It’s probably a myth that we’re sleeping less than we used to

http://qz.com/491414/its-actually-a-myth-that-were-not-getting-enough-sleep/

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

44 47 11 years ago

qz.com

jwmoz• 11 years ago

I always need more sleep.

agentultra• 11 years ago

Me too. Father of two young ones.

api2• 11 years ago

Child = startup with a lot of overnight support calls.

jxm262• 11 years ago

Me too! Although, I'd love to try taking a couple weeks where I literally sleep until I can't anymore. Take the first couple days, crash for as long as needed (probably a while) until I'm fully rested, then repeat this daily and see how many hours my body "actually" likes to sleep in it's most natural state.

Seems hard to do though when you're working a job, moonlighting projects, life gets in the way, etc..

afterburner• 11 years ago

The headline is misleading; the article is talking about research that shows we're sleeping as much as we used to, the "myth" being that we're sleeping less than we used to. We still might not be getting enough sleep, it's just now it seems that might have always been the case.

akshatrathi3• 11 years ago

I wrote the piece. Thanks for the feedback. I see it differently though.

If you look at the studies most people are sleeping between seven and nine hours, which is what the little research we have done on sleep says we need. The "myth" is that, as opposed to what the CDC says, the number of people sleeping less than the recommended hours hasn't increased. Thus the myth that most of us are not sleeping enough.

lighthawk• 11 years ago

The problem we are having today is people that are overweight. Notice I said overweight and not obese. You don't have to be obese to have sleep problems. Simply getting your weight down enough can often reduce sleep apnea, which increases the quality of sleep.

In addition, when we go to sleep matters, and this can vary, depending on the person.

Finally, the amount of light, noise, the mattress, pillow, etc. all matter. Don't cheap out, but the most expensive mattress is not guaranteed to be the best. Don't sleep on a couch or an uncomfortable mattress.

jerf• 11 years ago

If we have "always" been getting "not enough" sleep, then for sufficiently large definitions of "always" I begin to question the "not enough".

The twentieth century saw a lot of poorly-informed scientists second-guessing human body mechanims that have been keeping us alive for millions upon millions of years, on the basis of "studies" that constituted tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny samplings of a horrifically n-dimensional parameter space. I don't think the twentieth century scientists came out of it looking too good even now in 2015 and I expect them to continue to look worse as we learn more. This seems as likely a place as any for them to end up having been wrong.

basch• 11 years ago

enough probably means optimal not baseline to function adequately

dang• 11 years ago

Ok, we changed the title to make that claim more explicit.

quinncuatro• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure this is accurate. Speaking entirely anecdotally here, as I haven't done a lot of research on sleep trends. But ever since I saw Inception, I got into lucid dreaming. I only got lucid a handful of times over the years, but in trying to do so I changed my sleeping habits. I get about six hours of sleep every day, but I'm at a point where I fall into REM the minute I'm out. It's supposed to take an hour to fall into the cycle, but I've had cat naps that last about fifteen minutes with a full on dream. Since REM is the part of the cycle where your body rests the most, I feel that if I fall into the cycle sooner rather than later, I can safely shave a few hours off my sleeping time. Just my $.02

sp332• 11 years ago

Not all dreaming happens during REM sleep, so it's possible that you're not changing your cycle that much but still dreaming more.

abandonliberty• 11 years ago

Sounds interesting.

I'm curious about your experiment. What worked, what didn't, and what changes you notice (including potential placebo effects).

prodmerc• 11 years ago

I've only lucid dreamed once - that was one interesting experience. Usually, I don't remember my dreams at all, and when I do it's some weird stuff :-D.

I also have dreams when taking a 20-30 minutes nap during the day, and I can remember them more often. But I still can't go more than a few days sleeping a total of 6 or less hours, I'm just too tired. I need 7 hours at least.

What a waste of time... :-)

jpapon• 11 years ago

Since REM is the part of the cycle where your body rests the most, I feel that if I fall into the cycle sooner rather than later, I can safely shave a few hours off my sleeping time.

That's a pretty big leap to make. If the natural sleep cycle has several stages, it's likely that the other stages are also important.

akshatrathi3• 11 years ago

Yes, other stages are important. But during polyphasic sleeping, which is when you sleep more than once in a day, your sleep stages can get split too. We even have some scientific evidence for it. Though we still don't understand it well. More within links here: http://qz.com/430415.

akshatrathi3• 11 years ago

Thanks for your $0.02. I'm the author of the piece, and I know what you are talking about. I tried to cheat sleep for a year by sleeping approx 4.5 hours per day. More here: http://qz.com/430415 (slept 3.5 hours at night and took 3-4 naps of 20 mins in the day)

My experience was the same. I used to fall in REM very quickly, many times in the 20 min naps. Here I say REM but really I mean dreams and I'm taking dreams to be a proxy for REM.

brayton• 11 years ago

"Though a tiny fraction of people can get away with much less."

Why is that?

teekert• 11 years ago

But you ave it up so it was not what you thought it would be then?

How do you know you are in REM sleep by the way? Can you only dream during REM? I do often dream in the 9 min between my alarm snoozing, even if I do it a couple of times in a row. Does that mean I'm immediately back in REM sleep?

msutherl• 11 years ago

I did this for a year in high school (bi-phasic, 1.5h + 4.5h). Had to stop because I was disrupting my parents at night, but I had very good results overall. Felt like I had more energy during the day and enjoyed surreal relaxing times awake at night.

One thing though: I had a really hard time waking up from the short nap and had to have my girlfriend call me to wake me up every day. If you don't have a (girl/boy)friend to help you with this, or a very aggressive alarm clock, YMMV.

Another friend is doing a similar cycle right now and it's the same for him ... he has some friends ("accountability partners") who will call him to wake him up daily from his shorter nap and I think they talk about how their day went and then hang up.

Confiks2• 11 years ago

When I'm in a good environment and haven't slept all too recently, I can also easily get a 15-minute 'cat nap' with full on dreaming. I sometimes wake up from them multiple times in a mild dream-state panic, but I don't really consider that a problem.

I wear contact lenses, and keeping my eyes closed for more than 5 minutes will really dry up and irritate my eyes (beyond relief with lens solution). The problem is that when I take them out before taking a nap, beside the effort that that takes, my eyes will not take kindly to putting them in so quickly again. In the morning it's not usually a problem. Does anyone have anything to share about that?

sokoloff• 11 years ago

You won't like the answer, but when I had our first child, I switched back to glasses, precisely because of the ability to quickly transition from awake to napping when the baby slept. They're old enough now that I could probably switch back, but I don't think contacts are viable for the quick napping.

If it's just the protein buildup on the lens, you might try taking out set A, napping quickly, and inserting a fresh set B of lenses while set A continues to clean in the solution. They're cheap enough to try anyway.

matthewrhoden1• 11 years ago

When I was single I was really into fitness and as a result also made sure I got plenty of sleep. I would go to be really early to ensure I got the full 8hrs. Once I caught up on my sleep something funny started to happen. I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night. Then go back to sleep for a few more. Net result being only about 6 hrs of sleep.

Anymore, I'm of the opinion that your body knows how much sleep you need. That being on a schedule is almost more important than the specific hourly amount.

koenigdavidmj• 11 years ago

Once I caught up on my sleep something funny started to happen. I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night

Some are convinced that this was our sleep pattern before electric lighting was a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

arawde• 11 years ago

There's also http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-gol... which was posted a while back on HN and which I found quite interesting.

icelancer• 11 years ago

I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night.

This happens to me 100% of the time when I "go to bed early" and it ruins my day unless I seriously force myself to fall back asleep. I understand this is a "natural" pattern from years past, but it's incredible disruptive. I'm back to setting an alarm and jolting myself awake, which doesn't sound like the best way to do things, but oh well.

ashark• 11 years ago

I have a lot of trouble falling back asleep after something like that when I know an alarm is set. The result is that I have to stay up later than I'd like to make sure I'm so tired that I am very unlikely to wake up at all before the alarm goes off, getting 6-7 hours most nights, when I'd love 8-9 but can't risk waking up at 2:00 (because I wasn't falling-over tired when I went to bed) and not being able to fall back asleep due to alarm-anxiety.

My wife and I each take a separate sleep-in day on the weekends (someone has to get up with the kids) to make up for stuff like this. I'd rather not have one since it cuts heavily in to nice daylight hours, but as it is it's do the 12-hour-sleep make-up thing on the weekend or risk having a 3-hours-of-sleep night on a Tuesday because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.

The only solution I can come up with is "get rich enough not to have an alarm". :-/

mapt• 11 years ago

"Going to bed early" as in, substantially earlier than the day before?

There are a lot of cues that change when you get tired, but the body's internal rhythms should be expected to work on roughly a 24h cycle, and resist attempts to disrupt any cycle that's been followed for the last few days. It seems to work towards sufficiency of sleep about as strongly as it works towards regularity.

And we've engineered a week in which we're expected to 'sleep in', two days out of seven.

NumberCruncher• 11 years ago

It´s probably a myth that a systematic review of X studies, each involving 35 participants on average is better than throwing a d100.

waxman2• 11 years ago

A recently published controlled study found that in two groups who were deliberately exposed to the cold virus then forced to sleep less than 6 hours a night or more than 8 hours, the group that slept less than 6 hours caught colds at a 4.5X greater rate, which was independent of previous immune system strength, age, socio-economic, and every other variable they tracked.

The experimental design seems to be pretty solid, and once these findings are replicated, this is pretty strong evidence that "we're not getting enough sleep."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/short-sleepers-may-...

eterm• 11 years ago

No, it's evidence that we need more than 6 hours sleep, it's not evidence that we're not getting 6 hours sleep.

mayoff• 11 years ago

It's evidence that lack of sleep is unhealthy. It's not evidence that we are (on average) lacking sleep.

mordocai• 11 years ago

Unless you also show that a majority of people are getting less than 6 hours of sleep a night I don't see how the summary you gave shows that people are not getting enough sleep.

I did not read your link.

obastani• 11 years ago

The claim made by the article isn't that getting < 8 hours of sleep is bad (they agree it is), it's that most people get 8 hours of sleep; more specifically, that many surveys overestimate the number of people who get too little sleep.

waxman2• 11 years ago

There are interesting challenges with data collection (and I don't think the survey paper discussed in the OP really solves this problem), but to be clear, somewhere between 10-30% of Americans average fewer than 6 hours of sleep per night, which increases your risk of catching colds by 450%.

So getting less sleep than you need is definitely harmful, the questions become: a) how much do we really need, b) how much are people actually getting, and the jury still seems to be out on both of these.

kyleblarson• 11 years ago

If I get less than 8 hours of sleep I feel like crap. That's all the evidence I need.

joshdance• 11 years ago

I don't know why they don't just use the data that is already being collected - https://jawbone.com/blog/circadian-rhythm/

dsjoerg• 11 years ago

That is very cool however this data set has some serious selection bias to contend with.

lazyant2• 11 years ago

they made a study with an NBA team where players used to get about 5 hours of sleep (lots of traveling) and they when to sleep about 7-8 hours and their metrics (free shooting etc) improved quite a bit

pd12• 11 years ago

Source? That sounds intersting

lazyant2• 11 years ago

found it, it was Collegiate basketball (Cardinals) not NBA: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119836/

gwern• 11 years ago

Instead of using self-reported data, he wanted objective data—that which is recorded using sleep-monitoring instruments or by observers as participants slept in a lab. Youngstedt’s and his colleagues’ systematic review, published in Sleep Medicine Reviews, took into consideration 168 studies with objective data conducted between 1960 and 2013—involving more than 6,000 participants (understandably a much smaller set than the self-reported surveys) across 15 countries. It too reveals that the total sleep time hasn’t changed much in that period.

Why would you consider this as any evidence about whether the general population sleeps more or less? When you participate in a study, you are not making your usual decisions; you're cooperating and will sleep as long as you can or they let you, and there doesn't seem like much reason to expect sleep lab technicians to have gotten more impatient over the years and start rushing in to wake up subjects at hour 7.

skav• 11 years ago

Good objection, but the article also mentions other sources like time use diaries.

It’s probably a myth that we’re sleeping less than we used to

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