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Sleep is more important than food

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Re: Sleep is more important than food

#101

Post by RK »

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…

I agree with this (expect that USMLE is not a board exam).

My SO is a medical resident. They really are placed in unstable situations (to use a math/physics term). They are required to work 80 hr/week. If they report working more than 80 hr/week they get into trouble for a duty hours violation and yelled at for being "inefficient". If they report less than 80 hr/week they get in trouble for being slackers (a.k.a. "unprofessional", actually that's a catch-all phrase for anything the speaker doesn't like). No serious thought seems to be given to increasing staff levels.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#102

Post by eru »

yblokhin wrote: post #93
mv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I guess people don't want therapy at night?

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#104

Post by eru »

dazmax wrote: post #79
nopassrecover wrote: post #8

"So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours." The broken link there is meant to point to ( http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep-works/how-m... ) and I can't spot where it mentions thi…

I think the theory is that once you've fully slept off your sleep debt (which I've heard can be up to 40 hours) you are no longer able to sleep much more than your natural sleep requirement, bored or not.

Interesting. I can sleep for 12 hours several nights in a row.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#105

Post by eru »

nostrademons wrote: post #72

I totally agreed with the headline, but the evidence in the article doesn't really support it. You might as well say that water is more important than sleep, because you die if you go more than about 3 days without water. The length of time your body can go without something has little relation to how your body acts when deprived of small amounts of that thing, or how it acts when faced with short-term, quickly corre…

By that metric, heart beating is even more import than breathing.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#106

Post by eru »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #70
gordonbowman wrote: post #64

I was hoping to see some sleep hacks in the comments here. The author cites a few in the article: 1) Naps 2) Go to bed earlier 3) Start winding down at least 45 minutes before 4) Write down what's on your mind Does anyone here have any other sleep hacks to share?

4) Stop using an alarm. Wake up when your body tells you to.

If you need to be up at a reasonable hour, just keep a clock in reach. You'll wake up several times during the night and morning anyway. Just make it a habit to look at the clock, and check if you can go back to sleep or need to get up.

Worked for me the last couple of days.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#107

Post by mv »

yblokhin wrote: post #93
mv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

you must 'match' into a specialty. If you do not have a good rank or board scores you can only match into the 'lower' residencies like family or psych

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#108

Post by CWuestefeld »

nostrademons wrote: post #72

I totally agreed with the headline, but the evidence in the article doesn't really support it. You might as well say that water is more important than sleep, because you die if you go more than about 3 days without water. The length of time your body can go without something has little relation to how your body acts when deprived of small amounts of that thing, or how it acts when faced with short-term, quickly corre…

Agreed. The OP conflates significance and urgency. There a many things that are extremely important, yet there is no need to attend to them at a given moment.

The OP defeats a straw man. He argues against complete deprivation of sleep, yet his conclusion is based on sleep that isn't limited at all. Proving that something can't be done without entirely is far removed from proving that we can't cut back a bit.

He might be right, but for an article intended to be persuasive, he does a bad job of supporting his thesis.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#109

Post by sp4rki »

I am guessing that the 2.5% that needs under 8 hours of sleep is composed mainly of people in the tech industry. If I sleep under 5 hours I feel a bit groggy all morning, but if I sleep more than 6 ~ 6 1/2 hours, I feel like utter shit all day long. Incredibly, I was speaking about this same topic with some fellow coworkers and 5 (counting myself) out of 7 felt the same. It might be that they're bullshitting me or maybe the statistics are wrong, but the lack of sleep (as in the people that actually need less daily sleep, not the one's that do so because of lack of 'time') seems to have a correlation with professions that require staring at a screen all daylong. Anyways, in my experience, the number of people that need less than 8 hours of sleep is hugely over 2.5% of the population.

Re: Sleep is more important than food

#110

Post by makmanalp »

tedunangst wrote: post #83
makmanalp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with this more. However, whenever I refuse to do work I get stamped on the forehead with "lazy". For example, I figure out that the homework in a class is 25% the grade but there are 25 of them, so each is worth 1%. I understand the topic so I figure that it's a waste of my 4 hours to do the work for 1% extra. Bam, "you're so lazy".

Where does this lazy stamp actually land? Surely your school doesn't actually put a little (* lazy) on your transcript? You seem to know you're not lazy and there's no way the lazy stamp is actually going to be transmitted to anybody who cares, so why do you care?

Good point. I'm not too worried. I'm rather curious as to if I start prioritizing important things that need to be done vs things that can be postponed at work, am I going to suffer? I'm guessing the answer is yes.
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