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The Shorter Your Sleep, the Shorter Your Life: the New Sleep Science (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A "catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic" is causing a host of potentially fatal diseases, a leading expert has said. In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Matthew Walker, director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, said that sleep deprivation affected "every aspect of our biology" and was widespread in modern society. And yet the problem was not being taken seriously by politicians and employers, with a desire to get a decent night's sleep often stigmatised as a sign of laziness, he said. Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation, which is defined as less than seven hours a night. But this has been linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and poor mental health among other health problems. In short, a lack of sleep is killing us.
Eight hours or more work days are killing us. Learn more on the news at 23:00.
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You are assigned a certain amount of sleep at birth. If you don't use it all up, it's added to the start of your dirt nap.
It's basically an advert for the guy's book. He's probably right, though.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
By sleeping 10% more, you can extend your life by 4%.
If you consider: SLEEPING = LIVING
If not, then you have lost 6% of your life to sleep.
Slashdot staff is way ahead of you folks!
Longer you sleep, your life will extend by exactly the same number of hours you slept. So there is no net new active hours added to your life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Learn to get to bed and go to sleep early enough to get the requisite sleep. Stop all this bullshit about 'Muh biologies' as an excuse to stay up later. And then complain that the school day* starts too early.
Aside from getting a head start practicing what will be required in one's employment career, I concur that late nights and less sleep are very unhealthy (based on my anecdotal observations). I have been involved with several groups that split between members preferring daytime activities to those who preferred later in the evening. Over the course of a few decades, the apparent age difference of the earlybirds vs the night owls has really started to stand out. With the 'sundowners' (to borrow a term from dementia studies) aging about 10 to 20 years more in appearance than the early risers.
*I suspect that this may be the faculty as much as the students. When I went to high school, some of our teachers came from a segment of society that felt it necessary to close the bars every night. And then bitch when they had to put up with the little monsters first thing in the morning.
Have gnu, will travel.
And yet the problem was not being taken seriously by politicians and employers
Why should politicians and employers be involved? Because you're a bunch of kids who need daddy to tell you what to do?
Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation
Yeah, anything but personal choice to do more stuff and sleep less, then make it up by taking stimulants.
My wife and I go to bed at a reasonable time each night (10PM) and get up at 6AM, no need for an alarm clock. Yes, it takes discipline.
Do you have ESP?
Like we need ANOTHER reason for corporations to automate.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Extending life by 4% is equivalent to 1 hour a day. Sleeping 10% more, assuming you sleep 6 hours, is 6.6 hours, so you gain 0.4 hour. If you extend an 8 hour sleep by 10%, it's 8.8 hours, so you gain 0.2 hour. So either case is a win. I'm guessing you posted the above without getting enough sleep. :)
All scientific studies of increased or decreased human lifespan due to a specific factor are BS. There are way too many confounding variables over a human lifetime to make any claim credible.
I have no love for either politicians or bosses, but is this really their problem? I suppose if you have a job where you have to work for 16 hours a day, your employer is definitely taking away your sleep time. I don't think that describes too many people.
I think most of our sleep is being lost from OUR choices. We stay up late binging on netflix, or playing games, or otherwise entertaining ourselves. We pack our day with work, kids stuff, entertainment, commute, etc. We kind of bring on a very busy, very hectic schedule and sleep is just sort of sandwiched in there.
One can argue that a 40 hour work-week is no longer really that important, but I have no reason to believe that even if we went to a 20 hour workweek we would sleep even 5 minutes more. We'd just find more stuff to pack in there. In contrast I probably could say "I'm too sleepy, I'm going to show up for work in a few hours" and my boss wouldn't give a crap as long as I got my work done. It'd come off as all kinds of horrible, but I have some karma to burn. The problem is that it wouldn't fix anything. I'd sleep in, go to work, do my job, then come home and do the same bad thing that cost me sleep previously, only later, to later hours...
The article mentions I think only one point where work schedules are directly responsible: night shift workers with disrupted circadian rhythms. There is evidence that we are more ready to sleep at certain times of the day. That might push some groups to later hours than others. But that's not likely to solve the real problem.
Blockbuster: Russian Satellite Proof, America is ISIS!
ISIS positions north of Deir Ezzor manned by US Special Forces. Photos prove America is ISIS
[ Editor's Note 2: Gordon went to the Russian ministry of defense to get the best quality photos, as they are needed to drive home two messages. One is that we have photographic proof of US advisers, Special Ops, or whatever you want to call them seeming to be able to operate inside and/or near ISIS held areas.
Or two, these ISIS held areas can sometimes be SDF people dressed up as ISIS, depending what central casting in Hollywood has called up for the extras to dress as for the day.
But there is a third questions. The Russians have obviously had these photos for days and maybe even weeks now, so why have they been hiding them at this critical stage of the war with the SDF now coming deep into traditional Arab territory in what is clearly and army of conquest now, with the US fully onboard.
With ISIS pushed out of so many areas, and so many of the killed, or "gone to Idlib", who do we see Damascus showing signs of a shortage of manpower. I watched a video of SAA troops opening an new flank on Saquir Island south of Deir Ezzor. They were using on rubber boat being pulled back with a rope to shuttle troop across a narrow water barrier.
At a minimum then needed two, with the second boat shuttling over the ammunition that is typically needed to sustain and offensive, and especially reserve ammunition to handle counter attacks where running out can be a death sentence.
The ammo boat would also usually be carrying heavy crew manned machine guns, yet I have not seen a single one in any of these crossing videos, nor have I seen any RPG men with their backpacks of triple shot loads with any of these platoons going into combat on the west side of the river.
We thank the Russian command for these photos. Please send more, and send them sooner⦠Jim W. Dean ]
Editor's note: As US and SDF forces "defeat" ISIS near Deir Ezzor, it is now revealed that US and ISIS forces attacking Syrian Army positions are in fact one in the same. As long suspected, the US is supplying equipment and arms to ISIS, is safeguarding their leaders and fighting a totally phony war while in fact running the ISIS organization. Were one to say ISIS is commanded by Donald Trump, one would not be making a misstatement of any kind. Gordon Duff
The newly released images "clearly show that US special ops are stationed at the outposts previously set up by ISIS militants."
"Despite that the US strongholds being located in the ISIS areas, no screening patrol has been organized at them," the Russian Ministry of Defense said.
they can take my job so i can sleep more and live forever!
"And yet the problem was not being taken seriously by politicians and employers"
In America, perhaps you need to consider an employer's interest in this issue as finding the tradeoff between maximum profit and maximum employee productivity.
Why are politicians involved? Some right being violated? Our politicians are mostly in the business of violating our rights already. No more work to be done there.
Really, looking to government to solve the problem is usually THE PROBLEM.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Funny how even a health article has to take a jab at the president.
" (sleep deprivation, amazing as this may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven hours)."
Not really sure what the author was implying here but it comes off as pretty pathetic.
It's the number of complete 90 minute sleep cycles! Cruddy protein folds get repaired. Brain processes and problem-solves the day's events via dreaming. Boners get exercised. (No, it isn't having to pee in the morning, its happening to wake up, having to pee, during this period.)
Obesity (apnea), type II diabetes (excess sugar needing to pee, and neuropathy pain) all cut into this until you are lucky to get one full cycle.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Like someone else already commented here ... I don't get why any of this SHOULD be a problem for politicians or employers to address? Hopefully, as an adult, each one of us is capable of making our own decisions about how we live our daily lives.
Even the biggest work-a-holic has to sleep sometime, and he or she can opt to go to bed a little earlier if the core problem lies with expectations they're up bright and early to report to the job. A person can only do so much in a day (or night). There's diminishing returns on trying to cut back on sleep to squeeze more functional hours out of the day.
I went through an especially difficult stage myself, because I had a pre-teen daughter who just would NOT wake up on her own in the morning to catch her bus to school. We fought to get her into a different school than our home district, which had the side effect that she had to be up and out the door by 5:45AM or so to catch the bus that went out there. Meanwhile, I worked for a company with offices spread out over multiple time zones, and was expected to work later in the evening because west coast people needed assistance at 4 or 5PM their time, while I was on the east coast. Trying to accommodate both of those needs was really limiting my sleep.
But even then? I just had to make a habit of getting ready for bed each night ASAP, instead of doing any of the other things I would have liked to do. I learned to put everything else off until the weekends. It sucked, but I got through it and then summer provided a break. Now, she's much better about waking up on her own when her alarm goes off so I don't have to deal with it.
7.5 or 9 - you'll wake at the time your body is ready to. I have long suspected that 8.25 was the arithmetic mean of reported sleep spans and since the public hates decimal points, it was short-handed to 8, which is exactly when you should not be waking.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Rule of thumb: one hour of sleep before midnight equals two hours of sleep after midnight. So yes early to bed early to rise.
I come here for the love
"Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation"
All of which, with the possible slight exception of commutes which may be out of their control, are about GROWN ADULTS who aren't able to take themselves to bed on time.
Literally, people, I'm the most gadgety person in the whole of gadgetdom. And I switch them off, turn out the light, and go to sleep no problem at all, after using them for between 8-16 hours a day, every day, for my entire adult life.
If you're not going to bed because you're up doing stuff, stop it and go to bed.
Time for a nap. Because my life depends on it.
Better known as 318230.
"Seriously. I just tell people Iâ(TM)m a dolphin trainer. Itâ(TM)s better for everyone."
Space shuttle door gunner usually works for me.
Have gnu, will travel.
Even when child rearing is part of their chosen life path. Seriously how many hours are they deprived by uncomfortable sleep during pregnancy and not to mention feeding the tiny human in the first few months? And then sometimes they repeat the process ?
this is why i just sleep until i don't feel like sleeping anymore. only a loser gets up to an alarm.
"Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation."
While I can't speak for others, I was able to handle erratic and short sleep schedules perfectly fine in my 20's .My ability deal with poor sleep and still be productive is tremendously more taxing that in my 20's. It seems more and more people don't have kids until their 30's, I doubt I am the only on who suffer from lack of quality sleep in their 30's because of young children.
It's good to see social issues going back to basics: What the human body needs. What has brought this concern for health and lifestyle to the sudden attention of media? Not that it matters: These days everyone is too busy (and too cheap) to make any problem into an issue that politicians must regulate.