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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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Actually, that is an interesting point, but should be presented from the other side.
You're assigned a certain amount of awake time at birth, but sleep deprivation means you reduce that waking time bit by bit.
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.
I thought TFA might work out to that, but it turns out it doesn't - greatly increased risks of many diseases that'll take you out way sooner.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And if you try to use all your awake time consecutively, this is what happens.
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.
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?
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. :)
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.
"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.
The Tappet Brothers Law of Exercises:
Exercise extends life exactly by the duration spent exercising.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I thought TFA might work out to that, but it turns out it doesn't - greatly increased risks of many diseases that'll take you out way sooner.
But it would still be simple for the study to say "adults sleeping 6 hours per night lose a median of X years off their life." They don't say anything like that, so it is impossible to know if you are likely to lose more waking hours in your life than you gain by 40 waking days worth of time you gain each year by sleeping two hours less. If you sleep 6 hours instead of 8 each day for 40 years, you have gained just over 4 years of time. So the question is whether the health problems they studied are likely to reduce your life by more than 4 years on average.
The study also keeps throwing in statements such as "predicted to live only to their early 60s without medical intervention." But they don't state what medical intervention means here. Many of the problems mentioned in the study are caused by rising blood pressure. Does this mean that with blood pressure medication these adverse effects of sleep deprevation go away? And if they don't go away, are the effects diminished?
Considering there are real benefits of sleeping a little less (more hours in each day), you need to be very specific when describing the downsides. Worthless statements such as "twice as likely to have a heart attack" are meaningless without knowing whether medication affects that increase, what are the chances of surviving that heart attack, etc.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Actually, it's been pretty rigorously demonstrated at this point that teenagers bodies really genuinely do need sleep later in the day than adult ones. They really are biologically late sleepers, and late risers.
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."
"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.
The only way you could possibly get this impression is if your "sundowners" group was highly correlated with smokers, alcoholics and unwise drug use (of the kind further correlated with pre-existing neurological imbalance).
I had N24 for thirty years (recently conquered), and the only reason I presently look my age is the copious amount of albino hair infiltrating an even more copious mop of same-old hair. (Being awake all night for five out of every fifteen days certainly helped to keep me out of the sun.)
The systematically grizzled-before-their-time "sundowner" groups I have known either gathered together in dialysis clinics (member of extended family, who was the only athlete among them), hung out in smoky rooms all day, or retired at age fifty from owning a hectic restaurant to a semi-affluent lifestyle of sailboats, golf, and steadily escalating post yard-arm inebriation.
If I were you, I'd return both your bullshit detector and your dialect coach from whence they came and demand a full refund (if a $5 Starbucks gift card is the best you can wrangle, I'd still colour your situation improved—should you manage to spend it wisely).
The funny sensation you're now feeling? That's 'muh biologies' putting it's boot up your ass.
_____
On another note, the group of people who sleep less than they ought to also includes a disproportionate fraction of those who abuse fructose (somebody out there is drinking two Starbucks Mocha Frappuccinos per day).
Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Beverage
Serving size: 16 fl oz
Sugar: 69 g (4.91 tbsp)
How Worried Should We Be About Sugar? — 2016
Sleep deprivation leads to a) caffeine-seeking behaviour, and b) sugary-snack–seeking behaviour, and c) the aforementioned base-clearing (and liver clogging) home run.
Time for a nap. Because my life depends on it.
Better known as 318230.
If you sleep 6 hours instead of 8 each day for 40 years, you have gained just over 4 years of time. So the question is whether the health problems they studied are likely to reduce your life by more than 4 years on average.
That's A question. Another would be the degree to which 8 hours vs 6 improves your quality of life during your waking hours. I'm in a better mood all day if I get 8 instead of 6. At 3 or 4, I spend the day miserable and would gladly trade a couple of waking hours for sleeping ones.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
this is why i just sleep until i don't feel like sleeping anymore. only a loser gets up to an alarm.