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Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
191–200 of 262 posts
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#192Great, another source of anxiety to make it harder to maintain a consistent sleep schedule.
Agree. Every month there’s some new “discovery” about what can make your life shorter. It makes me anxious and definitely doesn’t help at all. I cannot simply manage so many variables. I try to do a little bit of everything, to be in the middle point of everything as much as I can; that’s my strategy.
I think this is a framing problem. You need to let go of the outcome and focus on what you can do. You can't control the result, but you can do the best that you're capsble of in your current situation, which includes not over-extending yourself.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#193Earlier 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…
Humans age, so obviously not. Interesting analogy, though
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree - an obvious connection would be "Lower income jobs tend to have less control over their schedule", be it shift workers, hourly service jobs or similar. There also may be links to worse healthcare due to lack of insurance in those jobs. It might just be another "Poorer people don't live as long" correlation.
The source data is from the UK so it has nothing to do with the health insurance attached to specific jobs. Healthcare is covered via general taxation in the UK.
I'm aware of the UK system, having been born and lived there for over 25 years :) I didn't note that the data was from UK persons, but the general point likely remains, if not as strongly.
While true health insurance isn't attached to jobs in the same way, there's still uneven access - the town I grew up in closed it's local surgery a decade or so ago, so it's about a 30 minute drive, or over 2 hours on a rather indirect bus. Not everyone has a car, or can afford to take pretty much an entire day off work to get there. Assuming you can actually get an appointment, too. Richer areas often are better served, and richer people have better access to transport and time flexibility.
And my job came with BUPA membership, which can also make some things easier, it's not the hard barrier to any care in the same way as the American system.
And while the paper said that it corrected for Socioeconomic status, knowing the /scale/ (and possible error) in that correction relative to the claimed meaningful difference would be useful in studies like this. It feels like the sort of correction should be detailed more than just saying they did it.
But I guess the paper isn't really claiming causation, merely correlation in that it's a predictor of mortality. Though many commenters here seem to assume.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#195Ah, fuck.
My reaction was slightly more humorous:
Baymax: Oh no.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#196I 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…
For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you. It might change depending on the seasons, and you might more or less sleep depending on what you're doing at that time. Waking up at the same damn hour everyday to deal with my kid's school was an utter pain for years, and I got in a bett…
> For people failing for a long time at fixed wake-up schedules or still feeling like shit after months of doing it: giving up is fine, and it frees you to explore what works for you.
Another piece of anecdata from someone who used to be like this for years. I first noticed that regular alarm sounds annoyed me and eventually I would get used to turning it off and going back to sleep (that is until I HAVE to wake up). I then figured that if I set up an alarm with a song that I like, it would make waking up more enjoyable. Which I eventually did. The first few weeks, I enjoy waking up and in a sense look forward to it, but after a certain amount of time not only I get used to it and the cycle continue, but I also can't stand that song anymore (RIP rolling in the deep, chainsmoking, ...). I randomly stumbled upon the app sleep for Android that has a feature I didn't know I needed, putting a playlist as an alarm sound (I shuffle it of course). Now every morning, waking up is an adventure, and more often than not I end up singing along. Now months in, I haven't failed to wake up even once. And I don't have any alarms on Sunday, yet I still wake up without it.
That is with the caveat that I know I need between 7:30 and 8h of sleep, and I stop all screens by 10 (night time feature of Android is very helpful in this regard). Except my ebook reader than I use without backlight.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#197> 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…
Another hypothesis that seems plausible to me is that what we’re really measuring when looking at sleep is mental health, and mental health is a strong predictor of mortality 10-15 years into the future.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#198Earlier 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…
99% of people die from causes other than "brain gunk".
I think the parent is talking about Alzheimers, which is the accumulation of brain gunk.
Alzheimer's is the fifth-leading cause of death among Americans age 65 and older.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was referring to the size of UK Biobank. Yes, only a fraction participated in actigraphy. The same is true of imaging, blood biomarkers, etc.
Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)
#200> 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…
Another hypothesis that seems plausible to me is that what we’re really measuring when looking at sleep is mental health, and mental health is a strong predictor of mortality 10-15 years into the future.
You are already correct, but the actual factor here is trait Neuroticism (negative emotion personality dimension), which is very roughly speaking a combination of genetic factors and your ACE score. ACE score is shockingly good at predicting mortality, having one over 6 makes people die on average 20 years earlier.