> And getting too much sleep—not just too little of it—is associated with health problems including diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease and with higher rates of death, studies show
I don't understand how people can honestly report stuff like this. If you are sick, you often sleep more because you are drained and tired. That's plenty to make the data look like that. Sleeping more doesn't necessarily make you sick in the first place. There's no point bringing this up because it would be silly to try to sleep less to improve your health.
I don't understand how people can think scientists don't know this. From the article:
People who reported they slept 6.5 to 7.4 hours had a lower mortality rate than those with shorter or longer sleep. The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2002, controlled for 32 health factors, including medications.
Of course controlling for confounders does not magically mean their study is perfect - there are always confounders that are either unknown or unable to be measured, particularly in retrospective/observational studies like this. But it's not nothing.
It should really be titled "For some people, seven hours of sleep might be better than eight", but that's probably not eye-catching enough.
The article supports what you are saying here:
> Other experts caution against studies showing ill effects from too much sleep. Illness may cause someone to sleep or spend more time in bed, these experts say.
There's this gem of wisdom only towards the end of the article:
> "I don't think you can overdose on healthy sleep. When you get enough sleep your body will wake you up," said Safwan Badr, chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
Sleeping until you naturally wake up is generally a good strategy.
It's not just the result of poor health causing more sleep. Both can be caused by a third factor. Chronic lack of exercise causes people to sleep 9+ hours per day. Put those same people on regular aerobic exercise regimes, and they start sleeping <8 hours.
Also, it's not the most outrageous hypothesis that oversleeping directly causes health problems, too. The body is complicated and poorly understood.
I'm not sure of your issue. The article used the term "associated" meaning that the above average sleep could be a symptom and/or a cause of those referenced health problems. The article does a good job of identifying the optimal sleep duration of a healthy individual. (Healthy being free of temporary and permanent ailments.)
The solution for me -- believe it or not, call me crazy -- it to go to sleep when I'm feeling sleepy and tired. I tend to read in bed; at least an hour before I want to actually sleep, I'll read. Sometimes I get to the point where I can't keep my eyes open after 30 mins in which case I pack away the book or kindle and go to sleep. Sometimes I read a bit longer than the prescribed one hour until I get to the point where I'm sleepy enough to go to sleep.
End result? I'm never tired in the mornings and I often wake up naturally before my alarm clock rings. I also don't have massive "crash and burn" effects on the weekends where I sleep for much, much longer.
You are far from crazy, it's just the opposite - you're doing exactely as one should. For (very) detailed explanation I warmly recommend "Good sleep, good learning, good life" [0] by dr Piotr Wozniak.
Depends on the book, sometimes I just keep reading and reading until the sun starts rising. I force myself to put down the book and try to sleep at least an hour or 2.
The key here is reading a book rather than your phone, laptop or some other bright screen which would stimulate your mind and prevent you from feeling sleepy.
I often do the same though I have found different lighting levels to help set myself into a "preparing for sleep state". I try to mirror the same settings I would use if reading a paper book, even when reading on iPad.
Ceiling lights on, bed made: awake time.
Nightstand light on, 2 pillows propped again headboard to lay/sit up more: reading time.
This works for me when I am on vacation or moving a lot, instead of looking at my computer for 9+ hours.
But most of my days fall in the latter category, and if I stay up until I am tired, I end up sleeping every ~26h or so, and that ends up being troublesome quite quickly :(
"Sometimes I get to the point where I can't keep my eyes open after 30 mins in which case I pack away the book or kindle and go to sleep. "
Agree and I would add that an excellent way that I have found to get back to sleep (if you wake up in the middle of the night) is to do something similar. Although there are many things that say otherwise, I actually find that I can pull out the iphone, read for 30 to 40 minutes (even with the bright light) and I will fall back to sleep for the rest of the night. (In other words when laying there for 5 or 10 minutes doesn't do the trick.)
I didn't read the study (just the article), but it appears that the authors are reporting their results for the "average" person. From what people say on here, it seems to me that sleep requirements vary a lot on a per person basis, and what works well for one person may not work well for another.
People have different health conditions, different amounts of exercise per day, different ages -- all kinds of factors. It seems that coming up with one number for everyone is far too simplistic.
For me personally, I feel absolutely horrible on anything less than 9 hours. I slept 7 last night and have been groggy all morning, even with 400 mg of caffeine. Part of my problem is that I got mono last year, and ever since then I've just been groggy in general. I asked my doctor about modafinil (which is supposed to keep you awake), but he said it had a high abuse potential and recommended corticosteroids instead. Meh, I'd rather have modafinil than steroids, so I passed on the offer.
I'm at a conference all this week, and it's quite annoying being "that guy" whose head is constantly bobbing during presentations even with sufficient sleep. No amount of rest seems sufficient to eliminate my tendency to fall asleep during lectures.
A sleep study might be a really good thing to do. Sleep disorders are very underdiagnosed, and many are identified only from sleep study results. Many many people with sleep disorders are completely unaware, and often go years before being properly diagnosed, if at all.
Personally i've been diagnosed with narcolepsy, but it took 9-10 years of problems and my life falling apart before any doctor caught it (finally having insurance thanks to the ACA). Modafinil helps me to be a little more functional during the day, and i'm really grateful for that.
Frequent dozing, microsleeps, like you're experiencing, even after a full nights sleep, are indicative that there is an issue here worth investigating.
I had mono during my university years and the need for more sleep stayed with me for several years after recovery. I managed to scale it back to a normal eight hour night by simply going to bed earlier, say 9-9:30 pm. The earlier I went to bed, the higher the quality of sleep and consequently the less I seemed to need.
I still go to bed relatively early compared to most people, around 9:30-10 pm, but I get up at 6 am and feel great. Give it a try and see if it works.
From the article, "'The problem with these studies is that they give you good information about association but not causation,' said Timothy Morgenthaler, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which represents sleep doctors and researchers, and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic Center for Sleep Medicine." Yep. It's painfully difficult and expensive to conduct a good randomized treatment-control study of sleep duration with an adequate sample size for figuring out what is optimal as a population central tendency. I think the observation that many people put in a quiet, dark room in daylight hours will fall asleep is one hint that more Americans get too little sleep than too much sleep at night, but there is still more research needed.
When I used to live in the subtropical zone of Taiwan (the latitude of Taipei is about like the latitude of Miami, and the climate is not greatly different), there was still a fairly strongly established cultural custom of taking a nap, a siesta, after lunch. It look me a long time to get used to doing that, but it seemed to make sense, especially in the summer. Sleep patterns vary somewhat by culture and by climate, but the big influence on sleep patterns in the twenty-first century appears to be artificial indoor light, which is much brighter and much less expensive compared to average wages all over the world than it used to be. I always encourage people with sleep problems to get outdoors IN THE MORNING DAYLIGHT for moderate exercise to entrain their bodies' biological clocks. Behavior genetic research shows that the biological clock genes are deeply conserved in most animals, so that basically the same set of genes controls the biological clocks of both fruit flies and human beings. Some flies (and some humans) have gene variants that bring about problems like delayed-sleep-cycle sydrome, but essentially everyone can entrain their biological clock by controlling light exposure.
This study relies on finding associations in a large data set, which is not really a complete scientific study. It's at best a hint about where scientists should conduct future research.
If you're just looking at correlations, it can be easy to miss hidden variables, even when attempting to control for them with statistical methods.
Compare with a well-known Standord study where athletes were asked to maximize their sleep, and then their results compared to when they got the "normal" amount of sleep. They showed a notable improvement while maximizing sleep.
If you're reading an article on sleep studies and it doesn't mention sleep debt, it's not giving the whole picture. Look up William Dement for more info.
Now just for a bit of info so it may help others... for years I had the problem of going to bed around 10pm and then lying there awake for hours. Sometimes almost to 1am. Classic insomnia, until I read a book on sleep by William Dement, it all started to make a bit more sense - I was going to bed too early for my body and not accumulating enough sleep debt...
So the solution was easy! Stay up later. Instead, I started going to bed at around 11pm. I started falling asleep easier (within the recommend 20 minutes) and didn't have the issue of insomnia any longer. However this did lead onto another issue - headaches. After years of suffering from insomnia I had found the solution but then it lead to headaches. I chose headaches. But then I A/B tested some more. I now go to sleep between 12am and 12:30am. Headaches gone. Counter-intuitive, I completely agree. But headaches begone!
So IANAD (I am not a doctor), but if you're suffering from insomnia, try staying up an hour later each night to accumulate a bit of sleep debt. And if it's working but you're then getting headaches, try staying up another hour. If you do experiment with this, shoot me an email (see my profile). I would be interested to see if it works for more people or completely backfires.
(For the curious, I get out of bed at 5:05am every morning for work. So under 5 clean hours each night, no insomnia, no headaches)
Edit: I should have put more info on William Dement, otherwise people may think he's just another fly-by-night "expert" - Dr. William C. Dement, M.D., Ph.D., the world's leading authority on sleep, sleep disorders, and the dangers of sleep deprivation. He is the director and founder of the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center, the world's first sleep disorders center.
The evidence for medium- to long-term sleep debt is sketchy at best. Certainly in the short term (1-3 days) if you are deprived of sleep, or if you're chronically short on sleep, there's all sorts of cognitive and physiological effects.
But after over longer terms of a week or more, after returning to a normal sleep schedule, it's more complicated. Much of the 'overtired' feeling and cognitive effects come from being deprived of slow-wave sleep (SWS), which you get in the deepest phases of sleep. It's in this phase of sleep that motor skills are consolidated, and it seems to be the 'physically restorative' part of sleep. This is opposed to REM sleep, which you get in the lighter phases of sleep and is where you dream and where memories are consolidated. Unlike SWS, there are very few side effects to being deprived of REM sleep. In a typical eight-hour sleep there will be several cycles of sleep, totalling about four to five hours out of eight spent in SWS, and the remainder in REM and in transition between states.
As for sleep debt and why it doesn't really exist beyond the short term, it comes down to what sleep researchers call sleep architecture, or how the cycles and phases of sleep are arranged through a night's sleep. For example, there's typically a bias towards getting more SWS in the first half of the night, and more REM sleep in the second. Here's what a typical night's sleep looks like (Stages 3 and 4 are SWS sleep):
Your sleep architecture changes under sleep deprivation. If you are selectively deprived of SWS one night (e.g. by an evil sleep researcher waking you up any time you enter SWS), you will spend more of the next night in SWS to compensate. If your sleep is reduced gradually over time, your body will sacrifice REM sleep to maintain the same amount of SWS -- about four to five hours a night. As I said before, not getting much REM sleep has few side effects.
This is why you are able to sleep only five hours a night and still feel fine: your body simply adjusted to spend very little time in SWS. If I could guess, I'd say you probably have very few dreams anymore, maybe just one occasionally, shortly before waking up? I can't explain why this helped your insomnia or headaches, because I don't know much about how an insomniac differs from a typical person. But it's not to do with sleep debt.
I went into the opposite direction: my sleep schedule now wants to be 2am or later and yet I still have to be up by 7:30 to make it to work on time.
I will agree though that I have to be in a state where my body just can no longer stay awake before I fall asleep. I can't lay in bed. I can't read, I have to literally go until I can't any longer. I'm currently in a month or so of terrible sleep by it being broken up into 2 intervals where I wake up in the middle of the night and stay up for a few hours until my body wants to shut back down again.
Insomnia is an insufferable bitch for the most part. I will say YMMV on anything you change regarding sleep habits. I personally need to be in a massive amount of slept debt to properly fall asleep but it can easily backfire quite easily if I'm not careful.
Actually the correct answer to "how many hours should I sleep?" is: it depends.
I spend several hours a week breaking down my body by lifting extremely heavy weights at the gym each week. I don't feel good with 7 hours of sleep. My body needs to repair itself.
You might want to try f.lux. Since the problem with electronic devices seems to be blue light, changing the hue of the screen to a more reddish tone seems to prevent the serotonin production inhibition associated with blue light.
A careful read of the article indicates its from the perspective of maximization of lifespan and maximization of short term productivity. Why must they both be the same or have anything to do with each other, beyond numerological coincidence?
You're talking about a completely different metric, which is quality of life.
From personal experience in .mil my "combat effectiveness" for uncle sam probably was maximized by only being able to sleep for about three hours per night. I would not wish that hell on anyone.
There should be more to life than merely making someone else richer at the fastest rate you're capable of, or being the last guy in your cohort to die, while suffering in agony.
If I sleep over 6-7 hours I find it incredibly difficult to get to sleep the following night. The problem for me is I am perfectly happy sleeping 12 hours :) If I actually obey my alarm and get up after 6 hours of sleep that seems perfect to get me through the day (without caffeine) and fall asleep quite quickly the next night.
I don't have any sources but for a lot of people this seems to decrease with age. I'm 28 and I can still sleep for 10-12 hours if I don't have any reason to get up, which is rare. However, I don't think my dad can actually sleep more than 8 hours if he wanted to.
I was under the impression that 7.5 hours was optimal because it falls within the recommended 7-9 hours and occurs at the end of a sleep cycle, which should help you feel more refreshed and alert upon waking.
Just keep in mind that nothing is exact. That "1.5 hours" is approximate, and will vary between people, and will probably vary from night to night depending on all sorts of things you'd never think of, and maybe between the start and end of the night. Plus I'm pretty sure switching from "awake" to "asleep" isn't instantaneous, so you have to count that time as well.
Yup, sleep cycles are 1.5 hours each and most humans need 5 of them. As long as you don't break out of a sleep cycle before the 1.5 hours is completed you tend to feel pretty awake when you do wake up, even if it's only been 3 hours.
So the "health" section of the WSJ needed to come up with a story about sleep, and found that many things correlate with the number 7.
The stone age-like study mentioned at the end, for example, simply found that their participants slept longer when they had no access to electricity: "subjective assessments of health and functioning did not reveal any relevant changes across the study." So why 7.2 hours? Sunset at 22:00, sunrise (or excessively loud birds!) at 5:30...
Even the title seems wrong. Sleep cycles take about 90 minutes each, so if I plan to wake up after a certain amount of time, I pick a multiple of 90 minutes, i.e. neither 7 nor 8 hours.
Sleep cycles don't all take exactly 90 minutes. The first one takes about 90 minutes, and each subsequent sleep cycle decreases in duration throughout the night. The last sleep cycle before you wake up will take significantly less than 90 minutes.
So, the article starts, and ends, with recommending 7-9 hours of sleep. Everything in between mostly supports those two values.
What's the real answer, proposed by reality and this article? Find out for yourself what your sleep duration should be.
Seems to me that the real purpose of this article was to remind folks that 5 hours is generally not going to be enough sleep, and 10+ hours might be a sign something's wrong.
To add to anecdotal evidence: What's worked for me is having a set wake-up time every single day of the week, and going to bed when I'm tired. Turns out I naturally want right around 8 hours of sleep, give or take 30 minutes on a day-to-day basis.
I find research that starts with the assumption that humans require identical amounts of anything to be absurd. People are metabolically different from each other - the optimal average has no bearing on what I should do, it only indicates the course that is most likely to be correct, ignoring all specific information about myself.
I have a lot of information about myself that differentiates me from the aggregate (and so should most people), so this recommendation is more dangerous than it is useful.
I wonder at which point in time did we stop going to sleep when we were tired and just started subscribing to some random number like 8 hours of sleep per day.
I'm seeing lots of researches being cited here, but, were those people healthier because they got less than 8 hours of sleep, or was there some other factor causing them to get / need less sleep which also helped their health?
[+] [-] lnanek2|11 years ago|reply
I don't understand how people can honestly report stuff like this. If you are sick, you often sleep more because you are drained and tired. That's plenty to make the data look like that. Sleeping more doesn't necessarily make you sick in the first place. There's no point bringing this up because it would be silly to try to sleep less to improve your health.
[+] [-] streptomycin|11 years ago|reply
People who reported they slept 6.5 to 7.4 hours had a lower mortality rate than those with shorter or longer sleep. The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2002, controlled for 32 health factors, including medications.
Of course controlling for confounders does not magically mean their study is perfect - there are always confounders that are either unknown or unable to be measured, particularly in retrospective/observational studies like this. But it's not nothing.
[+] [-] lilsunnybee|11 years ago|reply
It should really be titled "For some people, seven hours of sleep might be better than eight", but that's probably not eye-catching enough.
The article supports what you are saying here:
> Other experts caution against studies showing ill effects from too much sleep. Illness may cause someone to sleep or spend more time in bed, these experts say.
There's this gem of wisdom only towards the end of the article:
> "I don't think you can overdose on healthy sleep. When you get enough sleep your body will wake you up," said Safwan Badr, chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
Sleeping until you naturally wake up is generally a good strategy.
[+] [-] spacehome|11 years ago|reply
Also, it's not the most outrageous hypothesis that oversleeping directly causes health problems, too. The body is complicated and poorly understood.
[+] [-] orky56|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] max-a|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mickeyp|11 years ago|reply
End result? I'm never tired in the mornings and I often wake up naturally before my alarm clock rings. I also don't have massive "crash and burn" effects on the weekends where I sleep for much, much longer.
[+] [-] ivanche|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
[+] [-] u124556|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weavie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draker|11 years ago|reply
Ceiling lights on, bed made: awake time.
Nightstand light on, 2 pillows propped again headboard to lay/sit up more: reading time.
Lights off, 1 pillow: sleep time.
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|11 years ago|reply
But most of my days fall in the latter category, and if I stay up until I am tired, I end up sleeping every ~26h or so, and that ends up being troublesome quite quickly :(
[+] [-] larrys|11 years ago|reply
Agree and I would add that an excellent way that I have found to get back to sleep (if you wake up in the middle of the night) is to do something similar. Although there are many things that say otherwise, I actually find that I can pull out the iphone, read for 30 to 40 minutes (even with the bright light) and I will fall back to sleep for the rest of the night. (In other words when laying there for 5 or 10 minutes doesn't do the trick.)
[+] [-] lucian1900|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mreiland|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|11 years ago|reply
People have different health conditions, different amounts of exercise per day, different ages -- all kinds of factors. It seems that coming up with one number for everyone is far too simplistic.
For me personally, I feel absolutely horrible on anything less than 9 hours. I slept 7 last night and have been groggy all morning, even with 400 mg of caffeine. Part of my problem is that I got mono last year, and ever since then I've just been groggy in general. I asked my doctor about modafinil (which is supposed to keep you awake), but he said it had a high abuse potential and recommended corticosteroids instead. Meh, I'd rather have modafinil than steroids, so I passed on the offer.
I'm at a conference all this week, and it's quite annoying being "that guy" whose head is constantly bobbing during presentations even with sufficient sleep. No amount of rest seems sufficient to eliminate my tendency to fall asleep during lectures.
[+] [-] lilsunnybee|11 years ago|reply
Personally i've been diagnosed with narcolepsy, but it took 9-10 years of problems and my life falling apart before any doctor caught it (finally having insurance thanks to the ACA). Modafinil helps me to be a little more functional during the day, and i'm really grateful for that.
Frequent dozing, microsleeps, like you're experiencing, even after a full nights sleep, are indicative that there is an issue here worth investigating.
[+] [-] cgh|11 years ago|reply
I still go to bed relatively early compared to most people, around 9:30-10 pm, but I get up at 6 am and feel great. Give it a try and see if it works.
[+] [-] tokenadult|11 years ago|reply
When I used to live in the subtropical zone of Taiwan (the latitude of Taipei is about like the latitude of Miami, and the climate is not greatly different), there was still a fairly strongly established cultural custom of taking a nap, a siesta, after lunch. It look me a long time to get used to doing that, but it seemed to make sense, especially in the summer. Sleep patterns vary somewhat by culture and by climate, but the big influence on sleep patterns in the twenty-first century appears to be artificial indoor light, which is much brighter and much less expensive compared to average wages all over the world than it used to be. I always encourage people with sleep problems to get outdoors IN THE MORNING DAYLIGHT for moderate exercise to entrain their bodies' biological clocks. Behavior genetic research shows that the biological clock genes are deeply conserved in most animals, so that basically the same set of genes controls the biological clocks of both fruit flies and human beings. Some flies (and some humans) have gene variants that bring about problems like delayed-sleep-cycle sydrome, but essentially everyone can entrain their biological clock by controlling light exposure.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|11 years ago|reply
If you're just looking at correlations, it can be easy to miss hidden variables, even when attempting to control for them with statistical methods.
Compare with a well-known Standord study where athletes were asked to maximize their sleep, and then their results compared to when they got the "normal" amount of sleep. They showed a notable improvement while maximizing sleep.
[+] [-] hadoukenio|11 years ago|reply
If you're reading an article on sleep studies and it doesn't mention sleep debt, it's not giving the whole picture. Look up William Dement for more info.
Now just for a bit of info so it may help others... for years I had the problem of going to bed around 10pm and then lying there awake for hours. Sometimes almost to 1am. Classic insomnia, until I read a book on sleep by William Dement, it all started to make a bit more sense - I was going to bed too early for my body and not accumulating enough sleep debt...
So the solution was easy! Stay up later. Instead, I started going to bed at around 11pm. I started falling asleep easier (within the recommend 20 minutes) and didn't have the issue of insomnia any longer. However this did lead onto another issue - headaches. After years of suffering from insomnia I had found the solution but then it lead to headaches. I chose headaches. But then I A/B tested some more. I now go to sleep between 12am and 12:30am. Headaches gone. Counter-intuitive, I completely agree. But headaches begone!
So IANAD (I am not a doctor), but if you're suffering from insomnia, try staying up an hour later each night to accumulate a bit of sleep debt. And if it's working but you're then getting headaches, try staying up another hour. If you do experiment with this, shoot me an email (see my profile). I would be interested to see if it works for more people or completely backfires.
(For the curious, I get out of bed at 5:05am every morning for work. So under 5 clean hours each night, no insomnia, no headaches)
Edit: I should have put more info on William Dement, otherwise people may think he's just another fly-by-night "expert" - Dr. William C. Dement, M.D., Ph.D., the world's leading authority on sleep, sleep disorders, and the dangers of sleep deprivation. He is the director and founder of the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center, the world's first sleep disorders center.
[+] [-] a-priori|11 years ago|reply
But after over longer terms of a week or more, after returning to a normal sleep schedule, it's more complicated. Much of the 'overtired' feeling and cognitive effects come from being deprived of slow-wave sleep (SWS), which you get in the deepest phases of sleep. It's in this phase of sleep that motor skills are consolidated, and it seems to be the 'physically restorative' part of sleep. This is opposed to REM sleep, which you get in the lighter phases of sleep and is where you dream and where memories are consolidated. Unlike SWS, there are very few side effects to being deprived of REM sleep. In a typical eight-hour sleep there will be several cycles of sleep, totalling about four to five hours out of eight spent in SWS, and the remainder in REM and in transition between states.
As for sleep debt and why it doesn't really exist beyond the short term, it comes down to what sleep researchers call sleep architecture, or how the cycles and phases of sleep are arranged through a night's sleep. For example, there's typically a bias towards getting more SWS in the first half of the night, and more REM sleep in the second. Here's what a typical night's sleep looks like (Stages 3 and 4 are SWS sleep):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_architecture#mediaviewer/...
Your sleep architecture changes under sleep deprivation. If you are selectively deprived of SWS one night (e.g. by an evil sleep researcher waking you up any time you enter SWS), you will spend more of the next night in SWS to compensate. If your sleep is reduced gradually over time, your body will sacrifice REM sleep to maintain the same amount of SWS -- about four to five hours a night. As I said before, not getting much REM sleep has few side effects.
This is why you are able to sleep only five hours a night and still feel fine: your body simply adjusted to spend very little time in SWS. If I could guess, I'd say you probably have very few dreams anymore, maybe just one occasionally, shortly before waking up? I can't explain why this helped your insomnia or headaches, because I don't know much about how an insomniac differs from a typical person. But it's not to do with sleep debt.
[+] [-] w0rd-driven|11 years ago|reply
I will agree though that I have to be in a state where my body just can no longer stay awake before I fall asleep. I can't lay in bed. I can't read, I have to literally go until I can't any longer. I'm currently in a month or so of terrible sleep by it being broken up into 2 intervals where I wake up in the middle of the night and stay up for a few hours until my body wants to shut back down again.
Insomnia is an insufferable bitch for the most part. I will say YMMV on anything you change regarding sleep habits. I personally need to be in a massive amount of slept debt to properly fall asleep but it can easily backfire quite easily if I'm not careful.
[+] [-] andor|11 years ago|reply
Do you do any sports? Running or swimming for an hour (or cycling for two) works well for me.
[+] [-] laichzeit0|11 years ago|reply
I spend several hours a week breaking down my body by lifting extremely heavy weights at the gym each week. I don't feel good with 7 hours of sleep. My body needs to repair itself.
[+] [-] Amezarak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|11 years ago|reply
For many of us this will be the hardest part (and also a large source of sleep problems).
[+] [-] carlob|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] griffinmb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
A careful read of the article indicates its from the perspective of maximization of lifespan and maximization of short term productivity. Why must they both be the same or have anything to do with each other, beyond numerological coincidence?
You're talking about a completely different metric, which is quality of life.
From personal experience in .mil my "combat effectiveness" for uncle sam probably was maximized by only being able to sleep for about three hours per night. I would not wish that hell on anyone.
There should be more to life than merely making someone else richer at the fastest rate you're capable of, or being the last guy in your cohort to die, while suffering in agony.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnward|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeletonskelly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNJohnC|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andor|11 years ago|reply
The stone age-like study mentioned at the end, for example, simply found that their participants slept longer when they had no access to electricity: "subjective assessments of health and functioning did not reveal any relevant changes across the study." So why 7.2 hours? Sunset at 22:00, sunrise (or excessively loud birds!) at 5:30...
Even the title seems wrong. Sleep cycles take about 90 minutes each, so if I plan to wake up after a certain amount of time, I pick a multiple of 90 minutes, i.e. neither 7 nor 8 hours.
[+] [-] rthomas6|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|11 years ago|reply
What's the real answer, proposed by reality and this article? Find out for yourself what your sleep duration should be.
Seems to me that the real purpose of this article was to remind folks that 5 hours is generally not going to be enough sleep, and 10+ hours might be a sign something's wrong.
To add to anecdotal evidence: What's worked for me is having a set wake-up time every single day of the week, and going to bed when I'm tired. Turns out I naturally want right around 8 hours of sleep, give or take 30 minutes on a day-to-day basis.
[+] [-] blarara|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nevinera|11 years ago|reply
I have a lot of information about myself that differentiates me from the aggregate (and so should most people), so this recommendation is more dangerous than it is useful.
[+] [-] blarara|11 years ago|reply
Humans are so stupid.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garrickvanburen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] szatkus|11 years ago|reply