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

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

#181

Post by xeromal »

lostlogin wrote: post #83
devmor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes A second child would help with that too.

Sure but I doubt lack of sleep effects mortality greatly in childbearing years. Assuming you make it to 40-50, that's it. Now you can die whenever and have succeeded

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

#182

Post by willy_k »

deprecative wrote: post #35
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…

Just as a secondary data point. Without medication I have about a 32:12 hour cycle. Up for at least 30 hours and sleeping for about 12. I can function on 5 but I'm grumpy about it for a while. Always been that way. Completely inverted as well. Up all night and my body tries to convince me to sleep during the day but I'm just not able to for another twelve hours. I got fired from several jobs because of it. My folks w…

Have you tried magnesium l-threonate, sub-milligram melatonin, or CBN? The first two have been very effective for me and the latter seems promising, but I don’t have that much trouble getting to sleep so I’m curious if they’re effective for someone with real difficulties.

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

#183

Post by seer »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #88
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…

I did that for years with jobs that required it and didn’t find that worked for me.

I think I effectively switched from a night owl to an early bird by having something I _really_ wanted to do in the morning that was actually physical (martial arts classes).

I remember the exact day my body switched - I was going in the early morning and my body was not approving of my initiative. Every morning was hell - but then one morning early spring we had a training outside - sunrise, early leaves on the trees in the park, we all got quite sweaty some of the guys started to take our tops off and it looked like a scene from a martial arts movie. I remember thinking this looks so cool - we’re training like our forefather used to.

Next day I woke up exact time I needed no grogginess whatsoever. Have been an early bird ever since, almost 10 years now.

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

#184

Post by seer »

fastball wrote: post #167

My problem with regular sleep is that the sum of "good night sleep" + "energy for the day" is > 24 hours. Realistically I think it is about 26 hours on average. If I sleep for a normal amount (7-8 hours) I will generally have about 18 hours of energy. So if I just sleep when I'm tired my schedule is constantly shifting. If I go to bed when not tired I just stair at the ceiling for hours, which feels like a waste.

You might need stronger environmental queues for your body to wake up. The body has both internal and external data to know when you have to wake up - lights, noise levels etc.

If you set up your bedroom “too well” - quiet, light blocking roller blinds etc, then your body can only rely on the internal clock.

I used to have that but since moving to another place without those “niceties” suddenly my body quite easily finds “the correct time” every day.

Also you can experiment with this on long flights to get rid of jet lag. After I land, if I spend the first night drinking and fall asleep, I effectively ruin my internal clock for the night, and then the body has only the environmental queues. Wake up in the morning and my clock is effectively reset. Might not feel great for the day but suffer zero jet lag as I start waking up in the morning at the “correct” time even though I’ve flown halfway across the planet.

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

#185

Post by jdietrich »

geysersam wrote: post #19
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out. Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved. Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep" It's difficult to blame people for emoti…

It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"

Also: "people in poor health don't sleep well". That's really hard to fully control for, because a lot of problems will affect mortality at sub-clinical levels that don't satisfy diagnostic criteria and won't appear on your medical records.

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

#186

Post by baxtr »

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…

FWIW it’s mentioned in the study explicitly as a limitation:

> There are several limitations in this study. First, the single week of data collected for each individual provides only a snapshot of their sleep–wake patterns, and future work should collect sleep–wake data over a longer timeframe and include multiple weekend-weekday transitions. It is nevertheless interesting that even a snapshot of sleep behaviors is predictive of mortality for a follow-up period of several years.

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

#187

Post by princearthur »

flemhans wrote: post #172

I sleep when I feel tired and wake up when my body naturally wakes up (never an alarm). However it results in irregularity, although somewhat aligning with a 28-hour cycle. I wonder if that's good or bad.

If you can't help it, this is called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder (N24SWD) [1]. If it's just because you're not exposed to natural light a whole lot, circadian drift is "normal," though my recollection is that ~25 hours is more common. I guess it gets diagnosed if and when you complain to a doctor that you can't help it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep–wake_disorde...

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

#188

Post by sho_hn »

benrapscallion wrote: post #72
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…

That’s because this is in UK Biobank, a cohort of >500K Brits and collecting actually in such a large cohort is a miracle, let alone for multiple days. All thanks to the people who volunteered into the study. Would it be nice to have even more? Sure. But at that scale, patterns start to emerge.

Note the study had 60977 samples, not >500K.

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

#189

Post by willy_k »

vundercind wrote: post #129
deergomoo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you still get noticeable REM sleep with the THC? In my own experience, albiet with higher dosage and smoked so significantly shorter half life, is that I have subjectively instant sleep latency but I do not dream (unless I take magnesium, in which case I have anxiety-type dreams that I can remember very brief flashed of). Do you notice anything in the morning, like maybe a dull sort of haze?

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

#190

Post by styyyaaa »

kitchi wrote: post #151
styyyaaa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Any statistics buffs here who can tell me: Is 500k brits for 1 week as good as 5k brits for 100 weeks. Effectively with so much data aren't you getting a superposition anyway.

A superposition of? In statistical mechanics there's a concept of "ensemble average" and its provable that if you have a system, the average state of the system over say a 100 realisations ("ensemble average") run for 1 second each, is equal to the the average of one system run for a 100 seconds - under some assumptions of course. I don't know enough a about human biology to make a statement about whether any of thos…

I mean the data lacks any person's sleep history, but if there is a cohort of bad sleepers, as a group you get a collective pseudo-history (because altough study is done at the same time they are in different life stages) that is no-one's history but might track the average well for that cohort AND take into consideration more than a week.

In the similar way sampling the height of 1000 of 1M people will give you a good estimate of the average.

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