Get a good night's sleep for 7-8 hours. One tip that can improve your over well being and lays a good foundation for rest of everything you are going to do in life
Will recommend the book - "Why we Sleep"
> Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores.
Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, is an incredible look into the benefits of getting good amounts of sleep. Everything he talks about is also backed up by his own research.
It has convinced me to improve my sleeping habits, and I've been feeling much better because of it.
Highly recommended!
Coffee has been shown to reduce the length and quality of REM sleep, which is very important for early brain development. Read the relevant section in ‘Why We Sleep’ and you may change your mind.
There's so much information about Sleep in Matthew Walker's "Why we sleep". I strongly recommend it. <3
"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is an excellent book for those interested in what science has to say about sleep (disclaimer: it's excessively good for you)
That's a lot of errors, and he only examined Chapter 1 of "
Why we Sleep".
Walker comes out looking like a charlatan.
Why we sleepGreat readable book with lots of experiments, results and conclusions. It also made me stop drinking coffee after ~2 pm
Sleep is fascinating to study. So much to discover.
Awesome book: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Why We Sleep is a fantastic book. Everyone should read it.
Read ‘Why We Sleep’ by Mathew Walker, it’s an amazing book.
I highly recommend "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker. It does a great job describing the science of sleep.
+1 the book Why We Sleep is great
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker.
Sleeping is important, and since I started doing more (and improving the quality of), I feel better and get more done.
To everyone replying - "i can sleep even after drinking 100 coffees" - caffeine consumption affects certain stages of your sleep even though you might fall asleep, source is the book 'why we sleep'. All stages of your sleep are important, so if you are only getting rem sleep it is not good.
Why We Sleep is a good book on this topic and addresses many of the comments and concerns in this thread.
ya they're mostly red herrings. don't forget the impact on our sleep cycles which every day prove to be critically important to our longevity. for a pretty strong and compelling case for sleep (and against anything that gets in its way) -- check out "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.
>My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.
I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
I am currently reading the book "why we sleep" by Matthew Walker, and it is a fascinating scientific look at the reality of sleep schedules by an expert in the field. It sounds like you would be very interested in this. You should check it out.
The book, “Why We Sleep” covers this and many other sleep topics at length and in far more depth. It’s fascinating.
I can highly recommend the book -
Why We Sleep - mentioned at the top of the video. It goes into quite some depth on the reasons for and mechanics of sleep in a way I found approachable for someone with only a layman's understanding of chemistry:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501144316
I believe we do. For example, the book "Why we sleep" goes into the health and performance costs of not enough sleep. And even one hour of lost sleep is already significant.
The book Why We Sleep discusses the phase of our sleep that has extremely accurate timekeeping. I've forgotten the details, of course. But I think it's quite clear our brains know precisely what time it is.
His book (Why We Sleep) is full of studies and evidence backing up what he claims. It's quite an enjoyable read and I'd recommend reading it if you have doubts or want to know more.
The book Why We Sleep mentions some experiments comparing the difference between 8 and 7 hours per night. I haven't looked into the actual studies, but the book suggests that 8 hours of sleep opportunity is the ideal for most people.
10 is:
“ Finish workouts at least 2 to 3 hours before sleep. (Exercise generally will improve sleep. Good sleep will powerfully improve exercise)”
How is this “wrong” ?
My source is “Why We Sleep” by Dr Matt Walker. I’m happy to read other sources.
The music thing is definitely a real phenomenon. It’s well researched and covered in some detail in “
Why We Sleep” by Matt Walker (which is mentioned in tfa, and is a fantastic book.)
The fiction thing is interesting.
I wonder what that popular book Why We Sleep would say about this, and the other suggestions here in the comments. I guess I'll have to read it to find out.
I really like theirs newsletter, helps me to notice interesting topics I have missed and over the time highlights books that appear as recommended. That's how I finally started reading "Why we sleep", which I thought will be boring but is very entertaining.
In the book "
Why We Sleep" the author (Dr Matthew Walker) gives such a strong set of reasons that he says the wonder is why we ever bother to be awake.
It's a very thorough book and certainly convinces you of the tremendous benefits of sleep.
But “Why We Sleep” - recommends CBT-I as “the one of the most effective treatments for insomnia “ ... so why is it bad for people who suffer from insomnia? Your experience seems to echo the point the book makes.
The best book on this topic (that I've read) "
Why We Sleep" is uniformly
against all kinds of medicine.
There isn't long-term effect after 6 months (I think) of any sleep medicine, according to certain studies. The effect literally "wears off", despite the subjective notion of the user.
You might find the book Why We Sleep interesting.
if you're interested on learning more about it, read Why We Sleep. It talks about sleep aids and the importance of quality sleep
This was mentioned in Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep." Ghrelin and dopamine levels are high which keep you awake. It is suspected to be an evolutionary boost that you are alert more in order to find food.
Once I read Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" - I've started prioritizing sleep over most things. Highly recommend that book.
I'm sure different people have different sensitivity to caffeine and certainly the author's sleep benefited from both reducing caffeine and removing alcohol entirely. But if you read e.g. the studies mentioned in "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker, you'll see that alcohol's effects are much graver.
"
Why We Sleep" is the most important book I have read in many years. Helped me understand how my brain works and the nature of memory.
When I was younger, On The Road and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning opened my mind to travel and wandering.
Low sleep seems to correlate with disorders like diabetes, obesity, and cancer, which are definitely disorders of modernity. It also impairs cognitive performance in lab studies. Going through the book Why We Sleep right now and it’s eye opening for sure.
Yes, he had the author of "
Why We Sleep" on and the research is clear that marijuana reduces REM sleep - the health impact of _that_ - of reduced REM sleep - is yet unclear, AFAIK.
Like you say:
>I'd agree that sleeping is better than no sleep
That's pretty much where my standpoint lays now.
A good read on sleep (not just Early Riser or Night Owl) - Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams / Matthew Walker PhD
Get rid of screen time for 3 hours before bed.
Also, I highly recommend the book "Why we sleep"
Edit: you can also experiment woth wearing socks (by changing limb temperature you influence blood flow and heat dissappation
Needing very few hours of sleep is extremely rare. Basically everyone who claims to get along with less than the usual 7-8h of sleep do worse in various cognitive performance tests and most likely will suffer in longer term as well. Matthew Walker writes about this in his excellent book Why we sleep.
I would strongly emphatise 1) Get enough sleep! For motivation and general guidance on getting enough sleep please read the book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by Matthew Walker.
This comment is in a dire need of citation. Let me provide it:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.
The book states that every living organism on earth so far tested has shown signs of sleep or sleep like behaviour (like not moving for periods of time, relaxed state, etc).
"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is an amazing book and talks about this for of stuff and a lot more. Having read it, this is not surprising at all to me. Last year I read ~45 books, this book stood out as one of the best.
I can imagine (purely from reading Why We Sleep) that sleep aids medication would ruin the study, and won't help you sleep anyway
Reading "Why we sleep" right now and enjoying it very much. It covers a lot of research, and Walker manages to tell a story and get you the bird's eye view of what the research means. Definitely recommend.
Wow this is the first time I've ever seen a contrarian opinion on this book. I've never read Why We Sleep but I see it pop up in threads really often.
I don’t see how this post can be seen to be nitpicking.
Many of the points are that there is zero evidence to back up the authors claims, while using his scientific credentials as authority on the topic.
If the claims in this post are true, the author of “Why we Sleep” has behaved appallingly IMO.
`
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams` by Matthew Walker. Still in the midst of it actually, and it's had a huge impact.
Runner-up would be `the end of religion` by Bruxy Cavey.
For anyone interested in weight loss and heart health, please remember that both are impaired by not getting enough sleep. Studies have shown that you're way more likely to over eat if you get less than 7 hours of sleep a night.
Source: "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker.
I have forever changed my sleeping habits ever since before I even finished reading Why We Sleep. Best time/money investment I made in 2018.
At least according to Matthew Walker, in his Why we Sleep (which I recommend to everyone), it doesn't work for everybody. Only some people get anti-depressant effect.
The definitive reference for all things sleep is “why we sleep” by Matthew Walker. It’s a fantastic read, highly recommended. It single handedly moved getting enough sleep from a similar category to “I should probably eat less salt” to “this is the single most important thing for my health” for me.
Please do go on, you seem to have similar taste to mine (Why We Sleep and Design of Everyday Things) so I'd love to know which other books make it into your top 10 or whatever.
I think they talk about it in "
Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker, PhD.
Mostly about some people are biologically programmed to be night owl and other early bird.
The best sleep is not about what at what time you sleep but more if you follow what your biological cycle is telling you.
Currently Reading: Code Breaker/Walter Issacson (current favorite author)
Previous: Why we Sleep/Matthew Walker
I dont know any off hand but Mathew Walkers book "Why we sleep" talks about them. Apparently there are more road traffic accidents the day after the clocks change in spring when many people loose an hours sleep.
*
Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker
* Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
* What Doesn't Kill Us, by Scott Carney
* Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou
* The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondō
* How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams
"
Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut down sleep.
I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.
On the topic of sleep, I found Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" to be a really good read. I've spent about a month actively working on my sleep hygiene and I've seen a noticeable improvement in my productivity.
If you like “Why We Sleep” I recommend “The Sleep Solution” as a companion. Why We Sleep is heavy on interesting sleep science but light on practical tips for improving sleep (The Sleep Solution is the opposite...)
100% this - I read the Why We Sleep book earlier this year and this quote immediately came to my head when I read this news.
I recently read "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker (pretty good book overall). He provides evidence that states the ideal amount of daily sleep is between 7-8 hours. Any more or less is detrimental to overall health.
+1 to Why We Sleep. I've been cutting back caffeine, alcohol, light, and spreading the sleep gospel since reading it.
There are two such books:
* Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
* Discipline Equals Freedom by Willink Jocko
This is briefly touched upon in “Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams” by Matthew Walker. I highly recommend it!
+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.
I would add #4: books that are at least 10 years old. I feel like knowledge has to pass the test of time. This rule would rule out "Why We Sleep" for instance, but you'll be able to read it in 10 years if the science behind it still stands.
Sleep deprived people can't tell how impaired they are. Sleeping only 7 hours a night has serious long term mental and physical health consequences, and is affecting your productivity short term. If you don't believe me, read Why We Sleep, it's a great investment in your future health.
If I did, we wouldn't be going this challenging and hi-tech route :)
You can try all the sleep hygiene stuff you want, but if you're not improving the neurological function of your brain while you sleep, you're not improving the effectiveness of sleep, and since your natural ability to sleep degrades as you age...
The Oxford University Neurology of Sleep textbook is surprisingly approachable. Most people start with Dr Matthew Walkers, Why We Sleep. There are websites dedicated to tearing apart his science, but that goes a bit far. The guy does an excellent job of bringing the importance of sleep to light, and explaining the basics. He also owns up to the "mistakes" or things that have been learned since the book was published.
More information on your first sentence in Matthew Walker's
Why We Sleep (tl;dr: no caffeine >2pm it's v bad for sleep phases + long half-life).
I'd add mental health/anxiety issues as another reason to avoid it. It can be a fine cognitive enhancer - but caffeine as a crutch will give you a limp.
FWIW, the book "
Why We Sleep" mentions this paper by Francis Crick et. al. and talks about the history of sleep research.
I'm in the middle of it because of a Hacker News recommendation, and let me pass on the recommendation. It's great so far :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
For example, I think most of us now know that napping isn't for the "lazy" but it's nice to see the scientific reasoning for it. The author Walker is a great sleep advocate.
I've been reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, and I think I would opt for a ship (with at least some entertainment features) rather than a plane if it meant I could enjoy a long vacation in Europe without suffering from jet lag in the first week of being there.
Anki or space repetition, exercise every day, natural low-sulfer wines
books: thinking fast and slow, black swan/antifragile, why we sleep, the organize mind
> Dreaming actually means you are not sleeping well...
I'm fairly sure you're the one misinformed. Do you have any source on that? I recently read Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and why it didn't feel comprehensive, the book did NOT mention anything about dreaming while sleeping being a negative.
It was Why We Sleep, alright. I had started the book last year but only read the first couple of chapters. I must return to it and finish it. Thanks for the other suggestion.
Agreed. You can read about hacks and techniques to improve sleep all you want, but many people will fail to consistently implement those. Why We Sleep gives you the "why", highlighting consequences of poor sleep and the "how" science of those techniques working.
The book "Why we Sleep" talks about how alcohol is a REM-suppressor and how it prevents you from getting deep restful sleep. Drinking alcoholic drinks in the evening/night is much worse than drinking earlier in the day.
If you haven't already, I highly suggest reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a google sleep scientist and director of the Center for Human Sleep at Berkeley. The book is mainly focused on the causal effects of sleep deprivation, but he also mentions excessive sleep.
Nothing has illuminated my poor sleeping habits like reading 'Why We Sleep' by Matthew Walker. The book scared me into working on improving those habits with some degree of success. Many of the topics that Matthew Walker covered have been brought up in this thread.
I highly recommend the book "Why We Sleep" if you're interested in learning the actual mechanics of sleep.
After the Why We Sleep fiasco I'd quite like a site which peer reviews all the references in a book (could be crowd sourced wiki-style) individually. And then the book, or each chapter, gets a rating for factual correctness.
I bought and read Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep (which is referred to in PP's thirs reference) and would thoroughly recommend it to all humans. I now take some solace in my grumpiness when tired having a biological explanation.
I really enjoyed his book
Why We Sleep, but I think it important to inform people about the criticisms that have been been raised against some of his claims [0]. If you listen to him remember to take claims with a grain of salt. HN discussion from two months ago [1].
The thesis is still solid though: sleep is incredibly important for your health.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
Yes, that theory is actually talked about in the book "
Why We Sleep" which is mentioned in the comment you are responding too.
"Why We Sleep" and "The Body Keeps the Score" are two of the most helpful books I've ever read (and both found by reading HN book suggestions).
Aside from the drugs mentioned, read "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker and all the natural hormonal drugs that happen when one consistently sleeps.
On the subject of
Why We Sleep: I'm not sure how well it corresponds to the book, but Matthew Walker also has a Google Talks talk on the same subject that I recommend watching if you're not a book person:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXflBZXAucQ
I read
Why We Sleep and it's eye opening to discover the crucial part of us we take for granted.
I also recently bought Oura Ring to track my sleep and it has been great to see the analysis of my sleep.
I used to wake up at 4:30AM with an alarm now I wake up around 8:00AM without an alarm.
No coffee or nap required throughout the day.
Matthew Walker's book
Why We Sleep makes a clear case that drowsy driving is worse than drink driving, too.
So that would mean drunk driving is actually the third leading cause of impaired driving damage.
Why is the third cause villified, but not the first two?
I've just been reading Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. In it he mentions doctors will on average kill one patient during their residency due to sleep deprivation.
Apparently, decaf still contains about 25% of the normal level of caffeine. I read this in the "
Why we sleep" book by Matthew Walker, but haven't double checked.
Basically, that would mean that drinking decaf is not really the same as not drinking coffee.
That's actually about a different sleep book, Why We Sleep
Factfullness - Hans Rosling [Highly Recommended! My favorite book this year]
How to Change Your Mind - Michal Pollan [Thumbs up]
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker [Two Thumbs Up]
Creative Selection - Ken Kociend [Neutral. Blog post in book form. ]
Achtung Baby - Sara Zaske [Thumbs Up]
The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida [Been in my queue for years. Two thumbs up]
Small Fry - Lisa Brennan-Jobs [Neutral]
Gut - Giulia Enders [Two thumbs up]
Born a Crime - Trevor Noah [Two thumbs up. Learned more about the nuances of apartheid than I thought]
I'm Proud of You - Tim Madigan [Thumbs down]
Night - Elie Wiesel [Thumbs up]
Night owls are absolutely real and they are genetically predisposed. In fact, night owls will always be night owls and there's really nothing you can do about it. Everyone should read Dr. Matthew Walker's book 'Why We Sleep'.
> Any suggestions For things that have helped you perform at your best when you’re exhausted?
Don't get exhausted in the first place by sleeping more? If you're still seeing sleep as an inconvenient necessity, I'd recommend reading 'Why We Sleep': https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
> How much obesity and depression could be prevented or alleviated just by making sure people could get a decent night's sleep?
There's some body chemistry where being sleep deprived can manifest itself as hunger. I forget the details, but I read about it in "Why We Sleep"[0].
When I had a sleep study done, the pre-study questionnaire seemed to have more about depression symptoms than about sleep itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
A similar evolutionary argument was put forward in "
Why We Sleep"[0] by Matthew Walker. Its mention in the book was less specific, so I'm not sure if it's referring to the same study.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
What you are saying is pretty much in line with what Matthew Walker is presenting as a hypothesis for the role of dreams in his book "Why we sleep". I have no training in the field, nor am I particularly well read on the topic, but I thought you might like a confirmation that this is not just an anecdote.
Its not just short breaks. Effect of a good night's sleep are almost magical in this respect.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives.
One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight.
Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.
This is basically what Matthew Walker (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Walker_(scientist)) sort of alludes to in his book, "
Why we sleep". It's a good book. He specifically mentions hydras as well (iirc)... he's a neuroscientist who is a crazy maniac about sleep and he cites newest research and delivers a very clear message of urgency.
Lots of fascinating stuff there, highly recommend if you're interested.
That's disputed by Matthew Walker in
Why We Sleep.
He writes that biphasic sleep was a cultural phenomenon with no basis in sleep science, and that only one Western society ever really practiced it, whereas e.g. "primitive tribes" all have one uninterrupted phase of sleep.
I'm currently reading the book, "
Why We Sleep (Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)" right now and I'm stunned by all the new things we ignored when it comes to sleep. There are so many fascinating aspects of our life and body, all governed by Sleep.
I highly suggest reading the book to explore more about your sleep.
"
Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker. One of the best books I've read in a while.
I've commented before [1][2]; but pasting here: the author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446932
I would recommend reading
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker instead. [0]
The Promise of Sleep is an okay book, but it is almost 20 years old now and it shows.
I have read both books and it is remarkable how much more we learned in the time between them.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
I've read a lot about sleep over the years (and wrote a bit [2]), but I just finished reading the book mentioned in the article ("
Why We Sleep" [1]) and found it
fascinating.
The author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
If read only one book this year, let me strongly recommend you consider this one.
ps: if you prefer audio, the narrated version from Audible is also very good. There are just a few non-essential graphs, that you can download from their side in PDF.
[1] Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker - https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams-ebook... [non affiliate link]
[2] Quora - How do CEOs who sleep for only 4-5 hours daily manage to function and run multi-million dollar companies for years? http://qr.ae/TUpOrd
The majority of comments seem to have the belief that the need for 8 hours of sleep is truth, and seem to mostly be making up various excuses why the increase in sleep here doesn't show results.
As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.
I am currently reading
Why We Sleep as well, and Matthew Walker's research on the topic is really interesting to consider within the larger constellation of approaches to Alzheimer's—particularly in context of the dietary/metabolic angle.
The neural maintenance that occurs during sleep, the body's circadian mechanisms and quality of diet all seem to be highly complementary and ultimately point towards a more holistic and fundamental understanding of the disease (or brain physiology in general). It's been demonstrated pretty comprehensively that quality of diet and timing of eating have a profound effect on how well the body functions as a whole, so the sleep component seems to be an important thread in tying all of these approaches together.
The book "why we sleep" as I understand suggests the increase in probability of dementia if you don't sleep enough i.e., lack of sleep leads to brain damage that is not fixed by sleeping longer later.
There's no evidence that this was written by the author of Why We Sleep. This blog never links to Walker or to his social media or email, was never linked by Walker, and is not connected to Walker in any way other than using a "sleepdiplomat" handle (for all we know, I could've written that post).
check my reply to the OP about the Why We Sleep book. I really appreciate your comment and recognize myself in a lot of it.
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology (great!)
Dare to Lead (interesting and Powerful)
Rising Strong (Sensible)
What the most successful people do before breakfast (helpful in thinking about opportunity costs)
Why we sleep (interesting read)
Exponential organisations (Re-read after 2 years, worth it)
Prisoners of Geography (very interesting view of geopolitics, Putin, et al)
Continuous Delivery (great!)
Clean Code (must read for any serious programmer)
Built to last (picked it back after 1-2 years, cool book)
Site Reliability Engineering (didn't quite finish, but good book)
Building Microservices (fantastic book which puts everything I've done in the past year into so much more perspective)
"as a serious health debt"
Except, sleep isn't a debt because the loss can't be repaid.
This is one of many important things I have picked up from Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote "Why We Sleep" and has been doing the podcast rounds lately.
Not to pick on you at all. It sounds like you have made some big realizations and are making fantastic changes. Realizing I can't make up sleep to pay off the "debt" has been eye opening.
This reminds me of a section of the book "
Why we sleep"[1] that said similar techniques could enhance an older persons sleep quality. (I don't know the title of the study unfortunately.) It looks like this is an exciting area of research right now.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Is there some aspect of this that's quite new?
I'm reading Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker), published 2017-09 - an HN recommendation from a while back - and I've just read the chapter where he describes an experiment that sounds exactly like this (as in, same approach, same outcomes).
Thanks for this.
'Why we Sleep' was one of the books I was reading before reading your analysis, and you saved me from wasting any more time on that obviously inaccurate load of hyperbole.
More importantly, you saved me from wasting even more time trying to apply any of the advice by what seems to be sensationalism passing off as science (and maybe even jeopardising my health in the process).
Immensely frustrating how many people are citing his book in a thread about one of your own blog posts, of all places. I was so glad to see your post about it at the time, and this experiment is an interesting follow up.
"Why We Sleep" is everything wrong with "science" today, and as a person who also isn't a huge fan of sleeping, I'm desperate to understand the real drawbacks to a lack of sleep. That dumpster fire of a book has set back honest research on the subject by years.
Just venting, as I know you agree. Thanks again for your contributions to sanity.
I just read "Why We Sleep" which covers a lot of the same territory. Vital information, should be in the Human Brain Owner's Manual.
Lack of sleep might not stop you from succeeding, but it
can make you think slower, have poorer memory, get sick easier, eat more than you should, look older, and be more prone to depression and anxiety.
Please read "Why We Sleep" by neuroscientist Matthew Walker. Sleep is essential. Don't give it up lightly.
Younger children may need more sleep in total, but teenagers' circadian rhythm is shifted later relative to adults and younger children. They need 8 hours or so that starts
and ends later than younger children.
Or at least that's the argument made in the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Yes, see
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker:
The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
From what I understand (Matthew Walker -
Why we Sleep), you will have a better nights sleep if you take a cold shower before bed. According to the information I read, you want to bring your body temperature down for a more restful sleep.
As a bonus, cold showers likely bring on Hormesis, which in turn can also be beneficial for ones health.
Near the end of the book
Why We Sleep, the author specifically talked about this. The lack of sleep contribute to 170% likely more cause an error during surgery. Scary to ponder...
He mentioned the guy that started the residency program, Halstead, in John Hopkin turned out to be a cocaine addict. He stressed that a doctor needs to work all the time. No one knew about his drug addiction until he had passed away.
He even tried to get rid of the addiction by checking into a rehab up north but came away in addition to the cocaine addiction but also a morphine addiction as well.
I believe sleep to be one of the most underrated and underutilized health strategies, I know so many who diet and do all sorts but then are proud of the fact they only sleep 6 hours a night. Study after study shows how incredibly deterementail even a slight lack of sleep can be, so much so that I usually don't believe I've read them correctly to begin with.
I would suggest this book to anyone interested in the topic:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker
The author was on Joe Rogan at some point too but I haven't listened to it.
In my experience and the research I've read, you've almost mentioned all the top relevant reasons: alcohol use, stress, and reduction in sleep (kid being born). It's unlikely to be age.
I'd highly recommend last year's "Why We Sleep" [1] for more info on memory performance and how it's impacted far more that you'd suspect by full (and quality) sleep, which is in turn impacted far more than you'd suspect by alcohol and stress (not to mention kids).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
One of the most important things not mentioned in the article is sleep. Not enough sleep and your diet will change. Not enough sleep and your body will not finish recovering overnight. Read the book “
Why we sleep”. It will change your life.
P.S. I do marathon training and glycogen storing as well as activating the fat burning are essential!
It is definitely related to sleep. Cannabis disrupts NREM sleep, where memories are ushered from short term memory into your hippocampus. Matthew Walker's excellent book "
Why We Sleep" goes into this in some detail, highly recommended.
Edit: I should add, many substances disrupt NREM sleep in addition to cannabis, such as alcohol, caffeine, and sleep aids.
I find it concerning how many people in this thread immediately jump from believing Why We Sleep is truthful to the book is complete bullshit because guzey says so. Indeed, some good points are raised by him but at the end of the day he's just another fucking guy with a blog. The entire field deserves more study but the responses on here feel like Grandma on Facebook passing on something she read because it feels right.
Cannot comment on depression. But from personal experience and after reading Why we sleep, my understanding is that to get maximum benefits from diet and exercise, a good sleep is a prerequisite. This is paramount when you're doing these things for losing weight. I don't see good sleep being recommend enough whenever people embark on a weight-loss journey.
> Matthew Walker's
Why We Sleep is another example of a book offering good advice
There were actually several people challenging the claims made by Matthew walker, probably the most exhaustive of them is Alexey Guzey's critique of 'Why we sleep'[0]. The general point is that he takes scientific evidence and then incorrectly infers from it conclusions that fit his narrative.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
It isn't a matter of time since you were exposed to sunlight that causes sleepiness. Rather, you body has its own 24 our cycle called the Circadian rhythm that is phase locked to the solar cycle. If you go into a cave far away from the sun you'll still have a roughly 24 hour sleep/wake cycle but over time it will drift away from the actual day cycle. As far as I'm aware the duty cycle of 24 our sunlight input doesn't have any effect on the ability of the Circadian rhythm to phase match with it. If you're interested in learning more I'd recommend the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
"Glib advice aside, what is the recommendation when it comes to sleep and alcohol? It is hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol's harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise would be doing you, and the science, a disservice. Many people enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, even an aperitif thereafter. But it takes your liver and kidneys many hours to degrade and excrete that alcohol, even if you are an individual with fast-acting enzymes for ethanol decomposition. Nightly alcohol will disrupt your sleep, and the annoying advice of abstinence is the best, and most honest, I can offer."
- page 246, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Walker is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.
Why We Sleep[1] is a pretty complete look at what we know about sleep today and implies that many of the things I thought like being able to catch up on sleep is just wrong. Did confirm my belief that there are some people that just can operate on less, but they are fewer than might be imagined.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
Just the awareness is a great start. I'm reading the book Why We Sleep, which was recommended here recently. I've always loved sleep. I've always known you're SUPPOSED to get X hours of sleep and go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time. I've learned a lot of shocking things from the book already, but none of them scared me into sleeping more. Just the very fact that I'm a person reading a book about sleep has made me more aware of it. More likely to think "yes, i am a person who considers sleep valuable", which means I'm more likely to veto that extra TV episode before bed -- not because I necessarily learned more about the value of sleep, but just that the act of reading and thinking about it has made it more front-of-mind and hence more important.
I unscientifically believe that we shouldn't use an alarm clock or any kind of trigger to wake up.
My rational is: if your body has enough sleep, it'll wake up on its own.
On the flip side: it's actually very hard to sleep when your body doesn't need sleep.
On another flip side: it's easy to stay awake even though your body needs sleep.
With this, we should all sleep in a completely dark (blocked) room with no sound and etc. The "big unblocked east window in the bedroom" (unless the curtain blocks the light effectively) is a no for me.
I've read "why we sleep", and I get this conflict where:
1. The author believes in the no-trigger-to-wake-up as well.
2. Somehow I also get the impression that the author also believes that we should use sunlight as a trigger for waking up. We'd feel fresher. But wouldn't that cut off our sleep?
Good on you. As pointed out in Matthew Walker’s “
Why We Sleep”, most doctors don’t have a lot of experience or training in sleep science. I’ve heard of magnesium supplements for increasing melatonin levels, since your body needs it in the production of the latter. Do you think that was the underlying cause?
While I’m here commenting, my breakthrough moment in getting good sleep was having a strictly enforced bed time. It took a couple weeks of struggle and mediocre sleep to get there, but it has made getting to sleep a lot easier now.
This is something that has been worrying me a bit since reading Matthew Walker's book
Why We Sleep.
I've been an insomniac my whole life, so I suspect something like this is coming for me. This is why I'm building a sleep headband to monitor, adjust, and train for better sleep performance. If you're interested, check out https://soundmind.co
Ironically, the book he cites "
Why We Sleep" gave me insomnia.
I had never had any issues sleeping before reading it, but then I read it and thought "wow sleeping is soooo critical, I need to do better." I started getting stressed about getting enough sleep. Before long, I would feel anxious the minute I laid in bed.
But the fact that I wasn't sleeping made me even more stressed about sleeping! It was a reinforcing loop.
What helped me get back to sleeping well was to just stop caring about it.
The problem is that there are both some inaccuracies with the takedown, the book is still factually inaccurate in dangerous ways even though it
is accurate in others, and ultimately neither source gives a satisfactory conclusion to the question of how you should approach sleep issues.
There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.
It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
In a nutshell setting aside 8 hours, going to sleep and waking at the same time even on weekends and holidays, refrain from stimulants and depressants 8 hours before bed.
Recommended reading: Why We Sleep
Lack of sleep is a
huge public health danger that our society refuses to take seriously so far.
I highly recommend the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2018) [1]. It goes into great detail how driving while tired late at night is no different from driving drunk in terms of resulting fatalities -- yet driving while tired is entirely legal while drunk will lose your license.
It's also terrifyingly eye-opening in the number of hospital fatalities from sleep-deprived doctors, surgeons, residents, and nurses with their extremely long shifts.
This is a conversation America needs to be having. Thankfully there are hard-won limits on how many hours a day drivers and pilots can drive and fly... but it's a vastly larger problem than just those professions.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1501144324
I watched your heartfelt video full of great advice. Thank you for making it.
As one more piece of the puzzle, since you mentioned several times doing you best work at night and it being hard to get up in the morning, I can wonder how much of various stresses for many people may come from perhaps being a night owl in an early-morning lark business culture?
Also in one study, even just one night of missed sleep can lead to bipolar cycling in some people -- discussed by Matthew Walker in his book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams".
My compiled list for 2020, as suggested by friends I respect and HN:
General
====
- Master & Margarita (w reader's guide)
- Why we sleep
- The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion
- The wisdom of insecurity
- The denial of death
- The three body problem (friend's advice: slow burn, stick with it)
- The dubliners
- The devils (Dostoyevski)
- The name of the rose
- Enten-Oller (Kierkegaard)
- Zero to one (Peter Thiel, recommended reading as palantir new joiner - not fantastic but has some thought provoking ideas; i.e. which very important truth would very few people agree with you on?)
Economy/finance
===
- Basic economics (Thomas Sowell)
- How an economy grows and why it crashes
- Know the city
Math
===
- Coffee time in Memphis
- Real analysis (mathematics textbook)
- Problems from the book (Halfway through this one, and I found it really enjoyable, even with only a CS bachelors)
If anyone has read any and has feedback/notes, I'm looking forward to hearing them!
If anyone hasn't already read it, I highly recommend Dr. Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep. The book basically says that there is no human physiological process that is not improved by sufficient sleep. The book has more potential to be life changing that any self-help book out there, provided the sound advice is actually adhered to. The pithy takeaway being: Sacrificing sleep does not make you hardworking or successful, it makes you fat and stupid.
The little sleep he IS getting isn't even quality. From the author of
Why We Sleep:
> Unfortunately, the current set or classes of sleeping pills that we have do not produce naturalistic sleep. So they are all a broad set of chemicals that we call the sedative hypnotics. And sedation is not sleep. It's very different. It doesn't give you the restorative natural benefits of sleep.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war...
I recently listened to an interview with Matthew Walker (author of "Why We Sleep" book mentioned in article). Dr. Walker stated the scientific consensus is now trending toward historical biphasic sleep being a social trend rather than how we're "supposed" to sleep.
The Obstacle is the Way (somewhat encouraging)
The Art of Empathy (very interesting)
The Three Body Problem (good)
The Startup Way (decent)
The Politics of Bitcoin (short but interesting)
Why We Sleep (very much worth it)
The Last Arrow (mixed feelings)
The Prize (boring but informative)
Superhuman by Habit (OK, not much new)
The Circle of Profit (straight to the point)
Thinking in Systems (couldn't finish it)
Radical Candor (awesome)
Harry Potter #1 (too low of a reading level)
Man's Search for Meaning (classic)
Flow (Amazing!)
Scary Close (great)
You will likely also find Lex Fridman's conversation with Matt Walker "
Why we Sleep" last week interesting.
About 65 minutes in (just after a great discussion on coffee and caffeine) they go into how sleep (and dreaming) facilitates memory and learning - basically the creation of new schemas (models) and the updating and rewiring of existing ones.
What made it interesting was how it meshed with Hawkin's ideas from a completely different angle.
He also touched on why we forget things which is closer to the OP (like not remembering where you parked your car two weeks ago, but remembering where you parked it today), and how some people don't/can't forget things. Also the intricacy of things that we remember (like a particular pair of shoes someone was wearing when we first met them).
Sleep (and related, circadian health) are some super interesting topics of emerging research. For those that like books, there are two recent ones written by researchers in the field. Matthew Walker's
Why We Sleep, and Satchin Panda's Circadian Code that are pretty breezy reads. (there are YouTube interviews and TED talks as well):
For those that prefer more succinct reviews and want to spelunk citations, these are a couple good starting points:
Potter, Gregory D. M., Debra J. Skene, Josephine Arendt, Janet E. Cade, Peter J. Grant, and Laura J. Hardie. “Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Disruption: Causes, Metabolic Consequences, and Countermeasures.” Endocrine Reviews 37, no. 6 (December 2016): 584–608. https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2016-1083.
Manoogian, Emily NC, and Satchidananda Panda. “Circadian Rhythms, Time-Restricted Feeding, and Healthy Aging.” Ageing Research Reviews 39 (October 2017): 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2016.12.006.
Just a word of warning to any insomniacs on here thinking of reading Matthew Walkers book, Why We Sleep: it is probably one of the least helpful books I have ever read in terms of helping you sleep well. It mostly explains the many ways you are damaging your health by not sleeping well, and reading it while I had insomnia just made me anxious and made it more difficult to sleep. The one good thing that came out of reading it was a suggestion for CBT for sleep, and I would highly recommend that as that did actually help me sleep.
Kudos to the author on getting a blog post out! It’s something I haven’t done in years.
I also used to believe I need to “consume less, create more”...
Since then, it’s become more like “if you want to, then consume meaningfully, take time to digest it, sleep on it, get your mind off it for a while, go consume more, take a break, create something, be bad at it, and create again, and maybe eventually you’ll be good at it”.
Some books that shaped my thought process were:
Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
Also, blog posts about meditation, interviews with prolific movie writer/directors, and that Ira Glass video.
Paywalled, but based on the free paragraphs, I was kinda surprised that it didn't talk about the other factors that may affect sleep.
Currently reading 'Why we sleep' which is a fascinating book about the importance/history/evolution of sleep across species and time. (Highly recommend it -- definitely regretting all the sleepless/low sleep nights)
At a high level, my understanding is that the duration/quality of sleep depends on physiological, mental and environmental conditions.
It sounds like the focus of the article was on environmental (I would definitely love to sleep with zero light/sound).
Similarly, the 5-10 mins meditation may help, but if you're stressed out or have something on your mind, that can still keep you awake or wake you up.
You can make sure not to eat/drink anything by that time (6pm) but effects of caffeine/other foods you might have eaten earlier can impact your sleep quality.
Finally, the right physiological/chemical changes need to occur (melatonin/REM cycles/tired from physically exhausting activities) for you to actually be sleepy. Most people can't just sleep on command, although, you might be able to build/force the habit.
I did this for years and learned both from experience and later from reading the works of people who know much more about sleep than I do (highly recommend the book "Why We Sleep" that this kind of catchup is not possible. I found myself being exhausted and sleeping most of the day on weekends and over time this just kept getting worse and worse. I felt fine during the work week getting 3-6 hours of sleep, but on weekends I'd just crash. No, I was not catching up on my sleep debt by passing up for 12-14 hours on weekends instead. Now I make sure to give myself at least an eight-hour sleep opportunity per day. As a result I feel more alert more consistently, and my weekend sleep/wake schedule looks very similar to my normal weekday schedule.
One thing that struck me from Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep was him finishing up the section on lucid dreaming stating people don't know if lucid dreaming is bad, good, or irrelevant when it comes to affecting REM sleep's normal function. I never thought it might have some sort of negative cognitive effects, but I certainly now would be hesitant to try to induce it chemically.
Here is a recent book on the topic by Dr. Joel Fuhrman: "The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes".
A more general book with good advice on nutrition that is perhaps easier to follow -- but not specific to diabetes -- is "The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity" by John Mackey , Alona Pulde, and Matthew Lederman.
Good luck to you and your mom! It helps a lot in making lifestyle changes when family, friends, and neighbors are supportive. See also the book "The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People" for a bigger picture view on that.
Good sleep is another part of the puzzle -- see Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" on that. Essentially, good sleep gives you better self-control during the day -- as well as helping your health in many ways including regarding diabetes.
One of the many fascinating facts I learnt from Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is that the biorhythms of teenagers are shifted to later hours compared to those of adults in all human cultures of the globe, even in those rare societies hardly affected by technology. In evolution this was likely beneficial to make it easier for teenagers to socialize among themselves without adult disturbance, which was necessary to drive their tribe out of its ruts, to pioneer innovation and adaptation to changed conditions. In modern society we are stupid to undermine this by depriving the upcoming generation of their sleep.
Getting a solid 8+ hours of good quality sleep each night. For me this meant:
- Sleeping/waking at the same time each night/morning
- Keeping my room cool at night
- Relaxation exercises for both body and mind once I get into bed
- Getting a comfortable eye mask
- Actually taking sleep seriously (read Why We Sleep)
I feel so good each day, I have a better memory and emotional stability, and I don't fall asleep at work any more.
People's circadian rhythms change over the course of a lifetime very considerably. Trying to keep all age groups on the same schedule is actually a pretty bad idea. Check out the book Why We Sleep. I think especially how we treat adolescents, who are usually late shifted by 2 or 3 hours compared to adults, is going to look barbaric in another 30 years. People think that 9 AM is a "late start" for high school, but it should probably be more like 11 AM. Even the ratios of NREM versus REM sleep change a lot over different age groups.
Some good points!
I am not a doctor, but I have spent a lot of time in sleep clinics and reading about sleep. I am also quite familiar with the huge number of issues surrounding the relatively recent book "Why We Sleep" which is essentially considered partially-debunked at this point. I feel about that book the way most of us would feel about a book declaring that people who code or are interested in startups are missing opportunities to play more football.
My rhythm seems to be off by two REM cycles eg 1.5hx2, and I actually find 3h pretty easy to manage as it loops around every 7-8 days.
I don't have any trouble falling asleep during the day, because I own a https://nitehood.ca - the discount code is August15 BTW.
> I’ve always felt fine despite sleeping 5 hours
This is part of it, I think. In Why we Sleep, Dr. Walker specifically mentions that we often don't realize how sleep deprived we truly are. Given the fact that, if you rounded the percentage of people who have the mutation needed for less sleep, there's an effectively 0% chance of you having it, I'd say that's what's coming into play here.
I'm tired of the endless posts over
Why We Sleep. The book attempts to cover hundreds of studies in an accessible way, and it largely succeeds. It's certainly fluffy at times (as are all popular books, by necessity), but if you didn't like its message, nitpicking at minor points doesn't refute the central thesis, and pretending it does is below the standards of even internet flame wars.
Like, this kind of exchange is exactly why academics try to avoid randos from the internet. They tend to seize on one point, declare victory, and refuse to change their minds. And when the academic doesn't grovel in compliance, they declare academia to be a failure. As far as I'm concerned, UC Berkeley responded perfectly.
Someone else already recommended "
Why We Sleep" by the premier sleep researcher in the field, and I highly suggest you get it. Here is a passage from it that should make you rethink the entire rationale you are using to shortchange yourself of sleep:
"Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality."
The article describes declines in amount of sleep. Having just finished Matthew Walker’s book
Why We Sleep I was surprised to discover that measurable cognitive effects and mental health problems like depression and anxiety occur when sleep drops by as little as one hour (7 instead of 8).
It’s certainly believable that smart phones do affect sleep if nothing else and if so that could explain in part the increased incidences of mental health problems and other issues described in the article.
+1. I made the original comment on the other thread [1], and repeat here for others: if you read only one book this year, let me strongly recommend you consider this one ("
Why We Sleep").
Here's an interesting paragraph, pertinent to the discussion of Alzheimer:
"As we learned ..., sleep quality - especially that of deep NREM sleep - deteriorates as we age. This is linked to a decline in memory. However, if you assess a patient with Alzheimer's disease, the disruption of sleep is far more exaggerated. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that sleep disturbance precedes the onset of Alzheimer's disease by several years, suggesting that it may be an early-warning sign of the condition, or even a contributor to it.
Following diagnosis, the magnitude of sleep disruption will then progress in unison with the symptom severity of the Alzheimer's patient, further suggesting a link between the two. Making matters worse, over 60% of patients with Alzheimer's disease have at least one clinical sleep disorder. Insomnia is especially common, as caregivers of a loved one with Alzheimer's disease will know all too well.
"
The author goes on to discuss the studies his team did in testing the hypothesis of amyloid buildup in the brain (particularly in the frontal lobe, which regulates your sleep) would impact the quality of sleep, and reduce NREM sleep - which is crucial for memory formation and retention.
So even if the amyloid hypothesis doesn't explain the onset of Alzheimer, there's enough evidence to claim that amyloid plaques may be associated with the loss of deep sleep, and damage your memory.
Now the most interesting part is where the author claims the opposite: that lack of sleep is correlated with amyloid buildups, as it disrupts the function of glymphatic system within the brain.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
Hi, I am the author of the mentioned article. It is not an ad :). In fact, I am Czech publisher of Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep" (mentioned in the article) and a bit lifehacker too – blogging in Czech-only until recently. I just wanted to check if my suspictions about the most hyped sleep-trackers are legit but waited for something better to compare them with. I believe Dreem can be used for this task, but, sure, it is not perfect – some people report worse EEG signal quality and thus less effective stimulations. Dreem removed weekly reports in last app update and there is nothing like Oura Cloud for "data mining" in Dreem, which is really a miss! I finally bought another Dreem2 for my mother, so I have to translate everything from English to Czech for her but I want to try to help her with her terrible sleep habits. The article will probably continue one day with my longitudial results (tested on me and her too). Ask whatever you want, I will try to answer.
Best, Tomáš
Sleep is very very important, and I've learned this the hard way. Sleeping well has been a challenge, and I am glad I'm not alone.
Articles like this one and books like Why We Sleep however make me very anxious, since all they seem to do is point out how bad it is if one doesn't get enough sleep. I know that. How can I fix it? I had CBT based sleep therapy last year, and things have since improved, but not much. Then I have the occasional random doctors who tell me how sleep is actually not that important and how they used to sleep only 3h/day when they were my age. Even the cult book Why We Sleep has chapter after chapter of telling me how screwed I am because I don't sleep 8-9 h/day, with little actionable items that can help me. I get that it is super important to raise awareness about sleep, but every time I open such articles, I am invariably made anxious about my sleep, and people who know what I'm talking about know how hard it is to sleep with anxiety about your sleep.
Sorry for my rant :(
Note that Matt Walker has fallen from grace, at least on HN. His book "
Why we sleep" used to be widely recommended around here, but there appear to be very serious scientific shortcomings affecting some of the information he presents.
See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
That is not to say he's wrong on every count, but take what he says with a huge grain of "might have been invented/fudged and then cited from and by himself" salt.
One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got the idea from the excellent book "
Why We Sleep"[1]. It's possible that a similar HA project already exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
+1 for Why We Sleep, just finished it a few days ago.
Thanks for citing the study. Just read through the introduction and conclusion and the Dreem sounds very promising.
After reading Matthew Walker's "Why we Sleep", I currently use the deep sleep percentage metric provided by the Sleep as Android app to determine how well I sleep, and jot it down in a sleep log. The book has given me the idea that deep and uninterrupted sleep is hugely important, but obviously the app is only able to give a crude estimate.
Perhaps this headband would give me better insights into my (failings of) sleep. I hope the parent commenter replies to your message.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, it's the most mentioned book on sleep recently. According to this book there is no such thing as sleeping "too much". Sleeping a lot is correlated with higher mortality, but that is because sick people tend to sleep longer in order for the body to recover, not because sleep in any way causes ill health.
Based on my experience, I can say that after very difficult strength workout like rings, 1 arm pullups, iron cross, etc., there is a huge difference in recovery on the days that I sleep 11 hours vs. the days that I sleep 8 hours only.
On the other hand, sleeping less than 8 hours a day is devastating (check the book 'Why We Sleep' for details)
Moreover, I've read that this was known among 19th century strongmen (Eugene Sandow slept 11+ hours a day).
So whatever happens during sleep, we need more of it (if we stress our body more).
I highly doubt that in itself (sleeping more) is detrimental in any way.
I'm all for getting more sleep, but I think the author's barking up the wrong tree. Matthew Walker in "
Why We Sleep" says we should all set a bedtime alarm, as well as a wake-up alarm. Long story short: Good quality sleep depends on consistent sleep and wake times. Sounds like a job for a clock to me. Here's a modern take on the alarm clock that might change their mind:
http://byloftie.com/It's basic cost-benefit analysis. I completely appreciate where you're coming from, but despite all your points many of the checks
are still silly, banal and irrelevant - the benefit of waking someone up mid sleep cycle to ask them what they want to eat, or to get them to fill out a questionnaire, or to take a blood sample when they've only had one an hour or two before, is not worth the cost. You're giving a passionate response about how lucky we are to have that care anyway, but frankly you are vastly underestimating the devastating effects broken sleep has on the body. Most of the patients are on opiates anyway, so sleep is already at a premium (sedation =/= sleep).
Hospitals are understaffed, but that does not mean they have an excuse to endanger patient safety by ruining their best method of recovery; sleep. Many of my friends work in sleep science. Ask any of them what they think about the current ways we treat patient sleep, and they'll go on an hour long tirade about how absolutely ridiculous it is - how there are 100s of things that we could be doing differently, but don't because of antiquated science and work dogma, and there is almost no reason for close to 50% of times we wake patients up.
I highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. He puts a massive spotlight on the health implications that are cause by lack of sleep, especially for the elderly who make up the most hospital patients.
I actually read this book after seeing a glowing recommendation here, probably from you TBH. And I must say I was disappointed. Most self-help and business books have the same structure:
1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem.
2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem.
3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution.
4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effectiveness of the author's solution.
I read about 25% of Why We Sleep and skimmed the rest, it's all just the first step. I think sleeping is a lot like exercising: Most people agree that they need to do more of it. The problem is that we don't actually do it. So, the most important book on sleeping should be about teaching you how to sleep better and longer, which tend to include:
1. Make sure your bedroom is only for sleeping (and related), not "watching TV room" or "internet browsing before sleeping room".
2. Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Not even one single LED light.
3. If you actually wonder whether you need a short afternoon nap, yes you do.
4. Track your sleep with a device. Remember, the point is to sleep better, not just longer. You can sleep for 8 hours but the tracking will show that you may turn a lot while sleeping resulting in very short REM sleeps.
5. Collect and analyze the tracking data. Everyone is different. Thanks to tracking, I know that I always sleep better if I do some light walking or running prior in the evening.
Ever since I read Why We Sleep, I've been extremely reticent to go anywhere near sleep reduction. We don't know much about the lifetime-long-term effects of this type of sleep reduction, but what we do know about sleep deprivation in general puts the bar quite high for demonstrating this won't really mess you up if extended out to interesting timescales.
Throwing in a bit more with YMMV...
Xmg of melatonin is hard to measure, because there's apparently not great accuracy in most OTC pills. And... it may take you days to confirm if a specific pill is 'working' well or not. If/when you find a combination, buy a bunch to have on hand.
I recently received the book "why we sleep" and it discussed melatonin's process. If "1 hour before bed" works for you, that's good, but it never did for me. ~3 hrs did. Or... at least 2-3 hours at this time of the year. My routine has been taking a melatonin between 6 and 7ish, and by 10 I'm typically quite 'ready' for sleep, and it's usually a fast process. It doesn't seem like it in the moment, but my wife has noticed I'm "out like a light" (which I think is more just in comparison to months ago).
There seems to be quite a lot of information about why <7 hours sleep is bad for you, but I'm more interested in why sleep >=8 hours is associated with
increased mortality.
See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29790200 (an interesting study in itself).
I read "Why We Sleep" but unfortunately it didn't answer this question. The association could be correlational but it's been replicated too many times for me to believe that there's not something more fundamental. Perhaps there's a hormetic effect that's blunted by too much sleep similar to how HGH is bad for longevity?
I am just finishing reading the fantastic book
Why We Sleep [1], and as in so many well-meaning studies and articles, I can't help but feel like this effort is misguided. Just like an addict cannot accept help until they want it, I don't see how "adjusting" work schedules for those who don't even understand their own biology can possibly be helpful.
I've ALWAYS considered myself a night owl. I'm still not sure I'm not. But I've spent the past year rising earlier than I'm used to, and the past 7 months rising even earlier than that due to an enforced carpool with my wife. For the first time in my working life, I HAVE to be awake at a certain time (incidentally, far earlier than I'm used to). Instead of snoozing for an hour, I bolt from bed far earlier than I want to. I go to sleep marginally earlier. But my routine is regular I'm happier. I feel better. I feel healthier. I started reading the book and am acutely interested in tuning my sleep times to make this work even better.
Maybe I've never been a night owl. Maybe I've just had horrible sleep habits. Or maybe I AM a night owl, and I'd be even better off than I can possibly imagine, if I take all of these habits and processes and move them later in the day.
But I just feel like you can't possibly know if you're a morning bird or a night owl until you're already, consistently, religiously, getting enough sleep every night, on a consistent sleep/wake schedule.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
If you change your habits so that you sleep for eight hours a day instead of seven, after reading Why We Sleep, but in fact you didn't have to and you function just as well on seven, then you are literally wasting 4.1% of your life. That is a lot of life.
I know this book gets posted anytime something sleep related comes up... but I still find it underrated.
'Why We Sleep'[0] has changed my sleeping habits for the better and I wish everyone had the chance to read it. It's like a manual explaining how your body works 1/3 of the time you're alive.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
* Elements of Statistical Learning - Hastie, Tibshisrani
* (Lot's of machine learning books to list: PRML, All of Stats, Deep Learning, etc.)
* Active Portfolio Management - Kahn, Grinold
* Thinking, fast and slow - Kahneman
* Protein Power (the Eades') / Why we get fat (Taubes)
* Why we sleep (Walker)
* Deep Work / So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport)
* Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)
* Getting to Yes (Fisher)
I also respect people more when they succeed at their full time job and
then talk about how they did it, rather than full-time hucksters.
My problem with Cal, I guess, is how he writes. He's not an author, but a 'blog writer', and comes across as such in his books. Also, his insipid academic style is painfully dry, lacks flair, and contains no grander story beyond the literal. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is another example of a book offering good advice, but written by an untrained author.
For me, when I pick up a 'book', as opposed to reading a blog article, I want the author to have spent a while meditating on a point, and to have uncovered some small portion of the universe. That magic is lacking in Cal Newport's writing.
Speaking about other possible conditions, anecdotally there are two people in my family who saw a psychiatrist for ADHD like symptoms, who years later were eventually diagnosed with sleep apnea (both with a normal BMI).
It seems like this is not uncommon, quoting Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”:
> Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.
I would suggest you also look at the criticisms about the book you mentioned, Why We Sleep. I'd take the book's conclusions with caution.
"According to the new book
Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the sleep people get on sleeping pills like Ambien is not true sleep. Drugs like these simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain,” he explained to New York Magazine, “and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” That’s not sleep; that’s cryogenics. According to Walker, sleeping-pill sleep doesn’t have the same restorative powers—and there are lots, from an immune boost to emotional resilience—as good, old-fashioned zzzzs."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/better-th...
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
Some HN comments recently recommanded the book "
why we sleep".
After having read it, I can't prevent my self from doing the same. It definitly changed my views on the topic, and while it has a bit of a melodramatic tone, it is a well written entertaining piece that feeds you with data backed evidences with ease.
I'm reminded of two facts from Matthew Walker's book
Why We Sleep:
* People 5-18 years old sleep ~2 hours less per night than they did 100 years ago.
* U of Chicago study found that men who limited their sleep to 5 hours per night for a week experienced a drop in testosterone equivalent to 10-15 years of aging.
This is why I recommend every developer read Deep Work by Cal Newport and
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Deep Work in particular made a bigger impact on my programming than any thing else in ~25 years, including languages frameworks and tools.
What I’m saying is, good sleep and the principles from Deep Work made more of an impact on my productivity than switching from Java Spring, to Ruby on Rails, or to functional JS and Serverless. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I disagree. What's the alternative?
I prefer having a few wrong concepts in my toolbox than none at all. As the Gates quotes in the article suggests, it's good practice to be vigilant and run a basic reality check before absorbing an idea as part of your worldview, but that you might encounter wrong ideas is not a reason to stop reading accessible science books. I don't need to read papers on economic theory if I can pick up a basic book by a respected author and at least end up with some additional concepts, ideas and a good understanding what at least some experts believe is the truth. That doesn't mean I need to believe everything they say and if it matters you should neither rely on one journal's output nor on one author's book as the ultimate truth.
I can read a book about dieting or psychology or evolutionary theory and I should be aware that I won't end up as an expert, but at least I'll very likely be better informed.
"Why we sleep" has lots of good content, generally coherent information, etc. As the article here shows you shouldn't believe everything at face value but you will learn something. I'd love a reaction by the author to the claims here, but even if he says "I was wrong to do this" it doesn't invalidate his whole book or all his knowledge on the topic. He might have taken it out to avoid confusing laymen that all like to imagine themselves in the "under 5 hours" category. That doesn't make it sound in a scientific way but it does if his main aim is to get a message across that sleep is grossly undervalued.
There's lots of science on the need for sleep and what the article here says that there's no proof that sleep under 5 hours is harmful is simply not true.
> In Matthew Walker’s book
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, the neuroscientist is blunt: “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.”
I find it sad that people are still quoting this book. Many claims in this book have been debunked online[0]. The misinformation may even cause people to get too much sleep causing different kinds of issues.
As for me, this has caused me to come back with an impression of "we don't really know why we sleep." I wish there was a definitive source of information on this as popular as this book, but which is actually reputable. Now I just end up doubting my sleep patterns, waking up naturally and still being left unsure why I feel tired.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
But"
Why We Sleep" is not intended for an academic context, right?
I mean, obviously it wouldn't pass a "peer-review" analysis, but that is exactly what happens every time in science pop readings. Either we eliminate every science reading that is not strictly papers, or we accept some misinformation here and there.
In "The Body Keeps the Score", Bessel van der Kolk discusses the effects of psychological trauma and how important it is for people to process traumas via dreams which essentially remove the emotional component but leave the learning. When, say, veterans wake up from nightmarish dreams of a trauma, they don't complete processing it. Then they keep waking up from the same extreme nightmares stuck with that trauma unprocessed. He found a medication that helped veterans stay asleep through the entire nightmare, and within weeks the veterans moved past their traumatic dreams. There may also be non-medical interventions to help get past that trauma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_ScoreAnother book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...
"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).
Why We Sleep isn't really a "10 tricks to sleep" book, it's a book explaining the state of sleep research in 2018.
I found the research survey (less sleep => more cancer, more Alzheimer's, worse emotional states; more sleep => dreams for self-therapy, better health outcomes, better memory; your night/day inclination is immutable like your eye color) more effective at motivating me to improve my sleep habits.
What about your differing sleep schedules causes problems? My wife is an early bird and I am a (relative) night owl.
Michael Pollan:
How to Change Your Mind [1]
Not just about an utterly fascinating topic (psychadelic drugs), in terms of history (LSD turning from a scientific wonder drug to illegal), his personal experiences, and the neuroscience behind it, but also just extremely well-written -- a real page-turner. A crazy potent combination of science, spirituality (from a skeptic), and narrative. I expect his book will be a significant part of why psychadelic drugs will be legalized in the near future specifically for therapeutic purposes.
Also +1 for 2017's Why We Sleep [2]. After reading it, I couldn't believe how shockingly ignorant I'd been of how I spend a full third of my life, and how much it affects the other two-thirds -- and the degree to which a lack of sleep prevents us from perceiving the effects of lack of sleep, in a kind of vicious cycle.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transc...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
I recommend Why We Sleep which says this 2-sleep pattern is not normative for humans. Instead, siesta pattern is.
I read the book “
Why we sleep” and they present some statistics from studies.
One being that lack of quality sleep from working such long hours which can negatively impact sleep and has massive economic costs due to workspace accidents, errors and poor judgement.
From memory, one statistic showed Japan was losing the most money by far.
I highly recommend the book for those interested in improving your life.
I don't see a mention of the spike in accidents directly attributable to DST anywhere in this post on HN. I recently read "
Why we sleep"[0] and there's a fascinating section on the spike in accidents following the shift in timings. I can't quite find the exact article but this[1] study showed a 6.3% increase in number of _fatal_ accidents in the 6-day period after DST kicks in compared to (presumably) other days. And this was consistent over a 10-year period!
So... given the pros and cons(especially around health and safety) .. what would be your answer? :)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
[1] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/does-daylight-saving-tim...
Another endorsement for "
Why we sleep" here.
The book isn't so much about "why we sleep" but rather "why you should sleep more" – 350 pages of Walker telling you about study after study after study after study comparing well-slept to underslept people, and all of the afflictions the latter suffer from, often without even noticing it (and the consequences for industry and society).
While I found his contrived writing style annoying at times, the content is the kind of eye-opening that makes you want to buy a dozen copies just to give to your family and friends.
You're so off the mark with your comment, the only way my message might get through to you is by being very direct.
You're right, there are also a lot of people who are capable of simply going to sleep. But if you think that there isn't a sizeable group of people in society who have difficulty with this, then I have news for you.
You're wrong.
Also when I state I have issues with this for 25+ years, do you really think I haven't heard these type of comments or advice? Because if you think your comment is something that I have never heard before, or am not aware of, then I have news for you again.
You're wrong.
The reason I'm replying: you're either trolling (if so, touche) or you're serious. Since you have 500+ karma (aka leave some good comments), I simply wanted to give you this feedback. Because I know my stuff when it comes to sleep by (1) dealing with, by (2) studying the neurobiology of it in my psychology undergrad multiple times. Moreover, I know the group of people I fall in (the group that has trouble with sleep). I can't speak for them but I have an idea of how they feel and think since I'm recognizing what they say in my own experiences.
Read: Why we sleep from Matthew Walker, Phd
The Design of Everyday Things makes me rethink every user interaction or problem I face, and not just at work. Every time I open a door, I begin to think about that experience.
Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.
I could go on and on..
I would also recommend reading Why We Sleep from Matthew walker. It has a lot of in depth information about how are memory works.
The book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" gives some insight about what we know about sleep.
I've brought this up before, but worth repeating: According to the book
Why We Sleep, something like 30% of the population are hard-wired to be "night owls" and 30 or 40% early risers.
The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.
For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
Yes, it's hard with kids but basically have adopted a bifurcated sleep pattern - 6 hours, wake at 6:15 am, and help with family stuff and do about an hour of non-brain intensive work, and then two more hours of sleep before rewaking and restarting work in the late morning, raring to go. In the evening I can get so much done.
I have my own company, so this flexibility is possible.
The doctor who wrote Why We Sleep do not recommend those sleeping pills IIRC.
It's interesting to note how the general opinion of sleep is starting to shift away from the stereotypical ideal we had decades ago of the "powerful CEO that only sleeps 4-5 hours a night."
We know a lot more about sleep than we used to, and we now know how harmful lack of sleep is to the brain and body.
I highly recommend the book, "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker (who is a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley), which goes into the myriad reasons why we require plentiful sleep.
The book discusses numerous studies conducted over the years that highlight how lack of sleep (in both quantity and quality) affect our mental faculties, our behaviour, and the increased health risks, such as the greater risk of heart disease and dementia, from lack of sleep.
Surprisingly, I encounter a lot of other developers and engineers that don't really concern themselves too much with sleep, and some that, as the article states, still do wear their poor sleep patterns as 'badge of pride.' I wonder if it's because engineers generally fall more into the 'night owl' chronotype category? Is there any kind of study that looks into chronotype by occupation to see how our genetics align with our job preferences?
As a 'night owl' myself, I know how punishing it can be if you're used to working late, and then having to wake up early to commute and get into an office at the same time as everyone else, and it was one of the reasons I moved away from agency work and started working remotely.
I wonder if one day we'll go so far as to stagger start times for people with different chronotypes (night owls and morning larks)? Or if we'll make adjustments to school start times for students in their teenage years, which is when longer sleep associated with a shift in circadian rhythm kicks in.
The book ‘Why we Sleep’ has a lot of the detail on how sleep (or the lack of) impacts you.
I've been reading
Why We Sleep, a really good and important book about sleep from a noted sleep research and professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker. Some of this intuitively makes sense based on his research.
Alcohol interfers with sleep, specifically the ability to remember information and to form new memories by harming and reducing REM sleep. This effect lasts for stuff you learned days earlier (read a book on Monday, get drunk on Wednesday night and you'll remember less than you would have otherwise). Alcohol and sleep don't mix. He recommends you drink earlier in the day (the closer to bed time the worse) and to not consume too much.
Based on this book, I largely no longer drink during the week after work (he also recommends not drinking caffeine much past noon). I've changed my habits, and am sleeping better.
Better sleep will make your mind sharper. It's not just the amount of sleep you are getting, however. Quality is really important. Alcohol interferes with our ability to sleep, specifically, REM sleep, and if you allow decades of daily interference with such a critical life system, I could see it leading to cognitive decline. Even if you don't get dementia, drinking alcohol too late in the day will cause cognitive issues.
Really enjoyed:
- 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
- American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
- Atomic Habits - James Clear
- But What If We're Wrong - Chuck Klosterman
- Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
- The Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi
- Elements of Fiction: Characters & Viewpoint - Orson Scott Card
- The Elephant In The Brain - Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
- Gridiron Genius - Michael Lombardi
- The Longevity Diet - Valter Longo
- Open - Andre Agassi
- Warriors & Worriers - Joyce Benenson
- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
- World After Capital - Albert Wenger
Read an interesting anecdote on amyloids in
Why We Sleep. During a certain sleep phase, the brain tissues change size and open up pathways for cerebrospinal fluid to pass this. This washes out amyloids.
Over time with age and with brain damage, older adults lose the ability to generate this type of sleep, and so there is less cleaning.
Does anyone know any more about this? It seems plausible that the cause could be partly due to a loss of this sleep cleaning function. Indeed lack of sleep is correlated with alzheimers.
But that's just a book anecdote. I'd be curious to read more.
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.
This has changed how I approach sleep.
"Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker. I wish I could give a copy of this book to everyone I meet.
Having just finished the book, this article runs counter to what's discussed in Why We Sleep.
You might have a point here.
I wish I hadn't read "Why we sleep"...
If you don't sleep 8+ hours every night: Matthew Walker - Why We Sleep
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.”
The "
Why we sleep" book is just full of facts about the difference between a good nights sleep and a lack of sleep. There are so many things that fall apart when a few hours are taken off and nobody can be conscious of it, even though they are very very measurable. He also discusses thing like how two groups of people get a night of good sleep, they learn something and get 3 days of quality sleep. Then one of the groups has their sleep limited by several (3/4?) hours. The following day they get full nights rest, and the next day they are tested on what they learned earlier in the week and there were significant deficits for the group that had that one night of bad sleep in the middle of the week.
After reading about it, I've learned a lot more about sleep, but the greatest effect is that I really appreciate sleep more, make lots of time to optimize length and quality. Knowing all the info in the book it would be difficult to justify using an alarm clock to force yourself to rise before your body is ready.
Really cool book.
It is presented by Matthew Walker, a sleep researcher, in his Why We Sleep.
Reading
Why We Sleep has made me somewhat skeptical about people claiming to not need sleep. A quote from the book:
> We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III
> Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep.
Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
The gene described here is also called DEC2: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.
The article mentioned a book that is literally called Why We Sleep, written by a sleep researcher.
I recently read the book
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (a professor at Berkeley). It's pop-sciency in style but more nuanced and well-supported than most pop science books I've read. I definitely recommend picking it up. It made me value sleep
a lot more than I used to, both for long-
and short-term reasons.
Among other things, the book talks about how much sleep people need. Almost everyone needs around 8 hours—it varies with age, but it pretty consistent among people at the same with very rare exceptions. For most people, being short even by just one hour (ie a night with seven hours of sleep) has a number of measurable negative effects.
https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/15...
Oh, I agree. Erikson does not appear to be a scientist at all. But I think the criticism should be along the lines of "he was not using the scientific method or citing sources which used such in the writing of this book", not personal attacks of "he doesn't have a degree in behavioral science".
To illustrate my point, this article[0] paints a very dim view of the science used in the book "Why We Sleep". The author of the book is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley. Being in academia (even a professor at a prestigious school!) doesn't mean the book he wrote is de facto "scientific".
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...
~8.5 hours.
Most of my life I did the typical not getting enough sleep and then binging on the weekend, which doesn't work well at all. Since reading "Why We Sleep"[0] though, I've changed my lifestyle to prioritize getting quality sleep every single night. That book was pretty eye-opening in obliterating a lot of myths I believed about sleep and then teaching my how complex and important it is, indeed it is just as important as waking time if not more. The idea that time spent asleep is "wasted time" is now absurd to me, as so many bad things happen when you short sleep.
Since getting quality sleep regularly it's been like unlocking a superpower: retaining more information, better progress with strength training and skill-based hobbies, more solid emotional balance and way more motivation / inspiration at work.
Can't recommend that book enough.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
If I could summarize "
Why We Sleep" in a single sentence though it would be:
"Sleep or you will die"
That grabs readers' attention. While the hyperbolic tone of the book can be justified given that sleep is so misunderstood ... it does invite skepticism at the same time so I appreciate that the author of this article has done such a thorough lookup.
-- edited for clarity
My colleague recently recommended the book "
Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. While I was expecting it to tout the benefits of good sleep, I was surprised at the evidence around the inverse:
not
getting a full night's sleep is alarmingly bad for you.
The evidence suggests that this extends far beyond cognitive and psychological health impacts. For example, the author notes that there is a 24% increase in heart attacks the day after we lose an hour of sleep during daylight savings. This is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.
Given these mental and physical risks, it is insane that we allow physicians to routinely work shifts that endanger themselves and lead to measurable drops in their performance.
This may be very anecdotal but might help someone in a similar predicament. After reading
Why We Sleep I think I got some explanation what happened to me, but at least for my case it seems it wasn't really on the money. I _was_ able to make the switch from night owl to an early bird myself so it's certainly possible, though requires some effort and dedication.
I naturally woke up at 10 am and didn't really like mornings, and my most productive periods were definitely 1-2am. Thats when the most exciting coding solutions seemed to come to me.
Then I started going to early martial arts training. Since I wanted to go before work, I had to wake up at 7:30. For about 8-9 months it was quite unpleasant, though the training sessions themselves were fun enough for me to want to continue.
But then something strange happened. I vividly remember the day I "switched". It was spring time and we just started getting our training sessions outside. It was intense enough that the guys decided to go shirtless and take in the morning sun. And at that exact moment, basking in the sun at 8am, during a demanding physical exercise I thought to myself - wow! this is so exciting, fun and natural. It felt a bit like a Chinese kung-fu movie. A very energising experience.
And from that exact day I start feeling sleepy at 11pm and wake up at 7:30 consistently each day and would feel awesome in the mornings.
This is I know very anecdotal, but at least I know it's possible. And the recipe seemed to be lots and lots of sun, outdoor activity and a very positive emotional feedback. This I think might be the biggest reason. Currently the most positive feedback we usually encounter is in the evening - late night YouTube / tv / internet / books / friends / family, ... even intercourse. Quite a lot of the stuff we look forward to happens in the evening. It makes sense that our bodies adapt to make us most alert when it senses we get the most bang for the buck. But if you reverse that and attempt to do the stuff you really like early, your body might adopt, albeit slowly.
I can't read TFA, but wanted to note that there's an interesting statistic in the book
Why We Sleep: Something like 30% of the population are hard-wired to be "night owls" and 20% early risers. The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.
For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
For those interested, Internal Time [1] does a good job at explaining chronotypes.
People that say they "changed from night owl to early riser" (or vice-versa) have never been night owls in the first place, but something else was the cause (diet, screen time, etc).
Chronotypes are genetics-based so no amount of wishful thinking will make you a night owl or an early riser (though obviously you can try and force this with alarm clocks / melatonin... to your own risk).
Another book worth mentioning is Why we sleep by Walker. It has it's flaws but overall does a good job at explaining the importance of sleep.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Internal-Time-Chronotypes-Social-Yo...
so there are several levels to "improving your sleep". I agree that if you sleep like shit and only get 4 hours per night you don't need the ring. you need to get more sleep.
but for some people that actually sleep well and want to tweak the quality of their sleep it can be valuable. let me give a few example of such tweaks: altering the time you go to bed, altering the surface you sleep on, reducing the amount of blue light you get, playing with the temperature in the room, not using screens X hours before going to bed, not eating X hours before going to bed. I could go on. The point I'm trying to make is that if you already get enough sleep (or you think you get enough sleep) the ring might help you. yes - the price is ridiculous. but it's not about the price, it's about improving a [very] important aspect of your life.
If you want to be scared shitless into paying attention to your sleep I recommend: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. Everything from cognitive abilities, fertility, risk of cancer and other diseases can be influenced by poor quality sleep. Sleep, along with eating properly and exercise is a pillar for a good quality life. I believe it's worth making it a priority.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
You can kiss goodbye to your quality of life if you "work from bed". As Matthew Walker, of "
Why We Sleep"[+], reminds: you want your brain to associate your bed with
sleeping.
A related point is that if you're not feeling sleepy, don't lay around in the bed waiting for sleep (go to a different area of the room, if possible)—just as how we don't (?) sit around at the dinner table waiting for hunger to arrive.
[+] With warts and all, like any book. Don't let the so-called "egregious errors" pointed out by some guy online distract from the main points made in the book.
>This is actually a common misconception. In reality, it is not possible to "catch up" on missed sleeping hours.
I find that the same sentiment is worded misleadingly in the book Why We Sleep.
If you have a day of bad sleep (i.e. non-optimally consolidating the day's events), followed by a day of good sleep, it's not like your "health bar" is permanently lowered.
You'll just never get to re-consolidate that lost day.
So, today I read 20 pages of a book and sleep like crap - I "lose" the synthesis of those 20 pages in my memory/associative brain map/whatever. If I slept better, I'd remember way more from those 20 pages.
What's lost forever by that poor sleep is the _opportunity_ to properly synthesize those 20 pages just on that one night. Not your "health", and you don't get a permanently increased level of cortisol. After a good night of sleep, you do physiologically recover and you're back to normal.
Also, take everything in "Why We Sleep" with a grain of salt - sleep is hugely important and sleep deprivation sucks but he mentions several times in the book that "everybody sleeps badly once in a while, if it's not the norm then you're fine." Many times he's mentioning effects of chronic deprivation for long periods of time.
And insomnia paranoia will probably make you sleep worse than if you stop worrying about t.
You might want to read "Why We Sleep" by Matt Walker. It's quite fascinating what sleep actually does and how it affects memories and thinking. There is a large section devoted to debunking myths about pulling all-nighters; the super broad stroke is that the short term memory area of the brain needs sleep to offload data to the long term memory area and a lack of sleep causes the short term memories to just bounce off. Once sleep is achieved the brain can resume normal functioning which seems like "a-ha" moments but really is just your short term memory functioning with a fresh cache again.
Thanks for the reply. Sorry I didn't give more details. Unfortunately, I've been following most of the "best practices" for sleep for a while, as it's been almost a year since my sleep turned to a mess.
Currently, I try to take a walk at least 30 minute everyday in the morning and then I do the 7-minute-workout in the afternoon, even when I have no energy. My sleep's improved for the past couple of months since I started this workout routine. I can't tell if it's because of that or my sleep just improves on its own but I'll keep doing it since exercising is better than doing nothing. I also started 18:6 intermittent fasting. That might also have helped.
Still, my improved sleep means about 5 to 5.5 hours (sometimes less) a night with at least 2 awakenings in between. My normal sleep was about 8 hours with 1 awakening, and I'd still nap in the afternoon if given the opportunity. Now, I can't nap and there's no rebound sleep (i.e. I don't sleep more the next day because I sleep very little the day before). It's a pretty messed up situation and doctors haven't found anything abnormal from medical tests, including MRI and EEG. Sleep study indicated 50% sleep efficiency, reduced REM and deep sleep, but no sleep apnea or any common cause.
I tried the 2-min fall asleep method when my condition first started but it didn't really help. And yes, I only drink green tea and have some chocolates before lunch time in terms of stimulants.
I've also read Why We Sleep before my sleep got this bad. In fact, knowing too much about how sleep work and the negative impact on health with lack of sleep makes it much worse for me. So now I tend to avoid reading articles like this and learning more details.
I guess what I'm asking is if there's anything more I can do, like something to supplement or eat/do to make up for the stuff lost due to insufficient sleep. It's a long shot asking in a tech forum, but I'm willing to give anything a chance to help improve my sleep. Let's hope there's more research into sleep as insomnia is one of the worst form of suffering.
[EDIT: the post says "Prefer books by experts in the field" and says these are people who have spent their lives researching that field. It gives GEB as an example of such a book. That claim is factually incorrect and calls into question the idea of requiring books to meet that criteria. Does anyone of the many people who've downvoted my comment care to explain why you find it objectionable?]
> The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach.
Hofstadter was only 34 when GEB was published
Matthew Walker, PhD in his book "
Why We Sleep" discussed sleep cycles and their variances from one person to the next. Specifically, during his discussion of circadian rhythm in chapter 2. From page 22: "As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we'll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten. [...] Consequently the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable."
He discussed varying sleep cycles across individuals. Specifically, he suggested society needs to be more inclusive of different sleep patterns and needs. Instead, society rewards people who naturally wake early in the morning at the cost of "night owls". All in the same area of the book.
You're welcome to research and earn your own PhD in neurology and author your own book on sleep patterns, but I'll stick with Dr Walker's work.
Curiously the book Why We Sleep says the exact opposite: we all have natural sleep cycles that differ and it's genetic, impossible to change. What I've noticed is that it's possible to keep a consistent schedule and overcome all of that inertia, but if you slip up you'll find yourself back in your natural cycle. Interestingly, the cited reason for this is that evolutionary, it's an advantage to not have everyone asleep at the same time.
No, but the post is largely a quote of a blog post (the guy who declared UC Berkeley a failure), which is in turn a followup on a different blog post.
I respect Andrew Gelman, but in this case I think he jumped to fit this into a pattern where it doesn't belong. I've looked into all the criticisms of Why We Sleep (which, again, covers hundreds of studies), and there's no p-hacking, there's no fraudulent data, there's no piles of studies retracted, and there's no crisis of replication. Literally the worst criticism is that one bar of a bar graph is removed, in a way that doesn't even change the point of the single sentence referring to it. There are simply better targets out there than sleep.
True. But it's also well known that Alzheimer's increases the buildup of amyloid-beta, which latches into hippocampus (memory)
and thalamus (which controls sleep). With lack of sleep, your brain is unable to get rid of the excess of amyloid-beta.
It's unknown if lack of sleep causes the onset of Alzheimer's, but the opposite is likely true: Alzheimer's patients don't sleep well. So once it starts to develop, it spirals down likely because of sleep deficiency, thus accelerating memory loss.
Source: "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker. We had a few threads recently about the book here [1], [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446932
> Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence?
Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal.
It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires.
I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
I loved "Why We Sleep" (was a HN recommendation, I think!). One of my biggest takeaways was learning to not feel guilty about it. I think the constant 'hustle mentality' ends up making a lot of this community (in particular) demonise sleep in an "I'll sleep when I'm dead" and "if I'm not working 22 hours a day I'm being out hustled!" When I 'forgave' myself for sleeping (which sounds mental, but bear with) and started to get a consistent 7.5 hours a day, I found that I was just working _better_. Smarter not harder, I guess? Focussed work is definitely > unfocussed work!
Do you consistently go to bed at the same time, keep you meal times relatively consistent and keep your stimulant intake (caffeine, etc) consistent as well? I fare a whole lot better when I do.
Regardless, for me:
8:30 alarm, although I'm usually stirring by then. Meditate, coffee, email check (I rarely reply at this time).
~9:30 Gym
~11:15 Work
I drink decaf coffee in the afternoon, and decaf tea in the evening (it's not as good, but cutting the bulk of my caffeine out after my breakfast cup has really helped my sleep). I try to keep some level of routine/discipline, including an hour or so to relax before bed, which is usually around 12:30-1am. I forced myself to get up 'early' for a fair while, but after reading Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Sleep-Science-Dreams/dp/0141...) I just accepted I was more of a night owl and adjusted accordingly.
8 hours of sleep per night. That’s it.
If I can nail this, everything else will fall into place. I’ll naturally drink less alcohol and eat better. In the last few months, I’ve experimented (via Apple Watch) with the impact that alcohol and diet has on sleep.
The book Why We Sleep, combined with habit theory, has had the greatest influence on this decision.
My fiancée is an avid reader of fiction and canonical literature, she averages around 40 books a year. I was looking for something interesting to get her one Birthday for a change and was recommended "The Master & Margarita" by some folks on reddit. She loved it. It's a very strange book apparently but it steered her into some other Russian authors since.
I've read "Why we sleep" on your list—I average about 20 non fiction a year. It made me think about my own sleeping habits, although I believe there is a blog post out there that claims there is little scientific evidence to back up some of the medical claims made in the book, I still found it beneficial and thought provoking. The history and theory around sleep and it's role in human evolution I found particularly interesting.
I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "
Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.
The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or less to get some work or studying done and to get more hours in the day. Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts.
If you are curious about some common causes of ailments or what the function that consumes pretty much 1/3 of your lifetime does, I'd absolutely whole-heartedly recommend this book.
Dr Panetta, Williams:
Count Girls In [1]
The field guide for anyone who refuses to accept girls and women are less likely to succeed as engineers, scientists, or in any technology profession. This accessible yet science-grounded book was effortless to read and is packed with chapter after chapter of practical age specific advice. I’m a father of two young girls (and a boy) and I will no doubt keep it at my side for many years to come.
My key take away: It seems too often we assume the way things are is they way they will always be, so we fix the symptoms and stop looking for better answers. “Education is education and the same for both genders, so the dispartity between genders in the tech field must be girls aren’t as good at it or boys keep them out of the club.” Well the authors present a wealth of scientific evidence to strongly suggest our approach to STEM education (starting in the home) is geared more towards the way boys brains are biologically wired to learn, and simple intuitive adjustments to the way the same concepts are taught to girls net amazing results. After trying a few of the tips on my 2 and 6 year olds there’s no doubt.. anyone who wants a girl or a women in their life to succeed should read this book. It’ll change lives.
+1 for Why We Sleep, alarming, insightful and ultimately likely to add years the lives of those who read it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1613739397
And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action?
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
There's a good book on the topic called "
Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkley. In it, it discusses how teens are biologically designed stay up much later than their parents would, with the theory that this is when they would have a chance to socialise and mate without the watchful eye of parents. Not only that, it reduces the time that a tribe would be open to attack or prededation - if everyone slept at the same time, there would be an 8 hour window of the day where humans would be incredibly vunerable. Presumably it would be favourable to have a few adults in the tribe to have a similar night-owl streak, to keep the tribe secure throughout the night.
The book really pushes the narative that making kids, and especially young teens wake up so early just to fit into an adults daily routinee is akin to child abuse, as it stunts their growth in ways - physically and mentally - that cannot be achieved by any means except through sleep deprivation.
Allow me to back this up with an actual piece of research.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by
genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy,
based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall
asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on
the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly,
they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to
a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather
their genetic fate.
Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
Not far behind you. An uncle had a major bypass heart operation in his 60s, after which he started daily 4-mile walks and he's still doing pretty well 15 years later. Inspired me to start daily walks earlier in life (usually about a mile) and a few sessions of exercycle and karate every week.
The other ingredient which I have only been recently aware of (thanks in large part to reading "Why we sleep") is getting a full night's sleep. That's hard for me, because I am naturally a "night owl" and light sleeper with kids who need to get up early, but I am aware of the need and try to get 7 or 8 hours as best I can.
I'm interested in this subject. I recently read '
Why We Sleep' and I have started a revolution of getting enough quality sleep, and it has been life changing. I recommend this to everyone.
One thing that offended the reading voice in my head was the careless grammar in the article. I'm not a stickler, but starting sentences with 'am' rather than 'I am', for instance, makes the article sound rushed.
I highly recommend the 2017 book "
Why We Sleep" [1]. Written by a doctor, starting at page 335 he calls exactly for ensuring hospital patients can sleep, why this is so critical for recovery, and how many things in hospitals currently work against this. (The book covers so much ground, including other reforms like school time starts, why society doesn't value sleep because sleep-deprived people don't perceive their substandard performance, and so on.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
The book Why We Sleep mentioned an experiment. Some plants obviously change during day or night, extending leaves during the day and letting them droop at night, something like that from what I remember. People thought the plant was just reacting to the sunlight, until they put the plant in total darkness for several days and observed it going through the same cycles. The plant was not only responding to light, but also to an internal timer. Depending on how you define sleep, this is sleep. Granted plants don't use sleep for all the same purposes as animals.
Matthew Walker, the author of
Why We Sleep, was on the Joe Rogan Experience recently.
I've been in material cognitive decline over the past year or so and I'm nearly certain it's due to my abhorrent sleep patterns. This episode really helped me prioritize a fix over other things that would normally result in a night of 3-5 hrs in bed or on the floor (who knows how much actual sleep).
It's a great episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
I'm reading this book(
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker) right now. The number one piece of advice it provides is to set an alarm to go to bed and try to fall asleep at the same time every night, even on weekends. Other pieces of advice include lowering the temperature to 65°F at night(really), reduce or stop caffeine and alcohol intake, avoid screen time and light at night, and several other pieces of advice.
It's an okay book. Not the best I've read, but if you feel tired during the day, it's worth a read. My sleep quality has markedly increased since starting to read it.
Here is an example from The Black Swan (cloze deletion)
{{c1::The Platonic fold}} is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.
Here is a basic card I read and decide if this is info I have forgotten or if I knew about this:
“We had observed a real-estate transaction that takes place each night when we sleep. Fitting the notion of a long-wave radio signal that carries information across large geographical distances, the slow brainwaves of deep NREM had served as a courier service, transporting memory packets from a temporary storage hold (hippocampus) to a more secure, permanent home (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had helped future-proof those memories.”
Excerpt From: Matthew Walker. “Why We Sleep.” iBooks.
That might not be as easy as you expect.
Here's a relevant passage from sleep scientist Matthew Walker's book '
Why we sleep' (which I highly recommend):
"Although every human being displays an unyielding twenty-four-hour pattern, the respective peak and trough points are strikingly different from one individual to the next. For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,”and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness, like myself. You may colloquially know these two types of people as “morning larks”and “night owls,”respectively. Unlike morning larks, night owls are frequently incapable of falling asleep early at night, no matter how hard they try. It is only in the early-morning hours that owls can drift off. Having not fallen asleep until late, owls of course strongly dislike waking up early. They are unable to function well at this time, one cause of which is that, despite being “awake,”their brain remains in a more sleep-like state throughout the early morning. This is especially true of a region called the prefrontal cortex, which sits above the eyes, and can be thought of as the head office of the brain. The prefrontal cortex controls high-level thought and logical reasoning, and helps keep our emotions in check. When a night owl is forced to wake up too early, their prefrontal cortex remains in a disabled, “offline”state. Like a cold engine after an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature, and before that will not function efficiently. An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics."
I would highly recommend "
Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker to get academic insight to latest research related to sleep and basic understanding what sleep is. There is a good touch on how other species sleep; and why having a nap during a day is beneficial in improving intellectual and physical capacities!
Sleep health benefits are definitely underrated in modern society..
Based on my understanding of the topic I sympathise the research narrative to move to polyphasic sleep cycle to COPE with sleep disorders I do not believe it is adequate sleeping routine to any healthy individual and doing so can be harmful to health!
And from personal note as a parent raising second infant I can confirm that having segmented night sleep over long periods of time is most de-humanizing experience with real mental threads.
Not really possible to 'catch up'. Matthew Walker's book '
Why We Sleep' goes in depth on this. It really made me re-think my life and ensure I'm getting enough sleep daily.
I can't do it justice, but sleeping 8 hours > sleeping 6 and napping 2 later.
So sleeping 5 hours 5 days a week and 12 hours on the weekends just doesn't cut it.
I personally believe sleep research is at the same stage as the food pyramid was in the 80s.
As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep.
When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light.
I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed?
I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
Seconding and thirding the point on getting good sleep:
"
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreamsby Matthew P. Walker"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep"An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity."
Since a few years ago (when I read
Why We Sleep [0]) I’ve made it my priority above all else to allow myself 8 hours of sleep, even if I don’t ‘use’ all of it. With more sleep, an innumerable amount of things are better (as read in the book), but subjectively I noticed the following after about a month straight of good sleep:
* Pain was far more manageable (IBS, MMA injuries)
* Sleep was more restorative when I woke up
* Emotions far more regulated (less irritable)
* Quicker to come up with on the spot jokes, or come up with a refutation to an argument
* Gym performance +30% at least
* Gym recovery faster
* Short and long term memory improvement
* Less health flair ups
* Reduction in brain fog
It’s hard to notice these differences subjectively unless you know what it’s like when you’re “optimized”
Following a keto (or carnivore with a focus on ketosis) diet leads to a further boost across the dimensions mentioned above.
I think many people outside of self-optimization don’t realize what they’re sacrificing when they choose to forego sleep. Even total productivity is enhanced, despite working less hours due to sleeping.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
My very TLDR summary:
The older people at the firm had the same experience coming into this business. So they expect every new comer to behave the same. Its that simple.
Doctors do that with residents which I think is more concerning.
I read about it in a book called
why we sleep[1] about sleep.
[1] -
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...I agree with at least most of the criticism of "
Why We Sleep" and haven't read the book. My concerns about messing up circadian rhythms have nothing to do with the book (other than that some of the advice in the book seems to encourage some people to mess up their circadian rhythm). I am disabled due to sleep issues and have met a few others who also have severe issues due to circadian issues (some people with Non-24 do fine if they can keep a Non-24 schedule). It is at least possible that for some people experimenting with a non-24 hour schedule could cause a permanant Non-24 condition so anyone considering trying such a schedule should be aware of the potential risk.
For me (and I'd guess many others) a sleep mask does not make it much easier to sleep during the day. I would need to have a dark environment for a while before sleep. Some people can set up a room like that but I can't at this point. This is not to say that I never get to sleep during the day, but I stay up longer when I go to sleep during the day, even if I have been awake for a while. Some people with Non-24 have the same reaction I do and others don't.
According to some videos in which Matthew Walker (the author of "
Why we sleep") is answering some Q&As on the Internet, he briefly talks about weed and alcohol.
Both these drugs are used as sedatives, but they are not good for your sleep. Your sleep cycles are just not the same (e.g. you don't get to REM as much) and it is considered detrimental for your sleep.
As others have mentioned in this thread, I highly recommend reading "Why we sleep" by M. Walker. It's one of the best books I've read.
>
I don't think anyone else is interpreting it that way, and can confidently assert that the error is entirely on your end.The post is very clear that it's talking about expertise in the sense referred to in my comments (which, as also indicated in my comments, I don't fully agree with):
"Rule #1: Prefer books by experts in the field
The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach.
Positive indicators of this in a blurb may include “Professor in [field directly related to the book’s topic]”, “Long-time researcher in [field directly related to the book’s topic]”.
Note how they say "Professor in" and "Long-time researcher in".
The way you're using a term, a 21 year old can have "spent their life researching the topic" if they've been focused on it over the previous three years.
reading Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker. After reading this book I decided to put sleep quality above everything and it helped me take the adequate measures. What worked for me was : lowering my caffeine intake (no more than 2 coffee), no caffeine in the afternoon, no screen in the evening, no work 2 or 3 hours prior to go to bed, increasing exercise and sunlight exposition in the day. Oh and good earplugs !
I had a purely practical issue with "
Why we sleep". The book says multiple times that you cannot run a sleep deficit and then make it up later. So what
should I do if I have run a deficit? If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a
permanent reduction in cognitive function? If I turn my alarm off and let my body decide it makes me sleep for longer after a deficit, is my body wasting its time?
It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true
I know everyone is recommending the book Why We Sleep, but I'll pile on and say that I found it to be a fantastic read, and the consequences of alcohol consumption are devastating. Stats like 40+% reduction in retained information from just a few drinks the night after learning new facts. Or the night BEFORE learning new facts. And how the ill consequences occur even if you abstain for several DAYS after learning new facts, then have several drinks 3 days later.
8 Hrs max at the office, 5 days a week. Rest is mostly family and sleep.
I cut down personal projects to a minimum after reading "Why we sleep", and it helps with overall well-being.
Commuting via Bike is also a big health-win for me. One hour on most work-days (sometimes the temperature or other circumstances require the car).
After reading "
Why We Sleep" I've been led to believe it really ought to be just socially acceptable to consume this drug. Unless we challenge the culture of working early then it seems to be the case that many of us are physiologically dependent on caffeine because our work culture demands it.
Or we could fix the culture problem.
Two hour naps will likely put you into a deep slow-wave REM sleep cycle. Waking up mid sleep cycle often leads to grogginess. If you cut your naps to 25 minutes or slightly less, you avoid deep REM sleep and should wake up feeling refreshed.
"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is a good summary on the science behind sleep. The book also recommends to not use the "snooze" function on your alarm clock. It allows you to slip back into a sleep cycle that gets disrupted multiple times everyday.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon. Really fantastic book about the changes in American society over the last two centuries. Argues that the impacts of new technology are decreasing over time.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Genius Foods by Max Lugavere
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
The Framers Coup by Michael Klarman
Leadership by George MacGregor Burns
Strategy by Lawrence Freedman
Several books by Joseph Campbell or Peter Drucker. Can't go wrong with either.
Actually your speculation is a good one.
From the book Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker, it's reported that teenager's circadian rhythm is different from the one of their younger siblings. It's shifted progressively forward, so forward that it passes even the timing of adults.
This is something wired in their brain and should be addressed when setting school times.
Moreover, Walker also proposes a socio-evolutionary explanation of why adolescent sleep schedule is shifted:
"Central to the goal of adolescent development is the transition from parental dependence to
independence, all the while learning to navigate the complexities of peer-group relationships and
interactions.
One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle
themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of
their adult mothers and fathers.
This ingenious biological solution selectively shifts teenagers to a
later phase when they can, for several hours, operate independently—and do so as a peer-group
collective.
It is not a permanent or full dislocation from parental care, but as safe an attempt at
partially separating soon-to-be adults from the eyes of Mother and Father.
There is risk, of course.
But the transition must happen. And the time of day when those independent adolescent wings
unfold, and the first solo flights from the parental nest occur, is not a time of day at all, but rather
a time of night, thanks to a forward-shifted circadian rhythm."
edit: putted a little more space in between sentences
1. Continue to lose weight - i've lost 10 pounds the past month, would like to lose 30 more.
2. Work through PentesterLab Pro - past couple times I would get halfway through the first badge and just stop. This time I am pairing it with Anki cards.
3. Continue getting 7-8 hours sleep, been doing this since I read 'Why We Sleep'
4. Learn Ruby/Rails build a handful of applications.
Why We Sleep [1], by Matthew Walker, PhD.
Page 92:
"Adolescents face two other harmful challenges in their struggle to obtain sufficient sleep as their brains continue to develop. The first is a change in their circadian rhythm. The second is early school start times."
Also:
"... the circadian rhythm of a young child runs on an earlier schedule. Children therefore become sleepy earlier and wake up earlier than their adult parents. Adolescent teenagers, however, have a different circadian rhythm from their young siblings. During puberty, the timing of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is shifted progressively forward: a change that is common across all adolescents, irrespective of culture of geography."
It goes on to explain why this is the case, and the impact on your sleep schedule.
Also page 308-16 there's an entire chapter on Sleep and Education, and the problem of schools starting progressively early, mostly for the convenience of society at large, rather than a net benefit of the kids.
The book has been largely discussed on HN before; definitely worth reading.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Non-fiction:
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi
How To Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan
Open - Andre Agassi
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
World After Capital - Albert Wenger
Fiction:
Chocky - John Wyndham
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
The Eight Mountains - Paolo Cognetti
The Invisibility Cloak - Ge Fei
The Midnight Fox - Betsy Byars
Such Small Hands - Andres Barba
The Thief - Fuminori Nakamura
Ties - Domenico Starnone
Trick - Domenico Starnone
If you're really interested, read the book
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The book references a ton of studies that show, definitively, getting less than 7 hours of sleep is hugely detrimental to your health.
The book actually talks about how psychiatric disorders cause insomnia which creates a feedback loop of getting less sleep, which amplifies the detrimental effects of the disorder, which in turn worsens the insomnia.
Thanks.
Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021.
- Cant't hurt me by David Goggins.
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read)
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership.
- How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time).
- Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein.
- I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it)
- Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.)
- Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
- The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna.
- Turn the Ship Around.
- Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.)
- Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes)
- Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.
In the book "
Why We Sleep" the author writes about how some people are naturally night owls and it damages their health to be forced into a morning routine (e.g., waking up early for school).
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/style/sleep-problem-late-...
According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
I'm currently reading Why We Sleep and just finished a chapter on how humans' ancestors came out of the trees and started sleeping on the ground. It's speculated that early humans' use of fire made this non-suicidal - keeping away the big nocturnal predators and also reducing the number of ticks, etc, preying on them.
So I've read "Why We Sleep" and my understanding of Walker when he says "sleep loss is not a debt that can be repaid" simply meant that sleep does not work like an accounting system - if you slept for 3 hours less last night, sleeping for 3 hours more tonight will not "catch you up" and bring you back to baseline. You're just going to have to sleep your regular number of hours for a while until your body recovers. The damage done by one night of poor sleep is not going to be irreversible. People lose sleep all the time and are fine after they have had enough consecutive nights of normal sleep.
Just finishing reading "Why We Sleep" and it talks about a lack of sufficient sleep being chronically linked with dementia. Alcohol is a major inhibitor of REM sleep, so if you go to sleep intoxicated, you may be technically asleep but you loose a lot of its benefits. So, I wonder if it's the alcohol -> limits effects of sleep -> induces dementia.
Here is the blog post regarding factual errors in "
Why we sleep" in case anyone is interested:
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/I was about to read the book based on a colleague's recommendation, but the blog post and a separate article in my local newspaper debunking few of the claims made me decide against it.
This is also covered in Matthew Walker's
Why We Sleep where he cites several controlled studies demonstrating the role of sleep in learning and outlines the neurobiology behind it:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
I used to see sleep as a waste of time. A few years ago I started to recognize its importance in overall well-being and adjusted my schedule and commute accordingly.
Reading Walker's book led me both to take sleep more seriously still and to take more pleasure in it.
I've had my share of sleep problems in the past. Fixed it by reading "
Why We Sleep" and "Circadian Code" and borrowing a lot of ideas and suggestions there.
I immediately gave up coffee, at first, a long with a bunch of other things (details at [0]).
Anyway, recently I started experimenting with coffee again and it turns out it didn't have any impact on my sleep, whatsoever. I started drinking coffee again (albeit, little less than what I drank before) and I still sleep 8+ hours daily.
I eat very cleanly, in general, and exercise daily.
I think that trying to fit my last meal 4-5 hours before sleeping has had the biggest impact on my sleep!
It's extremely important for your physical and mental health to eat clean, sleep well (8+ hours minimum) and exercise (strength training preferred). Optionally try to include time restriction on the eating window (say, eat within 8 hours period in each 24 hours). That's all there is to it, really. The rest is probably genetic lottery.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639429 (old comment of mine)
> "there's no objective winner here"
To a large degree I agree with what you're saying (you know what they say about opinions), but the last couple years I've put a lot more effort into improving my sleep habits after reading Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep". Tons of science and data-driven conclusions.
But what I found incredible, there are studies to back this up, is that in spring, when we "lose" an hour of sleep, the next day after changing the clocks, heart attacks increase by about 24%.[0] Of course on the flip side, apparently there is a ~21% reduction in heart attacks when we set the clocks back in the fall, so maybe it's a wash.
Suicide rates also jump in spring on the day immediately after the clocks have been pushed forward.
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/daylight-savings-time-change-ki...
I suggest you read "why we sleep" by Matthew Walker. According to him (phd in neuroscience from stanford) you are just short changing yourself -- you're opening yourself up to all sorts of heath conditions later on. Not telling you how to live your life, just saying this book fundamentally changed the way I think about sleep and it is worth your time (IMHO)
The book "
Why We Sleep" talks about how all animals (and plants) have circadian cycles, and the low point of the cycle is marked by a low body temperature. They have done cross cultural studies and can see that the circadian cycles of teenagers are later, and that the cycles change throughout life. Regardless of your sleeping habit the circadian cycle seems to hit it's low temperature point at the same time. Thus, if you start going to bed at 8 PM every night your low body temperature will still arrive at the same time, regardless of your sleep habits.
Take this all with a grain of salt, because my memory of the book is not infallible. It might give you a place to start researching how much of our sleep behavior is innate vs environmental as you ask. It's certainly not a new idea to sleep researchers, I bet there is an answer out there.
As for the "Why We Sleep" book. I found it well written and it is well reviewed by many, so you might be interested in it.
Dare to Lead -Rene Brown
Fooled by randomness- Nassim T
Principle - Ray Dalio
Drive - D Pink
The Laws of Human Nature -R Greene
Influence- Robert Cialdini
21st lessons for 21st century - Y. Harari
Why we sleep -M. Walker
Skin in the Game - Nassim T.
Social Animal - David B.
Einstein - Isaacson
Steve Jobs - Isaacson
Blink - malcolm gladwell
Outlier - malcolm gladwell
The tipping point - malcolm gladwell
Game of Throne series
It's not a
talk, but worth a mention. Joe Rogan interviews Matthew Walker, a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science and author of the book "
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
I have my eye on
Why We Sleep and want to read it soon. I did ask Matthew Walker once about the fact that he says you cannot pay of Sleep Debt whereas William Dement (Promise of Sleep) says you can pay off up to 1-2 weeks but no more. In my experience, I can pay off some sleep debt in a week but it levels out after that.
I haven't heard back on that, probably should message him outside of Twitter, but was hoping for a public dialogue.
https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256
rammy1234onMay 6, 2021
Will recommend the book - "Why we Sleep"
DoingIsLearningonMay 10, 2021
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
He sort goes a bit ad hominem on some parts but he has a lot of fair points.
yhoisethonJan 16, 2020
Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
ahansenonJuly 13, 2018
It has convinced me to improve my sleeping habits, and I've been feeling much better because of it.
Highly recommended!
ytwySXpMbSonOct 4, 2020
daen1ononJan 1, 2021
hrznonMay 16, 2019
RachelFonNov 15, 2019
Walker comes out looking like a charlatan.
SuperChihuahuaonApr 14, 2018
crooonFeb 4, 2019
Great readable book with lots of experiments, results and conclusions. It also made me stop drinking coffee after ~2 pm
g10ronJan 25, 2019
Awesome book: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
magna7onSep 11, 2019
LiamPaonAug 15, 2019
T-1000onAug 17, 2020
efotoonDec 7, 2019
[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/stop-obsessing-over-sleepyour-br...
aguynamedbenonJune 23, 2018
lmiller1990onDec 2, 2019
Sleeping is important, and since I started doing more (and improving the quality of), I feel better and get more done.
seaman1921onApr 7, 2021
lbrdnonFeb 20, 2020
carimuraonJan 16, 2019
CDRdudeonMar 9, 2018
I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
freedombenonDec 26, 2018
thravonMay 25, 2019
spjwebsteronDec 29, 2017
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501144316
kharakonDec 9, 2019
rcontionFeb 28, 2020
dyadiconJune 23, 2018
PerfectElementonDec 26, 2018
LeonBonOct 12, 2019
“ Finish workouts at least 2 to 3 hours before sleep. (Exercise generally will improve sleep. Good sleep will powerfully improve exercise)”
How is this “wrong” ?
My source is “Why We Sleep” by Dr Matt Walker. I’m happy to read other sources.
LeonBonOct 11, 2019
The fiction thing is interesting.
hellofunkonSep 4, 2018
SimpleMindsonFeb 25, 2019
LeonBonMar 6, 2019
It's a very thorough book and certainly convinces you of the tremendous benefits of sleep.
onethoughtonApr 3, 2021
DominikPetersonMay 18, 2020
[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
rofo1onJuly 29, 2018
There isn't long-term effect after 6 months (I think) of any sleep medicine, according to certain studies. The effect literally "wears off", despite the subjective notion of the user.
azag0onNov 3, 2018
kurizu4444onDec 18, 2020
zip1234onFeb 26, 2019
amondalonMar 4, 2020
wojcikstefanonDec 10, 2019
ilamontonFeb 5, 2019
When I was younger, On The Road and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning opened my mind to travel and wandering.
chillacyonSep 23, 2018
sevaghonJuly 18, 2018
Like you say:
>I'd agree that sleeping is better than no sleep
That's pretty much where my standpoint lays now.
markdog12onFeb 6, 2019
sebslomskionMar 6, 2019
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963
vordooonFeb 25, 2020
swsieberonApr 18, 2019
Also, I highly recommend the book "Why we sleep"
Edit: you can also experiment woth wearing socks (by changing limb temperature you influence blood flow and heat dissappation
mikostyonApr 30, 2018
crooonMay 15, 2019
hpoeonMay 18, 2020
For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"
crooonMar 4, 2019
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.
The book states that every living organism on earth so far tested has shown signs of sleep or sleep like behaviour (like not moving for periods of time, relaxed state, etc).
itsangarisonApr 26, 2019
jimnotgymonJune 28, 2020
sgdpkonDec 28, 2019
bsmitty5000onDec 14, 2019
tybitonFeb 26, 2020
Many of the points are that there is zero evidence to back up the authors claims, while using his scientific credentials as authority on the topic.
If the claims in this post are true, the author of “Why we Sleep” has behaved appallingly IMO.
davidandgoliathonSep 13, 2018
Runner-up would be `the end of religion` by Bruxy Cavey.
elriconJune 14, 2020
Source: "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker.
veskyonFeb 5, 2019
dorchadasonNov 17, 2018
lemmingonMay 18, 2020
Nebbit123onFeb 5, 2019
BelphemuronJuly 23, 2018
Mostly about some people are biologically programmed to be night owl and other early bird.
The best sleep is not about what at what time you sleep but more if you follow what your biological cycle is telling you.
JoeMayoBotonMar 23, 2021
Previous: Why we Sleep/Matthew Walker
collywonMay 18, 2020
guiambrosonDec 23, 2018
* Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
* What Doesn't Kill Us, by Scott Carney
* Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou
* The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondō
* How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams
praptakonMay 18, 2020
I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.
kolencherryonNov 28, 2018
softwaredougonDec 23, 2018
aloukissasonOct 16, 2019
jb775onJan 30, 2021
carimuraonFeb 5, 2019
vermadenonFeb 5, 2019
* Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
* Discipline Equals Freedom by Willink Jocko
zomnoysonOct 30, 2019
ilamontonDec 28, 2019
yoranonFeb 8, 2019
purplethinkingonJan 9, 2019
pedalpeteonJuly 27, 2021
You can try all the sleep hygiene stuff you want, but if you're not improving the neurological function of your brain while you sleep, you're not improving the effectiveness of sleep, and since your natural ability to sleep degrades as you age...
The Oxford University Neurology of Sleep textbook is surprisingly approachable. Most people start with Dr Matthew Walkers, Why We Sleep. There are websites dedicated to tearing apart his science, but that goes a bit far. The guy does an excellent job of bringing the importance of sleep to light, and explaining the basics. He also owns up to the "mistakes" or things that have been learned since the book was published.
jds375onJuly 15, 2018
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
rwnspaceonDec 24, 2018
I'd add mental health/anxiety issues as another reason to avoid it. It can be a fine cognitive enhancer - but caffeine as a crutch will give you a limp.
chubotonNov 8, 2018
I'm in the middle of it because of a Hacker News recommendation, and let me pass on the recommendation. It's great so far :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
For example, I think most of us now know that napping isn't for the "lazy" but it's nice to see the scientific reasoning for it. The author Walker is a great sleep advocate.
steelframeonOct 31, 2019
misiti3780onSep 9, 2019
books: thinking fast and slow, black swan/antifragile, why we sleep, the organize mind
sushidonMar 18, 2019
I'm fairly sure you're the one misinformed. Do you have any source on that? I recently read Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and why it didn't feel comprehensive, the book did NOT mention anything about dreaming while sleeping being a negative.
Anthony-GonFeb 25, 2020
bwh2onApr 25, 2021
asavadattionApr 18, 2019
SuperChihuahuaonApr 26, 2018
magnamerconMay 7, 2019
JealousmangoonDec 5, 2018
VanitonApr 18, 2019
joshvmonMar 27, 2020
EngineerBetteronJan 2, 2018
plahteenlahtionDec 24, 2018
Lost and Founder: The Mostly Awful, Sometimes Awesome Truth about Building a Tech Startup
by Rand Fishkin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957156
Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change
by Risto Siilasmaa
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39850907
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
by Daniel Coyle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25870385
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964879
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters
by Richard P. Rumelt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36658033
TheAceOfHeartsonJan 12, 2020
The thesis is still solid though: sleep is incredibly important for your health.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
philip1209onJan 5, 2019
RelysonFeb 25, 2020
"Why We Sleep" and "The Body Keeps the Score" are two of the most helpful books I've ever read (and both found by reading HN book suggestions).
marcbal77onDec 7, 2019
333conNov 30, 2018
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
parskionOct 1, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXflBZXAucQ
momentmakeronDec 24, 2018
I also recently bought Oura Ring to track my sleep and it has been great to see the analysis of my sleep.
I used to wake up at 4:30AM with an alarm now I wake up around 8:00AM without an alarm.
No coffee or nap required throughout the day.
jeffdavisonApr 9, 2019
So that would mean drunk driving is actually the third leading cause of impaired driving damage.
Why is the third cause villified, but not the first two?
pastor_williamsonFeb 26, 2020
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
tonyedgecombeonApr 26, 2019
collywonAug 22, 2019
Just watch the first few minutes of this.
https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...
rocgfonJan 16, 2019
Basically, that would mean that drinking decaf is not really the same as not drinking coffee.
dewyonFeb 25, 2020
kayproonDec 12, 2018
How to Change Your Mind - Michal Pollan [Thumbs up]
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker [Two Thumbs Up]
Creative Selection - Ken Kociend [Neutral. Blog post in book form. ]
Achtung Baby - Sara Zaske [Thumbs Up]
The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida [Been in my queue for years. Two thumbs up]
Small Fry - Lisa Brennan-Jobs [Neutral]
Gut - Giulia Enders [Two thumbs up]
Born a Crime - Trevor Noah [Two thumbs up. Learned more about the nuances of apartheid than I thought]
I'm Proud of You - Tim Madigan [Thumbs down]
Night - Elie Wiesel [Thumbs up]
magnamerconJune 10, 2019
simonhfrostonJune 3, 2020
Don't get exhausted in the first place by sleeping more? If you're still seeing sleep as an inconvenient necessity, I'd recommend reading 'Why We Sleep': https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
funkluteonFeb 25, 2020
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
privongonJuly 27, 2019
There's some body chemistry where being sleep deprived can manifest itself as hunger. I forget the details, but I read about it in "Why We Sleep"[0].
When I had a sleep study done, the pre-study questionnaire seemed to have more about depression symptoms than about sleep itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
privongonJune 10, 2019
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
rocgfonNov 21, 2019
sidm83onJune 9, 2021
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives.
One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight.
Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.
chupa-chupsonDec 14, 2019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
wfnonMay 18, 2021
Lots of fascinating stuff there, highly recommend if you're interested.
TomteonJan 1, 2019
He writes that biphasic sleep was a cultural phenomenon with no basis in sleep science, and that only one Western society ever really practiced it, whereas e.g. "primitive tribes" all have one uninterrupted phase of sleep.
BrajeshwaronDec 17, 2020
I highly suggest reading the book to explore more about your sleep.
guiambrosonJuly 13, 2018
I've commented before [1][2]; but pasting here: the author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446932
StyrkeonJune 12, 2018
The Promise of Sleep is an okay book, but it is almost 20 years old now and it shows.
I have read both books and it is remarkable how much more we learned in the time between them.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
drejonOct 1, 2018
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/295665/why-we-sleep/97801419...
guiambrosonJune 23, 2018
The author presents a vast amount of scientific evidence amount pretty much every corner of why we sleep, from its evolutionary roots thousands of years ago, to the importance of dreams and REM sleep for your memory, reasons and impact of insomnia, to what happens in the neurochemistry in your brain when you drink coffee, alcohol or sleep pills, and much, much more.
If read only one book this year, let me strongly recommend you consider this one.
ps: if you prefer audio, the narrated version from Audible is also very good. There are just a few non-essential graphs, that you can download from their side in PDF.
[1] Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker - https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams-ebook... [non affiliate link]
[2] Quora - How do CEOs who sleep for only 4-5 hours daily manage to function and run multi-million dollar companies for years? http://qr.ae/TUpOrd
TenokeonApr 11, 2021
As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.
holowireonMar 24, 2019
The neural maintenance that occurs during sleep, the body's circadian mechanisms and quality of diet all seem to be highly complementary and ultimately point towards a more holistic and fundamental understanding of the disease (or brain physiology in general). It's been demonstrated pretty comprehensively that quality of diet and timing of eating have a profound effect on how well the body functions as a whole, so the sleep component seems to be an important thread in tying all of these approaches together.
d0mineonApr 26, 2019
guzeyonFeb 26, 2020
rcontionDec 26, 2018
krigathonDec 12, 2018
Dare to Lead (interesting and Powerful)
Rising Strong (Sensible)
What the most successful people do before breakfast (helpful in thinking about opportunity costs)
Why we sleep (interesting read)
Exponential organisations (Re-read after 2 years, worth it)
Prisoners of Geography (very interesting view of geopolitics, Putin, et al)
Continuous Delivery (great!)
Clean Code (must read for any serious programmer)
Built to last (picked it back after 1-2 years, cool book)
Site Reliability Engineering (didn't quite finish, but good book)
Building Microservices (fantastic book which puts everything I've done in the past year into so much more perspective)
heymijoonApr 26, 2019
Except, sleep isn't a debt because the loss can't be repaid.
This is one of many important things I have picked up from Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote "Why We Sleep" and has been doing the podcast rounds lately.
Not to pick on you at all. It sounds like you have made some big realizations and are making fantastic changes. Realizing I can't make up sleep to pay off the "debt" has been eye opening.
Paul-ishonApr 18, 2019
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
justsomeguy3591onMay 21, 2019
I went from a varied sleep schedule, trying to catch up on the weekends, etc to a solid 7.5-8h routine every night and it's made a tremendous difference. Best of luck to you!
[0] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZ1YGJ5/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_...
[1] http://routineexcellence.com/why-we-sleep-book-review-summar...
JeddonAug 20, 2018
I'm reading Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker), published 2017-09 - an HN recommendation from a while back - and I've just read the chapter where he describes an experiment that sounds exactly like this (as in, same approach, same outcomes).
TooSmugToFailonNov 15, 2019
'Why we Sleep' was one of the books I was reading before reading your analysis, and you saved me from wasting any more time on that obviously inaccurate load of hyperbole.
More importantly, you saved me from wasting even more time trying to apply any of the advice by what seems to be sensationalism passing off as science (and maybe even jeopardising my health in the process).
rdgthreeonMay 19, 2020
"Why We Sleep" is everything wrong with "science" today, and as a person who also isn't a huge fan of sleeping, I'm desperate to understand the real drawbacks to a lack of sleep. That dumpster fire of a book has set back honest research on the subject by years.
Just venting, as I know you agree. Thanks again for your contributions to sanity.
jpm_sdonOct 17, 2018
simplifyonDec 29, 2018
Please read "Why We Sleep" by neuroscientist Matthew Walker. Sleep is essential. Don't give it up lightly.
gradysonNov 6, 2018
Or at least that's the argument made in the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
lemmingonDec 27, 2019
The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
hourislateonJan 29, 2020
As a bonus, cold showers likely bring on Hormesis, which in turn can also be beneficial for ones health.
momentmakeronJan 5, 2019
He mentioned the guy that started the residency program, Halstead, in John Hopkin turned out to be a cocaine addict. He stressed that a doctor needs to work all the time. No one knew about his drug addiction until he had passed away.
He even tried to get rid of the addiction by checking into a rehab up north but came away in addition to the cocaine addiction but also a morphine addiction as well.
PlasticTankonMay 19, 2020
I would suggest this book to anyone interested in the topic:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker
The author was on Joe Rogan at some point too but I haven't listened to it.
crazygringoonOct 27, 2018
I'd highly recommend last year's "Why We Sleep" [1] for more info on memory performance and how it's impacted far more that you'd suspect by full (and quality) sleep, which is in turn impacted far more than you'd suspect by alcohol and stress (not to mention kids).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
denfromufaonJune 13, 2020
P.S. I do marathon training and glycogen storing as well as activating the fat burning are essential!
ropans808onOct 31, 2018
Edit: I should add, many substances disrupt NREM sleep in addition to cannabis, such as alcohol, caffeine, and sleep aids.
brewdadonMay 19, 2020
sbmthakuronJuly 27, 2019
DoingIsLearningonNov 9, 2020
There were actually several people challenging the claims made by Matthew walker, probably the most exhaustive of them is Alexey Guzey's critique of 'Why we sleep'[0]. The general point is that he takes scientific evidence and then incorrectly infers from it conclusions that fit his narrative.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
SymmetryonNov 6, 2018
sprintfonDec 18, 2017
- page 246, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Walker is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.
mscastsonSep 11, 2019
People take pride in sleeping less than they should which is pretty fucked up in my opinion.
DHH also have a lot to say about it:
https://m.signalvnoise.com/sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-...
https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/microsoft-reboots-war-on-s...
yellow_postitonOct 27, 2019
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
rcontionDec 17, 2018
taninonOct 11, 2019
My rational is: if your body has enough sleep, it'll wake up on its own.
On the flip side: it's actually very hard to sleep when your body doesn't need sleep.
On another flip side: it's easy to stay awake even though your body needs sleep.
With this, we should all sleep in a completely dark (blocked) room with no sound and etc. The "big unblocked east window in the bedroom" (unless the curtain blocks the light effectively) is a no for me.
I've read "why we sleep", and I get this conflict where:
1. The author believes in the no-trigger-to-wake-up as well.
2. Somehow I also get the impression that the author also believes that we should use sunlight as a trigger for waking up. We'd feel fresher. But wouldn't that cut off our sleep?
not_a_mothonJan 1, 2019
While I’m here commenting, my breakthrough moment in getting good sleep was having a strictly enforced bed time. It took a couple weeks of struggle and mediocre sleep to get there, but it has made getting to sleep a lot easier now.
pedalpeteonSep 4, 2020
I've been an insomniac my whole life, so I suspect something like this is coming for me. This is why I'm building a sleep headband to monitor, adjust, and train for better sleep performance. If you're interested, check out https://soundmind.co
w1ntermuteonDec 28, 2019
cmoxfoxonJuly 12, 2020
I had never had any issues sleeping before reading it, but then I read it and thought "wow sleeping is soooo critical, I need to do better." I started getting stressed about getting enough sleep. Before long, I would feel anxious the minute I laid in bed.
But the fact that I wasn't sleeping made me even more stressed about sleeping! It was a reinforcing loop.
What helped me get back to sleeping well was to just stop caring about it.
nonbirithmonApr 3, 2021
There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.
It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
guiambrosonNov 17, 2018
I've mentioned the book on several other threads [2], so I'll avoid repeating here.
Along the same lines of expanding the ability of your body/mind, one that I'm currently reading is "What doesn't kill us" [3]. Pretty fascinating to think that we have a lot more control over our immune system than originally thought.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606274
[3] https://www.amazon.com/What-Doesnt-Kill-Environmental-Condit...
flocialonOct 17, 2018
Recommended reading: Why We Sleep
crazygringoonMay 17, 2021
I highly recommend the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2018) [1]. It goes into great detail how driving while tired late at night is no different from driving drunk in terms of resulting fatalities -- yet driving while tired is entirely legal while drunk will lose your license.
It's also terrifyingly eye-opening in the number of hospital fatalities from sleep-deprived doctors, surgeons, residents, and nurses with their extremely long shifts.
This is a conversation America needs to be having. Thankfully there are hard-won limits on how many hours a day drivers and pilots can drive and fly... but it's a vastly larger problem than just those professions.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1501144324
pdfernhoutonJuly 20, 2018
As one more piece of the puzzle, since you mentioned several times doing you best work at night and it being hard to get up in the morning, I can wonder how much of various stresses for many people may come from perhaps being a night owl in an early-morning lark business culture?
Also in one study, even just one night of missed sleep can lead to bipolar cycling in some people -- discussed by Matthew Walker in his book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams".
skadamatonJuly 29, 2018
His interview on Joe Rogan is a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
He covers everything from why we sleep (obv), naps, melatonin, etc. I've just finished it and really enjoyed it.
kidintechonDec 16, 2019
General
====
- Master & Margarita (w reader's guide)
- Why we sleep
- The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion
- The wisdom of insecurity
- The denial of death
- The three body problem (friend's advice: slow burn, stick with it)
- The dubliners
- The devils (Dostoyevski)
- The name of the rose
- Enten-Oller (Kierkegaard)
- Zero to one (Peter Thiel, recommended reading as palantir new joiner - not fantastic but has some thought provoking ideas; i.e. which very important truth would very few people agree with you on?)
Economy/finance
===
- Basic economics (Thomas Sowell)
- How an economy grows and why it crashes
- Know the city
Math
===
- Coffee time in Memphis
- Real analysis (mathematics textbook)
- Problems from the book (Halfway through this one, and I found it really enjoyable, even with only a CS bachelors)
If anyone has read any and has feedback/notes, I'm looking forward to hearing them!
unmoleonJuly 13, 2019
elicashonAug 17, 2018
> Unfortunately, the current set or classes of sleeping pills that we have do not produce naturalistic sleep. So they are all a broad set of chemicals that we call the sedative hypnotics. And sedation is not sleep. It's very different. It doesn't give you the restorative natural benefits of sleep.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war...
enceladus_iceonAug 27, 2018
xhrpostonDec 12, 2018
The Art of Empathy (very interesting)
The Three Body Problem (good)
The Startup Way (decent)
The Politics of Bitcoin (short but interesting)
Why We Sleep (very much worth it)
The Last Arrow (mixed feelings)
The Prize (boring but informative)
Superhuman by Habit (OK, not much new)
The Circle of Profit (straight to the point)
Thinking in Systems (couldn't finish it)
Radical Candor (awesome)
Harry Potter #1 (too low of a reading level)
Man's Search for Meaning (classic)
Flow (Amazing!)
Scary Close (great)
dwdonAug 16, 2021
About 65 minutes in (just after a great discussion on coffee and caffeine) they go into how sleep (and dreaming) facilitates memory and learning - basically the creation of new schemas (models) and the updating and rewiring of existing ones.
What made it interesting was how it meshed with Hawkin's ideas from a completely different angle.
He also touched on why we forget things which is closer to the OP (like not remembering where you parked your car two weeks ago, but remembering where you parked it today), and how some people don't/can't forget things. Also the intricacy of things that we remember (like a particular pair of shoes someone was wearing when we first met them).
lhlonDec 7, 2019
For those that prefer more succinct reviews and want to spelunk citations, these are a couple good starting points:
Potter, Gregory D. M., Debra J. Skene, Josephine Arendt, Janet E. Cade, Peter J. Grant, and Laura J. Hardie. “Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Disruption: Causes, Metabolic Consequences, and Countermeasures.” Endocrine Reviews 37, no. 6 (December 2016): 584–608. https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2016-1083.
Manoogian, Emily NC, and Satchidananda Panda. “Circadian Rhythms, Time-Restricted Feeding, and Healthy Aging.” Ageing Research Reviews 39 (October 2017): 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2016.12.006.
jm__87onJune 24, 2018
jannyferonAug 23, 2019
I also used to believe I need to “consume less, create more”...
Since then, it’s become more like “if you want to, then consume meaningfully, take time to digest it, sleep on it, get your mind off it for a while, go consume more, take a break, create something, be bad at it, and create again, and maybe eventually you’ll be good at it”.
Some books that shaped my thought process were:
Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
Also, blog posts about meditation, interviews with prolific movie writer/directors, and that Ira Glass video.
an4rchyonMay 16, 2019
Currently reading 'Why we sleep' which is a fascinating book about the importance/history/evolution of sleep across species and time. (Highly recommend it -- definitely regretting all the sleepless/low sleep nights)
At a high level, my understanding is that the duration/quality of sleep depends on physiological, mental and environmental conditions.
It sounds like the focus of the article was on environmental (I would definitely love to sleep with zero light/sound).
Similarly, the 5-10 mins meditation may help, but if you're stressed out or have something on your mind, that can still keep you awake or wake you up.
You can make sure not to eat/drink anything by that time (6pm) but effects of caffeine/other foods you might have eaten earlier can impact your sleep quality.
Finally, the right physiological/chemical changes need to occur (melatonin/REM cycles/tired from physically exhausting activities) for you to actually be sleepy. Most people can't just sleep on command, although, you might be able to build/force the habit.
drakonkaonFeb 3, 2019
pastor_elmonAug 17, 2018
pdfernhoutonAug 9, 2018
A more general book with good advice on nutrition that is perhaps easier to follow -- but not specific to diabetes -- is "The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity" by John Mackey , Alona Pulde, and Matthew Lederman.
Good luck to you and your mom! It helps a lot in making lifestyle changes when family, friends, and neighbors are supportive. See also the book "The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People" for a bigger picture view on that.
Good sleep is another part of the puzzle -- see Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" on that. Essentially, good sleep gives you better self-control during the day -- as well as helping your health in many ways including regarding diabetes.
rerxonSep 23, 2018
adamchonDec 26, 2018
- Sleeping/waking at the same time each night/morning
- Keeping my room cool at night
- Relaxation exercises for both body and mind once I get into bed
- Getting a comfortable eye mask
- Actually taking sleep seriously (read Why We Sleep)
I feel so good each day, I have a better memory and emotional stability, and I don't fall asleep at work any more.
notabeeonFeb 26, 2020
petefordeonAug 17, 2020
I am not a doctor, but I have spent a lot of time in sleep clinics and reading about sleep. I am also quite familiar with the huge number of issues surrounding the relatively recent book "Why We Sleep" which is essentially considered partially-debunked at this point. I feel about that book the way most of us would feel about a book declaring that people who code or are interested in startups are missing opportunities to play more football.
My rhythm seems to be off by two REM cycles eg 1.5hx2, and I actually find 3h pretty easy to manage as it loops around every 7-8 days.
I don't have any trouble falling asleep during the day, because I own a https://nitehood.ca - the discount code is August15 BTW.
dorchadasonNov 17, 2018
This is part of it, I think. In Why we Sleep, Dr. Walker specifically mentions that we often don't realize how sleep deprived we truly are. Given the fact that, if you rounded the percentage of people who have the mutation needed for less sleep, there's an effectively 0% chance of you having it, I'd say that's what's coming into play here.
knzhouonApr 12, 2020
Like, this kind of exchange is exactly why academics try to avoid randos from the internet. They tend to seize on one point, declare victory, and refuse to change their minds. And when the academic doesn't grovel in compliance, they declare academia to be a failure. As far as I'm concerned, UC Berkeley responded perfectly.
sp3000onOct 17, 2018
"Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality."
leonroyonJune 27, 2019
It’s certainly believable that smart phones do affect sleep if nothing else and if so that could explain in part the increased incidences of mental health problems and other issues described in the article.
guiambrosonJuly 3, 2018
Here's an interesting paragraph, pertinent to the discussion of Alzheimer:
"As we learned ..., sleep quality - especially that of deep NREM sleep - deteriorates as we age. This is linked to a decline in memory. However, if you assess a patient with Alzheimer's disease, the disruption of sleep is far more exaggerated. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that sleep disturbance precedes the onset of Alzheimer's disease by several years, suggesting that it may be an early-warning sign of the condition, or even a contributor to it.
Following diagnosis, the magnitude of sleep disruption will then progress in unison with the symptom severity of the Alzheimer's patient, further suggesting a link between the two. Making matters worse, over 60% of patients with Alzheimer's disease have at least one clinical sleep disorder. Insomnia is especially common, as caregivers of a loved one with Alzheimer's disease will know all too well.
"The author goes on to discuss the studies his team did in testing the hypothesis of amyloid buildup in the brain (particularly in the frontal lobe, which regulates your sleep) would impact the quality of sleep, and reduce NREM sleep - which is crucial for memory formation and retention.
So even if the amyloid hypothesis doesn't explain the onset of Alzheimer, there's enough evidence to claim that amyloid plaques may be associated with the loss of deep sleep, and damage your memory.
Now the most interesting part is where the author claims the opposite: that lack of sleep is correlated with amyloid buildups, as it disrupts the function of glymphatic system within the brain.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
tombarysonAug 4, 2019
Best, Tomáš
yationOct 11, 2019
Articles like this one and books like Why We Sleep however make me very anxious, since all they seem to do is point out how bad it is if one doesn't get enough sleep. I know that. How can I fix it? I had CBT based sleep therapy last year, and things have since improved, but not much. Then I have the occasional random doctors who tell me how sleep is actually not that important and how they used to sleep only 3h/day when they were my age. Even the cult book Why We Sleep has chapter after chapter of telling me how screwed I am because I don't sleep 8-9 h/day, with little actionable items that can help me. I get that it is super important to raise awareness about sleep, but every time I open such articles, I am invariably made anxious about my sleep, and people who know what I'm talking about know how hard it is to sleep with anxiety about your sleep.
Sorry for my rant :(
MauranKilomonOct 31, 2020
See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
That is not to say he's wrong on every count, but take what he says with a huge grain of "might have been invented/fudged and then cited from and by himself" salt.
patrickkonFeb 17, 2020
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
guiambrosonSep 15, 2018
I've mentioned the book on several other thread [2], so there's plenty of opinions there if you're interested in knowing more.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606274
real-hackeronJan 2, 2019
user_erroronMar 26, 2020
After reading Matthew Walker's "Why we Sleep", I currently use the deep sleep percentage metric provided by the Sleep as Android app to determine how well I sleep, and jot it down in a sleep log. The book has given me the idea that deep and uninterrupted sleep is hugely important, but obviously the app is only able to give a crude estimate.
Perhaps this headband would give me better insights into my (failings of) sleep. I hope the parent commenter replies to your message.
purplethinkingonJan 9, 2019
rofo1onMay 7, 2019
On the other hand, sleeping less than 8 hours a day is devastating (check the book 'Why We Sleep' for details)
Moreover, I've read that this was known among 19th century strongmen (Eugene Sandow slept 11+ hours a day).
So whatever happens during sleep, we need more of it (if we stress our body more).
I highly doubt that in itself (sleeping more) is detrimental in any way.
ycyouonFeb 17, 2021
AromasinonJune 5, 2019
Hospitals are understaffed, but that does not mean they have an excuse to endanger patient safety by ruining their best method of recovery; sleep. Many of my friends work in sleep science. Ask any of them what they think about the current ways we treat patient sleep, and they'll go on an hour long tirade about how absolutely ridiculous it is - how there are 100s of things that we could be doing differently, but don't because of antiquated science and work dogma, and there is almost no reason for close to 50% of times we wake patients up.
I highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. He puts a massive spotlight on the health implications that are cause by lack of sleep, especially for the elderly who make up the most hospital patients.
pdnonJuly 25, 2018
1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem.
2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem.
3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution.
4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effectiveness of the author's solution.
I read about 25% of Why We Sleep and skimmed the rest, it's all just the first step. I think sleeping is a lot like exercising: Most people agree that they need to do more of it. The problem is that we don't actually do it. So, the most important book on sleeping should be about teaching you how to sleep better and longer, which tend to include:
1. Make sure your bedroom is only for sleeping (and related), not "watching TV room" or "internet browsing before sleeping room".
2. Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Not even one single LED light.
3. If you actually wonder whether you need a short afternoon nap, yes you do.
4. Track your sleep with a device. Remember, the point is to sleep better, not just longer. You can sleep for 8 hours but the tracking will show that you may turn a lot while sleeping resulting in very short REM sleeps.
5. Collect and analyze the tracking data. Everyone is different. Thanks to tracking, I know that I always sleep better if I do some light walking or running prior in the evening.
regularfryonJune 17, 2020
lowercasedonJan 30, 2021
Xmg of melatonin is hard to measure, because there's apparently not great accuracy in most OTC pills. And... it may take you days to confirm if a specific pill is 'working' well or not. If/when you find a combination, buy a bunch to have on hand.
I recently received the book "why we sleep" and it discussed melatonin's process. If "1 hour before bed" works for you, that's good, but it never did for me. ~3 hrs did. Or... at least 2-3 hours at this time of the year. My routine has been taking a melatonin between 6 and 7ish, and by 10 I'm typically quite 'ready' for sleep, and it's usually a fast process. It doesn't seem like it in the moment, but my wife has noticed I'm "out like a light" (which I think is more just in comparison to months ago).
theatraineonOct 11, 2019
See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29790200 (an interesting study in itself).
I read "Why We Sleep" but unfortunately it didn't answer this question. The association could be correlational but it's been replicated too many times for me to believe that there's not something more fundamental. Perhaps there's a hormetic effect that's blunted by too much sleep similar to how HGH is bad for longevity?
rcontionDec 26, 2018
I've ALWAYS considered myself a night owl. I'm still not sure I'm not. But I've spent the past year rising earlier than I'm used to, and the past 7 months rising even earlier than that due to an enforced carpool with my wife. For the first time in my working life, I HAVE to be awake at a certain time (incidentally, far earlier than I'm used to). Instead of snoozing for an hour, I bolt from bed far earlier than I want to. I go to sleep marginally earlier. But my routine is regular I'm happier. I feel better. I feel healthier. I started reading the book and am acutely interested in tuning my sleep times to make this work even better.
Maybe I've never been a night owl. Maybe I've just had horrible sleep habits. Or maybe I AM a night owl, and I'd be even better off than I can possibly imagine, if I take all of these habits and processes and move them later in the day.
But I just feel like you can't possibly know if you're a morning bird or a night owl until you're already, consistently, religiously, getting enough sleep every night, on a consistent sleep/wake schedule.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Smaug123onApr 12, 2020
fbelzileonNov 29, 2019
'Why We Sleep'[0] has changed my sleeping habits for the better and I wish everyone had the chance to read it. It's like a manual explaining how your body works 1/3 of the time you're alive.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
vowellessonDec 28, 2019
* (Lot's of machine learning books to list: PRML, All of Stats, Deep Learning, etc.)
* Active Portfolio Management - Kahn, Grinold
* Thinking, fast and slow - Kahneman
* Protein Power (the Eades') / Why we get fat (Taubes)
* Why we sleep (Walker)
* Deep Work / So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport)
* Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)
* Getting to Yes (Fisher)
helmholtzonNov 9, 2020
My problem with Cal, I guess, is how he writes. He's not an author, but a 'blog writer', and comes across as such in his books. Also, his insipid academic style is painfully dry, lacks flair, and contains no grander story beyond the literal. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is another example of a book offering good advice, but written by an untrained author.
For me, when I pick up a 'book', as opposed to reading a blog article, I want the author to have spent a while meditating on a point, and to have uncovered some small portion of the universe. That magic is lacking in Cal Newport's writing.
throwaway34241onOct 3, 2020
It seems like this is not uncommon, quoting Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”:
> Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.
ralphstodomingoonJan 31, 2021
kszxgzonJuly 23, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/better-th...
flubertonDec 15, 2020
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=why+we+sleep&ia=web
d33onNov 8, 2020
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
VanitonMay 12, 2020
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
andyljonesonJuly 26, 2020
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep
yattiasonSep 11, 2019
janvdbergonDec 14, 2019
* Why We Sleep: https://j11g.com/2019/05/31/why-we-sleep-matthew-walker/
* The Effective Executive: https://j11g.com/2019/03/18/the-effective-executive-peter-dr...
* High Output Management: https://j11g.com/2019/01/29/high-output-management-andrew-s-...
* Bad Blood: https://j11g.com/2019/01/21/bad-blood-john-carreyrou/
* The 7 Habits (I reread this after a long time and it still holds up!) https://j11g.com/2019/09/30/the-7-habits-of-highly-effective...
* A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace (This is just an amazing book and became one of my all time favorites) https://j11g.com/2019/08/08/a-supposedly-fun-thing-ill-never...
boboTeaonNov 6, 2019
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
Firelfy Lane
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1472878.Firefly_Lane
sametmaxonJuly 18, 2018
After having read it, I can't prevent my self from doing the same. It definitly changed my views on the topic, and while it has a bit of a melodramatic tone, it is a well written entertaining piece that feeds you with data backed evidences with ease.
ty1564onJan 14, 2021
* People 5-18 years old sleep ~2 hours less per night than they did 100 years ago.
* U of Chicago study found that men who limited their sleep to 5 hours per night for a week experienced a drop in testosterone equivalent to 10-15 years of aging.
ryanmarshonApr 21, 2019
Deep Work in particular made a bigger impact on my programming than any thing else in ~25 years, including languages frameworks and tools.
What I’m saying is, good sleep and the principles from Deep Work made more of an impact on my productivity than switching from Java Spring, to Ruby on Rails, or to functional JS and Serverless. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
notechbackonApr 12, 2020
I prefer having a few wrong concepts in my toolbox than none at all. As the Gates quotes in the article suggests, it's good practice to be vigilant and run a basic reality check before absorbing an idea as part of your worldview, but that you might encounter wrong ideas is not a reason to stop reading accessible science books. I don't need to read papers on economic theory if I can pick up a basic book by a respected author and at least end up with some additional concepts, ideas and a good understanding what at least some experts believe is the truth. That doesn't mean I need to believe everything they say and if it matters you should neither rely on one journal's output nor on one author's book as the ultimate truth.
I can read a book about dieting or psychology or evolutionary theory and I should be aware that I won't end up as an expert, but at least I'll very likely be better informed.
"Why we sleep" has lots of good content, generally coherent information, etc. As the article here shows you shouldn't believe everything at face value but you will learn something. I'd love a reaction by the author to the claims here, but even if he says "I was wrong to do this" it doesn't invalidate his whole book or all his knowledge on the topic. He might have taken it out to avoid confusing laymen that all like to imagine themselves in the "under 5 hours" category. That doesn't make it sound in a scientific way but it does if his main aim is to get a message across that sleep is grossly undervalued.
There's lots of science on the need for sleep and what the article here says that there's no proof that sleep under 5 hours is harmful is simply not true.
nonbirithmonDec 2, 2020
I find it sad that people are still quoting this book. Many claims in this book have been debunked online[0]. The misinformation may even cause people to get too much sleep causing different kinds of issues.
As for me, this has caused me to come back with an impression of "we don't really know why we sleep." I wish there was a definitive source of information on this as popular as this book, but which is actually reputable. Now I just end up doubting my sleep patterns, waking up naturally and still being left unsure why I feel tired.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
hackandtriponApr 12, 2020
I mean, obviously it wouldn't pass a "peer-review" analysis, but that is exactly what happens every time in science pop readings. Either we eliminate every science reading that is not strictly papers, or we accept some misinformation here and there.
pdfernhoutonJan 25, 2021
Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...
"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).
achompasonNov 29, 2018
I found the research survey (less sleep => more cancer, more Alzheimer's, worse emotional states; more sleep => dreams for self-therapy, better health outcomes, better memory; your night/day inclination is immutable like your eye color) more effective at motivating me to improve my sleep habits.
What about your differing sleep schedules causes problems? My wife is an early bird and I am a (relative) night owl.
crazygringoonDec 23, 2018
Not just about an utterly fascinating topic (psychadelic drugs), in terms of history (LSD turning from a scientific wonder drug to illegal), his personal experiences, and the neuroscience behind it, but also just extremely well-written -- a real page-turner. A crazy potent combination of science, spirituality (from a skeptic), and narrative. I expect his book will be a significant part of why psychadelic drugs will be legalized in the near future specifically for therapeutic purposes.
Also +1 for 2017's Why We Sleep [2]. After reading it, I couldn't believe how shockingly ignorant I'd been of how I spend a full third of my life, and how much it affects the other two-thirds -- and the degree to which a lack of sleep prevents us from perceiving the effects of lack of sleep, in a kind of vicious cycle.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transc...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
auslegungonJune 13, 2019
bamboozledonJune 20, 2019
One being that lack of quality sleep from working such long hours which can negatively impact sleep and has massive economic costs due to workspace accidents, errors and poor judgement.
From memory, one statistic showed Japan was losing the most money by far.
I highly recommend the book for those interested in improving your life.
vmurthyonAug 29, 2020
So... given the pros and cons(especially around health and safety) .. what would be your answer? :)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
[1] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/does-daylight-saving-tim...
skoschonOct 17, 2018
The book isn't so much about "why we sleep" but rather "why you should sleep more" – 350 pages of Walker telling you about study after study after study after study comparing well-slept to underslept people, and all of the afflictions the latter suffer from, often without even noticing it (and the consequences for industry and society).
While I found his contrived writing style annoying at times, the content is the kind of eye-opening that makes you want to buy a dozen copies just to give to your family and friends.
mettamageonMay 14, 2020
You're right, there are also a lot of people who are capable of simply going to sleep. But if you think that there isn't a sizeable group of people in society who have difficulty with this, then I have news for you.
You're wrong.
Also when I state I have issues with this for 25+ years, do you really think I haven't heard these type of comments or advice? Because if you think your comment is something that I have never heard before, or am not aware of, then I have news for you again.
You're wrong.
The reason I'm replying: you're either trolling (if so, touche) or you're serious. Since you have 500+ karma (aka leave some good comments), I simply wanted to give you this feedback. Because I know my stuff when it comes to sleep by (1) dealing with, by (2) studying the neurobiology of it in my psychology undergrad multiple times. Moreover, I know the group of people I fall in (the group that has trouble with sleep). I can't speak for them but I have an idea of how they feel and think since I'm recognizing what they say in my own experiences.
Read: Why we sleep from Matthew Walker, Phd
SaturdaysonFeb 5, 2019
Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.
I could go on and on..
aoneronSep 3, 2018
brainzaponOct 18, 2018
ilamontonMar 16, 2019
The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.
For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
Yes, it's hard with kids but basically have adopted a bifurcated sleep pattern - 6 hours, wake at 6:15 am, and help with family stuff and do about an hour of non-brain intensive work, and then two more hours of sleep before rewaking and restarting work in the late morning, raring to go. In the evening I can get so much done.
I have my own company, so this flexibility is possible.
kibaonNov 1, 2019
milchekonOct 2, 2019
We know a lot more about sleep than we used to, and we now know how harmful lack of sleep is to the brain and body.
I highly recommend the book, "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker (who is a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley), which goes into the myriad reasons why we require plentiful sleep.
The book discusses numerous studies conducted over the years that highlight how lack of sleep (in both quantity and quality) affect our mental faculties, our behaviour, and the increased health risks, such as the greater risk of heart disease and dementia, from lack of sleep.
Surprisingly, I encounter a lot of other developers and engineers that don't really concern themselves too much with sleep, and some that, as the article states, still do wear their poor sleep patterns as 'badge of pride.' I wonder if it's because engineers generally fall more into the 'night owl' chronotype category? Is there any kind of study that looks into chronotype by occupation to see how our genetics align with our job preferences?
As a 'night owl' myself, I know how punishing it can be if you're used to working late, and then having to wake up early to commute and get into an office at the same time as everyone else, and it was one of the reasons I moved away from agency work and started working remotely.
I wonder if one day we'll go so far as to stagger start times for people with different chronotypes (night owls and morning larks)? Or if we'll make adjustments to school start times for students in their teenage years, which is when longer sleep associated with a shift in circadian rhythm kicks in.
nreillyonApr 21, 2019
pwthorntononFeb 21, 2018
Alcohol interfers with sleep, specifically the ability to remember information and to form new memories by harming and reducing REM sleep. This effect lasts for stuff you learned days earlier (read a book on Monday, get drunk on Wednesday night and you'll remember less than you would have otherwise). Alcohol and sleep don't mix. He recommends you drink earlier in the day (the closer to bed time the worse) and to not consume too much.
Based on this book, I largely no longer drink during the week after work (he also recommends not drinking caffeine much past noon). I've changed my habits, and am sleeping better.
Better sleep will make your mind sharper. It's not just the amount of sleep you are getting, however. Quality is really important. Alcohol interferes with our ability to sleep, specifically, REM sleep, and if you allow decades of daily interference with such a critical life system, I could see it leading to cognitive decline. Even if you don't get dementia, drinking alcohol too late in the day will cause cognitive issues.
jger15onDec 23, 2018
- 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
- American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
- Atomic Habits - James Clear
- But What If We're Wrong - Chuck Klosterman
- Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
- The Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi
- Elements of Fiction: Characters & Viewpoint - Orson Scott Card
- The Elephant In The Brain - Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
- Gridiron Genius - Michael Lombardi
- The Longevity Diet - Valter Longo
- Open - Andre Agassi
- Warriors & Worriers - Joyce Benenson
- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
- World After Capital - Albert Wenger
graemeonMar 23, 2019
Over time with age and with brain damage, older adults lose the ability to generate this type of sleep, and so there is less cleaning.
Does anyone know any more about this? It seems plausible that the cause could be partly due to a loss of this sleep cleaning function. Indeed lack of sleep is correlated with alzheimers.
But that's just a book anecdote. I'd be curious to read more.
jjwalz17onJune 4, 2018
This has changed how I approach sleep.
wreathonDec 1, 2018
x0neronNov 16, 2018
meijeronSep 5, 2019
I wish I hadn't read "Why we sleep"...
ppsonJuly 2, 2019
raamdevonDec 28, 2019
“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.”
seatdrummeronSep 14, 2018
After reading about it, I've learned a lot more about sleep, but the greatest effect is that I really appreciate sleep more, make lots of time to optimize length and quality. Knowing all the info in the book it would be difficult to justify using an alarm clock to force yourself to rise before your body is ready.
Really cool book.
dorchadasonNov 6, 2018
joshvmonMay 5, 2019
> We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III
> Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep.
Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
The gene described here is also called DEC2: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.
sn9onDec 20, 2017
tikhonjonOct 11, 2018
Among other things, the book talks about how much sleep people need. Almost everyone needs around 8 hours—it varies with age, but it pretty consistent among people at the same with very rare exceptions. For most people, being short even by just one hour (ie a night with seven hours of sleep) has a number of measurable negative effects.
https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/15...
fastballonJan 16, 2020
To illustrate my point, this article[0] paints a very dim view of the science used in the book "Why We Sleep". The author of the book is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley. Being in academia (even a professor at a prestigious school!) doesn't mean the book he wrote is de facto "scientific".
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...
dota_fanaticonMar 23, 2018
Most of my life I did the typical not getting enough sleep and then binging on the weekend, which doesn't work well at all. Since reading "Why We Sleep"[0] though, I've changed my lifestyle to prioritize getting quality sleep every single night. That book was pretty eye-opening in obliterating a lot of myths I believed about sleep and then teaching my how complex and important it is, indeed it is just as important as waking time if not more. The idea that time spent asleep is "wasted time" is now absurd to me, as so many bad things happen when you short sleep.
Since getting quality sleep regularly it's been like unlocking a superpower: retaining more information, better progress with strength training and skill-based hobbies, more solid emotional balance and way more motivation / inspiration at work.
Can't recommend that book enough.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
stuxnet79onNov 15, 2019
"Sleep or you will die"
That grabs readers' attention. While the hyperbolic tone of the book can be justified given that sleep is so misunderstood ... it does invite skepticism at the same time so I appreciate that the author of this article has done such a thorough lookup.
-- edited for clarity
apawloskionMay 15, 2019
The evidence suggests that this extends far beyond cognitive and psychological health impacts. For example, the author notes that there is a 24% increase in heart attacks the day after we lose an hour of sleep during daylight savings. This is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.
Given these mental and physical risks, it is insane that we allow physicians to routinely work shifts that endanger themselves and lead to measurable drops in their performance.
seeronFeb 25, 2020
I naturally woke up at 10 am and didn't really like mornings, and my most productive periods were definitely 1-2am. Thats when the most exciting coding solutions seemed to come to me.
Then I started going to early martial arts training. Since I wanted to go before work, I had to wake up at 7:30. For about 8-9 months it was quite unpleasant, though the training sessions themselves were fun enough for me to want to continue.
But then something strange happened. I vividly remember the day I "switched". It was spring time and we just started getting our training sessions outside. It was intense enough that the guys decided to go shirtless and take in the morning sun. And at that exact moment, basking in the sun at 8am, during a demanding physical exercise I thought to myself - wow! this is so exciting, fun and natural. It felt a bit like a Chinese kung-fu movie. A very energising experience.
And from that exact day I start feeling sleepy at 11pm and wake up at 7:30 consistently each day and would feel awesome in the mornings.
This is I know very anecdotal, but at least I know it's possible. And the recipe seemed to be lots and lots of sun, outdoor activity and a very positive emotional feedback. This I think might be the biggest reason. Currently the most positive feedback we usually encounter is in the evening - late night YouTube / tv / internet / books / friends / family, ... even intercourse. Quite a lot of the stuff we look forward to happens in the evening. It makes sense that our bodies adapt to make us most alert when it senses we get the most bang for the buck. But if you reverse that and attempt to do the stuff you really like early, your body might adopt, albeit slowly.
ilamontonJan 8, 2019
For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
dot1xonFeb 25, 2020
People that say they "changed from night owl to early riser" (or vice-versa) have never been night owls in the first place, but something else was the cause (diet, screen time, etc).
Chronotypes are genetics-based so no amount of wishful thinking will make you a night owl or an early riser (though obviously you can try and force this with alarm clocks / melatonin... to your own risk).
Another book worth mentioning is Why we sleep by Walker. It has it's flaws but overall does a good job at explaining the importance of sleep.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Internal-Time-Chronotypes-Social-Yo...
mircealonMay 17, 2019
but for some people that actually sleep well and want to tweak the quality of their sleep it can be valuable. let me give a few example of such tweaks: altering the time you go to bed, altering the surface you sleep on, reducing the amount of blue light you get, playing with the temperature in the room, not using screens X hours before going to bed, not eating X hours before going to bed. I could go on. The point I'm trying to make is that if you already get enough sleep (or you think you get enough sleep) the ring might help you. yes - the price is ridiculous. but it's not about the price, it's about improving a [very] important aspect of your life.
If you want to be scared shitless into paying attention to your sleep I recommend: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. Everything from cognitive abilities, fertility, risk of cancer and other diseases can be influenced by poor quality sleep. Sleep, along with eating properly and exercise is a pillar for a good quality life. I believe it's worth making it a priority.
rchaudharyonJan 10, 2020
kashyapconJan 4, 2021
A related point is that if you're not feeling sleepy, don't lay around in the bed waiting for sleep (go to a different area of the room, if possible)—just as how we don't (?) sit around at the dinner table waiting for hunger to arrive.
[+] With warts and all, like any book. Don't let the so-called "egregious errors" pointed out by some guy online distract from the main points made in the book.
sevaghonJuly 18, 2018
I find that the same sentiment is worded misleadingly in the book Why We Sleep.
If you have a day of bad sleep (i.e. non-optimally consolidating the day's events), followed by a day of good sleep, it's not like your "health bar" is permanently lowered.
You'll just never get to re-consolidate that lost day.
So, today I read 20 pages of a book and sleep like crap - I "lose" the synthesis of those 20 pages in my memory/associative brain map/whatever. If I slept better, I'd remember way more from those 20 pages.
What's lost forever by that poor sleep is the _opportunity_ to properly synthesize those 20 pages just on that one night. Not your "health", and you don't get a permanently increased level of cortisol. After a good night of sleep, you do physiologically recover and you're back to normal.
Also, take everything in "Why We Sleep" with a grain of salt - sleep is hugely important and sleep deprivation sucks but he mentions several times in the book that "everybody sleeps badly once in a while, if it's not the norm then you're fine." Many times he's mentioning effects of chronic deprivation for long periods of time.
And insomnia paranoia will probably make you sleep worse than if you stop worrying about t.
agrippanuxonMay 22, 2019
sy7aronJune 5, 2020
Currently, I try to take a walk at least 30 minute everyday in the morning and then I do the 7-minute-workout in the afternoon, even when I have no energy. My sleep's improved for the past couple of months since I started this workout routine. I can't tell if it's because of that or my sleep just improves on its own but I'll keep doing it since exercising is better than doing nothing. I also started 18:6 intermittent fasting. That might also have helped.
Still, my improved sleep means about 5 to 5.5 hours (sometimes less) a night with at least 2 awakenings in between. My normal sleep was about 8 hours with 1 awakening, and I'd still nap in the afternoon if given the opportunity. Now, I can't nap and there's no rebound sleep (i.e. I don't sleep more the next day because I sleep very little the day before). It's a pretty messed up situation and doctors haven't found anything abnormal from medical tests, including MRI and EEG. Sleep study indicated 50% sleep efficiency, reduced REM and deep sleep, but no sleep apnea or any common cause.
I tried the 2-min fall asleep method when my condition first started but it didn't really help. And yes, I only drink green tea and have some chocolates before lunch time in terms of stimulants.
I've also read Why We Sleep before my sleep got this bad. In fact, knowing too much about how sleep work and the negative impact on health with lack of sleep makes it much worse for me. So now I tend to avoid reading articles like this and learning more details.
I guess what I'm asking is if there's anything more I can do, like something to supplement or eat/do to make up for the stuff lost due to insufficient sleep. It's a long shot asking in a tech forum, but I'm willing to give anything a chance to help improve my sleep. Let's hope there's more research into sleep as insomnia is one of the worst form of suffering.
jamesrcoleonFeb 8, 2019
> The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach.
Hofstadter was only 34 when GEB was published
ianaionSep 23, 2018
He discussed varying sleep cycles across individuals. Specifically, he suggested society needs to be more inclusive of different sleep patterns and needs. Instead, society rewards people who naturally wake early in the morning at the cost of "night owls". All in the same area of the book.
You're welcome to research and earn your own PhD in neurology and author your own book on sleep patterns, but I'll stick with Dr Walker's work.
thisiszilffonDec 26, 2018
knzhouonApr 12, 2020
I respect Andrew Gelman, but in this case I think he jumped to fit this into a pattern where it doesn't belong. I've looked into all the criticisms of Why We Sleep (which, again, covers hundreds of studies), and there's no p-hacking, there's no fraudulent data, there's no piles of studies retracted, and there's no crisis of replication. Literally the worst criticism is that one bar of a bar graph is removed, in a way that doesn't even change the point of the single sentence referring to it. There are simply better targets out there than sleep.
guiambrosonJuly 22, 2018
It's unknown if lack of sleep causes the onset of Alzheimer's, but the opposite is likely true: Alzheimer's patients don't sleep well. So once it starts to develop, it spirals down likely because of sleep deficiency, thus accelerating memory loss.
Source: "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker. We had a few threads recently about the book here [1], [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446932
judofyronMar 6, 2019
Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal.
It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires.
I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
iambenonApr 8, 2019
iambenonSep 18, 2018
Regardless, for me:
8:30 alarm, although I'm usually stirring by then. Meditate, coffee, email check (I rarely reply at this time).
~9:30 Gym
~11:15 Work
I drink decaf coffee in the afternoon, and decaf tea in the evening (it's not as good, but cutting the bulk of my caffeine out after my breakfast cup has really helped my sleep). I try to keep some level of routine/discipline, including an hour or so to relax before bed, which is usually around 12:30-1am. I forced myself to get up 'early' for a fair while, but after reading Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Sleep-Science-Dreams/dp/0141...) I just accepted I was more of a night owl and adjusted accordingly.
emdowlingonDec 26, 2018
If I can nail this, everything else will fall into place. I’ll naturally drink less alcohol and eat better. In the last few months, I’ve experimented (via Apple Watch) with the impact that alcohol and diet has on sleep.
The book Why We Sleep, combined with habit theory, has had the greatest influence on this decision.
CaRDiaKonDec 16, 2019
I've read "Why we sleep" on your list—I average about 20 non fiction a year. It made me think about my own sleeping habits, although I believe there is a blog post out there that claims there is little scientific evidence to back up some of the medical claims made in the book, I still found it beneficial and thought provoking. The history and theory around sleep and it's role in human evolution I found particularly interesting.
b_bonJuly 24, 2018
The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or less to get some work or studying done and to get more hours in the day. Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts.
If you are curious about some common causes of ailments or what the function that consumes pretty much 1/3 of your lifetime does, I'd absolutely whole-heartedly recommend this book.
bretthowellonDec 23, 2018
The field guide for anyone who refuses to accept girls and women are less likely to succeed as engineers, scientists, or in any technology profession. This accessible yet science-grounded book was effortless to read and is packed with chapter after chapter of practical age specific advice. I’m a father of two young girls (and a boy) and I will no doubt keep it at my side for many years to come.
My key take away: It seems too often we assume the way things are is they way they will always be, so we fix the symptoms and stop looking for better answers. “Education is education and the same for both genders, so the dispartity between genders in the tech field must be girls aren’t as good at it or boys keep them out of the club.” Well the authors present a wealth of scientific evidence to strongly suggest our approach to STEM education (starting in the home) is geared more towards the way boys brains are biologically wired to learn, and simple intuitive adjustments to the way the same concepts are taught to girls net amazing results. After trying a few of the tips on my 2 and 6 year olds there’s no doubt.. anyone who wants a girl or a women in their life to succeed should read this book. It’ll change lives.
+1 for Why We Sleep, alarming, insightful and ultimately likely to add years the lives of those who read it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1613739397
nonbirithmonJuly 30, 2020
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
kevinkelleronJune 9, 2021
Previous discussions on HN:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519
TBH I haven't made up my mind about the book yet, just thought you should know about these things too.
AromasinonOct 31, 2020
The book really pushes the narative that making kids, and especially young teens wake up so early just to fit into an adults daily routinee is akin to child abuse, as it stunts their growth in ways - physically and mentally - that cannot be achieved by any means except through sleep deprivation.
devxpyonSep 23, 2018
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by
genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy,
based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall
asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on
the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly,
they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to
a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather
their genetic fate.
Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
ilamontonNov 19, 2018
The other ingredient which I have only been recently aware of (thanks in large part to reading "Why we sleep") is getting a full night's sleep. That's hard for me, because I am naturally a "night owl" and light sleeper with kids who need to get up early, but I am aware of the need and try to get 7 or 8 hours as best I can.
jimnotgymonApr 8, 2019
One thing that offended the reading voice in my head was the careless grammar in the article. I'm not a stickler, but starting sentences with 'am' rather than 'I am', for instance, makes the article sound rushed.
crazygringoonDec 5, 2018
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Buttons840onMay 18, 2021
jcimsonJune 23, 2018
I've been in material cognitive decline over the past year or so and I'm nearly certain it's due to my abhorrent sleep patterns. This episode really helped me prioritize a fix over other things that would normally result in a night of 3-5 hrs in bed or on the floor (who knows how much actual sleep).
It's a great episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
TheAdamAndCheonJuly 12, 2020
It's an okay book. Not the best I've read, but if you feel tired during the day, it's worth a read. My sleep quality has markedly increased since starting to read it.
misiti3780onJuly 26, 2019
{{c1::The Platonic fold}} is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.
Here is a basic card I read and decide if this is info I have forgotten or if I knew about this:
“We had observed a real-estate transaction that takes place each night when we sleep. Fitting the notion of a long-wave radio signal that carries information across large geographical distances, the slow brainwaves of deep NREM had served as a courier service, transporting memory packets from a temporary storage hold (hippocampus) to a more secure, permanent home (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had helped future-proof those memories.”
Excerpt From: Matthew Walker. “Why We Sleep.” iBooks.
buttsciclesonMar 7, 2018
Here's a relevant passage from sleep scientist Matthew Walker's book 'Why we sleep' (which I highly recommend):
"Although every human being displays an unyielding twenty-four-hour pattern, the respective peak and trough points are strikingly different from one individual to the next. For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,”and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness, like myself. You may colloquially know these two types of people as “morning larks”and “night owls,”respectively. Unlike morning larks, night owls are frequently incapable of falling asleep early at night, no matter how hard they try. It is only in the early-morning hours that owls can drift off. Having not fallen asleep until late, owls of course strongly dislike waking up early. They are unable to function well at this time, one cause of which is that, despite being “awake,”their brain remains in a more sleep-like state throughout the early morning. This is especially true of a region called the prefrontal cortex, which sits above the eyes, and can be thought of as the head office of the brain. The prefrontal cortex controls high-level thought and logical reasoning, and helps keep our emotions in check. When a night owl is forced to wake up too early, their prefrontal cortex remains in a disabled, “offline”state. Like a cold engine after an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature, and before that will not function efficiently. An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics."
vadyalexonJune 17, 2020
Sleep health benefits are definitely underrated in modern society..
Based on my understanding of the topic I sympathise the research narrative to move to polyphasic sleep cycle to COPE with sleep disorders I do not believe it is adequate sleeping routine to any healthy individual and doing so can be harmful to health!
And from personal note as a parent raising second infant I can confirm that having segmented night sleep over long periods of time is most de-humanizing experience with real mental threads.
jacobolusonApr 26, 2019
He’s the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, so you could also look up his lab’s scholarly publications https://www.humansleepscience.com/p-u-b-l-i-c-a-t-i-o-n-s
kojeovoonFeb 3, 2019
I can't do it justice, but sleeping 8 hours > sleeping 6 and napping 2 later.
So sleeping 5 hours 5 days a week and 12 hours on the weekends just doesn't cut it.
pedalpeteonApr 3, 2021
As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep.
When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light.
I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed?
I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
pdfernhoutonJuly 14, 2018
"Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew P. Walker" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
"An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity."
spacephysicsonMay 18, 2020
* Pain was far more manageable (IBS, MMA injuries)
* Sleep was more restorative when I woke up
* Emotions far more regulated (less irritable)
* Quicker to come up with on the spot jokes, or come up with a refutation to an argument
* Gym performance +30% at least
* Gym recovery faster
* Short and long term memory improvement
* Less health flair ups
* Reduction in brain fog
It’s hard to notice these differences subjectively unless you know what it’s like when you’re “optimized”
Following a keto (or carnivore with a focus on ketosis) diet leads to a further boost across the dimensions mentioned above.
I think many people outside of self-optimization don’t realize what they’re sacrificing when they choose to forego sleep. Even total productivity is enhanced, despite working less hours due to sleeping.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
inv13onMar 20, 2021
The older people at the firm had the same experience coming into this business. So they expect every new comer to behave the same. Its that simple.
Doctors do that with residents which I think is more concerning.
I read about it in a book called why we sleep[1] about sleep.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
joveianonAug 17, 2020
For me (and I'd guess many others) a sleep mask does not make it much easier to sleep during the day. I would need to have a dark environment for a while before sleep. Some people can set up a room like that but I can't at this point. This is not to say that I never get to sleep during the day, but I stay up longer when I go to sleep during the day, even if I have been awake for a while. Some people with Non-24 have the same reaction I do and others don't.
rocgfonMay 7, 2019
Both these drugs are used as sedatives, but they are not good for your sleep. Your sleep cycles are just not the same (e.g. you don't get to REM as much) and it is considered detrimental for your sleep.
As others have mentioned in this thread, I highly recommend reading "Why we sleep" by M. Walker. It's one of the best books I've read.
jamesrcoleonFeb 9, 2019
The post is very clear that it's talking about expertise in the sense referred to in my comments (which, as also indicated in my comments, I don't fully agree with):
"Rule #1: Prefer books by experts in the field
The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach.
Positive indicators of this in a blurb may include “Professor in [field directly related to the book’s topic]”, “Long-time researcher in [field directly related to the book’s topic]”.
Note how they say "Professor in" and "Long-time researcher in".
The way you're using a term, a 21 year old can have "spent their life researching the topic" if they've been focused on it over the previous three years.
mariedavidonApr 25, 2021
jimnotgymonApr 3, 2021
It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true
rcontionJan 8, 2019
citeguisedonFeb 5, 2019
I cut down personal projects to a minimum after reading "Why we sleep", and it helps with overall well-being.
Commuting via Bike is also a big health-win for me. One hour on most work-days (sometimes the temperature or other circumstances require the car).
aesh2Xa1onJuly 15, 2019
Or we could fix the culture problem.
jb775onJuly 13, 2020
"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is a good summary on the science behind sleep. The book also recommends to not use the "snooze" function on your alarm clock. It allows you to slip back into a sleep cycle that gets disrupted multiple times everyday.
heuristonDec 23, 2018
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Genius Foods by Max Lugavere
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
The Framers Coup by Michael Klarman
Leadership by George MacGregor Burns
Strategy by Lawrence Freedman
Several books by Joseph Campbell or Peter Drucker. Can't go wrong with either.
lparmonNov 7, 2020
From the book Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker, it's reported that teenager's circadian rhythm is different from the one of their younger siblings. It's shifted progressively forward, so forward that it passes even the timing of adults.
This is something wired in their brain and should be addressed when setting school times.
Moreover, Walker also proposes a socio-evolutionary explanation of why adolescent sleep schedule is shifted:
"Central to the goal of adolescent development is the transition from parental dependence to
independence, all the while learning to navigate the complexities of peer-group relationships and
interactions.
One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle
themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of
their adult mothers and fathers.
This ingenious biological solution selectively shifts teenagers to a
later phase when they can, for several hours, operate independently—and do so as a peer-group
collective.
It is not a permanent or full dislocation from parental care, but as safe an attempt at
partially separating soon-to-be adults from the eyes of Mother and Father.
There is risk, of course.
But the transition must happen. And the time of day when those independent adolescent wings
unfold, and the first solo flights from the parental nest occur, is not a time of day at all, but rather
a time of night, thanks to a forward-shifted circadian rhythm."
edit: putted a little more space in between sentences
selleckonDec 26, 2018
2. Work through PentesterLab Pro - past couple times I would get halfway through the first badge and just stop. This time I am pairing it with Anki cards.
3. Continue getting 7-8 hours sleep, been doing this since I read 'Why We Sleep'
4. Learn Ruby/Rails build a handful of applications.
guiambrosonOct 16, 2019
Page 92:
"Adolescents face two other harmful challenges in their struggle to obtain sufficient sleep as their brains continue to develop. The first is a change in their circadian rhythm. The second is early school start times."
Also:
"... the circadian rhythm of a young child runs on an earlier schedule. Children therefore become sleepy earlier and wake up earlier than their adult parents. Adolescent teenagers, however, have a different circadian rhythm from their young siblings. During puberty, the timing of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is shifted progressively forward: a change that is common across all adolescents, irrespective of culture of geography."
It goes on to explain why this is the case, and the impact on your sleep schedule.
Also page 308-16 there's an entire chapter on Sleep and Education, and the problem of schools starting progressively early, mostly for the convenience of society at large, rather than a net benefit of the kids.
The book has been largely discussed on HN before; definitely worth reading.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
jger15onDec 12, 2018
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi
How To Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan
Open - Andre Agassi
Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
World After Capital - Albert Wenger
Fiction:
Chocky - John Wyndham
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
The Eight Mountains - Paolo Cognetti
The Invisibility Cloak - Ge Fei
The Midnight Fox - Betsy Byars
Such Small Hands - Andres Barba
The Thief - Fuminori Nakamura
Ties - Domenico Starnone
Trick - Domenico Starnone
dntrkvonMay 7, 2019
The book actually talks about how psychiatric disorders cause insomnia which creates a feedback loop of getting less sleep, which amplifies the detrimental effects of the disorder, which in turn worsens the insomnia.
BrajeshwaronDec 9, 2020
Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021.
- Cant't hurt me by David Goggins.
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read)
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership.
- How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time).
- Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein.
- I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it)
- Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.)
- Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
- The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna.
- Turn the Ship Around.
- Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.)
- Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes)
- Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.
ronyehonMar 16, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/style/sleep-problem-late-...
According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
SymmetryonMar 29, 2018
jm__87onApr 27, 2019
xhrpostonAug 2, 2018
vesinisaonDec 16, 2019
I was about to read the book based on a colleague's recommendation, but the blog post and a separate article in my local newspaper debunking few of the claims made me decide against it.
klenwellonOct 11, 2019
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
I used to see sleep as a waste of time. A few years ago I started to recognize its importance in overall well-being and adjusted my schedule and commute accordingly.
Reading Walker's book led me both to take sleep more seriously still and to take more pleasure in it.
rofo1onApr 8, 2019
I immediately gave up coffee, at first, a long with a bunch of other things (details at [0]).
Anyway, recently I started experimenting with coffee again and it turns out it didn't have any impact on my sleep, whatsoever. I started drinking coffee again (albeit, little less than what I drank before) and I still sleep 8+ hours daily.
I eat very cleanly, in general, and exercise daily.
I think that trying to fit my last meal 4-5 hours before sleeping has had the biggest impact on my sleep!
It's extremely important for your physical and mental health to eat clean, sleep well (8+ hours minimum) and exercise (strength training preferred). Optionally try to include time restriction on the eating window (say, eat within 8 hours period in each 24 hours). That's all there is to it, really. The rest is probably genetic lottery.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639429 (old comment of mine)
thr0w__4w4yonNov 2, 2019
To a large degree I agree with what you're saying (you know what they say about opinions), but the last couple years I've put a lot more effort into improving my sleep habits after reading Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep". Tons of science and data-driven conclusions.
But what I found incredible, there are studies to back this up, is that in spring, when we "lose" an hour of sleep, the next day after changing the clocks, heart attacks increase by about 24%.[0] Of course on the flip side, apparently there is a ~21% reduction in heart attacks when we set the clocks back in the fall, so maybe it's a wash.
Suicide rates also jump in spring on the day immediately after the clocks have been pushed forward.
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/daylight-savings-time-change-ki...
misiti3780onOct 17, 2018
Buttons840onDec 26, 2018
Take this all with a grain of salt, because my memory of the book is not infallible. It might give you a place to start researching how much of our sleep behavior is innate vs environmental as you ask. It's certainly not a new idea to sleep researchers, I bet there is an answer out there.
As for the "Why We Sleep" book. I found it well written and it is well reviewed by many, so you might be interested in it.
james_niroonDec 29, 2019
Fooled by randomness- Nassim T
Principle - Ray Dalio
Drive - D Pink
The Laws of Human Nature -R Greene
Influence- Robert Cialdini
21st lessons for 21st century - Y. Harari
Why we sleep -M. Walker
Skin in the Game - Nassim T.
Social Animal - David B.
Einstein - Isaacson
Steve Jobs - Isaacson
Blink - malcolm gladwell
Outlier - malcolm gladwell
The tipping point - malcolm gladwell
Game of Throne series
throwaway010718onDec 23, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
ElijahLynnonFeb 6, 2019
I haven't heard back on that, probably should message him outside of Twitter, but was hoping for a public dialogue.
https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/922599108950368256
coolswanonDec 17, 2019
https://www.amazon.com/American-Marriage-Novel-Tayari-Jones/...
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
https://www.amazon.com/These-Truths-History-United-States/dp...
Growth by Vaclav Smil
https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Microorganisms-Megacities-MIT-...
Prepared by Diane Tavenner
https://www.amazon.com/Prepared-What-Kids-Need-Fulfilled/dp/...
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
https://www.amazon.com/Friend-Novel-Sigrid-Nunez/dp/07352194...