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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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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.
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
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.