The problem is the 8 hour workday for me. Getting ready for work takes an hour, commute is at least an hour by train each way, so getting enough sleep is tough.
Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
201–210 of 257 posts
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
avoid artificial light after 8 To follow this advice in my location (sunset today 6pm) should I be going to bed at 8pm? Or should I be trying to read by moonlight or something?
Haven’t heard of blue light blocker glasses. My wife and I put in red led bulbs for our nightstand lights and read paper books or magazines for about a half hour before going to sleep. I also do legs up the wall for about 10 minutes right before going to sleep and that really helps me.
The glasses are about ten bucks on Amazon. I use a pair, but I found that dimming the lights is also important.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Candles are nice. But anything is better, than ordinary LED light..
Can confirm, found ~2 beeswax candles (dunno if other materials are different brightness) is perfect for reading and getting about the house. I've been looking for a Once you get used to a couple candles carried (per person) and maybe one in the room for general illumination—which only took me a couple days—electrical multi-room illumination at night seems irritatingly bright and kinda insane. Sort of like when you c…
I found red LEDs with USB power (so <2.5W) to be pretty good. They are available for decorative purposes.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#204When I first had a kid, it was living hell. I mean, it was wonderful, and joyful (really, I'm not kidding) but waking up 5 times a night with a screaming 2 month old was effing brutal. I wore a 50 yard stare all the time, my colleagues tell me. Now, though, with an 18 month old I do a lot better - maybe even better than before having her. She still wakes up early (6:30 AM or so) BUT now that I know I absolutely, posi…
It's really hard to explain to people just how effing brutal it can be for the first several years. Sleep is so random and uneven, it can really break a parent. I have a theory that people have evolved to forget just how bad the first years are, and that's the only reason people have more than one kid, because if we did really remember it all, we'd have all have serious Post Baby Trauma Disorder and no one would ever…
Having two kids was the worst. Twice as many, still a noob parent. Poor kids, poor mum and dad. I mean we were nice to them but always exhausted.
Was lucky. Got some good advice. Listened to it. Kids and parents are more happy now.
We now have more than three and it is still way less stressful.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, maybe I’m weird, but without an alarm I can sleep 12 hours. And when I do, I feel like total shit: very tired, groggy, and a little depressed. If I sleep 5-7 hours on the otherhand, I feel much better.
This used to be me. I now realize that the reason for my grogginess was that I was totally dehydrated after my 10+ hr sleeping marathon. I now sleep with a water bottle and try to drink half of it before going to bed. When I do this I find that I will naturally wake up after about 8.5 hrs, drink the remaining half of the bottle, fall back asleep for 30 min, and then wake up feeling great. Wonder if this could work fo…
I, too, keep water by the bedside and drink some before falling asleep. However, the older I get, the less I drink, so I don't wake up every couple hours to pee. The moral of this story: don't get old.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#206I think the research behind this news is quite weak: only 9 days and not that many participants (18 men and 18 women).
I also take issue with how the article mentions that sleep is not a balance sheet, but doesn't really lay out that this was explicitly tested. They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours…
> They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong.
Well, if you take a reference of 7 hours instead of 8, it is more possible. That's kind of what I was doing when I was in high-school: sleeping 5 hours or under on week days, so a total of about 24-25 hours over 5 days; and then sleeping 12 hours or more on week-end nights. So I was sleeping as much in those 2 days, as I was in the other 5, for a total of about 50 hours / week, which is around 7 hours per day on average.
Note that I do not recommend this rhythm! Periodically during those years, I suffered from awful 3- to 5-days long periods during which I was... I don't know how to explain, like if there was a cotton wall between the world and me, I had no control over anything, everything was happening automatically, I had kind of visions of stuff that would happen not matter what I'd do, etc. I guess all of this was caused by sleep deprivation. Gee, I don't miss those periods... luckily it stopped after high-school.
But all my life, I have had huge difficulties to fall asleep at night, and also suffered from stress, which doesn't combine well with the necessities of school times, work times, and other mandatory times: I generally managed to sleep earlier when there was no need to wake up early... If I ever need to wake up at 5 or 4 AM, I won't even manage to get any sleep (or 45 minutes with 10 sweaty 180 heartbeats per minute wake-up inside).
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#207Sleep is fun, people who regularly lack it will tell you they're "just fine" but they've been lacking sleep for so long that the baseline they're comparing themselves to is already skewed. Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen. Your body knows exactly how much sleep it needs. But that's not compati…
I dunno, maybe I’m weird, but without an alarm I can sleep 12 hours. And when I do, I feel like total shit: very tired, groggy, and a little depressed. If I sleep 5-7 hours on the otherhand, I feel much better.
It's possible your body is catching up on years of chronic sleep deprivation.
If you can get several weeks of vacation with no alarm, you may find yourself sleeping 10-12 hours a night for a while, but eventually it should decrease.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, I'm the opposite. Even without the screen time or stimulation, I will fall dead asleep at 10pm, and no matter what, will wake up promptly at 4am. I feel like there really are people who have different needs.
> will wake up promptly at 4am. A possible explanation is that you've trained your body to wake at that time -- but it isn't necessarily enough/appropriate sleep.
Wouldn't there be feelings of tiredness or some kind of exhaustion? I generally feel well rested and chipper all day.
Without those feelings of tiredness, how would you know if it's training or your actual internal clock working correctly?
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#209I think the research behind this news is quite weak: only 9 days and not that many participants (18 men and 18 women).
Please support your argument with numbers. 36 participants can be plenty or can be absolutely insignificant. My partner is just in the process of getting subjects for an experiment and she's trying to estimate the required number of participants. In their case 30 participants would make the experiment useless, 40-42 would make it very powerful (significant). You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on…
36 participants is reasonable for showing some effects, and it is easy for people who've just internalized "small samples bad" to underestimate that. I'm glad you raised the point, especially since ignoring it tends to push people to respect very large studies - even when those studies use self-report on famously unreliable topics like weight and sleep.
I still find it worrying here because we know there's substantial variance in how/when people sleep, and 36 is well below "representative sample" numbers. More generally, a 36 participant, 2 week study ought to be examined pretty carefully when it contradicts a study (Akerstedt et al) on 38,000 subjects over 13 years. I can hardly blame the authors for that, though; small lab confirmations of large self-report studies are a useful and established practice.
But I don't think that's the damning part. The 9 night study span is incredibly worrying for trying to assess a long-term effect. If a value shifts over that span, is it rising steadily, rising to a new equilibrium, or reacting to a change and then returning to homeostasis?
(I do want to give credit to the study for using pre-experiment substance/diet/sleep control, and then applying individual sleep times to avoid "night owls" being a confounder. Seeing studies judge "sleep time" by making all subjects go to bed at the same hour is infuriating.)
Finally, there's strong evidence that something was unusual about study conditions. The WaPo article claims that the weekend sleepers "gained nearly three pounds over two weeks", but that's pretty much journalistic malpractice. The study actually found that all patients in the study gained weight; more weight with higher confidence for the low-sleep groups, but the groups had heavy overlap in amount gained. We can be confident that two weeks of work-schedule sleep do not cause that sort of weight gain for most people, since the reduction to the absurd there is everyone gaining ~70 lb/year indefinitely. It's the sort of number which raises pretty significant questions about how this compares to anything outside the lab setting.
Re: Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
#210Great JRE podcast episode with Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience, Founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig