[raamdev]

Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina, because it made me a better father; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, because it taught me of the importance of something that I’d occasionally dismiss as a nuisance; Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC by Pete Egoscue, because it completely changed the way I understood posture, pain, and how repetition influences my body; and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because it taught me how despite big changes in technology and society and way of living, very little changes when it comes to our personal struggles and concerns; Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, because it helped me realize that in any situation, my attitude is what I always have control over; and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey because it greatly contributed to my mental framework for how to be productive and for this quote, which is probably my favorite of the past decade:

“In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.”

[w1ntermute]

Re: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, this critique of the book is worth a read: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

[yhoiseth]

Thanks for sharing. Very informative. Especially this quote gave me pause:

> I wanted to drop you a line to thank you for all the time and effort involved in debunking Matthew Walker’s book. As someone who works with individuals with insomnia on a daily basis, I know from firsthand experience the harm that Walker’s book is causing.

> I have many stories of people who slept well on less than eight hours of sleep, read Walker’s book, tried to get more sleep and this led to more time awake, frustration, worry, sleep-related anxiety, and insomnia. …

[Reedx]

Disappointing... That book has been highly recommended ad infinitum on HN, to the point that it was sounding like gospel. Maybe that should've been a hint, heh.

Has Walker responded to that critique?

[Gatsky]

Glad someone posted this. This book gets so much praise. But like any popsci book, there are huge incentives for the author to exaggerate and manipulate to produce a clear and marketable message. Just consider that if there was no interesting story to tell about sleep, of course there would be no book.

[_0ffh]

Funnily enough, there's also a completely different book by the very same name, written by a German sleep researcher. And this one's actually really good (imo). [1]

[1] https://service.randomhouse.de/paperback/Why-We-Sleep/Albrec...

[kaiwen1]

What a great critique. I'd like to see a similar treatment of Jason Hickel's "The Divide", which feels both terribly important and very biased and sloppy.

[biophysboy]

I'd like to give this a more thorough read, but so far this critique strikes me as done in bad faith. I read the book. I'm also in the middle of a biophys PhD, so I like to think my opinion is "extra super special". Here are my comments:

Point 1: the chart bottoms out at 7, which falls within the range the book recommends. I'm fairly sure he recommends 7-9, and that the required amt varies from person to person. Another thought I had: metabolism and longevity go hand and hand. I mean, I just read a brand new paper from George Church's Harvard lab, showing that they reversed several chronic ailments in mice by inserting FGF21, which regulates glucose levels. And sleep absolutely regulates metabolism. Personally, I'm keeping my ears perked up when it comes to metabolism/circadian rhythms/homeostasis, etc.

Point 2: Depression is an incredibly complicated topic. It is a psychological construct, the net result of thousands and thousands of genes, filtered through a modern technological world, and then filtered through inventories, interviews, and assessments. For this reason, I am not at all surprised that Guzey was able to find studies that suggest that sleep deprivation might have some benefit for some people. I would HIGHLY recommend this new, open-access Nature review paper covering the genome wide studies on depression: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0450-5. Its almost not worth pitting a complex phenotype like depression against another complex behavior like depression. But what the hell, let's brush with broad strokes: the significant genetic variants associated with depression have to do with regulating homeostasis (eg sirtuins). So I would not be surprised if good sleep is at least correlated with low levels of depression.

Point 3: I know almost nothing about FFI, but we have kept mice awake, and they do eventually die. I'm pretty sure humans would die too, but ethics precludes us from performing such a study.

Points 4&5: This is just fussing about Walker's writing and WHO. I'll have to agree with Guzey that Walker's citations and consistency are often weak. And I honestly couldn't care less about WHO. But I'm pretty confident that sleep quantity has declined with time across the world. I remain curious about the connections between light and circadian rhythms (I think retinal cells go straight to the superchiasmatic nucleus, the circadian rhythm controller). Also, sugar is a thing in the modern world.

So yeah, I'm just frustrated by his nitpicking, and his seeming lack of appreciation for sleep as an open biological question. We don't know why we sleep, really. If anything, the title is the worst part of the book. But at least the contents respect the question. This criticism does not. Nonetheless, I am a sucker for obsessive bloggers (eg slatestar, gwern, cowen, etc), so I will definitely be checking out Guzey's other writing. It looks interesting.

[gpanders]

I also loved 7 Habits -- before reading it I had kind of brushed it off as just another wishy-washy self help book, but it exceeded all expectations.

However, what I took away from it was nothing about productivity, but rather how to live a good life. Habits 1-3, 5, and 7 are all solid advice that have broad application far outside of the narrow domains of the workplace. The mental model in Habit 1 about the "circle of influence vs. circle of control" has been one of the single most effective contributions to my mental health.

[sivers]

When new parents ask my advice, “Brain Rules for Baby” is the one and only book I recommend. Everyone has told me later they loved it.

[doctorcroc]

Egoscue was a paradigm shift for me. I had never considered posture as a critical factor in health, and since reading his books, I've gone down the rabbit hole of posture and myofascial therapy, and I'm appaled at how ignored this domain is in society. Most of us are walking around with so much energy trapped in the tension of our bodies, and our knowledge work further disembodies us. To anyone reading this, I highly recommend buying The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion, it's like 6 bucks on Amazon, and will change your life.

[ilamont]

+1 for Why We Sleep. It's one of those books that really changed my outlook on a fundamental aspect of life that too many of us take for granted.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Great suggestions. Your post reads like the first part of Meditations by Aurelius.

[teamwork007]

If you like Rilke, you'd also really like James Hollis' The Middle Passage (1993). As for as books from the past decade go David Brooks' The Road to Character was pretty good. His follow-up The Second Mountain would have been better if he didn't recycle so much from the previous work. Sam Harris' Waking Up was pretty eye opening as Harris is a very lucid thinker.

[celticmusic]

Mans Search For Meaning affected me in a way that very few books ever have. You grow up knowing about the holocaust, you see the imagery, but it's all impersonal. You understand why it's a horrific deed, why hitler was a horrible human being, and why we as a society should never allow that to happen again.

But there's just something about Frankl's descriptions, at least for me. It personalized it in a way I had never really experienced before. That book horrified me in a way that none of the other material on the holocaust ever had.