Slashdot Mirror
Expert Says You're Deluding Yourself If You Think You're Productive On Six Hours of Sleep (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Chicago Tribune: Getting through the workday on little sleep is a point of pride for some. But skimping on shuteye could be shortening your life and making you a less than stellar employee, according to Matthew Walker, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. "Underslept employees tend to create fewer novel solutions to problems, they're less productive in their work and they take on easier challenges at work," said Walker, author of "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams," out Tuesday. Operating on short sleep -- anything less than seven hours -- impairs a host of brain and bodily functions, said Walker, who is also a professor of neuroscience and psychology. It increases your risk for heart attack, cancer and stroke, compromises your immune system and makes you emotionally irrational, less charismatic and more prone to lying. When asked, "What do you say to people who sacrifice sleep to work?" Walker said: "I often ask the question in return, 'Is the reason you've still got so much to do because you haven't gotten enough sleep and so you're inefficient while you're working?' We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increased when you're getting sufficient sleep and it will take you longer to do the same thing on an under-slept brain, which means you end up having to stay awake longer. So goes the vicious cycle."
I'm no more productive with 8 hours of sleep than I am with 6.
I've always known this, and wished bosses were smarter about it. Meaning, when I'm working on a weeks or months-long project, who cares if I come in an hour later, especially if it means I'm far more productive?
... then you really have to question what they say next. I hate that phrase. "We know that..."
sleep on it
the folks I know losing sleep to work are doing it because the wage stagnation that started in the 80s and's been going strong since decimated their wages so that they work two jobs to make ends meet. Even the folks who don't have two jobs put in extra hours in a desperate bid to move up because companies stopped giving cost of living raises in the mid 2000s.
Sure, the extra work they do might not be the best but good enough is always good enough. People are losing sleep because they're being taken advantage of and made to work longer hours. As an added benefit if you're doing the work of 1.5 employees that's less people your company has to hire, meaning more competition for your job, driving your wages down further and leading to you working harder. See where this thing's going?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think we've found the cause for their gender dyslexia.
They could spend a few month in an Ashram and learn a bit.
Experts actually say that if you think everybody requires the same number of hours of sleep, you're deluding yourself.
Getting through the workday on little sleep
Now please turn off my office lights and close the door behind you.
Have gnu, will travel.
This "expert" is deluding himself if he thinks "awake" and "asleep" are real. We are all deluding ourselves with each passing moment.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Nuff said. Take everything that comes out of there with a shovel of salt. If they aren't challenging the status quo (whether justified or not), then they aren't Berkeley.
The expert came to this conclusion after studying the data while having only slept 6 hours 50 minutes...
Not getting 8 hours sleep a night has nothing to do with work. It has to do with having a life outside work. In order to get 8 hours sleep a night I'd have to be in bed by 7:30pm and asleep by 8:00pm, because I get up at 4:00am, do physical training for a competitive sport, then go to work by 8:30am. If I make no stops on the way home from work I'm home at 5:30pm. 2.5 hours is damned little time during a weekday to get things done you need to get done at home to prepare for the next day. I can't give up training, and I certainly can't afford anything without working. Even if I gave up my training I'm supposed to call 'work, eat, sleep, repeat' a life? That'd kill me faster than getting 6 hours sleep a night (plus a short nap at lunchtime). It's all well-and-good for some researcher to waggle a finger at everyone and tell them "You're going to DIE, SOON, if you don't get 8 hours sleep a night every night!", but it's not realistic unless you're either independently wealthy and don't have to work, or are so dull that work/sleep/eat/repeat is somehow enough for you.
Well, we know that ACs make the best posts on Slashdot.
What do we know about creimer?
We cant all be researchers doing fuckall.
Here in the real world we need to work 25 hours a day just to keep even.
"Matthew Walker, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California" His job is literally to find ways to keep his job.
Around 90/91 I got hauled into a project that was really late. I had nothing to do with that project until I got hauled into it. Seems I suddenly needed to show up at work at 8 AM for a group meeting on both Sat and Sun, or get fired. Guess what? I was young, and was still drunk at that time of morning. Lemme sleep in another couple hours I'd be glad to pitch in and help. But make me show up so early? I slept off the night before in my cube, on company time.
Experts are deluding themselves if they think that I'm productive at all.
Six hours of sleep. and 18 hours of delusion, which is dreaming, which happens in sleep.,... so it will work out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What experts say to people for which 6 hours is the maximum they can sleep?
People are different. They have different needs for sleep. If I sleep for more than 6, I feel like utter shit. Headaches and lethargy all day. I work best on about 6, and am function on down to 4. Above that I'm less productive.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Ask the people at FN and every other US-based arms manufacturer. Global sales for decades going strong now...
I'd also be okay with number of hours of sleep required being a legal question to ask on an application. Some jobs simply require more of a person than others.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
That is exactly my position as to the legitimate state of affairs (which is not to say, sane), because that's what the 2A says, and it hasn't gotten the attention it needs to reflect the present circumstances.
The problem here specifically with that issue is the constitution should have been amended long ago. Instead, they skipped the proper process and screwed us on every other front they could using the same "because we need/want to today" rationale. And they'll keep doing exactly that until/unless we get after this the right way.
The reality at the moment is that there is a huge amount of law that should never have been made, but the fact is that law is here now and it isn't even slightly likely to go away. So I'm not particularly worried that the constitution does, in fact, authorize keeping and carrying of arms in general. We're well past that.
What I personally would prefer is that the constitution be amended to reflect the current realities in arms. I think it really needs to be done. Nuclear and biological and chemical arms are all stand-up examples of why this needs to be done, quite aside from the issue of guns in the people's hands. The present laws, without a proper constitutional foundation, keep those things illegal, but in the process, they screw us on many other fronts - and that is in no way a good thing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You need so many hours to reset/repair your brain. And your body needs repair in the additional sleep. If you short yourself you might get away with the brain for a while, but they are both tied together so your thinking will eventually get cloudy. Not to mention the eventual breakdown of the body and/or brain.. Or you can deny all of this and wait till you get older.
As a public service:
If you wake up tired ***even after getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep***, have headaches, become forgetful and just plain drained, and if people tell you you snore, you might have sleep apnea.
This is when you are not breathing (airway is blocked) many, many times during sleep.
You can get an objective diagnosis by a sleep study. The new way to do this is to wear a sensor laden machine on your forehead during one nightâ(TM)s sleep.
The solution to apnea is a pump that puts slightly pressurized air into a mask you wear in your bed: a CPAP.
Donâ(TM)t live with apnea; it destroys your body over time and leaves you with no energy.
Any article that thinks that working less gives you more sleep is ignoring the majority of life. I do my 38-40 hours of work, rarely more, and I'm lucky if I get an average of 6.5 hours of sleep per day. I'm not partying, I'm just trying to maintain my health and my house.
I'm more productive than a lot of people at my job, that's why I'm in the position I'm currently at, with no risk of losing it. Sometimes I can't sleep properly and when it goes on for several days it does affect my job.
But I'm still productive even on six hours a day. That's not being delusional. I'm not on my best performance, but still more productive than others.
The title could be right if it said "you are deluding yourself if you think you are your most productive on six hours of sleep" (that's a lot of yous). But it doesn't say that, so it's wrong. Also it is not what the expert said.
In the summary they quote the expert saying you're less productive in your work when sleep deprived. Being less productive is different from not being productive.
Then comes the delusional part:
And those people who claim they can survive on six hours of sleep or less, unfortunately, are deluding themselves and their health.
He didn't correlate the productivity with people "deluding themselves". He was talking about health.
The author of TFA made up (wrong) affirmations in the name of the expert, none of the editors decided to call him on that.
a momentary blip in oil production shouldn't have caused 50 years of declining wages. Trickle down economics did. Here's a good list of reasons Reagan stunk on ice. And yes, I'm aware Clinton carried on Reagan's legacy to win the presidency. I never said I liked him either. A Republican's a Republican. Even with a D next to their name.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I go to bed, fall asleep, and then 5 hours later I wake up feeling refreshed and rested. So should I drug myself in order to get the "correct" and healthy amount of sleep? Or do I go to a doctor and tell him that some expert told me I was killing myself. so I need treated for insomnia. I really don't want to just lie in bed for three extra hours.
I call Bullshit. I know what I feel like when I'm tired, I know what I feel like when I have had enough sleep.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"creimer"?
I worked rotating shifts and slept four hours at a time. I was a mental mess and could barely function. Making a meal was a chore. When I was at work I slept on the table in the lunch room. At home I could not sleep and would walk around my neighborhood in the middle of the night getting the attention of the local sheriff deputies. I was 50 meters from my house and being questioned like I was a criminal. At last I was so fatigued that I collapsed in bed, asleep.
It really does not make any difference whether I'm more productive or not. If I'm more productive at work I just get more work to do. ("Oh, you're already finished that? well then here is some more work you can do"). As easy as that. There's no motivation for me to be more productive as it would just result in getting more work to do.
I rather stay up a bit later and have a few more hours of free time and then - for gawd's sake - will be tired in the office all day.
It's not that I can leave work early if I'm more productive. I still have to sit around in the office for 8.5h a day whether I'm productive or not.
First off, the title in a misquote. Operating on "short sleep" or not enough sleep is what the article was about. second, no new information here other than the author gave an interview. and apparently the title insights an emotional reaction in some people, even if its just comedic. begs the question is old news better than no news? P.S. I'm pro comedy :)
Seriously there are people who just stopped sleeping ever. THEY EXIST! Others use many short cycles of sleep. *inserts wikipedia article on one of the many names for this*
Man iza lazy.
Ask the people at FN and every other US-based arms manufacturer. Global sales for decades going strong now...
Side point. FN are Belgian, but your point stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_Herstal
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I know someone who is very productive on 5-6 hours of sleep while I need 8-9 hours every night. He's an outlier while I'm closer to normal. But this isn't about biological normality.
I know that 8 hours rest is the normal need and also, that I personally, am screwed without it. Unfortunately, working a 10-hour day, driving home, doing housework, then 'winding-down' means I can't get complete rest and my performance slowly degrades through the work week. The biggest problem is that I don't notice this loss of performance and thus accept the repeated overtime, when I need to be saying 'no'.
What do we know about creimer?
That a lot of people seem to have a rather unhealthy obsession with the guy?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Those that simulate it will stay long hours, but actually have less output and worse quality than more sane workers. But unfortunately, many "managers" are pretty low on productivity and insight anyways, so simulating productivity may be better for your career as those evaluating you do not understand that they are using an unsuitable metric. What we see here is the ages-old problem of faulty optimization strategies because of wrong selection of metric. The result is that people optimize with respect to the metric and not with respect to the actual problem they are trying to solve.
Of course, your live will suck badly with all the time spent at work, but many people seem to prefer that situation. Many will also be trapped in this situation, because they have no actual good marketable skills and need to fake it in order to survive.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If I sleep more than 7 hours for a couple of nights I end up waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get to sleep agin for an hour or so. I physically can't seem to sleep longer than that on average even if I stay in bed.
No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6.
"could be"
Also
"could not be"
Let us know when you actually have something to add other than simple speculation.
I think I'm perfectly capable of determining when I need to sleep, and I can certainly recognize when I no longer need to sleep, because I wake up.
I sleep, on average, between 5 and 6 hours a night. I go to bed around 10 and wake up around 4, usually. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is throw on some clothes and go running for somewhere between 4 and 8 miles. Then I shower and go to work, where I am pretty darn productive all day.
The key is that I pay attention to my body and go to sleep when it says it needs to. Sometimes I feel like going to bed at 8, so I go to bed at 8. Sometimes it's midnight before I feel like sleeping.
You become less productive when you force your body into rhythms and sleep patterns that cause imbalance that interferes with you cognitive abilities, not when you get less than some arbitrarily defined amount of sleep that some "expert" determined you should get.
for decades, no matter how much sleep I get.
That is what I track on my health incentive plan at work, so it is true.
I also am never stressed, work 40 hours a week, am always happy, eat the perfect diet according to what they think is perfect (which it isn't), and exercise exactly how much they think I should exercise.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
So, it's just like all the research that you can't actually multitask and noisy "collaborative" open-office environments are bad for productivity: it will just be ignored by people who think they can make an extra buck.
I often ask the question in return, 'Is the reason you've still got so much to do because you haven't gotten enough sleep and so you're inefficient while you're working?'
I've got "so much to do" because stuff grows to fill the space it's got. If you're the kind of person who likes to be hectic and busy all the time, you'll do it whether you're awake 16 hours a day or 20.
Same goes for bosses. We all talk about "getting the work done" but most of them only care about how busy you are - or how busy you look. Very few of them know what's a reasonable amount of work to expect, so they focus on hours and effort.
Nope, no sig
Because duty on a submarine is six hours of sleep.
The reason I've 'still got so much to do' is that the mountain of work is never-ending, and it wouldn't matter if I could work productively around the clock. The pile never gets smaller.
as does everybody in the 50s and 60s when corporate and marginal taxes were much higher and we had record growth and prosperity. If anything it spurs them to work harder instead of hoarding cash and power.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No, the constitution gives Americans the RIGHT to bear arms, while the nation's and state's laws let us know WHICH arms we can bear. While laws can and do regulate arms usage and legality, they cannot take away the RIGHT to bear arms.
If you want to abolish the RIGHT to bear arms, that's a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that.
As in, 7 hours is an average. Some need less and some need more. And the amount reduces with age. Ain't no way 7 hours is good enough for an infant.
The expert doesn't know this? Then he/she ain't no expert. Just an ageist person who spouts soundbites.
Experts say if you drink water, you're diluting yourself.
We complain about a lot of things here, but not about this subject. Working hours are flexible and I do everything to avoid let work ooze inside my lifetime hours. Working in IT infrastructure and its service management (whole backoffice, 500+ servers, 6 countries), I usually arrive at 8:30 everyday, have a minimum by law of one hour for lunch (we actually HAVE lunch here, differently from Americans that eat a sandwich in a 15-minute break), come back by 13:00 (we use 24h format here), sometimes 13:30. I can leave at 17:30 completing an 8-hour work journey. So, no worries. Of course, eventually I have to work on saturday nights to follow up on changes the teams are doing but it's not frequent so that does not bother me. I am old enough to know that, if you work for others, it's not worth it to grind your ass too much. Or to do loads of overtime. I'm well after that time. Work for living, not the other way around. If you own your own business, things may be different, but, again, don't sacrifice your family over work. Americans take proud in this shit and, as everybody, they will die alone, so...you know what to do.
It has only been in very recent years that the 2nd amendment has been interpreted as being some sort of absolute. It has always been interpreted (previously) as being as limited as the 1st,e.g. Libel, slander and yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.