective solution" for many people. You mentioned it. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, CPAP for short. It has helped literally millions of people to get better sleep. I'm one of them. I was a very heavy snorer before CPAP. I don't snore any more. Not at all.
The reason you don't see great emphasis on "magic potion to fix it" is because, for many people, CPAP does fix both snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. Yes, it's a gadget, but it's the exact opposite of gimmicks.
CPAP costs perhaps $1000 for a machine that lasts 5 years. Consumables (masks, hoses, etc) are perhaps $200 per year. That's retail price. Insurance coverage should reduce those numbers considerably.
Today's CPAP machines produce a daily report that shows, literally breath by breath, how you sleep. By analyzing your breathing the machine is able to adjust its operation to keep you from snoring and to keep your body from doing respiratory arousals (which is where you partially awaken to restart your breathing when snoring closes your airway).
Unfortunately, CPAP is inexpensive. Absurdly inexpensive. That's why doctors don't really give a shit about it. Yes, you can get an ENT to put you through a sleep test, and then prescribe a machine. And then, that's it. Problem solved. The ENT will see you perhaps once a year for monitoring. Your yearly expense is under $400 (as mentioned above), so the CPAP manufacturers aren't going to send doctors on free trips to conferences in Hawaii to discuss things. They aren't going to pay the doctors large honorariums to give quick BS presentations before everyone heads out for 36 holes of golf at the resort.
For some people CPAP works out of the box, but for others it needs to be fine tuned. There's really no money in this, so the medical establishment has set a criteria of AHI < 5.0 to say "problem solved".
So people need to put a little effort into fine tuning their therapy. Mostly by adjusting CPAP settings. But also by changing masks, changing sleeping positions, changing bedtime routine, etc. My AHI is 0.0 on most nights, because I was willing to do my own tweaks without help from the medical establishment.
And I've seen measurable, quantitative improvement. For example, before CPAP my hematocrit level (red blood cells) was above normal. My body was producing more cells to help transport as much oxygen as it could from my lungs. Since CPAP, my hematocrit has dropped steadily and is now in the normal range. That's just one simple measurement. Many people have dramatic improvement with much more serious health problems.
There is a wonderful piece of free open source software. It's called SleepyHead. It reads data from the SD card in your CPAP machine and produces beautiful breath-by-breath charts. Highly recommended.
Two places to go for CPAP support are cpaptalk[0] and apneaboard[1]. There are people willing to help interpret your SleepyHead results and help you tweak your therapy. They are better than probably 99% of doctors, who, once you have a CPAP machine, have no financial incentive to continue to care about you.
[0] http://cpaptalk.com/CPAP-Sleep-Apnea-Forum.html [1] http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Forum-Main-Apnea-Board-Foru...
Now even though I can still get through the exceptional sleepless night/day, the difference is so evident that my daily life is planned/scheduled to make sure I get plenty of sleep. Life feels a lot happier and fulfilling now.
I just realized how much a little light can disturb sleep. My blinds are opaque but hung 1-2 cm from the window frame, letting in just a few unwanted photons. I temporarily taped the blinds to the frame, leaving the room in almost complete darkness. I haven't felt this rested in years. Do try this at home!
Same argument when someone says "when I was a kid we did X and we lived". Doesn't mean sleeping on the back dashboard of the car on the freeway is a good idea, just that you in particular did not die from doing so.
"It survived evolution" = "It won't kill you" = "It's good enough"
They're setting the bar a bit lower than optimum.
A specific green has been shown to help reduce pain. [1] 525 nm seems to be the magic wavelength in this particular case.
I'm a chronic acute pain sufferer. I'd love for something as simple as an array of green LEDs to help with my pain. I keep meaning to get a large breadboard, a bunch of LEDs, and make such a device.
I wonder what effects other wavelengths might have? Would lights help sleep if they matched sunset darkening to night time through purple and indigo? It's fascinating stuff.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28092651
Small Haskell program using reactive-banana-automation feeds simple nodemcu firmware every second with UDP packets. It's quite easy to build RGB light this way as only one signal wire is required.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4148276/
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44565320
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.brown.slee...
I take a nap every afternoon preferably at 1:15 p.m.. I waken 20 minutes later, refreshed and ready for the rest of the day.
1) I thought I had lost my ability to sleep in when needed because of my age. Turns out I’m just more sensitive to light.
2) It even helps in the middle of a dark night. It’s a little darker, a little quieter, a little warmer. There was a paper recently about how maybe REM sleep warms the brain. Maybe there was something to nightcaps as well.
Most people have neighbors. Houses are often built poorly insulated. City regulations often have a very tight window of "quiet" hours (eg: 11pm to 7pm), that are only barely enforced, if at all. Stuff like you mentioned, lights and such, don't help. So you have a ton of undersleeping people, which is likely to affect society as a whole quite drastically.
Maybe when I'm older with less to lose I'll experiment more and see if things like that work.
The immediate effect is quite interesting: routine tasks become less-accessible while imagination becomes more-accessible, so you think more about what you're doing, which often spawns new ideas (e.g. the desire to exercise or play an instrument, understanding both as a cyclical muscle control problem.) Afterward, the transition to sleep feels trivial.
Large doses are generally not beneficial.
For anyone with circadian issues, the Circadian Sleep Disorders Network is a patient advocacy group that has some helpful info:
https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org
There is also an independent mailing list mentioned on that site for people with circadian disorders. I'm not sure what similar resouces are available for just insomnia.
Edit: Oh, there is also "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia", which is a structured approach to "sleep hygiene".
Edit2: My overall impression with insomnia is that things like racing thoughts or caffine keeping you awake can be treated but if you deal with all of that stuff and still can't sleep, there is no treatment (and often circadian issues are involved).
What is the problem with science here? Without being an expert it seems like there are three possibilities:
1) Sleep studies are too difficult to discern results and control.
2) We have culturally been focused on the wrong results, organizational efficiencies rather than individual health.
3) Humans actually adapt to new conditions faster than expected.
Everyone is at least mildly interested in this topic and mildly an expert. Its easier to see problems than remedies and there are conspiracy theories too: http://rotateshift.blogspot.com/
There are lots of pieces of knowledge that have obvious practical implications that aren’t acted upon because it’s inconvenient and the function of a system is different from what people say it’s for. School is more childcare than education and using the same buses for elementary and high school is cheaper so all high school students are sleep deprived and learn less than they would if they could get up at a natural hour. Psychological research on learning like the forgetting curve that works is ignored while crap like learning styles comes and goes in fads. Direct instruction works wonderfully but is boring to teach so it isn’t adopted anywhere.
School isn’t about learning. Politics isn’t about policy. Healthcare isn’t about health.
The purpose of a thing is what it does, not what someone says it’s for.
I agree though about school being at least half to keep the kids locked up and out of the way for most of the day.
People care about long term health impacts.
I've always liked B.F. Skinner's ideas about learning, where the forgetting curve is paired with the idea that making mistakes is quite harmful since then we also have the memory of the incorrect answer (that will decay more slowly than random information due to being close to the thing we want to actually use). So it is better to refer to the correct answer until you can recall it correctly, which happens automatically as a standard brain optimization when we do something repeatedly.
I don't really know anything about direct instruction, but it sounds like a core idea is heavily scripted teacher student interaction, which sounds even more dystopian to me than the current system (like being raised by an automated call center in human form). But IMO a bit further in that direction would be great. Remove teachers from the normal learning loop and provide a variety of learning materals (books, video, audio). Teachers can then assist students individually and spend more time being social workers or whatever else is needed so that kids are in a place to be able to learn. Currently the whole school experience tends towards performance art by teachers where the presence or absence of students is a secondary concern. If learning was the important part then the experience would be centered around learning with the presence or absence of teachers a secondary concern.
Podcasts also work well, in my experience.
*I usually listen to audiobooks while I ride my bicycle to college.
I usually set a sleep timer and drift off. The thing that I haven't found a solution for yet though with it is needing to use my phone right before I fall asleep. I inevitably fall into the trap of checking email or looking up something.
https://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/
I can't emphasize how much better I sleep with it. When I forget to close them some nights, the next day I feel significantly less rested and my sleep quality after sunrise is a lot worse (I often wake up several times as well).
Check it out especially if your room gets lots of sunlight in the morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
I don't think waking up every 3 hours or so is necessarily that bad if you can get back to sleep easily, since that is about the length of a sleep cycle (they get shorter later in the night). Although in your case it might be a symptom of your brain being more active at night and you might not be getting enough deep sleep when it happens.
I've found finding stuff to help stay asleep has been easier than finding stuff to help get to sleep. The articles always talk about sleep drugs being more harmful than helpful, but I think that is mostly stuff that helps you get to sleep (and even those might sometimes be better than not taking them, especialy for brief usage). Certainly I've found a few things that help me stay asleep and significantly improve my sleep quality.
If you have trouble again here are a few things you could try. Short list in order of longer description below (NR = not recommended for various reasons even though it did help, see longer desciption for details): baclofen, phenibut (NR), l-citrulline, l-theanine, magnesium (NR), rosemary extract (NR) or lemon balm (NR), taurine (NR), uridine monophosphate, melatonin patch.
I've found baclofen to be very helpful with staying asleep and getting better quality sleep. I showed some studies I found on pubmed to my primary care doctor who was willing to prescribe it. The downside is that tolerance builds exceptionally quickly and it is generally a good idea to not take it for at least two days a week. I've tried more complicated dosing but 10mg every other day works well (10mg for two days and then a day off works ok too but any longer than that will need two days off to reset in my experience). You can't go up or down by more than 10mg per day (and shouldn't go down by 10mg multiple days in a row) or risk seizures and when I am in a particularly disrupted state it only helps stay asleep for maybe two days at a particular dose. Lately my sleep has been less disrupted even when I don't take it and I've been using for maybe a week or more at 10mg and it still seems to improve my sleep quality.
Phenibut is similar, halfway between baclofen and gabapentin (which I've heard can also help sleep, although I have never tried it since the side effects seem worse than with baclofen). Phenibut has an overlaping set of side effects with baclofen, possibly a somewhat lower seizure risk but some people find it highly addictive. I also suspect it may cause retinal taurine depletion (that leads to permanant retinal damage that is not obvious at first) with heavy continuous use (although that wouldn't be very helpful for sleep since it has the same issue as baclofen). It is available without a prescription and I've found it works better for sleep than baclofen but it causes my light therapy visor to hurt my eyes even on the low setting (it normally does some on high but not on low). 10mg baclofen then 600mg phenibut then a day off seems to work well for me. However, phenibut affects brain dopamine (another fragile part of the body) more than baclofen so between that and retinal issues and the potential for addiciton I would highly recommend just using baclofen.
L-citrulline is another one that I have found very helpful, although I haven't used it as much. It seems to have conflicted with another medication I am on (that I think was building up to too high levels at the time) to cause easy bleeding and a bright pink rash. After lowering the dose of that medication it hasn't caused trouble, but keep an eye out for such things if you try it. I add 3g l-citrulline powder to almond milk at around 6 or 6:30pm when aiming to be in bed at 11pm. It tastes good so you don't necessarily need much to go with it and taking it with water should be fine too. I haven't tried the more common citrulline mallate, so no idea if that would work. I initially tried it because my circulation is not very good so that could be related to why it helps me (or possibly not, nitric oxide and glutathione are sleep promoting substances). I get the "doctor's best" brand l-citrulline powder from vitacost. It is fairly expensive (you can get baclofen for less even if you pay the full cost). N-acetyl-l-cysteine did not seem to do anything for me taken with or without the citrulline.
100mg L-theanine also helps me stay asleep, although not as much as other things and I haven't used it that much. I had an asthma reaction when using it with phenibut, which is another reason I worry about phenibut (although I haven't used it with baclofen so it is possible the same could happen). It is inexpensive and widely available. 400mg or more magnesium is very effective for me but makes me too tired the next day and less doesn't seem to help my sleep. But I'm not sure how common that is so it might be worth a try.
I don't think I've found anything else in typical herbal sleep formulas to be helpful at all except rosmarinic acid (rosmary extract or lemon balm leaves) that helped quite a bit when I first took it but quickly stopped helping and took several months off to have an effect again. It might also potentially cause retinal taurine depletion if you use it for too long, so overall it is not a great option but an occasional lemon balm tea might be helpful (the rosemary extract is also a great flavor with soy or almond milk). Taurine helps me stay asleep but the sulfur makes it not a great choice for extended use if you have digestive issues (and maybe even if you don't).
Another thing that has helped me is 150mg sublingual uridine monophosphate. It seemed to have a circadian effect as well when I first used it (I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm), but less so after using it for a while. I've lately taken it about 7pm when aiming for 11pm bed time and that seems to work well, although right before bed can work too. It isn't that well known but has been studied some and a different form and much higher dose has been FDA approved as a prescription drug for a couple of conditions. There is some chance it may cause or speed the growth of cancer, although this hasn't been noticed in humans taking the much higher dose yet to my knowledge and hopefully is unlikely at 150mg. The only reputable source I know of for uridine monophsphate powder is nootropicsdepot.com.
While oral or sublingual melatonin wakes me up at night, the first thing I found that really helped me stay asleep was a melatonin patch. The first place I got it from went out of business and the last time I looked the only place I could find that I was willing to buy from was "Respro Labs" on Amazon, but they are quite expensive (I get the 10mg, cut them in quarters, and use one or two quarters a night; the backing is a bit annoying to cut). Also, they last longer than 8 hours (previous patches did too) and make me really tired the next day if I forget to take them off in the morning, which happens quite a bit. But it is still a decent option and I wish they were more widely available and not so expensive.
There is a chance you have sleep apnoea, and you stop breathing a few times over the course of your sleep at night, lowering your oxygen levels until your body has a suffocation reaction, over and over again. That can happen dozens of times every night and you won‘t remember any of it.
You don‘t decide that the recording is invalid. You tell your doctor what happened and he decides which conclusions can be drawn from the data.
So from personal experience it seems like some of the things in this article do not mesh well with personal experience. I'm just confused at this point as to what to do. Am I suppose to stay sleeping for 8 hours even though I am awake? If for some reason I can't sleep at night and get less hours of sleep than expected, am I suppose to call in late to work and miss my morning meetings? You want to do the right thing here but getting 8 hours of sleep for some people just seems unpractical and there must be countless people who never get 8 hours and live long fruitful lives (I have no evidence for this but it seems like it would be true due to me not remembering anyone who told me they get 8 hours of sleep). I guess I require more evidence that 8 hours is what everyone should be getting. If maybe some people need 8 and others do not, then maybe they need to word it that way.
I used to feel the same way before reading this book that I need only 6 hours of sleep. I was wrong. I started eating healthy and getting exercise (cardio) regularly - Bam, now I need more than 8 hours of sleep and my sleep quality improved tremendously.
As for you need to wake up at certain time... you still can go to sleep earlier. Yes, I know. That's difficult and you miss other things instead of work, but you should know what you're trading sleep for.
Chill out for 30 minutes by doing nothing.
You think coffee in the early afternoon could affect sleep?
My children are up at 6am, so that’s when I have to be up.
Those statements might be good for raising more public awareness so that they're not chronically extremely underslept, e.g. consecutively for 4-5 hours a day. But to only advocate sleeping a lot is too partial IMHO.
Even if it wasn't stolen sleep (say we needed no sleep, and the day had only 16 hours), constantly overworking would still be lost time (with family and friends and me-time) that you would never recover.
(And the culture and glorification around working to live has a lot of employer influence in it).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712
Most of the literature I've read reports otherwise, that Zolpidem actually can increase the quality of your sleep. Of course, it's not without it's disadvantages as well.
But it does somewhat, just not fully.
Thought experiment for the author. Say he slept 6 hours every day during the week, and come the weekend, is he going to say that there is no benefit to sleeping more than 8 hours, or will that 10+ hour sleep do any good over 8 hours? I strongly suspect that, yes, "catch up sleep" is useful, but just not 100% restorative. But the original claim sounds more like the former, "catch up sleep isn't useful".
This causes the brain to withhold REM sleep until the sedative has worn off, then suddenly catches up. So lots of people report very vivid dreams at the end of the night.
Since the amount of REM sleep was less, the quality of the sleep is also lower (he said only half or so).
I’ll happily give up eye candy for privacy and I’m sure it’s much cheaper for them to serve bandwidth wise.
Even tried editing the article URL to no avail. :(
Shame on them for not making all articles reachable from the text home page, and for not redirecting to the article from the choice page.
https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=558058812
Plain text link: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=558058812