> We aimed to assess the relationship of objectively measured sleep regularity with risk for all-cause mortality, and mortality from cardiometabolic causes and cancer, in a large cohort (N = 60 977) who wore accelerometer devices for 1 week.
They look at one week of sleep data and then check mortality records about 10 to 15 years later. It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality, but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion. I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data.
That’s because this is in UK Biobank, a cohort of >500K Brits and collecting actually in such a large cohort is a miracle, let alone for multiple days. All thanks to the people who volunteered into the study. Would it be nice to have even more? Sure. But at that scale, patterns start to emerge.
As you point out that's a multi day commitment, and if part of the volunteers either adjust the timing of the experiments to match specific weeks (e.g. parents choosing school vacations), or adjust their schedule accordingly, what is measured becomes fundamentally different in nature to what measuring longer periods would bring.
I'm with you on how we don't have a choice regarding to the quality of the study, it's just crazy hard to get any data at scale. But we can look at it as a very flawed "best of what we can do" and not take the patterns too seriously.
There’s a health research programme currently underway in the UK that’s looking to recruit up to 5 million people. I believe they’re currently at around the 1 million mark.
> It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved.
Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep"
It's difficult to blame people for emotionally attaching more to the latter than the former.
It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"
The issue is that almost all human behavior is correlated and, even if you have an easy-to-see [sic] method of action, e.g. “brain gunk”, that doesn’t automatically negate a nearly-infinite set of other possible causes from correlated behavior. Just a random example: those with high stress probably sleep poorly. You can think of a number of possible explanations that link high stress to shorter lifespans: more likely to commit suicide, more fat retention, less time for healthy activities, etc.
"Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality"
You got it.
"but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion"
This is always the case unless you assume reality is as big as what you can perceive.
"I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data."
You can say this of literally 100% of the studies, it will never be enough. I understand it when authors put this at the end of a study because they want more funding and because their subject is all they think about. But for reasonable human beings you gotta make a common sense jump and allocate resources to other subjects. Yes, regular sleep has good effects on health, the burden of proof of that was already 0, this study is a nice added touch, there will be no double dessert, move on.
Every deductive leap comes with uncertainty in establishing a causal chain. I don't I'm being overly reductive about the nature of evidence when I say that.
There is a specific question that needs to be addressed: With a one week window into sleep habits, are we selecting for people who are chronically poor sleepers, with those poor sleep habits leading to disease?
OR
Are we selecting for people who are chronically ill for other reasons and those chronic illnesses prevent them from getting regular sleep?
For example, people with sleep apnea have terrible sleep, and they have lower life expectancy than the general population. However, the cause of that lower life expectancy is not the poor quality of sleep; it's the cardiac effects of abnormal breathing over a long period of time.
If a person with decades of excellent sleep habits developed sleep apnea in the last 5 to 10 years of their life, the accelerometer will capture their irregular sleep and the death registry will capture their early deaths. That doesn't mean poor sleep habits killed them.
There are many other such chronic illnesses that can be confounded this way. Heart failure. Obstructive lung disease. Dementia. All can lead to irregular sleep. Add them together and you've captured a large segment of the population with ~10 years left to live.
The authors address this relationship in the conclusion and supplementary materials, but they appear to approach it entirely from the framework of poor sleep being causative of cardiovascular disease. Well yes, there's evidence that poor sleep can cause cardiovascular disease, but it's also well established (as I explained) that it can happen the other way around. If you want to cement a full chain of causality, you need a longer time window. Capture a young population with a low burden of chronic disease, show that poor sleep habits came first (i.e. within a certain age window), then cardiovascular disease, and then shorter lifespan. That would be the ideal data, even if difficult to acquire.
It is easy to say that good quality sleep is good for a person. But what if I literally never get that type of sleep. What should I do? How concerned should I be? How much focus and effort should I put into this? Should I take the Ambien I'm prescribed or should I try to go for the best natural path - because I really, really don't have good experience with Ambien. And it's almost like it's the best modern medicine can offer.
FWIW it’s mentioned in the study explicitly as a limitation:
> There are several limitations in this study. First, the single week of data collected for each individual provides only a snapshot of their sleep–wake patterns, and future work should collect sleep–wake data over a longer timeframe and include multiple weekend-weekday transitions. It is nevertheless interesting that even a snapshot of sleep behaviors is predictive of mortality for a follow-up period of several years.
I would expect that P(bad sleep this week | bad sleep chronically) > P(bad sleep this week | not bad sleep chronically). It's a question of inferential power: what is the minimum detectable effect size with such an indirect measurement?
Another hypothesis that seems plausible to me is that what we’re really measuring when looking at sleep is mental health, and mental health is a strong predictor of mortality 10-15 years into the future.
You are already correct, but the actual factor here is trait Neuroticism (negative emotion personality dimension), which is very roughly speaking a combination of genetic factors and your ACE score. ACE score is shockingly good at predicting mortality, having one over 6 makes people die on average 20 years earlier.
I found the best way to ensure sleep regularity is by having a fixed wake-up time. If you don’t have one and you begin to set your alarm clock to early hours, the first weeks doing so will feel like hell. But eventually all will be worth it. The sleepiness during the day will disappear and, at night, your body will naturally want to get some rest early.
Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise, so as to ensure maximum tiredness at night.
Nowadays, my sleeping patterns are mostly regular thanks to these protocols. Every day about 9pm, I feel sleepy, and my bed begins to look very enticing. I follow this pattern for my daily well-being, but it’s nice to know it reduces my mortality risk, too.
I think you have a key component in good sleep but there are 2 more imo.
The first is that phones and light break our natural sleepiness triggers and the second is that we don't exercise our bodies enough because of our sedentary lifetstyle.
I used to struggle with terrible insomnia and I still get bouts of it time to time but I've also found it's related to my laxing my 3 rules.
If I have a good workout about 5x a week, I turn off my phone and the lights 30 minutes before bed and take a good long shower in the dark and I have a regular alarm set at 7am that goes off 7 days a week, I'm almost guaranteed a good nights sleep every night. It also had the added affect of ridding me of my night terrors and sleep walking I used to have frequently but I'm 90% certain that was correlated to me using my phone in bed and it causing my brain to enter a weird state where it never really turned off.
I'm going to "yes, and" this with just one more thing that may seem obvious: almost any amount of alcohol is enough to throw that pattern out of whack.
The older I get the more reluctant I am to make the trade. Few glasses of wine with friends is hard to pass up though :)
I think I effectively switched from a night owl to an early bird by having something I _really_ wanted to do in the morning that was actually physical (martial arts classes).
I remember the exact day my body switched - I was going in the early morning and my body was not approving of my initiative. Every morning was hell - but then one morning early spring we had a training outside - sunrise, early leaves on the trees in the park, we all got quite sweaty some of the guys started to take our tops off and it looked like a scene from a martial arts movie. I remember thinking this looks so cool - we’re training like our forefather used to.
Next day I woke up exact time I needed no grogginess whatsoever. Have been an early bird ever since, almost 10 years now.
That’s a bummer! Have you found out why that didn’t work? Perhaps something like caffeine or allergies was interfering with your sleep?
If haven’t found out, I wholly recommend doing a sleep study if you can. It can shed some light on any obstacles you may be experiencing. I’ve never done one myself, but I know people who got enduring benefits from the insights of their studies.
For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you.
It might change depending on the seasons, and you might more or less sleep depending on what you're doing at that time.
Waking up at the same damn hour everyday to deal with my kid's school was an utter pain for years, and I got in a better health and shape once I could adjust depending on my daily condition.
It still have a set of fixed alarms, but regularly ignore the first ones as needed, and only wake no-matter-what for the last one for my job. I heard from other coworkers doing the same, and it was a game-changer for most of us.
> For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you.
Another piece of anecdata from someone who used to be like this for years. I first noticed that regular alarm sounds annoyed me and eventually I would get used to turning it off and going back to sleep (that is until I HAVE to wake up). I then figured that if I set up an alarm with a song that I like, it would make waking up more enjoyable. Which I eventually did. The first few weeks, I enjoy waking up and in a sense look forward to it, but after a certain amount of time not only I get used to it and the cycle continue, but I also can't stand that song anymore (RIP rolling in the deep, chainsmoking, ...). I randomly stumbled upon the app sleep for Android that has a feature I didn't know I needed, putting a playlist as an alarm sound (I shuffle it of course). Now every morning, waking up is an adventure, and more often than not I end up singing along. Now months in, I haven't failed to wake up even once. And I don't have any alarms on Sunday, yet I still wake up without it.
That is with the caveat that I know I need between 7:30 and 8h of sleep, and I stop all screens by 10 (night time feature of Android is very helpful in this regard). Except my ebook reader than I use without backlight.
I agree with this except for the early part. At least personally waking up at about 8 works for me, that way I’m not waking up before sunrise in winter which makes me unhappy quite reliably.
A lot of people are weirdly proud of how early they wake up, and I’ve literally been shamed for waking up late, called lazy etc in a casual sense but that’s nonsense. I just work later.
One thing I've done is create a "color clock" using a smart bulb that changes color based on a daily schedule.
So at 8:00pm the bulb has a dim orange glow, this changes to dim red glow at 9pm and then turns off at 10pm (sleep time).
Its a really nice relaxing way of ensuring a regular sleep pattern (no longer clock watching etc).
I don’t know about a German shepherd dog specifically. But my experience with dogs is that they will wake me up whether I like it or not… whenever they feel like it, even in the middle of the night. That can be severely disrupting.
Haha, so true—whether it’s a German Shepherd or a cat, you’re definitely getting a "reliable alarm clock" that doesn’t care about weekends or your sleep schedule!
Alarms aren't foolproof though. I often shut them off in my sleep or sleep through them, so I have to keep the phone on the other side of the room AND change the alarm every week or two to prevent adaptation, and that still doesn't help if I can't fall asleep for whatever reason and end up sleeping through due to sheer exhaustion. What I've found that actually works well is alcohol; if I'm not tired at sleep-time, take a swig of 130 proof absinthe and I'll be asleep before long.
> What I've found that actually works well is alcohol; if I'm not tired at sleep-time, take a swig of 130 proof absinthe and I'll be asleep before long.
I’d be wary of relying on alcohol to sleep, because the relaxation that it offers is somewhat distinct from a good night’s sleep.
Alcohol has been known to disrupt “REM sleep”, thus making your sleep phases inconsistent. In the long run, it might leave you with even poorer sleep quality.
I have found that vibrating alarms on wrist watches to be very effective. For over 5 years I've been setting a vibration alarm on my watch and another backup alarm on my phone. I never slept through the vibration alarm. Granted YMMV
Sleep for Android has some neat modes to try to prevent this. Even just the fact it colours the snooze button green and the dismiss button red is incredibly thoughtful and works well. My just woken up brain can somehow understand "red bad". If you're on iOS the alarms are caveman style. My partner sets like 20 alarms on her phone, it's hilarious.
Just here to confirm. I have facetime setup at 5am in the morning with my family across the pacific. I've also started to exercise regularly. It's been 2 months and my sleep pattern is exactly like yours, and I feel exactly like you do.
There's an Android app called "Sleep" where you set an alarm window and put your phone on the corner of your bed, and the alarm only goes off when it detects you're a little active already and not in deep sleep (using the accelerometer to detect movement). If it doesn't detect enough activity it'll go off regardless at the end of the window.
It has a bunch of other features as well (rating how well you slept and detecting patterns to give advice, a snore detector, etc) but that alarm is the one I use it for.
Most people have to wake up at a fixed time for work and school their entire lives. I don't think that's what sleep hinges on, else everyone would have good regularity and we'd take it for granted.
It's your behavior and attitude towards going to bed.
I do much better with no alarm clock and being in situations where i don’t need one. Allowing myself to naturally wake up and being in situations where variable times to naturally wake up are ok are very much better for my brain and overall health.
In my case, having a bedtime alarm would only leave me anxious and frustrated if I went to bed and failed to sleep at that time.
But I have tried something similar: setting an alarm to decompress before sleeping. No phone, no TV — just some quiet music playing or some books to read.
I still set this night alarm, but it is much easier to ignore it than to ignore my body’s natural tendency to lose steam after waking up early and having done so much during the day.
for me the best way is to not worry about sleep at all. After many decades of abusive relationship with sleep. I've had enough. If it comes it comes, if not then thats ok too.
I stop reading this 8 hr nonsense or fearing an early death from not sleeping. whatever.
Have you ever heard the saying “correlation is not causation” ? Couldnt it be that you already had a good enough health to push you to adopt a better sleep schedule ?
I wonder how this translates if the irregularity is by choice. I can certainly see why people working back to back night and day shifts, or otherwise frequently being at a sleep debt that was compensated for later, would die younger.
But as a freelancer, my sleep schedule is more or less my own. I go to sleep when I'm tired and usually try to sleep as long as I want to. Sometimes that's 11pm-10am, sometimes 6am-11am. It can oscillate throughout the week, but I try to average 16 hours of sleep in any given 48 hour period.
Maybe this is incredibly unhealthy, but I've believed for a long time that it's kept me younger and healthier than being forced into a sleep rhythm that isn't what my body wants.
As someone whose natural sleep cycle seems to be closer to 26-28 hours, and whose preferred sleeping hours in a 24-hour cycle are 6am to 2-3pm... I commend you.
Sincerely, someone forced into a "normal" schedule by kids school start times and, well, everything else too, I suppose.
Hah. I've often thought that my actual rhythm is for a 25-26 hour day. I was going to write that but it seemed like too much to explain. As I go to bed later and later, eventually I find myself awake past sunrise, which is usually the day when I'll intentionally have a short sleep and snap back to an early bedtime that night.
Kids would definitely screw up this aspect of my lifestyle lol. But kids give you immortality, and here I am just wondering if I'm gaining or losing a couple years.
I really hoped I’d grow out of wanting to sleep ~3-11am but it’s just never happened. No matter how tired I am during the day, I get a second wind around 8pm and have to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour during the work week because I won’t get sleepy, even if I stay away from screens.
Unfortunately I really enjoy night time, so I regularly completely fail at that task. I can’t remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, and yet here I am on Hacker News at 1:48am. At least I can sleep in tomorrow.
I’ve been in this situation and the problem is basically that the various internal clocks aren’t getting good quality information to keep them in sync. Light, food, and exercise and the timing of them have a big impact.
After I quit my day job and started freelancing, I actually saw my sleep schedule worsen. It partly had to do with the initial lack of projects and clients, and other challenges of freelancing itself, but what I observed was that my day job's grind or regular schedule also helped my sleep schedule.
However, I eventually overcame those challenges and created my own schedule to work with, and my sleep cycle became better then onwards.
Interesting, I have a DEC2 mutation and don't need much sleep, but I do sleep very consistently. When I was first working through this discovery, I asked the dr how it was that people who have this have no adverse effects when folks always say not sleeping long enough is bad for your health and he said "well, we don't really know that's true" and kinda shrugged it off.
I recall watching a documentary on Discovery way back, where they followed some multiday ultramaraton competitors. They'd draw blood samples, measure vitals and have them answer mental acuity questionnaires each time they stopped for food or sleep.
The competitors limited themselves to power naps, max 30 minutes though often just ten minutes.
The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps. Though IIRC the mental acuity did drop some as the event progressed.
Been at least 15 years since I saw the program so might misrember some parts, but I clearly recall the physical effects of the power naps.
Keep in mind these were quite fit athletes though.
>The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps.
we don't even know if the "brain cleaning so, longterm, you don't get dementia" hypothesis is true, and here you/they are saying "we know it's false for these people".
> The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps. Though IIRC the mental acuity did drop some as the event progressed.
I assume you mixed these up?
There's two well-known extreme sleep schedules (Uberman 6x20m or Dymaxion 4x30m) that let you subsist on two hours of sleep a day, because you drop into REM sleep immediately. This however only clears up "brain fog". If you would do exercise on these sleep schedules, you would make little progress because muscle repair happens outside of REM sleep.
also things are recommended for the average population, not the individual - with "conditions"/superpowers like yours, it's absolutely the individual that matters, not the mean.
I go to sleep between 1am and 1:30am naturally and wake up around 6/:30am naturally. Allergy season makes me kinda lethargic, but doesn't change how much sleep I need. 4/5hrs is ok, less than 4 is not ok. I also oddly don't get jet lag.
My problem with regular sleep is that the sum of "good night sleep" + "energy for the day" is > 24 hours. Realistically I think it is about 26 hours on average. If I sleep for a normal amount (7-8 hours) I will generally have about 18 hours of energy. So if I just sleep when I'm tired my schedule is constantly shifting. If I go to bed when not tired I just stair at the ceiling for hours, which feels like a waste.
You might need stronger environmental queues for your body to wake up. The body has both internal and external data to know when you have to wake up - lights, noise levels etc.
If you set up your bedroom “too well” - quiet, light blocking roller blinds etc, then your body can only rely on the internal clock.
I used to have that but since moving to another place without those “niceties” suddenly my body quite easily finds “the correct time” every day.
Also you can experiment with this on long flights to get rid of jet lag. After I land, if I spend the first night drinking and fall asleep, I effectively ruin my internal clock for the night, and then the body has only the environmental queues. Wake up in the morning and my clock is effectively reset. Might not feel great for the day but suffer zero jet lag as I start waking up in the morning at the “correct” time even though I’ve flown halfway across the planet.
Whenever I see a study about something that affects longevity, I want to know how much of a difference it makes expressed as a number I can relate to. If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, would you live 18 hours longer on average, or 1.5 months, or 5 years? This would be a way to decide how much attention and effort one should to devote to the numerous studies about things that affect mortality.
Looking at the graph in the study, it looks like 0.972 fraction of the very regular sleepers are alive after 7.8 years and 0.945 of the highly irregular sleepers. The difference is 0.027, or in other words 2.7% more of the highly irregular sleepers have died off after 7.8 years. It might be significant in the statistical sense, but it looks like a pretty small difference to me.
I don't know to translate that into a statement like: If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, you would live __(x days)__ longer on average. With some hand-wavy reasoning I arrived at something like 10 days longer over a period of 10 years. I.e., a very small amount on average. I'd welcome someone with a statistics background to do a real calculation.
A confounding factor example would be someone who sleeps regularly and someone who sleeps irregularly, two people who both live the same amount of years... but the irregular sleeper lives their last 10 years with greatly impaired capacity after a stroke. [Note: some of my work involves dealing with elderly people and "impaired after a stroke" is an extremely real, and common, thing.] These 'fuzzy' conclusions may be the best we can do.
Sleep is like drinking water. No one says, "I'm gonna get dehydrated right now and then drink a lot more water later so it's OK." But people do this for sleep. You need to sleep right when you're tired, because being tired is a stress that will need more time to heal the longer it goes. Sleep timing is underrated but it is just as important as quality and amount.
I think the analogy holds if you consider all these behaviors as negative behaviors which they are.
But you're right, people do say it so he's wrong. You could rephrase it as going on a bender and not eating/drinking as healthy is probably just as bad as lack of regular sleep.
> Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration, by comparing equivalent mortality models, and by comparing nested SRI-mortality models with and without sleep duration (p = 0.14–0.20). These findings indicate that sleep regularity is an important predictor of mortality risk and is a stronger predictor than sleep duration.
Not totally disagreeing with you, but this indicates that it is _more_ important than the latter two when concerned with all-cause mortality.
I wish some of the sleeping/eating studies covered the options "sleep when I'm tired" and "eat when I'm hungry."
When remote work is an option, it'd be nice to know the health opportunity cost of RTO. Sadly the cohort is too hard to study outside of nursing home residents.
Irregular weekend sleeping seems to have a knockon effect of hurting weekday sleeping. Just do it the same every time. The weekend shouldn't be different
Does anyone else consistently get 6 to 7 hours of sleep no matter what? It doesn't feel optimal and I feel great on the rare days I get 8 hours, but I can function just fine on less. Also cannot easily fall back asleep if woken up which is really frustrating.
> Does anyone else consistently get 6 to 7 hours of sleep no matter what
6 hours is too little IMO. If I sleep 6 hours for more than a few days in a row, I feel like shit and need caffeine to wake up properly. Then I end up sleeping 10-12 hours on my days off to compensate (and to take a break from caffeine). It doesn't feel healthy.
So, I try to get at least 8 hours consistently. That way, I don't need caffeine at all and function just about fine.
I usually get 6 hours dead on. Rarely 7 or more. I'm asleep less than a minute after going to bed, and have such a regular sleep duration that I never have to set an alarm. In fact, I haven't used an alarm clock at all in 20+ years. Well perhaps, less than a dozen times.
I am fully awake and ready to go a few minutes after waking up, too. No coffee needed.
I do occasionally take an hour nap here and there, but that is also rare.
I'm a zombie if I have less than 8 hours, that's the absolute minimum. I drank a lot of coffee for years even though that had diminishing returns, until I realized it just concealed my exhaustion instead of helping, so I stopped.
Of course, spending 12-14 hours a day facing brights screens do not help.
I feel like shit any time I get less than 8 hours of sleep. Usually I get 9 or 10. However a day nap of 45-60 min does help a lot when I’m at a deficit.
After having a kid Ive wondered how all these sleep disruption means you'll die studies could actually be true. You'd think evolution would have taken care of it at some point
As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes. If you survive long enough to make sure your kid reaches maturity, that's all that matters there.
Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.
Maybe, but do other mammals suffer from this? Maybe it woukd have been taken care of with some early human-ish species with shorter life spans or something.
Sure it can. Knowledge, skills, and wisdom passed on to children and grandchildren well into adulthood significantly increases their chances of successfully passing on their genes to future generations, attract quality mates, and reduce stressors that can be passed down through subsequent generations.
Curious to learn which lifestyle factors correlate with extremely regular sleep patterns. Of my friends who have very regular sleep patterns, they tend to be very stable, long termists, career focussed, good in relationships, at least moderately sociable, fit and healthy (although in no way obsessed) and well rounded. Kinda good at everything but not extreme in any way. I'd guess those factors alone would have a noticeable effect on longevity.
I sleep when I feel tired and wake up when my body naturally wakes up (never an alarm). However it results in irregularity, although somewhat aligning with a 28-hour cycle. I wonder if that's good or bad.
If you can't help it, this is called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder (N24SWD) [1]. If it's just because you're not exposed to natural light a whole lot, circadian drift is "normal," though my recollection is that ~25 hours is more common. I guess it gets diagnosed if and when you complain to a doctor that you can't help it.
Regardless of that reality, circadian rhythms have been extensively studied, and there is more evidence than just this study to support the claim they're making. Patterns and routines are generally beneficial as a rule.
That being said, there is a lot of diversity amongst us, and I'm quite sure that when you factor in (epi-)genetic variation - particularly in the short to medium term - there are some unexpected advantage/cost ratios to wildly different strategies.
Oh man I took my sleep for granted last month, have been working late and waking up at strange times. Sometimes sleep at 3 am and wake up at 7am then sleep at 11pm and wake up at 6am. Eventually my body totally crashed, interestingly I had a panic attack and heart attack type symptoms at 2am in the morning. Had to rush to ER.
I know this will not help you, but stressing about sleep is a vicious cycle which does not help.
I used to be much more anxious about sleep — and life in general — but I have leaned that if I don’t sleep that is fine. Life goes on, the body gets what the body needs, and I should focus on living instead of sleeping.
Being active, spending time with friends, going outside for walks, laughing, and taking the world as it comes to me has done more for my sleep than reading studies or buying stuff (outside of a tempurpedic matress and solid oak frame).
Agree. Every month there’s some new “discovery” about what can make your life shorter. It makes me anxious and definitely doesn’t help at all. I cannot simply manage so many variables. I try to do a little bit of everything, to be in the middle point of everything as much as I can; that’s my strategy.
I think this is a framing problem. You need to let go of the outcome and focus on what you can do. You can't control the result, but you can do the best that you're capsble of in your current situation, which includes not over-extending yourself.
I live in an area that observes DST and since most devices does the changeover automatically I've never noticed the switch. Only notice when other people start moaning about it. Wonder if it affects certain people more than others.
It deeply affects me. I’ve lived in places that have it and currently live where there is no DST. If my state implemented it I would try to negotiate with my workplace to keep the same actual hours so my schedule doesn’t change, if they refused I would consider moving, job or state.
when I worked in UK doing shift work work gave me bonuses and pamphlets on the health costs for working through the graveyard shift regularly. The management initially wanted us to do weekly rotations of 3 shifts we tried for a month and it was undeniably sure fire way to die early. So we decided we'd rather do monthly shifts, it worked mostly ok except heading into winter I didn't get to see the sun for a while.
nowadays I still do some kind of on-call hours, and I think being on call should pay a butt load more honestly.
Subtitling: "Graveyard shift is a work shift running through the late hours of the night through the early hours of the morning, typically from midnight until 8 am."
I was wondering if you actually did some job on a graveyard at night or if there was a second meaning there. Good I looked that up...
This feels like one of those points that go back to our recent history vs the last 100,000 years of evolution.
Before artifical light, alarm clocks, jobs, screens with blue light etc - we presumably woke and slept fairly consistently, no doubt tied partly to sunlight and temperature. Some people probably slept more than others, as they always have, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more consistency.
I think a “correlation is not causation” cautionary note is important here - there are a lot of things that cause fragmented sleep, and also cause death. Stress and underlying disease are two obvious ones.
> We aimed to assess the relationship of objectively measured sleep regularity with risk for all-cause mortality, and mortality from cardiometabolic causes and cancer, in a large cohort (N = 60 977) who wore accelerometer devices for 1 week.
They look at one week of sleep data and then check mortality records about 10 to 15 years later. It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality, but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion. I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data.
That’s because this is in UK Biobank, a cohort of >500K Brits and collecting actually in such a large cohort is a miracle, let alone for multiple days. All thanks to the people who volunteered into the study. Would it be nice to have even more? Sure. But at that scale, patterns start to emerge.
An issue could be how people choose that week.
As you point out that's a multi day commitment, and if part of the volunteers either adjust the timing of the experiments to match specific weeks (e.g. parents choosing school vacations), or adjust their schedule accordingly, what is measured becomes fundamentally different in nature to what measuring longer periods would bring.
I'm with you on how we don't have a choice regarding to the quality of the study, it's just crazy hard to get any data at scale. But we can look at it as a very flawed "best of what we can do" and not take the patterns too seriously.
Note the study had 60977 samples, not >500K.
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There’s a health research programme currently underway in the UK that’s looking to recruit up to 5 million people. I believe they’re currently at around the 1 million mark.
https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/
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Yes. Any statistics buffs here who can tell me:
Is 500k brits for 1 week as good as 5k brits for 100 weeks.
Effectively with so much data aren't you getting a superposition anyway.
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And that's fair - it should just thoroughly be discussed and qualified not to release false research.
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> It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved.
Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep"
It's difficult to blame people for emotionally attaching more to the latter than the former.
It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"
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The issue is that almost all human behavior is correlated and, even if you have an easy-to-see [sic] method of action, e.g. “brain gunk”, that doesn’t automatically negate a nearly-infinite set of other possible causes from correlated behavior. Just a random example: those with high stress probably sleep poorly. You can think of a number of possible explanations that link high stress to shorter lifespans: more likely to commit suicide, more fat retention, less time for healthy activities, etc.
Sure, but things that make narrative sense can easily fall down when examined - that's why the statistics are important and not just a rubber stamp. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
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99% of people die from causes other than "brain gunk".
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"Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality"
You got it.
"but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion"
This is always the case unless you assume reality is as big as what you can perceive.
"I'd really like to see the same study with longer term sleep data."
You can say this of literally 100% of the studies, it will never be enough. I understand it when authors put this at the end of a study because they want more funding and because their subject is all they think about. But for reasonable human beings you gotta make a common sense jump and allocate resources to other subjects. Yes, regular sleep has good effects on health, the burden of proof of that was already 0, this study is a nice added touch, there will be no double dessert, move on.
Every deductive leap comes with uncertainty in establishing a causal chain. I don't I'm being overly reductive about the nature of evidence when I say that.
There is a specific question that needs to be addressed: With a one week window into sleep habits, are we selecting for people who are chronically poor sleepers, with those poor sleep habits leading to disease?
OR
Are we selecting for people who are chronically ill for other reasons and those chronic illnesses prevent them from getting regular sleep?
For example, people with sleep apnea have terrible sleep, and they have lower life expectancy than the general population. However, the cause of that lower life expectancy is not the poor quality of sleep; it's the cardiac effects of abnormal breathing over a long period of time.
If a person with decades of excellent sleep habits developed sleep apnea in the last 5 to 10 years of their life, the accelerometer will capture their irregular sleep and the death registry will capture their early deaths. That doesn't mean poor sleep habits killed them.
There are many other such chronic illnesses that can be confounded this way. Heart failure. Obstructive lung disease. Dementia. All can lead to irregular sleep. Add them together and you've captured a large segment of the population with ~10 years left to live.
The authors address this relationship in the conclusion and supplementary materials, but they appear to approach it entirely from the framework of poor sleep being causative of cardiovascular disease. Well yes, there's evidence that poor sleep can cause cardiovascular disease, but it's also well established (as I explained) that it can happen the other way around. If you want to cement a full chain of causality, you need a longer time window. Capture a young population with a low burden of chronic disease, show that poor sleep habits came first (i.e. within a certain age window), then cardiovascular disease, and then shorter lifespan. That would be the ideal data, even if difficult to acquire.
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It is easy to say that good quality sleep is good for a person. But what if I literally never get that type of sleep. What should I do? How concerned should I be? How much focus and effort should I put into this? Should I take the Ambien I'm prescribed or should I try to go for the best natural path - because I really, really don't have good experience with Ambien. And it's almost like it's the best modern medicine can offer.
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FWIW it’s mentioned in the study explicitly as a limitation:
> There are several limitations in this study. First, the single week of data collected for each individual provides only a snapshot of their sleep–wake patterns, and future work should collect sleep–wake data over a longer timeframe and include multiple weekend-weekday transitions. It is nevertheless interesting that even a snapshot of sleep behaviors is predictive of mortality for a follow-up period of several years.
The other problem is that irregular sleep may correlate with lower income, which correlates with a lot of things that lower life expectancy.
I would expect that P(bad sleep this week | bad sleep chronically) > P(bad sleep this week | not bad sleep chronically). It's a question of inferential power: what is the minimum detectable effect size with such an indirect measurement?
Yep, longer tracking period would better establish if consistent irregularity (or lack thereof) impacts mortality risk.
Another hypothesis that seems plausible to me is that what we’re really measuring when looking at sleep is mental health, and mental health is a strong predictor of mortality 10-15 years into the future.
You are already correct, but the actual factor here is trait Neuroticism (negative emotion personality dimension), which is very roughly speaking a combination of genetic factors and your ACE score. ACE score is shockingly good at predicting mortality, having one over 6 makes people die on average 20 years earlier.
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I found the best way to ensure sleep regularity is by having a fixed wake-up time. If you don’t have one and you begin to set your alarm clock to early hours, the first weeks doing so will feel like hell. But eventually all will be worth it. The sleepiness during the day will disappear and, at night, your body will naturally want to get some rest early.
Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise, so as to ensure maximum tiredness at night.
Nowadays, my sleeping patterns are mostly regular thanks to these protocols. Every day about 9pm, I feel sleepy, and my bed begins to look very enticing. I follow this pattern for my daily well-being, but it’s nice to know it reduces my mortality risk, too.
I think you have a key component in good sleep but there are 2 more imo.
The first is that phones and light break our natural sleepiness triggers and the second is that we don't exercise our bodies enough because of our sedentary lifetstyle.
I used to struggle with terrible insomnia and I still get bouts of it time to time but I've also found it's related to my laxing my 3 rules.
If I have a good workout about 5x a week, I turn off my phone and the lights 30 minutes before bed and take a good long shower in the dark and I have a regular alarm set at 7am that goes off 7 days a week, I'm almost guaranteed a good nights sleep every night. It also had the added affect of ridding me of my night terrors and sleep walking I used to have frequently but I'm 90% certain that was correlated to me using my phone in bed and it causing my brain to enter a weird state where it never really turned off.
I'm going to "yes, and" this with just one more thing that may seem obvious: almost any amount of alcohol is enough to throw that pattern out of whack.
The older I get the more reluctant I am to make the trade. Few glasses of wine with friends is hard to pass up though :)
I do none of those things and have great sleep.
Shutting off your phone and lights early is especially smart. It lets your mind and body transition smoothly into rest mode
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I did that for years with jobs that required it and didn’t find that worked for me.
I think I effectively switched from a night owl to an early bird by having something I _really_ wanted to do in the morning that was actually physical (martial arts classes).
I remember the exact day my body switched - I was going in the early morning and my body was not approving of my initiative. Every morning was hell - but then one morning early spring we had a training outside - sunrise, early leaves on the trees in the park, we all got quite sweaty some of the guys started to take our tops off and it looked like a scene from a martial arts movie. I remember thinking this looks so cool - we’re training like our forefather used to.
Next day I woke up exact time I needed no grogginess whatsoever. Have been an early bird ever since, almost 10 years now.
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That’s a bummer! Have you found out why that didn’t work? Perhaps something like caffeine or allergies was interfering with your sleep?
If haven’t found out, I wholly recommend doing a sleep study if you can. It can shed some light on any obstacles you may be experiencing. I’ve never done one myself, but I know people who got enduring benefits from the insights of their studies.
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For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you.
It might change depending on the seasons, and you might more or less sleep depending on what you're doing at that time.
Waking up at the same damn hour everyday to deal with my kid's school was an utter pain for years, and I got in a better health and shape once I could adjust depending on my daily condition.
It still have a set of fixed alarms, but regularly ignore the first ones as needed, and only wake no-matter-what for the last one for my job. I heard from other coworkers doing the same, and it was a game-changer for most of us.
> For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you.
Another piece of anecdata from someone who used to be like this for years. I first noticed that regular alarm sounds annoyed me and eventually I would get used to turning it off and going back to sleep (that is until I HAVE to wake up). I then figured that if I set up an alarm with a song that I like, it would make waking up more enjoyable. Which I eventually did. The first few weeks, I enjoy waking up and in a sense look forward to it, but after a certain amount of time not only I get used to it and the cycle continue, but I also can't stand that song anymore (RIP rolling in the deep, chainsmoking, ...). I randomly stumbled upon the app sleep for Android that has a feature I didn't know I needed, putting a playlist as an alarm sound (I shuffle it of course). Now every morning, waking up is an adventure, and more often than not I end up singing along. Now months in, I haven't failed to wake up even once. And I don't have any alarms on Sunday, yet I still wake up without it.
That is with the caveat that I know I need between 7:30 and 8h of sleep, and I stop all screens by 10 (night time feature of Android is very helpful in this regard). Except my ebook reader than I use without backlight.
Finding what feels natural can sometimes be a matter of listening to those instincts rather than pushing against them
That method nearly wrecked my life and didn’t change my sleep patterns
I agree with this except for the early part. At least personally waking up at about 8 works for me, that way I’m not waking up before sunrise in winter which makes me unhappy quite reliably.
A lot of people are weirdly proud of how early they wake up, and I’ve literally been shamed for waking up late, called lazy etc in a casual sense but that’s nonsense. I just work later.
One thing I've done is create a "color clock" using a smart bulb that changes color based on a daily schedule. So at 8:00pm the bulb has a dim orange glow, this changes to dim red glow at 9pm and then turns off at 10pm (sleep time). Its a really nice relaxing way of ensuring a regular sleep pattern (no longer clock watching etc).
Get a german shepherd dog. They will wake you up at the same time everyday whether you like it or not.
I don’t know about a German shepherd dog specifically. But my experience with dogs is that they will wake me up whether I like it or not… whenever they feel like it, even in the middle of the night. That can be severely disrupting.
Haha, so true—whether it’s a German Shepherd or a cat, you’re definitely getting a "reliable alarm clock" that doesn’t care about weekends or your sleep schedule!
Alarms aren't foolproof though. I often shut them off in my sleep or sleep through them, so I have to keep the phone on the other side of the room AND change the alarm every week or two to prevent adaptation, and that still doesn't help if I can't fall asleep for whatever reason and end up sleeping through due to sheer exhaustion. What I've found that actually works well is alcohol; if I'm not tired at sleep-time, take a swig of 130 proof absinthe and I'll be asleep before long.
> What I've found that actually works well is alcohol; if I'm not tired at sleep-time, take a swig of 130 proof absinthe and I'll be asleep before long.
I’d be wary of relying on alcohol to sleep, because the relaxation that it offers is somewhat distinct from a good night’s sleep.
Alcohol has been known to disrupt “REM sleep”, thus making your sleep phases inconsistent. In the long run, it might leave you with even poorer sleep quality.
I set an additional alarm one hour before I need to wake up specifically so that I can get the feeling of going back to sleep. It has really helped.
I have found that vibrating alarms on wrist watches to be very effective. For over 5 years I've been setting a vibration alarm on my watch and another backup alarm on my phone. I never slept through the vibration alarm. Granted YMMV
Sleep for Android has some neat modes to try to prevent this. Even just the fact it colours the snooze button green and the dismiss button red is incredibly thoughtful and works well. My just woken up brain can somehow understand "red bad". If you're on iOS the alarms are caveman style. My partner sets like 20 alarms on her phone, it's hilarious.
Just here to confirm. I have facetime setup at 5am in the morning with my family across the pacific. I've also started to exercise regularly. It's been 2 months and my sleep pattern is exactly like yours, and I feel exactly like you do.
I do a version of this where what I have is a fixed wake-up time WINDOW.
The window is 90m, to account for 90m sleep cycle. I set the alarm to whichever multiple of 90 falls within the wake up window.
As a result, I sleep somewhere with 7h to 7h30 consistently, with the odd ~6h sleep day or ~9h in special circumstances (being sick).
There's an Android app called "Sleep" where you set an alarm window and put your phone on the corner of your bed, and the alarm only goes off when it detects you're a little active already and not in deep sleep (using the accelerometer to detect movement). If it doesn't detect enough activity it'll go off regardless at the end of the window.
It has a bunch of other features as well (rating how well you slept and detecting patterns to give advice, a snore detector, etc) but that alarm is the one I use it for.
Most people have to wake up at a fixed time for work and school their entire lives. I don't think that's what sleep hinges on, else everyone would have good regularity and we'd take it for granted.
It's your behavior and attitude towards going to bed.
I do much better with no alarm clock and being in situations where i don’t need one. Allowing myself to naturally wake up and being in situations where variable times to naturally wake up are ok are very much better for my brain and overall health.
This is a fantastic way to give yourself an early heart attack.
I think a solid rhythm is important!
what helped me was to use an alarm clock.
but to go to sleep!
In my case, having a bedtime alarm would only leave me anxious and frustrated if I went to bed and failed to sleep at that time.
But I have tried something similar: setting an alarm to decompress before sleeping. No phone, no TV — just some quiet music playing or some books to read.
I still set this night alarm, but it is much easier to ignore it than to ignore my body’s natural tendency to lose steam after waking up early and having done so much during the day.
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for me the best way is to not worry about sleep at all. After many decades of abusive relationship with sleep. I've had enough. If it comes it comes, if not then thats ok too.
I stop reading this 8 hr nonsense or fearing an early death from not sleeping. whatever.
Have you ever heard the saying “correlation is not causation” ? Couldnt it be that you already had a good enough health to push you to adopt a better sleep schedule ?
I wonder how this translates if the irregularity is by choice. I can certainly see why people working back to back night and day shifts, or otherwise frequently being at a sleep debt that was compensated for later, would die younger.
But as a freelancer, my sleep schedule is more or less my own. I go to sleep when I'm tired and usually try to sleep as long as I want to. Sometimes that's 11pm-10am, sometimes 6am-11am. It can oscillate throughout the week, but I try to average 16 hours of sleep in any given 48 hour period.
Maybe this is incredibly unhealthy, but I've believed for a long time that it's kept me younger and healthier than being forced into a sleep rhythm that isn't what my body wants.
As someone whose natural sleep cycle seems to be closer to 26-28 hours, and whose preferred sleeping hours in a 24-hour cycle are 6am to 2-3pm... I commend you.
Sincerely, someone forced into a "normal" schedule by kids school start times and, well, everything else too, I suppose.
Hah. I've often thought that my actual rhythm is for a 25-26 hour day. I was going to write that but it seemed like too much to explain. As I go to bed later and later, eventually I find myself awake past sunrise, which is usually the day when I'll intentionally have a short sleep and snap back to an early bedtime that night.
Kids would definitely screw up this aspect of my lifestyle lol. But kids give you immortality, and here I am just wondering if I'm gaining or losing a couple years.
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I really hoped I’d grow out of wanting to sleep ~3-11am but it’s just never happened. No matter how tired I am during the day, I get a second wind around 8pm and have to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour during the work week because I won’t get sleepy, even if I stay away from screens.
Unfortunately I really enjoy night time, so I regularly completely fail at that task. I can’t remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, and yet here I am on Hacker News at 1:48am. At least I can sleep in tomorrow.
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I’ve been in this situation and the problem is basically that the various internal clocks aren’t getting good quality information to keep them in sync. Light, food, and exercise and the timing of them have a big impact.
After I quit my day job and started freelancing, I actually saw my sleep schedule worsen. It partly had to do with the initial lack of projects and clients, and other challenges of freelancing itself, but what I observed was that my day job's grind or regular schedule also helped my sleep schedule.
However, I eventually overcame those challenges and created my own schedule to work with, and my sleep cycle became better then onwards.
How did you fill your schedules despite your initial lack of projects?
Interesting, I have a DEC2 mutation and don't need much sleep, but I do sleep very consistently. When I was first working through this discovery, I asked the dr how it was that people who have this have no adverse effects when folks always say not sleeping long enough is bad for your health and he said "well, we don't really know that's true" and kinda shrugged it off.
I recall watching a documentary on Discovery way back, where they followed some multiday ultramaraton competitors. They'd draw blood samples, measure vitals and have them answer mental acuity questionnaires each time they stopped for food or sleep.
The competitors limited themselves to power naps, max 30 minutes though often just ten minutes.
The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps. Though IIRC the mental acuity did drop some as the event progressed.
Been at least 15 years since I saw the program so might misrember some parts, but I clearly recall the physical effects of the power naps.
Keep in mind these were quite fit athletes though.
>The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps.
we don't even know if the "brain cleaning so, longterm, you don't get dementia" hypothesis is true, and here you/they are saying "we know it's false for these people".
nah, fam.
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> The scientist found that all the physical adverse effects of sleep deprivation were negated by the short power naps. Though IIRC the mental acuity did drop some as the event progressed.
I assume you mixed these up?
There's two well-known extreme sleep schedules (Uberman 6x20m or Dymaxion 4x30m) that let you subsist on two hours of sleep a day, because you drop into REM sleep immediately. This however only clears up "brain fog". If you would do exercise on these sleep schedules, you would make little progress because muscle repair happens outside of REM sleep.
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> power nap
I assume they weren't drinking coffee at every stop, do you remember what they did before napping ? (the "power" part)
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I realize this is far off, but I'm hoping that someday I can get gene therapy to get this.
The assumption is what you do when awake those extra hours is more productive (or fun of whatever you are aiming for...) than asleep.
Sleeping you has the disadvantage it cannot keep score. Wake you has "I completed X today and Y yesterday". Advocate for sleeping you!
also things are recommended for the average population, not the individual - with "conditions"/superpowers like yours, it's absolutely the individual that matters, not the mean.
Do you work out? How often, how long and what type of exercises do you do?
5 days a week, Velodrome 1 hour high intensity. 49/14 + :30 each way to work. I'm tall and skinny.
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when you say dont need much sleep, are we talking 6 hours or something more out thre like 4 hours or less?
I go to sleep between 1am and 1:30am naturally and wake up around 6/:30am naturally. Allergy season makes me kinda lethargic, but doesn't change how much sleep I need. 4/5hrs is ok, less than 4 is not ok. I also oddly don't get jet lag.
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My problem with regular sleep is that the sum of "good night sleep" + "energy for the day" is > 24 hours. Realistically I think it is about 26 hours on average. If I sleep for a normal amount (7-8 hours) I will generally have about 18 hours of energy. So if I just sleep when I'm tired my schedule is constantly shifting. If I go to bed when not tired I just stair at the ceiling for hours, which feels like a waste.
You might need stronger environmental queues for your body to wake up. The body has both internal and external data to know when you have to wake up - lights, noise levels etc.
If you set up your bedroom “too well” - quiet, light blocking roller blinds etc, then your body can only rely on the internal clock.
I used to have that but since moving to another place without those “niceties” suddenly my body quite easily finds “the correct time” every day.
Also you can experiment with this on long flights to get rid of jet lag. After I land, if I spend the first night drinking and fall asleep, I effectively ruin my internal clock for the night, and then the body has only the environmental queues. Wake up in the morning and my clock is effectively reset. Might not feel great for the day but suffer zero jet lag as I start waking up in the morning at the “correct” time even though I’ve flown halfway across the planet.
My problem isn't really waking up though, it's the going to sleep.
This matches my experience. I think I have a 25 hour circadian rhythm, which has me always wanting to stay up one hour later than the night before.
Whenever I see a study about something that affects longevity, I want to know how much of a difference it makes expressed as a number I can relate to. If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, would you live 18 hours longer on average, or 1.5 months, or 5 years? This would be a way to decide how much attention and effort one should to devote to the numerous studies about things that affect mortality.
Looking at the graph in the study, it looks like 0.972 fraction of the very regular sleepers are alive after 7.8 years and 0.945 of the highly irregular sleepers. The difference is 0.027, or in other words 2.7% more of the highly irregular sleepers have died off after 7.8 years. It might be significant in the statistical sense, but it looks like a pretty small difference to me.
I don't know to translate that into a statement like: If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, you would live __(x days)__ longer on average. With some hand-wavy reasoning I arrived at something like 10 days longer over a period of 10 years. I.e., a very small amount on average. I'd welcome someone with a statistics background to do a real calculation.
A confounding factor example would be someone who sleeps regularly and someone who sleeps irregularly, two people who both live the same amount of years... but the irregular sleeper lives their last 10 years with greatly impaired capacity after a stroke. [Note: some of my work involves dealing with elderly people and "impaired after a stroke" is an extremely real, and common, thing.] These 'fuzzy' conclusions may be the best we can do.
Sleep is like drinking water. No one says, "I'm gonna get dehydrated right now and then drink a lot more water later so it's OK." But people do this for sleep. You need to sleep right when you're tired, because being tired is a stress that will need more time to heal the longer it goes. Sleep timing is underrated but it is just as important as quality and amount.
> No one says, "I'm gonna get dehydrated right now and then drink a lot more water later so it's OK."
Err yeah they do? That's 'a night out', 'going out for drinks', 'night on the town', etc.
Sort of get the point, but not a brilliant analogy ;)
I think the analogy holds if you consider all these behaviors as negative behaviors which they are.
But you're right, people do say it so he's wrong. You could rephrase it as going on a bender and not eating/drinking as healthy is probably just as bad as lack of regular sleep.
I've walked myself into a circle. You're right
> Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration, by comparing equivalent mortality models, and by comparing nested SRI-mortality models with and without sleep duration (p = 0.14–0.20). These findings indicate that sleep regularity is an important predictor of mortality risk and is a stronger predictor than sleep duration.
Not totally disagreeing with you, but this indicates that it is _more_ important than the latter two when concerned with all-cause mortality.
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I wish some of the sleeping/eating studies covered the options "sleep when I'm tired" and "eat when I'm hungry."
When remote work is an option, it'd be nice to know the health opportunity cost of RTO. Sadly the cohort is too hard to study outside of nursing home residents.
Related:
How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016904
Ah, fuck.
My exact same sentiment. My day got a little darker after reading this.
My reaction was slightly more humorous:
Baymax: Oh no.
You beat me to it.
One of the best things I ever did was start going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day regardless of weekend or weekday.
in what ways was it one of the best things?
I wake up feeling rested everyday around the same time without an alarm. I also go to sleep fairly easily.
The yo yo of late weekends and spending part of the week trying to get back to an earlier time left me tired much of the time.
Irregular weekend sleeping seems to have a knockon effect of hurting weekday sleeping. Just do it the same every time. The weekend shouldn't be different
Does anyone else consistently get 6 to 7 hours of sleep no matter what? It doesn't feel optimal and I feel great on the rare days I get 8 hours, but I can function just fine on less. Also cannot easily fall back asleep if woken up which is really frustrating.
This used to be a problem for me until I stopped drinking alcohol.
I used to think it was related to caffeine or work stress but cutting out drinking seems to have fixed all my sleep issues.
On my days off, I can sleep 12 hours if I don't set an alarm. And I could easily do more, if I didn't force myself out of bed.
Amazing! Without Advil PM I can’t sleep more than 7. Really goes to show how diverse sleep habits/requirements are from person to person.
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> Does anyone else consistently get 6 to 7 hours of sleep no matter what
6 hours is too little IMO. If I sleep 6 hours for more than a few days in a row, I feel like shit and need caffeine to wake up properly. Then I end up sleeping 10-12 hours on my days off to compensate (and to take a break from caffeine). It doesn't feel healthy.
So, I try to get at least 8 hours consistently. That way, I don't need caffeine at all and function just about fine.
I usually get 6 hours dead on. Rarely 7 or more. I'm asleep less than a minute after going to bed, and have such a regular sleep duration that I never have to set an alarm. In fact, I haven't used an alarm clock at all in 20+ years. Well perhaps, less than a dozen times.
I am fully awake and ready to go a few minutes after waking up, too. No coffee needed.
I do occasionally take an hour nap here and there, but that is also rare.
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I'm this 100%. Waking up at 5am on a Saturday is such a pain because my brain just won't let me go back to sleep.
I'm a zombie if I have less than 8 hours, that's the absolute minimum. I drank a lot of coffee for years even though that had diminishing returns, until I realized it just concealed my exhaustion instead of helping, so I stopped.
Of course, spending 12-14 hours a day facing brights screens do not help.
Same, let me know if you find a solution. My brain just runs wild if I ever wake up leading me to not fall back asleep
I've found that 7 is about ideal for me as a 35 year old male. Anything more or less seems to cause more issues
I feel like shit any time I get less than 8 hours of sleep. Usually I get 9 or 10. However a day nap of 45-60 min does help a lot when I’m at a deficit.
After having a kid Ive wondered how all these sleep disruption means you'll die studies could actually be true. You'd think evolution would have taken care of it at some point
As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes. If you survive long enough to make sure your kid reaches maturity, that's all that matters there.
Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.
Maybe, but do other mammals suffer from this? Maybe it woukd have been taken care of with some early human-ish species with shorter life spans or something.
> As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes
A second child would help with that too.
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As a parent, you’re underselling the impact of the help of grandparents and siblings on fertility
Sure it can. Knowledge, skills, and wisdom passed on to children and grandchildren well into adulthood significantly increases their chances of successfully passing on their genes to future generations, attract quality mates, and reduce stressors that can be passed down through subsequent generations.
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long enough to pass on genes also includes living long enough to make sure your child survives, so there is that as well.
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Curious to learn which lifestyle factors correlate with extremely regular sleep patterns. Of my friends who have very regular sleep patterns, they tend to be very stable, long termists, career focussed, good in relationships, at least moderately sociable, fit and healthy (although in no way obsessed) and well rounded. Kinda good at everything but not extreme in any way. I'd guess those factors alone would have a noticeable effect on longevity.
There is likely 100 factors that affects longevity and having a 3% better is pretty huge just for one factor
My Oura ring establishes a consistent sleep rhythm and nudges me when it is approaching.
I read that with a lower case O at first and was intrigued!
I sleep when I feel tired and wake up when my body naturally wakes up (never an alarm). However it results in irregularity, although somewhat aligning with a 28-hour cycle. I wonder if that's good or bad.
If you can't help it, this is called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder (N24SWD) [1]. If it's just because you're not exposed to natural light a whole lot, circadian drift is "normal," though my recollection is that ~25 hours is more common. I guess it gets diagnosed if and when you complain to a doctor that you can't help it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep–wake_disorde...
Just consider yourself to not live long, that is the reality anyway
When I was younger I went to clubs every Friday and Saturday, dancing till morning, then continuing the exercises at home. Guess that takes a toll.
This is probably correlated with so many other cofounding factors, like employment/stress/substance abuse
Regardless of that reality, circadian rhythms have been extensively studied, and there is more evidence than just this study to support the claim they're making. Patterns and routines are generally beneficial as a rule.
That being said, there is a lot of diversity amongst us, and I'm quite sure that when you factor in (epi-)genetic variation - particularly in the short to medium term - there are some unexpected advantage/cost ratios to wildly different strategies.
> Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors.
Whew, glad we covered all 6 of the known possible confounding variables.
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Well my sleep is certainly regularly fucked up, so I guess that means I'm dying eventually.
Oh man I took my sleep for granted last month, have been working late and waking up at strange times. Sometimes sleep at 3 am and wake up at 7am then sleep at 11pm and wake up at 6am. Eventually my body totally crashed, interestingly I had a panic attack and heart attack type symptoms at 2am in the morning. Had to rush to ER.
Great, another source of anxiety to make it harder to maintain a consistent sleep schedule.
I know this will not help you, but stressing about sleep is a vicious cycle which does not help.
I used to be much more anxious about sleep — and life in general — but I have leaned that if I don’t sleep that is fine. Life goes on, the body gets what the body needs, and I should focus on living instead of sleeping.
Being active, spending time with friends, going outside for walks, laughing, and taking the world as it comes to me has done more for my sleep than reading studies or buying stuff (outside of a tempurpedic matress and solid oak frame).
Fortunately, I did learn early on that stressing about sleep, especially as I lie awake in bed, was making things worse.
Agree. Every month there’s some new “discovery” about what can make your life shorter. It makes me anxious and definitely doesn’t help at all. I cannot simply manage so many variables. I try to do a little bit of everything, to be in the middle point of everything as much as I can; that’s my strategy.
I think this is a framing problem. You need to let go of the outcome and focus on what you can do. You can't control the result, but you can do the best that you're capsble of in your current situation, which includes not over-extending yourself.
Cat owners are screwed.
What about people with very young children? Like infants?
Well obviously they would have severely impacted sleep? What are you trying to imply?
Consider it a sacrifice. The cause being noble doesn't make it any healthier
As somebody with Non-24 sleep wake disorder i concur.
very cool that dst has been killing us all this time.
I live in an area that observes DST and since most devices does the changeover automatically I've never noticed the switch. Only notice when other people start moaning about it. Wonder if it affects certain people more than others.
It deeply affects me. I’ve lived in places that have it and currently live where there is no DST. If my state implemented it I would try to negotiate with my workplace to keep the same actual hours so my schedule doesn’t change, if they refused I would consider moving, job or state.
It would still happen with or without DST. The winter and summer phases of sunlight adjust people's sleep schedules. It's just more dramatic with DST
when I worked in UK doing shift work work gave me bonuses and pamphlets on the health costs for working through the graveyard shift regularly. The management initially wanted us to do weekly rotations of 3 shifts we tried for a month and it was undeniably sure fire way to die early. So we decided we'd rather do monthly shifts, it worked mostly ok except heading into winter I didn't get to see the sun for a while.
nowadays I still do some kind of on-call hours, and I think being on call should pay a butt load more honestly.
Subtitling: "Graveyard shift is a work shift running through the late hours of the night through the early hours of the morning, typically from midnight until 8 am."
I was wondering if you actually did some job on a graveyard at night or if there was a second meaning there. Good I looked that up...
This feels like one of those points that go back to our recent history vs the last 100,000 years of evolution.
Before artifical light, alarm clocks, jobs, screens with blue light etc - we presumably woke and slept fairly consistently, no doubt tied partly to sunlight and temperature. Some people probably slept more than others, as they always have, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more consistency.
Disclaimer: I know nothing, just interested
im checking hacker news in between astrophotography subs.
looks like i'm in danger
I think a “correlation is not causation” cautionary note is important here - there are a lot of things that cause fragmented sleep, and also cause death. Stress and underlying disease are two obvious ones.
"Finally, we acknowledge the correlational nature of our findings. Sleep regularity may be both a cause and marker of premature mortality risk."
Shit, I do sleep 8 hrs a day but regularity is out of the question. Fuck
I am so fucked
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Personal experiences cannot disprove a large scale statistical observation like this.
i forgot the rule that I don't post against the wind in internet. So I can avoid arguments with random peoples at online.
your anecdata is not data. this almost seems like a troll post
i forgot the rule that I don't post against the wind in internet. So I can avoid arguments with random peoples at online.