Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
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Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#2In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it:
Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#3Great article. Sleep is important. I liked that the article went out of its way to dispel several of the "but four hours is fine" myths. Two of my favorites:
>some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep.
Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Congratulations if you're one of them, but your genetic gift doesn't make the need for sleep any less real for the rest of us, and talk about these outliers is mostly a distraction.
>I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level?
>Right. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived.
To me that's a great analogy. Most people can grasp the concept of having a problem and dealing/coping/adapting so long that they don't realize they have the problem. It makes sense that this phenomenon can apply to sleep as well.
Intellectually, I know I need to consistently sleep longer. If only knowing that and then acting on it were an easier gap to bridge (as I write this just past midnight...).
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#4>A professor I collaborate with at Penn State named Orfeu Buxton says that 8.5 hours of sleep is the new eight hours. In order to get a healthy eight hours of sleep, which is the amount that many people need, you need to be in bed for 8.5 hours.
So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours.
That said, this article has plenty of good insight and is well-written.
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#5I think we are only beginning to understand the importance of a good night's sleep.
I just recently listened to a fantastic episode of the Kevin Rose podcast featuring sleep scientist Matthew Walker [0], and found it very enlightening.
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#6In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it: Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
Great episode! I just posted another comment about Matthew Walker on the Kevin Rose podcast. There was definitely overlap with JRE #1109, but some new things, too.
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#7Previously Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#8I believe I'm one of the "short sleepers" they mention in the article. I've bought wirstband mostly to track my sleep patterns. Even though article says that devices like fitbit are not accurate enough in tracking different phases of sleep, my goal was largley to see how much time do I spend sleeping. In the last four months, I average out at 6,1hrs.
90% of the time I will wake up before the alarm and will sleep the same amount of time over the weekends, when I usually don't go to bed as early as I do during the working part of the week. The thing that I constantly think about is - could I benefit from those 2 extra hours to get to that magic number 8? I would really like to try it, but I keep waking up after 6 hrs. :)
I've started to think it's because of not so healthy lifestile - no exerxice, sub optimal diet, irregular bed time. Is it possible that my poor lifestyle results in me waking up after only 6 hrs of sleep and while feeling OK (it became normal to me), I could feel better if I slept longer? That was always something I pondered about. How to know if you really are a short sleeper, or you're just a person that gets by with sleeping less than recommended while not feeling as good as they could if they slept longer?
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#9Great article. Sleep is important. I liked that the article went out of its way to dispel several of the "but four hours is fine" myths. Two of my favorites: >some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep. Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a…
I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me. After a 6 hour night of sleep I noticed my rating would drop significantly the next day, and after several low sleep nights in a row it would take days to recover completely. A graph of my bullet rating over time clearly showed the periods of low sleep.
Most people don't have a measurement that objective. After I stopped playing chess so much in college, I even caught myself trying to excuse my poor sleep habits by telling myself I wasn't falling asleep in lectures and I could still finish my homework.
Re: Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist
#10Small quibble: the headline should be "in bed for more than eight hours"
The expert says 8.5 hours in bed (trying to sleep) to sleep 8, since we don't sleep the whole time.
So, if you have an accurate sleep tracker, "8" is still the number.