Sleep

Do we sleep enough?

The photogenic researcher who keeps on making pronouncements about the pathologies of modern work schedules, and whose name I can never remember is Till Roenneberg. He is attached to the EUCLOCK project, and the MPG and LMU etc. I’m not convinced, BTW, by the Munich Chronotype Questionaire due to him and Martha Merrow; the questions make almost no sense for my own personal routine, so I wonder who else they cover poorly? Plus there is all the usual challenges of inferring anything from a survey. However, the strident lifestyle advice that these folks give out rests on more data than that particular survey, I hope (?)

AFAICT the question of sleep is not at all solved. Alexey Guzey, argues.

If you take one thing away from this entire essay, remember this: as long as you feel good, sleeping anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a night seems basically fine for your health …, regardless of whatever Big Sleep wants you to believe.

All of the evidence we have about sleep and long-term health is in the form of those essentially meaningless correlational studies, but if you’re going to use bad science to guide your sleep habits, at least use accurate bad science.

Why do we sleep?

This is suggestive. The electrochemical pump that seems to clean out the crap from our brains. Maybe. (Fultz et al. 2019) (“why” in evolutionary context is always fraught anyway.

Getting better sleep

Why blue light before bed time is bad for sleep (for some of us?).

We have known for quite awhile now that light is the most powerful cue for shifting the phase or resetting the time of the circadian clock. We also know that melatonin is present at low levels during the day, begins being released a few hours before bedtime and peaks in the middle of the night. Past studies have shown that light suppresses melatonin, such that light in the early evening causes a circadian delay, or resets the clock to a later schedule; and light in the early morning causes a circadian advancement, or resets the clock to an earlier schedule. […] we found that humans display a peak sensitivity to light in the blue wavelength region of the spectrum. Rods and cones […] could not account for this differential regulation of melatonin production, so we postulated another type of photoreceptor was responsible for mediating such physiological responses. These wavelength-sensitive photoreceptors were identified soon after and are known as melanopsin-containing ganglion cells

4 7 8 sleep method for falling asleep

I put the tip of my tongue where the ridge of the gum meets my upper front teeth before exhaling forcefully through my mouth to make a whooshing sound. Then, I close your mouth and inhale through my nose for a count of four. Next, I hold my breath to a count of seven, then exhale through my mouth making the same whoosh sound for a count of eight.

Incoming

Alexey Guzey, Theses on Sleep

In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.

It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep deprivation.

I also discuss the bidirectional relationship of sleep and mania/depression and the costs of unnecessary sleep, noting that sleeping 1.5 hours per day less results in gaining more than a month of wakefulness per year, every year

See also The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment

References