The whole “natural” thing is maybe a good source of ideas to try, but that’s it.
A list of things that are totally unnatural: brushing teeth, antibiotics, painkillers, surgery, hip replacements, antidepressants, infant mortality below 10%, not dying of an ear infection, clean chlorinated water...
> My sleep statistics tells me that I slept an average of 5:25 hours over the last 7 days, 5:49 hours over the last 30 days, and 5:57 over the last 180 days hours, meaning that I’m awake for 18 hours per day instead of 16.5 hours. I usually sleep 5.5-6 hours during the night and take a nap a few times a week when sleepy during the day.
> This means that I’m gaining 33 days of life every year. 1 more year of life every 11 years. 5 more years of life every 55 years.
> Why are people not all over this?
Because that's not how humans work. You're gaining 33 days of being not-asleep in sum per year. More accurately, you're getting however many more minutes per wakeful period. And gaining minutes of being not-asleep per day is very different from "gaining days of life every year". Life != being awake. Things are happening during sleep. Useful things.
Personally, I spent many years doing what you're recommending when I was younger. Felt low-level sleepy all the time. Used caffeine off-and-on to blunt the effect. Now I've gotten into a good enough homeostasis that I don't need alarms and I don't oversleep. I never feel sleepy except for the moments before falling asleep at night or on the rare occasions where I have to wake up early. I love sleep now. I protect it and it protects me.
The quality of a day depends on how it was spent. The quality of a life is the summation of all those days. Adding 30 minutes to each day's wakeful period is not some huge gain in efficiency like you're making it out to be. And for me, gaining thirty more minutes actually makes the quality of the rest of the minutes in that day worse. I low-key despise society for making me think I needed to do more such that sacrificing my sleep and normal alertness for more time spent awake was a good trade.
I recommend looking into the concept of healthspan. Optimize for area under the curve, not time spent awake.
Do not spend time reading it. From the article:
"I have no trust in sleep scientists
Why do I bother with all of this theorizing? Why do I think I can discover something about sleep that thousands of them couldn’t discover over many decades?
The reason is that I have approximately 0 trust in the integrity of the field of sleep science."
By the way, he criticizes the book: "Why we sleep". Sure the book exaggerates, but it shouldn't be completely disqualified. BTW, if you like this book, you will probably like Oracle of the Night: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/07/the-oracle-of-...
This essay, convinced me that people with no domain specific knowledge can cherry-pick ideas to support any BS they want
> I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables of interest Bessone P, Rao G, Schilbach F, Schofield H, Toma M. The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2021 Aug;136(3):1887-941.(the authors changed analysis post-hoc and fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put the post-hoc results into the abstract but decided not to mention the null-preregistered results there or anywhere else in the paper explicitly ).
This is the highest quality of research from the most fancied universities, and it was pre-registered (the gold standard of oversight). And even they were dishonest with the results. For me, personally, this single paragraph is enough to shut the door on all (all) psychology research.
I like that this challenges some assumptions, but it does very little to discredit the AMPLE research in the area. Other than to say, let's not trust old research, which is kind of a gas-lighty way to look at it.
Claims of the nature "the entire field is wrong, I propose to change everything" are deserving of a bit more basis in fact than this.
There is neither supporting evidence, nor even plausible models that go beyond the clearly superficial.
I don't know if the author is right. But Occam's Razor implies that simply ignoring this as, well, yet another person positing vague claims on the Internet, is probably the right answer.
To be fair, they did claim this to be theses. I am looking forward to them proving or disproving those theses. I will not lose much sleep until then.
There's a lot, the appeal to how humans lived 10k years ago seems odd though. Just because they lived in a certain way doesn't mean it's optimal. This is plainly obvious when you look at diets. Just because something was done out of necessity doesn't mean it's right. Weak argument right off the bat.
Irrelevant to the post, but relevant to sleeping--I fixed my trouble sleeping with candles.
Right before I want to go to sleep, I darken the whole house, light one or two candles, and read a slow-paced book. 15 minutes to drowsiness, 5 minutes to sleep, every time. I'll even look at a blue-light screen right up until candle-time.
No mention of the CO2 buildup in a bedroom or buildings in general.
When I camp in a tent, more airflow, I sleep better. In a bedroom, the air is stale after a few hours, the UK has small houses unlike Europe and US.
Plenty of discussions on CO2 levels on here already: Higher Levels of CO2 May Diminish Decision Making Performance (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14738010
Literally Suffocating in Meeting Rooms, A Little https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237875
On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18959796
Is Conference Room Air Making Us Dumber? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19845029
No mention of Tryptophan intake, tryptophan into the brain can become serotonin and melatonin.
Blue light stimulates serotonin production in the brain, a jap study on school kids found when all things equal including diet, they found those with highest serotonin levels walked to school and got more blue light from the sun than those driven to school.
Melatonin has an antioxidant effect 4x greater than vit c, it also increase the release of mesenchymal stem cells so the body can repair itself better, which is important when thinking about plastic molecules in the body, because a study suggests plastic binds to stem cells and inactivates the cell making it harder for us to repair.
Light pollution within the bedroom from clocks, phones etc can also reduce melatonin compared to a completely blacked out bedroom.
The serotonin hypotheses about sleep duration ie little sleep mania, more sleep depression didnt look at CO2 levels.
The author needs to be careful what scientific studies are selected and ignored, sleep is massively complex, but I am also aware even google scholar doesnt always present the links to everything on a topic. Just like SEO can manipulate business website ranking, scientific study ranking can also be manipulated!
How does your essay explain that I feel horrible for 2-3 hours after waking up if I don't get enough sleep?
I don't just mean feeling a little slow. I am physically sick to the point of being unable to eat food, having a headache (not every time) and not being able to process information (e.g. reading an email 2-3 times and still not comprehending it fully).
Is this a unique reaction?
It's hard to me to even start considering whether I might be sleeping too much or whether sleeping less is not actually that bad, when the act of forcefully waking up (due to noise, alarm or whatever) is something I would classify as not too far from torture.
Does this simply not bother other people that much?
Yes, please, do continue to slam a whole field that you are not yourself in. Love hearing from people who love to just cherry pick a couple of articles to support their claims. eye roll
A lot of this stuff matches my experience. I'm a classic night owl and occasionally subject myself to acute sleep deprivation (< 3-4 hours of sleep). Typically the next day I'm in weirdly good humor, slightly manic, and feel as if my senses have been heightened. My girlfriend thinks I'm crazy for saying this, but I enjoy the feeling. If the sleep deprivation turns into multiple days, I begin to become sluggish and irritable...but I try not to let that happen.
Very interesting article. I'll try that myself, could be a fun experiment. The parallel with fasting was surprising to me, though now it sounds obvious. Outside of whether or not the author is right about their theory, this calls for more rigorous science on sleep. The value of even a small chance of adding 1/2 hours to the life of people is immense.
This essay convinced me to experiment with 6 hour sleep days. Excited to see what happens.
> Finally, there’s moon shining right at you and all kinds of sounds coming from the forest around you.
Tell me you've never been in a remote area without telling me you've never been in a remote area. If you go somewhere truly far from any developed city (I first experienced it in rural China) you will often find at night that it is BLACK. Can't see your hand right in front of your face BLACK. I remember someone starting a blow torch to work on a car in the middle of the night and it was like a rave the light show was so intense against how deep the darkness was.
Potentially of relevance, a paper I wrote on a possible function of dreaming during REM sleep:
A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering
Discussed on hacker news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
Perhaps coincidentally, but I can rarely sleep more then 6 hours in a night. It seems that I've always been that way. My eyes just open after about 6 hours, and I feel the need to get out of bed. The only way I've ever been able to get more is when I'm hungover or ill.
I don't ever feel like I need to sleep more, but the anxiety I get from all the sleep studies telling me I do need to sleep more, sure does keep me up at night!
> Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and comfort
Would you expect this to generalize to other animals? For example, if you gave ultra-comfortable beds to dogs, mice, etc., would you expect them to spend longer times asleep? And I think we should specify "asleep, not merely resting" here.
Crackpot garbage.
Sleep fasting? Maybe occasional fasting in everything can be good. Food, sex, sleep, social interactions.
> Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal’s skin, or on the ground.
I would argue that some of my best nights were during outdoor survival situations where I slept in small shelters that kept my warmth and on a hard surface.
Personally, the sound of a familiar bird species will lull me to sleep. Birds sing when it's safe. Silence in nature is when you should worry.
Having slept on bear skins, those are surprisingly comfortable. That's why it's such a trope in romance. You can easily fall asleep on one and be comfortable all night. Throw in a few friends and you have got a cozy experience. Three people will keep a bed very warm even without heating to the point where you must open windows and get rid of covers.
Have we forgotten that our species has used fire as a tool for at least 2 million years? Usually, a fire would be kept going all night which would keep the camping ground dry and warm.
Has the author ever slept in the wild? Birds waking you? If this held true, no one would be able to sleep in rural areas.
This thesis seems to extrapolate a lot without paying attention to the details. It presents ideas as common sense and proceeds to mislead the reader through cherry-picked information that is a prime example of the confirmation bias.