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Sleep is more important than food

blogs.hbr.org

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Re: Sleep is more important than food

#91

Post by joe_the_user »

mv wrote: post #81
pyre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent the sleep deprivation is a weeding process/learning experience in and of itself. Being able to perform under stress/lack of sleep is a good quality in a doctor.

I am a 3rd year in medical school, and firmly believe that sleep deprivation is a terrible weeding process. If a doctor is sleep deprived I do not want them touching me with a ten foot pole. They make enough mistakes as it is! Sure you argue that they limit work hours, but I can tell you first hand that these limits are only paid lip service to, and I routinely see residents work 80+ (sometimes 90+) hours a week. Oh…

You pretty much can only be a psychiatrist or family doctor with little or no hope of every specializing.

And that's the problem (not your problem but the profession's problem) - the hope is to specialize whereas being a family doctor is the booby prize.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#93

Post by yblokhin »

mv wrote: post #81
pyre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent the sleep deprivation is a weeding process/learning experience in and of itself. Being able to perform under stress/lack of sleep is a good quality in a doctor.

I am a 3rd year in medical school, and firmly believe that sleep deprivation is a terrible weeding process. If a doctor is sleep deprived I do not want them touching me with a ten foot pole. They make enough mistakes as it is! Sure you argue that they limit work hours, but I can tell you first hand that these limits are only paid lip service to, and I routinely see residents work 80+ (sometimes 90+) hours a week. Oh…

Can you please explain more why psychiatrists get it easier?

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#94

Post by Natsu »

jey wrote: post #65
jonmc12 wrote: post #45

I'm surprised this article is at the top of HN. 1) It is not the announcement of a research study, rather it is just referencing previous hbr blogs and sleepfoundation.org's general guidelines for sleep. 2) It offers no unique advice. 3) The title is basic linkbait (ie, its not really about food vs sleep). Why the upvotes? is it because everyone is tired?

The research is voluminous and has been around for a long time. Articles like this make the results easy for us normals to digest. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl...

In experiments, rats have actually been killed by lack of sleep. Mind you, it took about a month as I recall, but it's still a bit scary.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#95

Post by pdx »

nostrademons wrote: post #74
winestock wrote: post #3

Schools such as Caltech and MIT have rigorous curricula that proverbially requires constant study every day of the week just to stay in the middle of the pack. Naturally, most students cut back on sleep. Proponents of this approach are aware of this, even boast about it, saying that this is the best way to learn the material. On the other hand, numerous studies -- including the link at the top of this page -- conclud…

I wonder if any studies have been done on the relationship between sleep and deliberate practice. I find that I need a pretty consistent 8 hours of sleep a night for normal operation. However, I've found that when I'm doing something challenging (say, a startup or a new project at work, or learning a new programming framework), this spikes upwards fast. I need about 9.5 hours when doing something moderately challengi…

I was also thinking of that hypothesis as I read this.

It rings very true to me. I believe that people who have trouble sleeping are often people who didn't learn that much that day, and conversely, people who learn on a given day seem to need more sleep.

I noticed this with my kids. A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more. This is the period that you can really begin to see them starting to "get it", about a lot of things in their world. Even though they aren't talking yet, they are beginning to understand what you are saying, so they are learning fast.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#97

Post by wtn »

gaius wrote: post #84
esoteriq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have to be? There are only 133 Medical Schools in the U.S. and there is a marked shortage of doctors in some areas, most notably general family doctors. The only area that learning how to deal with sleep deprivation would be a benefit is surgery and critical care areas (ICUs). But then again, if you could schedule things better and get more doctors in, maybe these doctors don't have to learn how to function o…

The shortage is purely artificial; the AMA keeps a cap on numbers to make sure pay stays high.

The Maine Experiment suggests that when an area has more doctors, they administer more procedures, many of them unnecessary. This counters your simple supply-demand argument--doctors actually manipulate demand.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1135711...

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#99

Post by a-priori »

giu wrote: post #10

A tool I've been using for the past days: http://sleepyti.me/ I'm currently testing it. The last two days I went to bed at a time which the tool suggested; getting up wasn't much of an issue, and I felt some improvements, but it's definitely too early to say that it works for me.

Placebo effect.

Sleep doesn't work in neat 90 minute cycles. They're really longer in the early part of the night, and get faster and more biased towards REM in the later part of the night. The details are very individual and also vary night to night, so you can't predict with any accuracy at the start of the night what stage you'll be in at 7:00:00AM the next morning.

(Anecdote: A friend of mine used to swear by a theory, mostly as a joke, that the recipe for good night's sleep was sleeping an odd number of hours. One day he came all happy and said, "Thank God 15 is an odd number!")

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#100

Post by jonmc12 »

jey wrote: post #65
jonmc12 wrote: post #45

I'm surprised this article is at the top of HN. 1) It is not the announcement of a research study, rather it is just referencing previous hbr blogs and sleepfoundation.org's general guidelines for sleep. 2) It offers no unique advice. 3) The title is basic linkbait (ie, its not really about food vs sleep). Why the upvotes? is it because everyone is tired?

The research is voluminous and has been around for a long time. Articles like this make the results easy for us normals to digest. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl...

I think this is what surprises me - this is hacker news, not normals news. How interesting is a safe interpretation of the research that conforms to what I was taught in 2nd grade? Its like someone posted an article extolling the virtues of the food pyramid or something. Even my doctor has a more liberal interpretation of the research than this particular author (and he is probably more qualified to make this interpretation).

In the past I've experimented with quantities of sleep, polyphasic sleep, measuring sleep quality, light / sound in the room, sleep supplements, etc, etc. Why? because sleep takes up 25-30% of my life. Its a no brainer activity for me to try to hack and optimize. Further, given sleep is such a big part of all of our lives, I'm surprised more people on this site do not have a similar mindset about experimenting and tweaking their sleep patterns.

Show me some articles with new research, personal experiments, or useful tips that can allow me to hack my sleep - these kind of interpretations are much more useful to digest.

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