Hello Guzey! Your blog and your new organization are a big inspiration to me. I greatly enjoyed this post; here is a grab-bag of thoughts which hopefully contains some useful info for you:
You might be interested to learn that some corners of Buddhism sometimes seem to have a strong anti-sleepiness agenda:
The Buddha himself warned against sleeping in excessively luxurious beds—it is the last of a series of eight moral commandments that good monks should uphold. But it’s unclear if this teaching was intended to prevent people from oversleeping, or to prevent them from flaunting their wealth and status, or some other purpose like discouraging sexuality.
How are you measuring sleep hours? Are you talking about time in bed or time asleep as measured by a device like a fitbit? Even though I think of myself as someone who falls asleep easily, the time it takes for me to fall asleep + some tossing and turning during the night + the time I spend lazing around in the morning + probably some inaccuracy on part of fitbit, means that my actual time asleep is usually about an hour less than my time in bed. This measurement issue is important because it otherwise makes it hard to understand what people are reporting/recommending when they say things like “half of hunter-gatherers sleep less than 6 hours per day, and they’re doing fine” or “it’s important to get 8 hours of sleep every night”.
Here are my biggest worries about potential downsides to chronically cutting back on sleep (the upside of course being an extra 1-2 hours awake every day, which is a strong benefit):
Am I really coming out ahead on lifespan?
Alzheimer’s, heart health, susceptibility to disease, and other long-term health things. Maybe exercise is less effective while sleep-deprived? Or some other effect whereby I eventually lose the extra hours.
Accident risk from driving—if I go about my day 10% drowsier, am I “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller”?
Is an hour of increased “effective lifespan” in my thirties worth more than an hour of extended “regular lifespan” in old age, or vice versa? (This is a complex calculation IMO that depends on a lot of stuff. I hope to write a detailed post about it someday.)
Am I undermining the quality of my life enough to outweigh the gain in quantity?
If I slept less, I would have to endure the unpleasant feeling of sleepiness more often, just like the feeling of hunger.
Other changes in consciousness besides the feeling of sleepiness. In the morning I often feel more “fresh”, happier, with more wide-field awareness and more in tune with my sensations. My body feels healthier and more flexible. During late evenings, I definitely often feel that narrow “amphetamine-like focus” and I’m able to get a lot done. Sometimes I’m excited, sometimes stressed and miserable, but either way I feel like I am more beset by buzzing thoughts and less able to relax and enjoy a vivid experience of life. (But some of this is probably not caused by sleepiness itself, but rather the structure of my day which proceeds from a new day full of potential to the end of a day when I am trying to finish tasks and tie up loose ends.)
Does sleep deprivation help or hurt my productivity? (I’ve done a bit of self-experimentation here and discovered to my horror that I seem to get more work done while sleep deprived—this was true even when I was working in the office 9-5, so it’s not just an effect of late-night “amphetamine-like focus” nor of getting more done by spending more total hours awake. But I suspect the causality might go the other way—perhaps I got less sleep during periods when I was stressed and working hard.) Perhaps sleep deprivation helps some types of productivity while hurting other less-visible aspects of productivity, like making me less creative or less good at prioritizing.
Rather than chronic sleep reduction, I feel more amenable to the idea that acute sleep deprivation might be good (or at least not so bad). I would be interested in reading some detailed answers to questions like, “If I stay up late, to what extent should I set back my morning alarm (to avoid sleep deprivation), versus to what extent should I tough it out and then just go to bed earlier the next day?” In your mind, how correlated are the likelihoods of your theses about chronic (the section “Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night...”) vs acute (Occasional acute sleep deprivation is good...”) sleep reduction? Do they both rise and fall together, or are they unrelated, or are they anticorrelated (such that finding out one claim was true would make you think maybe the other was false)?
Finally, what types of sleep studies would you be most interested in seeing going forwards? Nowadays, fitbits and other devices can track sleep and sleep phases with reasonable accuracy. So it seems like we should be about to enter a golden age of really being able to get answers to many of the questions you’re raising. But unlike with, say, Apple’s “Heart and Movement Study” where you could hope to get information about the dose-response curve of exercise benefits as measured by heartrate and VO2max changes, many of the outcomes of interest with sleep seem hard to measure. (Alzheimer’s risk or other super-long-term health hazards? Productivity and happiness?) So, if you had ten thousand fitbits and a big grant check to run whatever study you wanted, what design would you be most excited about?
Hello Guzey! Your blog and your new organization are a big inspiration to me. I greatly enjoyed this post; here is a grab-bag of thoughts which hopefully contains some useful info for you:
You might be interested to learn that some corners of Buddhism sometimes seem to have a strong anti-sleepiness agenda:
The Buddha himself warned against sleeping in excessively luxurious beds—it is the last of a series of eight moral commandments that good monks should uphold. But it’s unclear if this teaching was intended to prevent people from oversleeping, or to prevent them from flaunting their wealth and status, or some other purpose like discouraging sexuality.
Besides metaphorical “awakening”, Buddhism places lots of emphasis on literal wakefulness including a long litany of tips on avoiding laziness in general and drowsiness during meditation in particular.
Finally and most intriguingly, there is a long tradition of claims that advanced meditators need less sleep, presumably because time spent meditating is making up for the need for sleep.
How are you measuring sleep hours? Are you talking about time in bed or time asleep as measured by a device like a fitbit? Even though I think of myself as someone who falls asleep easily, the time it takes for me to fall asleep + some tossing and turning during the night + the time I spend lazing around in the morning + probably some inaccuracy on part of fitbit, means that my actual time asleep is usually about an hour less than my time in bed. This measurement issue is important because it otherwise makes it hard to understand what people are reporting/recommending when they say things like “half of hunter-gatherers sleep less than 6 hours per day, and they’re doing fine” or “it’s important to get 8 hours of sleep every night”.
Here are my biggest worries about potential downsides to chronically cutting back on sleep (the upside of course being an extra 1-2 hours awake every day, which is a strong benefit):
Am I really coming out ahead on lifespan?
Alzheimer’s, heart health, susceptibility to disease, and other long-term health things. Maybe exercise is less effective while sleep-deprived? Or some other effect whereby I eventually lose the extra hours.
Accident risk from driving—if I go about my day 10% drowsier, am I “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller”?
Is an hour of increased “effective lifespan” in my thirties worth more than an hour of extended “regular lifespan” in old age, or vice versa? (This is a complex calculation IMO that depends on a lot of stuff. I hope to write a detailed post about it someday.)
Am I undermining the quality of my life enough to outweigh the gain in quantity?
If I slept less, I would have to endure the unpleasant feeling of sleepiness more often, just like the feeling of hunger.
Other changes in consciousness besides the feeling of sleepiness. In the morning I often feel more “fresh”, happier, with more wide-field awareness and more in tune with my sensations. My body feels healthier and more flexible. During late evenings, I definitely often feel that narrow “amphetamine-like focus” and I’m able to get a lot done. Sometimes I’m excited, sometimes stressed and miserable, but either way I feel like I am more beset by buzzing thoughts and less able to relax and enjoy a vivid experience of life. (But some of this is probably not caused by sleepiness itself, but rather the structure of my day which proceeds from a new day full of potential to the end of a day when I am trying to finish tasks and tie up loose ends.)
Does sleep deprivation help or hurt my productivity? (I’ve done a bit of self-experimentation here and discovered to my horror that I seem to get more work done while sleep deprived—this was true even when I was working in the office 9-5, so it’s not just an effect of late-night “amphetamine-like focus” nor of getting more done by spending more total hours awake. But I suspect the causality might go the other way—perhaps I got less sleep during periods when I was stressed and working hard.) Perhaps sleep deprivation helps some types of productivity while hurting other less-visible aspects of productivity, like making me less creative or less good at prioritizing.
Rather than chronic sleep reduction, I feel more amenable to the idea that acute sleep deprivation might be good (or at least not so bad). I would be interested in reading some detailed answers to questions like, “If I stay up late, to what extent should I set back my morning alarm (to avoid sleep deprivation), versus to what extent should I tough it out and then just go to bed earlier the next day?” In your mind, how correlated are the likelihoods of your theses about chronic (the section “Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night...”) vs acute (Occasional acute sleep deprivation is good...”) sleep reduction? Do they both rise and fall together, or are they unrelated, or are they anticorrelated (such that finding out one claim was true would make you think maybe the other was false)?
Finally, what types of sleep studies would you be most interested in seeing going forwards? Nowadays, fitbits and other devices can track sleep and sleep phases with reasonable accuracy. So it seems like we should be about to enter a golden age of really being able to get answers to many of the questions you’re raising. But unlike with, say, Apple’s “Heart and Movement Study” where you could hope to get information about the dose-response curve of exercise benefits as measured by heartrate and VO2max changes, many of the outcomes of interest with sleep seem hard to measure. (Alzheimer’s risk or other super-long-term health hazards? Productivity and happiness?) So, if you had ten thousand fitbits and a big grant check to run whatever study you wanted, what design would you be most excited about?