Are you falling asleep correctly?

[Hrothbern]

Does the book also mention that too much sleep is on average comparable bad for health as too little sleep ?

 

[Hrothbern]

in that case im fookd. I either sleep 4 to 6 hours or go full 10-hour-hibernation-mode.

haha

I understand from various literature, mostly in the side lines, that the catch up does work... something like a rolling 7 night average perhaps ?
Also with people doing night shifts etc, your circadian rhytm of hormonal pulses (testosteron, cortisol, etc) does adapt as if your body wants to do the regular amounts of pulses and uses other windows.

On sleeping too long a big study has been done aggregating more than 100 cohort studies, the data of more than 5 million people...
All those people around the world doing the same study over and over again.... perhaps time for more specific studies that add something. Like a solid study of the weekend catch up

 

[Zelig]

Since you can't remember, that's not much of an inducement to read this book.

There's literally no book I've read in my life that I can remember specific quotes from.

People who are claiming they don't like chocolate are ridiculous liars because Mount Everest is tall

That doesn't make any sense.

I gave an analogy in the form of "A is like B".

You gave an premise in the form of "C because D" where the premise is obviously false.

I get 6 hours most nights (definitely did last night). Not sure what's so unbelievable about that.

Yes, lots of people are chronically sleep deprived. The part that is unbelievable is that you're able to function with chronic sleep deprivation without any deleterious effects.

Does the book also mention that too much sleep is on average comparable bad for health as too little sleep ?

That link is far more tenuous, for various reasons. There's no epidemic of people oversleeping, so even if it's problematic on an individual level, it's far less of a problem at the population level. It's also pretty hard to measure causally - people who sleep too much tend to do so because of underlying causes that are themselves bad for health. Most healthy people simply cannot force themselves to sleep for twelve hours per day.

 

[Kaitzilla]

I've heard of some new craze called Bamboo Pillows, but when I got one it was a very large, very firm (almost hard) pillow.
I guess it is good for sitting up in bed with, but sleeping on? Nope!
It is literally impossible to make it go flat or even flatish without heavy machinery, and my neck is pointed at the ceiling when I lay my head on it.
https://www.amazon.com/Bamboo-Pillows-Sleeping-Set-Hypoallergenic/dp/B078WFXW3K



Also, if one can't afford to splurge $40 on a white noise generating machine that they might not like sleeping with, audio tapes of rain falling are free.
That is good white noise.

Youtube keeps the screen on all night if you play it on a smartphone though.
Turning the brightness down to 0 sorta helps keep it charged.

What about an App that plays rain falling all night in the background?
Kind of hard to find a good one with no ads playing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/8ishih/whats_the_best_sleep_sounds_app/

Does anyone have a falling asleep app they'd like to recommend because they enjoy using it?
I hate wasting $1

 

[Synobun]

A friend gifted me a pillow last month that I am sure could be used as a replacement for a pipe in a mugging. It's currently collecting dust in my closet.

Personally, I like a somewhat thick pillow on the bottom and then a thin, wide pillow on top that I can adjust accordingly. These days I angle the top pillow so that I don't put any pressure on my impacted wisdom tooth while sleeping.

For "white noise", I listen to ~40 minutes of ASMR through a bluetooth earpiece. Plug it in afterwards and then switch to music on my laptop. I have two fans running in my room while I sleep so the music acts as a barometer for my sleep quality. If I can clearly hear the music, I'm not sleeping well. If it's indecipherable or unnoticed, I'm good. I tend to prefer total silence but this is impossible in the city and while living with roommates.

 

[Kaitzilla]

These days I angle the top pillow so that I don't put any pressure on my impacted wisdom tooth while sleeping.

I do the same thing with 2 pillows, thick and thin.

Sorry to hear about painful wisdom tooth.

I myself am struggling with kidney stones.
People who live without chronic pain just don't know.

I really feel the most for people with broken backs.
That invisible crazy pain that sometimes doesn't have any cure even if you spend tons of money and go through multiple surgeries.
All you can do is take opioids which might kill you in the long run.

 

[Hrothbern]

That link is far more tenuous, for various reasons. There's no epidemic of people oversleeping, so even if it's problematic on an individual level, it's far less of a problem at the population level. It's also pretty hard to measure causally - people who sleep too much tend to do so because of underlying causes that are themselves bad for health. Most healthy people simply cannot force themselves to sleep for twelve hours per day.

"people who sleep too much tend to do so because of underlying causes that are themselves bad for health"
That was my first angle to look upon "too long" sleep as well: underlying life style, disease or DNA factors causing both longer sleep as higher mortality.

About two years ago, when I was 60, I drastically changed my sleep behaviour from a 4-6 hour a day at irregular times to 8 hours and going to bed at 23.00-24.00. My rollercoaster job had ended, and I wanted to use the regained freedom over my time to get sleep normalised.
So... I also digged in into relevant literature to see what the current scientific insights were besides the mainstream advices you can read in every tabloid and health website.
And saw to my surprise that increased mortality from too long sleeping could not that easy be fully explained, attributed to other life style factors etc.

I try to find the relevant info again.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Yes, lots of people are chronically sleep deprived. The part that is unbelievable is that you're able to function with chronic sleep deprivation without any deleterious effects.

I'd hardly call 6 hours chronic sleep deprivation.

 

[Zelig]

I'd hardly call 6 hours chronic sleep deprivation.

Averaging six hours of sleep per night is exactly that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Does anyone have a falling asleep app they'd like to recommend because they enjoy using it?
I hate wasting $1

It wasn't free, but I have a variety of CDs and cassette tapes that have worked for me at various times. They range from rain, waves crashing against the shore, thunderstorms (if it's something you're used to, as I am living on the Prairies where it's common in summer, they're relaxing), to flute/harp music, to Arthur C. Clarke reading his own stories (good stories, but his voice was very dry and monotone).

And saw to my surprise that increased mortality from too long sleeping could not that easy be fully explained, attributed to other life style factors etc.

I try to find the relevant info again.

Before I was properly diagnosed and had the proper medication available, I was sleeping 12 hours a day and had trouble staying alert the rest of the time. Hypothyroidism does that to a person.

Now... there are other medical issues. I can't manage 8 hours straight without sleeping medication. Since I don't want to get dependent on those, I've been making do with sleeping as long as I can and having a nap later.

 

[cardgame]

The battery drain cannot be remedied except by killing the brightness - but if the light bothers you, just flip your phone over... I have done that before and it works beautifully.

By the way, this video is even better than rainymood, VERY high quality

@Zelig I once slept for 4 hours, then stayed up for 30 without even trying, I was so well rested. Explain that, science man!

 

[Zelig]

@Zelig I once slept for 4 hours, then stayed up for 30 without even trying, I was so well rested. Explain that, science man!

That's like someone saying "I once ate at McDonald's, and I felt great afterwards!"

Youtube keeps the screen on all night if you play it on a smartphone though.

Not if you pay for the non-garbage youtube.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Yes, lots of people are chronically sleep deprived. The part that is unbelievable is that you're able to function with chronic sleep deprivation without any deleterious effects.

I average three to five hours a night. I simply can't sleep any more than that. Does that make me sleep deprived? I sleep as much as I can sleep.

 

[Zelig]

I average three to five hours a night. I simply can't sleep any more than that. Does that make me sleep deprived? I sleep as much as I can sleep.

I don't know, I don't know you, and I'm not a doctor. I can't say if you've got an underlying condition that's preventing you from sleeping as much as you should, or if you're actually four or five standard deviations off the norm.

 

[cardgame]

That's like someone saying "I once ate at McDonald's, and I felt great afterwards!"

Come on now, that's completely implausible.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Come on now, that's completely implausible.

I take it you don't think that feeling good after eating unspecified biomass is possible.

 

[Zelig]

Come on now, that's completely implausible.

You seem to be under the impression that I've made a claim that I never actually made.

Obviously you can feel great after eating at McDonald's once. The point is that it doesn't matter. Having a daily Big Mac Meal habit still isn't going to be good for you, even if you have a couple big salads every weekend.

 

[Kaitzilla]

According to history, humans used to sleep 4 hours, wake up and do a bit of stuff, then sleep another 4 hours.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-maybe-we-should-again

Anthropologists have found evidence that during preindustrial Europe, bi-modal sleeping was considered the norm. Sleep onset was determined not by a set bedtime, but by whether there were things to do.

Historian A. Roger Ekirch's book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past describes how households at this time retired a couple of hours after dusk, woke a few hours later for one to two hours, and then had a second sleep until dawn.

During this waking period, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or have sex. Some would engage in activities like sewing, chopping wood, or reading, relying on the light of the moon or oil lamps.

Ekirch found references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century. This is thought to have started in the upper classes in Northern Europe and filtered down to the rest of Western society over the next 200 years.

Interestingly, the appearance of sleep maintenance insomnia in the literature in the late 19th century coincides with the period where accounts of split sleep start to disappear. Thus, modern society may place unnecessary pressure on individuals that they must obtain a night of continuous consolidated sleep every night, adding to the anxiety about sleep and perpetuating the problem.

Sleeping in two 4-hour blocs was also famously practiced by Winston Churchill and he lived to be 91 years old.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/polyphasic#Winston Churchill

We know quite a lot about Winston Churchill 's sleeping habits. As a wartime PM, his daily routine was watched closely by his assistants. Churchill could work his ministers to exhaustion by staying up late, but he would also routinely take a solid 1-2 hour nap in the afternoon. As such, he was a classical biphasic sleeper. At his house at Chartwell, his routine was quite regular. He would wake at 8, spend the morning in bed reading papers, dictating letters, etc., take a long nap at tea time, and work till as late as 3 am. He averaged 5-6 hours of sleep per day. Those words are attributed to Churchill himself: "You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one -- well, at least one and a half" (source). Churchill's well-drilled biphasic habits made him one of the most energetic wartime leaders. On a humorous note, F. D. Roosevelt's aides noted that after a Churchill's visit, the US president was so exhausted that he needed 10 hours of sleep for 3 days straight to recover.

Non-industrial people seem to get 6.4 hours.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/20151015-paleo-sleep-time-hadza-san-tsimane-science/

Members of three hunter-gatherer societies who lack electricity—and thus evenings filled with Facebook, Candy Crush, and 200 TV channels—get an average of only 6.4 hours of shut-eye a night, scientists have found. That’s no more than many humans who lead a harried industrial lifestyle, and less than the seven to nine hours recommended for most adults by the National Sleep Foundation.

People from these groups—two in Africa, one in South America—tend to nod off long after sundown and wake before dawn, contrary to the romantic vision of life without electric lights and electronic gadgets, the researchers report in Thursday’s Current Biology.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I don't know, I don't know you, and I'm not a doctor. I can't say if you've got an underlying condition that's preventing you from sleeping as much as you should, or if you're actually four or five standard deviations off the norm.

So some of us are "not credible" and others are?

According to history, humans used to sleep 4 hours, wake up and do a bit of stuff, then sleep another 4 hours.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-maybe-we-should-again

This is basically what I do now, though it's not necessarily exactly equal shifts of 4 hours.

I slept for about 5 hours this morning, and about 3 hours this evening (had the alarm set for 9:30 pm as there's a TV show I wanted to watch at 10 pm.

This will leave me more alert to do my daily word count for NaNoWriMo.

 

[Hrothbern]

That link is far more tenuous, for various reasons. There's no epidemic of people oversleeping, so even if it's problematic on an individual level, it's far less of a problem at the population level. It's also pretty hard to measure causally - people who sleep too much tend to do so because of underlying causes that are themselves bad for health. Most healthy people simply cannot force themselves to sleep for twelve hours per day.

"people who sleep too much tend to do so because of underlying causes that are themselves bad for health"
That was my first angle to look upon "too long" sleep as well: underlying life style, disease or DNA factors causing both longer sleep as higher mortality.

About two years ago, when I was 60, I drastically changed my sleep behaviour from a 4-6 hour a day at irregular times to 8 hours and going to bed at 23.00-24.00. My rollercoaster job had ended, and I wanted to use the regained freedom over my time to get sleep normalised.
So... I also digged in into relevant literature to see what the current scientific insights were besides the mainstream advices you can read in every tabloid and health website.
And saw to my surprise that increased mortality from too long sleeping could not that easy be fully explained, attributed to other life style factors etc.

I try to find the relevant info again.

I found back the most striking study for me at that time.

It has been done with 22,000 twins in Finland. It indicates that a duration of 7-8 hours is on average optimal and mortality risks increase on average with shorter and longer duration at roughly the same rate.
The figures were also adjusted for many life style etc factors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266277/

Participants: 21,268 twins aged ≥18 years responding to questionnaires administered to the Finnish Twin Cohort in 1975 (response rate 89%), and 1981 (84%).

Measurements: Subjects were categorized as short (<7 h), average, or long (>8 h) sleepers; sleeping well, fairly well, or fairly poorly/poorly; no, infrequent, or frequent users of hypnotics and/or tranquilizers. Cox proportional hazard models were used to obtain hazard ratios (HR) for mortality during 1982–2003 by sleep variable categories and their combinations. Adjustments were done for 10 sociodemographic and lifestyle covariates known to affect risk of death.

Results: Significantly increased risk of mortality was observed both for short sleep in men (+26%) and in women (+21%), and for long sleep (+24% and +17%), respectively, and also frequent use of hypnotics/tranquilizers (+31% in men and +39% in women). Snoring as a covariate did not change the results. The effect of sleep on mortality varied between age groups, with strongest effects in young men. Between 1975 and 1981, sleep length and sleep quality changed in one-third of subjects. In men there was a significant increase for stable short (1.34) and stable long (1.29) sleep for natural deaths, and for external causes in stable short sleepers (1.62).

Conclusions: Our results show complicated associations between sleep and mortality, with increased risk in short and long sleep.

Adjustments were done for 10 sociodemographic and lifestyle covariates known to affect risk of death.

We assessed the following sociodemographic and lifestyle covariates (asked both in 1975 and 1981; selected characteristics given in Table 1): married (yes/no), social class (6 categories: upper or lower white collar, skilled or unskilled workers, farmers, others), education (9 categories by years of school, high school equals to 12 years), working status (employed yes/no), BMI [body mass index (kg/m2) computed from self-reported weight and height], smoking status (4 categories: never, occasional, ex-, or current cigarette smoker), binge drinking,8 grams of alcohol consumed daily (based on self-reported average quantities of use of beer, wine, and spirits consumed9), conditioning physical activity (3 categories: sedentary, intermediate, vigorous physical activity10), and life satisfaction.11 Life satisfaction correlates highly (r = < 0.63) with depression as assessed concurrently by the Beck Depression Inventory.12 Snoring was asked in 1981 only with response alternatives “never,” “occasionally,” “often,” “almost always,” and “do not know.”

The table 2 in the article gives a good summary for the mortality findings after adjustment for the applied sociodemographic and life style covariates.
The RR shown is the Relative Risk. A value higher than 1 means a higher relative risk. For example a value of 1.50 means 50% more risk than the reference (sleepin 7-8 hours & sleeping well).
As caveat: the adjustments made for the covariates is as always based on a set of crucial key assumptions and subject to progressive insight.
(the table 1 in the article , not shown here in the post, shows the unadjusted values of the study)

For people that fancy to dig in the study where data of 5 million people were used here the link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079217300278
This recent study (2018) focuses on long sleep duration effects only and contains links to the studies used.

Here below one table of that huge study, showing the (unadjusted) RR's as function of the sleep duration for "all" and for some specific subgroups as Diabetes, Hypertension, Cardiovascular disease, Stroke, Coronary heart disease and Obesity.
Here you can see that for Hypertension and Obesity long sleep duration is indifferent to even beneficial.
For Hypertension probably explained by having a longer period that your blood pressure is simply low (which is the case during sleep), causing less damage.
For Obesity this could for example also come from a longer period where your hormonal balance restores better (Insulin and Leptin resistance decrease etc).

All in all there are really lots and lots of factors involved and I think it becomes because of that a very personal thing.
One thing not used in the studies here is that there are also indications that it is better to finish a sleep cycle (ended by dream-REM sleep) than break a sleep cycle off because your alarm tells you so. Many people wake up just before their alarm goes off. Indicating that our internal time clock (located in a dedicated part of our brain) has already adjusted our sleep cycles to fit nicely in.

Listening to your body, what feels good, is imo the mantra.

I started two years ago with increasing from 4-6 to 8 hours, as big reset, and over time I notice that I gradually wake up a bit earlier in the direction of 7 hours. So I let it happen.