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How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

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Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#101

Post by j-kidd »

tomflack wrote: post #91
j-kidd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to ancient Chinese wisdom, a day is divided into twelve 2-hours slices, and one is supposed to be: - falling asleep during the slice from 9pm to 11pm - remaining sound asleep during the slices from 11pm to 1pm and from 1am to 3am - waking up during the slice from 3am to 5am

I feel if this ancient Chinese wisdom were accurate, you could substantiate it with some kind of study, and the "Ancient Chinese wisdom" part would be merely an amusing anecdote relevant to the data.

Feel free to get one of this http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/黄帝内经 and knock yourself out.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#103

Post by LatvjuAvs »

And we have come to age when we stop trusting our bodies. We need papers and researchers saying how much we should sleep, how to sleep best and when not to sleep.

We stopped trusting in ourselves what to eat, how to sleep, how to walk and how to breathe, and when to go and relieve ourselves.

Everything must be boxed and timed.

Disconnected we are.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#104

Post by primitur »

btilly wrote: post #99
coldtea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ιf you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away. IIRC, the "disorder" is mostly a psychological thing, not something concrete. And it's uptick can also be ascribed to the willingness of more doctors to diagnose something where there was nothing before (to assist in selling some drugs, among other things). So the two situations you describe here are not at all contradictory.

I'll bet you $1000 that I've read more about ADHD than you have in the last year. Dismissing a genetically transmitted brain chemistry problem as "mostly a psychological thing" is extremely unhelpful.

Genetically transmitted brain chemistry may well be involved, but sleep is necessary for all kinds of brain chemistry, too.

You can't have one without the other, perhaps .. perhaps, the reason we have the genetic scenario now, is precisely because lack-of-sleep, or at least sleep-culture-effecting-brains, has been an environmental factor over the period of our evolution where such things mattered.

I think the entire point is, if sleep helps you focus, then for goodness sake: get the proper amount of sleep.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#105

Post by mason240 »

coldtea wrote: post #96
btilly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much symptoms of what is characterized as "lack of executive function" or "ADD" can be relieved just by getting sufficient sleep. If you're a person who reads the description of ADD and says that it sounds like you, maybe a lot. If you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away.

> Ιf you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away. IIRC, the "disorder" is mostly a psychological thing, not something concrete. And it's uptick can also be ascribed to the willingness of more doctors to diagnose something where there was nothing before (to assist in selling some drugs, among other things). So the two situations you describe here are not at all contradictory.

The good old "it's over diagnosed so it must be made up" argument.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#106

Post by nostrademons »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #94
nostrademons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are very different, isn't the conclusion there to figure out how much sleep you need to function effectively and ignore all the people who tell you how much you should need to function effectively? This is something you can measure and experiment with directly, and your results will be a lot more personally relevant than a blog post on the Internet.

I need to point this out -- the question of how much sleep I need to function effectively, and how my functioning varies with differing amounts of sleep, is definitely something I can measure. It is not at all something I can experiment with directly, unless you believe that sleep under the effects of sleep-inducing drugs is equivalent to natural sleep (it isn't, in my experience).

You can shorten the amount of sleep or wake up at different points in your sleep cycle - just use an alarm clock. You'll probably want to separate out these effects and control for each independently - I find I feel much more rested with 6.5 hours of sleep than with 7 (and perform better on tasks), because the latter interrupts me in the middle of a sleep cycle.

You can't really lengthen your natural sleep cycle without conflating things with drugs, but I've found that personally I can sleep up to 11 hours if I let myself (although there may be another conflating factor as I tend to sleep more when I'm learning something hard).

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#107

Post by coldtea »

mason240 wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ιf you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away. IIRC, the "disorder" is mostly a psychological thing, not something concrete. And it's uptick can also be ascribed to the willingness of more doctors to diagnose something where there was nothing before (to assist in selling some drugs, among other things). So the two situations you describe here are not at all contradictory.

The good old "it's over diagnosed so it must be made up" argument.

By the very definition of what you said, if it's "over diagnosed" then in the majority of cases it IS made up. That's what "over diagnosed" means: more diagnoses than actual incidents.

I didn't say it's entirely made up. Some people might legitimately have it. But I'm pretty sure from what I've read that a large majority of them do not. To quote Wikipedia:

"""In the United Kingdom, diagnosis is based on quite a narrow set of symptoms, and about 0.5–1% of children are thought to have attention or hyperactivity problems. The United States used a much broader definition of the term ADHD. As a result, up to 10% of children in the U.S. were described as having ADHD."""

I read those numbers, knowing how the medical "industry" works -- and how societal, work/life balance, dietary and other such issues in the US are fast to be characterized as "diseases" in need of medication -- with huge grains of salt.

100% more cases in the US? Sounds like a good deal of over-diagnosing the non existent to me.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#108

Post by btilly »

coldtea wrote: post #107
mason240 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good old "it's over diagnosed so it must be made up" argument.

By the very definition of what you said, if it's "over diagnosed" then in the majority of cases it IS made up. That's what "over diagnosed" means: more diagnoses than actual incidents. I didn't say it's entirely made up. Some people might legitimately have it. But I'm pretty sure from what I've read that a large majority of them do not. To quote Wikipedia: """In the United Kingdom, diagnosis is based on quite a narro…

That's what "over diagnosed" means: more diagnoses than actual incidents.

No. "Over diagnosed" simply means that it is diagnosed when it shouldn't be. There is nothing there about how frequently it is correctly diagnosed. If the true prevalence is 6% and 9% of kids are given the diagnosis, then it is over-diagnosed. See http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/prevalence.html for the geographic variation on the diagnosis rate. Clearly there are places where it is over-diagnosed. There are others where it doesn't seem to be.

I do not know why the ICD-10 has different criteria. The US classification is broader on that because a much wider variety of symptoms looks the same in brain scans, and reacts the same way to medication.

Regardless, before medication parent-teacher conferences were elaborations on the theme that my son required more attention than the rest of the class combined, and yet still was behind everyone else on a long list of things (starting with handwriting skills) despite his obvious brilliance. After medication we simply get a note that he is a joy in the classroom, and she wishes that other kids had half of his curiosity.

Note, he gets plenty of sleep, eats well, has carefully controlled TV, etc. (My definition of carefully controlled = no TV, under 4 hours/week of movies. The movies that he chooses are documentaries more often than not.)

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#109

Post by btilly »

primitur wrote: post #104
btilly wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bet you $1000 that I've read more about ADHD than you have in the last year. Dismissing a genetically transmitted brain chemistry problem as "mostly a psychological thing" is extremely unhelpful.

Genetically transmitted brain chemistry may well be involved, but sleep is necessary for all kinds of brain chemistry, too. You can't have one without the other, perhaps .. perhaps, the reason we have the genetic scenario now, is precisely because lack-of-sleep, or at least sleep-culture-effecting-brains, has been an environmental factor over the period of our evolution where such things mattered. I think the entire…

You have completely missed the point.

Sleep is good. Get sleep. But people who actually have ADHD do not simply lack sleep. End. Of. Story.

Your speculation of lack-of-sleep being the cause of ADHD is laughably wrong. If it were true, then my son wouldn't have the disorder.

Re: How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

#110

Post by tomflack »

j-kidd wrote: post #101
tomflack wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel if this ancient Chinese wisdom were accurate, you could substantiate it with some kind of study, and the "Ancient Chinese wisdom" part would be merely an amusing anecdote relevant to the data.

Feel free to get one of this http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/黄帝内经 and knock yourself out.

While 我一点儿回看中文 I hope you appreciate that a poorly referenced Chinese wikipedia article isn't really a contribution to this conversation.
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