Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

academic.oup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 262 posts

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#121

Post by vundercind »

dmurray wrote: post #48
noduerme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I've often thought that my actual rhythm is for a 25-26 hour day. I was going to write that but it seemed like too much to explain. As I go to bed later and later, eventually I find myself awake past sunrise, which is usually the day when I'll intentionally have a short sleep and snap back to an early bedtime that night. Kids would definitely screw up this aspect of my lifestyle lol. But kids give you immortalit…

Experiments where people aren't told what time it is end up with them gravitating towards a 25-26 hour day. So you're totally normal. Wikipedia [0] criticises these experiments and says they didn't account for electric light, which apparently lengthens the cycle. So to rephrase, people with any access whatsoever to electric light favour a 25-26 hour day. You're still totally normal, but it explains you may have bette…

I actually experimented with that. I allowed myself two candles, which I found was enough to read by and plenty for navigating my house.

Soon, all night time electric lighting seemed batshit crazy. Dozens of times too bright. Of course we all can’t fucking sleep. It’s so wildly much brighter than necessary.

I gave it up after a few weeks because it’s pretty much impossible to keep up if you’re ever around other people in the evening (and I have a family, so…) and they’re not entirely on-board, or just need to get stuff done at night because life is busy (again: I have a family) and everything about modern scheduling and activities assumes you can do things for hours after sun-down.

But, the experience did convince me that 95% of “night owls” and serious trouble sleeping are just the obvious and natural consequence of crazy-bright nighttime lighting and hyper-stimulating electronic home entertainment (which all also emits light, so I was shunning that stuff after dark too during my experiment). We have a sleeplessness epidemic? Gee I wonder if it’s because we light up our houses like a carnival and then put a world’s fair x100 at our finger tips. Like, yes, of course it’s that.

I’ve since discovered that low-dose weed gummies also get the job done with no side effects (aside from allowing me an hour or so of giggly TV watching right before bed, if I want it—oh no, what a tragedy), for me, and are far more compatible with modern life. Kinda lame to have to medicate my way out of the human body and mind of course not being able to cope with what we all do to them after dark, through.

I’ve used the analogy on here before, but imagine some 18th century emperor or king complained to his physician that he’d been lighting up his palace and grounds every night as bright possible and hosting a weeks-long 24/7 festival featuring the world’s finest entertainers (including the rather lewd sorts), intellectuals, travelers and philosophers, jesters and players, and, well, for some reason he’s having trouble falling asleep at a decent hour. LOL fucking yeah, dude, no wonder.

But we do that and then go “man I wonder if maybe I need a better pillow or to get more vitamin D” or whatever. Seriously?

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#122

Post by rgrieselhuber »

devmor wrote: post #60
tayo42 wrote: post #49

After having a kid Ive wondered how all these sleep disruption means you'll die studies could actually be true. You'd think evolution would have taken care of it at some point

As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes. If you survive long enough to make sure your kid reaches maturity, that's all that matters there. Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.

Sure it can. Knowledge, skills, and wisdom passed on to children and grandchildren well into adulthood significantly increases their chances of successfully passing on their genes to future generations, attract quality mates, and reduce stressors that can be passed down through subsequent generations.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#123

Post by ttoinou »

thimabi wrote: post #87

I found the best way to ensure sleep regularity is by having a fixed wake-up time. If you don’t have one and you begin to set your alarm clock to early hours, the first weeks doing so will feel like hell. But eventually all will be worth it. The sleepiness during the day will disappear and, at night, your body will naturally want to get some rest early. Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise…

Have you ever heard the saying “correlation is not causation” ? Couldnt it be that you already had a good enough health to push you to adopt a better sleep schedule ?

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#124

Post by styyyaaa »

foota wrote: post #30
neom wrote: post #2

Interesting, I have a DEC2 mutation and don't need much sleep, but I do sleep very consistently. When I was first working through this discovery, I asked the dr how it was that people who have this have no adverse effects when folks always say not sleeping long enough is bad for your health and he said "well, we don't really know that's true" and kinda shrugged it off.

I realize this is far off, but I'm hoping that someday I can get gene therapy to get this.

The assumption is what you do when awake those extra hours is more productive (or fun of whatever you are aiming for...) than asleep.

Sleeping you has the disadvantage it cannot keep score. Wake you has "I completed X today and Y yesterday". Advocate for sleeping you!

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#127

Post by tomcam »

thimabi wrote: post #87

I found the best way to ensure sleep regularity is by having a fixed wake-up time. If you don’t have one and you begin to set your alarm clock to early hours, the first weeks doing so will feel like hell. But eventually all will be worth it. The sleepiness during the day will disappear and, at night, your body will naturally want to get some rest early. Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise…

That method nearly wrecked my life and didn’t change my sleep patterns

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#128

Post by Calavar »

TZubiri wrote: post #102
Calavar wrote: post #13

> We aimed to assess the relationship of objectively measured sleep regularity with risk for all-cause mortality, and mortality from cardiometabolic causes and cancer, in a large cohort (N = 60 977) who wore accelerometer devices for 1 week. They look at one week of sleep data and then check mortality records about 10 to 15 years later. It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death pot…

"Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality" You got it. "but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion" This is always the case unless you assume reality is as big as what you can perceive. "I'd really like to see the same study with longe…

Every deductive leap comes with uncertainty in establishing a causal chain. I don't I'm being overly reductive about the nature of evidence when I say that.

There is a specific question that needs to be addressed: With a one week window into sleep habits, are we selecting for people who are chronically poor sleepers, with those poor sleep habits leading to disease?

OR

Are we selecting for people who are chronically ill for other reasons and those chronic illnesses prevent them from getting regular sleep?

For example, people with sleep apnea have terrible sleep, and they have lower life expectancy than the general population. However, the cause of that lower life expectancy is not the poor quality of sleep; it's the cardiac effects of abnormal breathing over a long period of time.

If a person with decades of excellent sleep habits developed sleep apnea in the last 5 to 10 years of their life, the accelerometer will capture their irregular sleep and the death registry will capture their early deaths. That doesn't mean poor sleep habits killed them.

There are many other such chronic illnesses that can be confounded this way. Heart failure. Obstructive lung disease. Dementia. All can lead to irregular sleep. Add them together and you've captured a large segment of the population with ~10 years left to live.

The authors address this relationship in the conclusion and supplementary materials, but they appear to approach it entirely from the framework of poor sleep being causative of cardiovascular disease. Well yes, there's evidence that poor sleep can cause cardiovascular disease, but it's also well established (as I explained) that it can happen the other way around. If you want to cement a full chain of causality, you need a longer time window. Capture a young population with a low burden of chronic disease, show that poor sleep habits came first (i.e. within a certain age window), then cardiovascular disease, and then shorter lifespan. That would be the ideal data, even if difficult to acquire.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#129

Post by vundercind »

deergomoo wrote: post #77
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone whose natural sleep cycle seems to be closer to 26-28 hours, and whose preferred sleeping hours in a 24-hour cycle are 6am to 2-3pm... I commend you. Sincerely, someone forced into a "normal" schedule by kids school start times and, well, everything else too, I suppose.

I really hoped I’d grow out of wanting to sleep ~3-11am but it’s just never happened. No matter how tired I am during the day, I get a second wind around 8pm and have to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour during the work week because I won’t get sleepy, even if I stay away from screens. Unfortunately I really enjoy night time, so I regularly completely fail at that task. I can’t remember the last time I w…

Methods that work for me, a lifelong “natural” (lol, nope) night owl:

1) No nighttime lighting brighter than a single-digit count of candles. No glowing screens after dark, either. Within a couple days I was no longer a “night owl”. Go figure, it was all fake, all those years.

2) A few mg of THC edible 90 minutes before I want to be asleep.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#130

Post by computator »

Whenever I see a study about something that affects longevity, I want to know how much of a difference it makes expressed as a number I can relate to. If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, would you live 18 hours longer on average, or 1.5 months, or 5 years? This would be a way to decide how much attention and effort one should to devote to the numerous studies about things that affect mortality.
Post reply on HN