Really interesting post. It is also quite counterintuitive - I personally think a lot of people are injured in sleep (including myself), and some of the postures indicated look like they could be very challenging/dangerous. Maybe the injuries come from lying on soft mattresses and a hard surface would be better as it provides more immediate feedback of bodily stress..?
Is this considered unusual? I’ve used minor variations of all of these except the sleeping on the shins posture, and I’m from Europe, not some African tribe.
I very predictably have nightmares whenever I fall asleep flat on my back, sleep paralysis kind of things. In Germanic mythology the mare is a demon who sits on your chest, so my conclusion is that I'm not alone in this.
Surprise, surprise, people are different to each other. I pretty much can only sleep on my back, no other positions allow me to fall asleep. Also, I don’t snore.
But I’m also very much in shape with no excess weight, snoring is generally correlated with ill health and being overweight.
Worth pointing out the false dichotomy here. I sleep better on my side, but I fall asleep better on my back! So ideally I'd go to bed on my back and then have someone push me over to my side once I'm sleeping...
I'm an expert snorer and can snore in any position. Probably central apnea, which only activates when most comfortable; previous sleep study showed nothing, presumably because I wasn't totally comfortable. I'd self medicate with a cpap if they were sold without a prescription. B1 with dinner/before bed helps, oddly.
Also, my previous cats preferred to sleep on my chest, so they trained me to sleep without a lot of motion. Currenrly, one cat likes to sleep on my legs and overheats them, resulting in a lot of movement at night; the other cat will only briefly visit at night, but will help me stay in place for naps on the couch.
When I was 16, I inherited a bit of money. Not a large sum at all, but enough so that I could afford a new bed, a bookshelf and some nick-nacks from my local furniture store. Being 16, I didn't exactly put much thought into how kind my new mattress would be to my back down the line, and so I managed to find the firmest mattress known to man.
At first, it was hard to sleep on, but I'm lazy, and so I kept it. That was a good decision. Today, I have a much softer mattress, and let me tell you, I'm suffering.
Whenever I go camping in the summer, where I'm not in need of any insulation, I usually opt for just a simple, thin, foam sleeping pad, and it works wonder. The first couple of nights it's usually quite rough, not uncomfortable mind you, just hard to sleep as it's not as superficially comfortable, but after the initial acclimation my back's so much better.
When I was 28 at my peak fitness days, I opted for a firm mattress believing it would strengthen me as I got used to it.
I never got used it. The slightest sound from outside would wake me. Sleeping on the side was a daily chore. I learned to sleep on my back and snore like a lion.
Switched recently a soft mattress with shoulder support. Sleep on my side like a baby.
This sounds easy to a/b test. Just sleep on the floor for a month, then your squishy mattress for a month, and document everything. (A month is just a guess, one or two weeks seems like transitional effects would dominate, hopefully after that you'd see more of the ongoing effects?)
I find this article quite insubstantial. He lists alternative sleeping positions, but no sources backing up the claim that "western sleeping positions" (whatever that is) are worse.
Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates.
Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).
I think this clause near the end was what made the article make sense to me:
> This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction
This is just one person noting in public what could be a correlation, and then all the rest (confirming correlation, establishing causation) is up to someone else!
This appears to be a journal article. Why should it have citations? This is an arena where people are supposed to be doing primary research. "I have a PhD and this is my opinion" is probably at least 20% of academics.
There is a search bar right above this article if you want to look that research up. This is some physiotherapist recording his opinion; based on field experience. I'm going out on a limb and saying none of the other researchers in the field have been writing about his experience so there isn't anything to cite.
Primary research does not include simply stating “this is my opinion” - and this article also does not consist of someone stating their opinion, it is someone claiming to describe widespread behaviors and explanations for them.
It also feels a little strange in writing. Examples:
"Figure Figure11 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow" - Of course it is without a pillow, it's a mountain gorilla! What is this clarification?
"To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a doorframe." - Would it not be better to say "you may have to hold on" or "newbies"? It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.
A pillow doesn't need to be a factory-made product that you buy at a store. Plenty of humans make pillows out of natural objects when sleeping outdoors. I can totally imagine a mountain gorilla using a chunk of wood, or even a body part of another gorilla, as a "pillow" if it makes them feel more comfortable.
Yeah im sure there are many tribespeople with pillows. It feels wierdly racist that this guy is acting like people in societies like this just live instinctually like gorillas and don't actually have the universal human trait of creating and relying on manmade tools.
He's viewing humans and gorillas as primates, not viewing tribespeople as gorillas.
Tribes people don't live instinctually. They have culture, like us. The critique here is our culture could benefit from observing how their culture does it.
The thing that makes it not racist for me is that he's clearly trying to point out that, as primates, in non-Western surroundings and when not socialized to prefer soft beds with fluffy pillows we tend to adopt similar sleeping positions as other primates do. It would be very racist if he had adopted a sneering "look at the lowly primitives" tone, but he's trying to show that these sleeping positions have helped him immensely and he's suggesting that we might research sleep positioning more as there seem to be differences in the two populations under comparison.
You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."
My dog loves pillows. But he doesn't move them. If he's laying down, and a pillow-like object is near, he'll use it. But if the sun moves, he'll move, without the pillow.
Humans are environment-changers. That’s why dogs teamed up with humans. Humans seem to spend a lot of time doing strange and seemingly useless things, like banging rocks together and looking at shiny boxes, but at the end of the day there is always extra food and the environment around humans is full of mysteriously comfortable objects.
If our dog wants to rest and a fleece or wool blanket happens to be in reach, it will pull it in position (and sometimes even fold it) in order to rest its snout on it. But admittedly it does not move the blanket substantially. I have yet to understand how it decides where to rest though. There is a lot of places and none seems to really dominate the other ones.
I have been paying more attention and ours loves head rests. So maybe they don't understand how to make or move them, he definitely prefers them. Disputing the original claim, or dogs differ too much from primates.
I have read your comment before reading the article, and at that time I have thought that you must be right.
Nevertheless, after reading the article I have seen that the clarification about the gorilla sleeping without a pillow made perfect sense in its context, because it has not been added to provide any additional information, but it was added for emphasis, in a context where the sleeping positions in modern environments were contrasted with their correspondents that are common both in non-modernized environments and for similar primates.
Moreover, I interpret his phrase "To start with" as having the same meaning as your suggestion "newbies".
Using a door frame in the beginning is indeed good practical advice for achieving the full squat position for those who are not used to it.
It did not made sense to me, because I am not a gorilla. They have different bodies. They look kinda similar in body shape, but they climb treat the way I will never be able to no matter how much I train.
So, gorila sleeping position implies exactly nothing for my sleeping position.
Funnily, as a brit, I have always had the ability to sit in a deep squat comfortably and it's not even from tons of practice. I only even realised that its unusual to be able to do and that it may be good for you when I was about 21. By which point there were many people who couldn't do it already. I certainly hadn't been practicing it throughout my teenage years.
I'm a Brit who can squat too, and I think it has quite a bit to do with not weather shoes at home and wearing "barefoot" shoes / zero-drop trainers outside. I have a hunch that it's lengthened my calf muscles and achilles tendons, which makes squatting much more comfortable. I couldn't really do it before switching to barefoot shoes.
I have never worn shoes at home, that's for sure. Not into barefoot shoes though. I'm not really sure why it is for me. If it's to do with calf muscles, I guess we could attribute it that my mother never learned how to drive and so we used to walk EVERYWHERE. And we lived in a tiny town.
Indeed. Many animals build nests. It's not a skill unique to humans at all. Finding something comfortable to rest on isn't a particularly difficult skill to master.
But that was the point... why don't gorillas make pillows then? My contention was that making a pillow is actually difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if pillows were seldom used by early humans.
You (most likely) have two comfortable potential pillows distal to your elbows...
(I don't use any of these positions, but I most commonly nap on a heated wooden floor in an insect-free environment. Oddly enough, I also support my temple on the dorsal surface of a wrist; it had never occurred to me that in addition to comfort, it keeps both ears free?)
> It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.
Lack of practice causes a "special physiological feature": ankle inflexibility. For some people it would take a significant amount of time stretching the ankles every day to recover enough ankle flexibility to squat, and that could perhaps still be insufficient, as joint mobility is established based on the range of motion used in childhood.
All the babies/toddlers I've seen (my own kids included) naturally do that "asian/slav squat" - for example to pick up toys from the ground, or when they want to rest a bit without completely sitting, right?
So at which point/age do some of us stop doing that type of squat before "use it or lose it" kicks in?
I don't think it's fair to outright dismiss it because it is not a systematic/empirical study (and the author explicitly mention that). In the case of posture, stretching & training I think there's several exercises out there that doesn't have a rigorous empirical study to back it up, yet can be explained to be good/bad from our anatomical understanding of the human body.
Well, unfortunately in this article there are claims that can be explained to be completely false from our anatomical understanding of the human body - such as the idea that it is impossible to snore with your mouth closed.
I thought the 'impossible to snore' note was because of the downwards spine position, where the soft palate cannot collapse. Not because the mouth is closed.
It is fine, indeed should be encouraged, to put some papers in the system that don't have formal data but do record common-sense observations. If people don't like them, then they can trump opinion with data in the scientific process.
That's how some steps of the science work, specifically the empirical studies. Empirical validation, falsifiability, and repeatability is all in that ball-park. But it's a part of the process and not all of it.
If that's the only thing you want to consider, sure. As a layman it's probably a good principle, and more so in engineering. But you'll have to shave off some significant works of science from history if you do that.
Next, the acceptability of journal papers without conclusive experiments varies across fields. In some fields, such as observational sciences (e.g., astronomy, ecology, sociology), observational studies are common and valuable contributions to the literature. These studies often involve collecting and analyzing data from real-world observations, surveys, or existing datasets without the need for controlled experiments. In such cases, it is perfectly acceptable to publish papers based solely on observational data.
When you say, "is not enough," the question I respond with is "enough for what?" It's fully acceptable to publish a paper with observations in order to stimulate interest and encourage further research in the area. It's not necessary for a journal to require final results.
Finally, consider some of these famous and important papers which were published as observations without conclusive results. Should they have held back and waited until conclusive results were available?
1. Edwin Hubble's "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae"
2. Albert Einstein's "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity"
> I instinctively understand and firmly believe everything mentioned in this article about sleeping is true.
Well, yes, but that's a standard quality of B.S. It's plausible, and intuitive. When you actually start trying to prove it out, though, you discover it's wrong.
True, there is a category of "no duh" scientific findings, like walking is beneficial to one's health, that do align with our intuition. But where science really shines is when the evidence points to something counterintuitive.
Even the "walking is beneficial" part is not just "duh".
I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?
And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.
> I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants"
This story is interesting, but doesn't shock me a whole lot from the perspective of losing our touch with nature, because we now have an understanding that our ancestors fluctuated between carnivory and herbivory quite a lot. If these population changes in gut bacteria can be caused in such a short span of time, it seems likely that it can also be reversed.
The poor people in my country squat when they're resting. I was taught early on as a kid that I shouldn't sit like that because that's what "poor people do".
I really regret listening to that piece of advice. As I observe my baby daughter, I realize how natural that squatting position is, and how much knee and hip mobility we really have.
Often the limiting factor is ankle mobility, as not being able to drive the knee in front of the toes means falling backwards as the center of mass never reaches mid foot.
It's why weightlifters have elevated heels, and why great squatters tend to have short femurs (and/or be short in general).
Same with walking barefeet. Now it is somewhat hip again in some areas, but not where I live. "Mum, why does this man wear no shoes?" I hear so often.
Now walking barefeet in the city is not recommended because of glass and dogshit everywhere, but through a path in the forest and over rocks it is much more fun (and healthy for my joints) without shoes. That is, if you relearned how to do it. You cannot walk barefeet, like you do with shoes. Also, if you started walking barefeet over 20, your skeleton and muscles in the feet will never really adopt again, like they would if you do it as a child. So if you have childs, let them go barefeet wherever and whenever possible (also in the snow for a short time).
Yeah I had the same response. He makes lots of anecdotal claims about tribespeople's back trouble but where's the data? It's mildly interesting nonetheless.
I'm not saying it's an either/or choice, but I'd rather trust articles written by obsessed old dude experts rather than articles written by "publish or perish" academics citing 100 other p-hacked "publish or perish" articles.
These and other anthropological elements are very well described by Esther Gokhale as the basis of her method (which has been a life changer, at least for me).
You can find more on her website or book "8 Steps to a pan-free back".
I'm skeptical that there's anything especially unhealthy about sitting at a desk even for long periods of time. What's more plausible to me is that back pain comes from having a weak back and it's more about what you're not doing, which is training your back muscles. Over the course of about a year, weight lifting eliminated a range of aches and pains I'd developed throughout adulthood, including back, wrist and knee pain. For the back it's all about deadlifts. In hindsight it seems obvious, all the muscles supporting my spine are visibly larger and demonstrably more powerful, carrying my body around is a much easier job for them now. Sinking into a padded chair after a few big lifts also feels fantastic and now feels like a perk of my job lol
I dunno. I never had chronic back or neck pain until I started working office jobs. When I was at university, I spent periods sitting at desks, but was never strapped to one for 8 hour shifts. I would sit down at a desk for max 4 hours at a time apart from during extreme crunch periods, and would spend the rest of my day walking around, lounging and chilling in different positions, excercising, etc. As soon as I started working at an office it became noticably harder to reach an over-10k step count daily, and even though I continued going to the gym and doing heavy back days, my left trap has become completely hardened up, and I've occasionally had lower back pain too during stressful times. I'm totally unable to train upper traps because they are literally like bricks. When I have a weekend where I walk and lounge a lot, or am off sick, or go on holiday, my traps feel significantly better and my workouts are better. It's a lifestyle where you are unnaturally in one position for too long that causes this.
>I'm skeptical that there's anything especially unhealthy about sitting at a desk even for long periods of time. What's more plausible to me is that back pain comes from having a weak back
I figure few habits will give you a weaker back than sitting at a desk for longer periods of time.
A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick, but supportive ergonomic chairs are part of the long term problem IMHO.
And deadlifts are not the only solution. I started out using just a backless stool and it helped a bit (can't slouch!), but what really sorted me out was using the "lumbar machine" at the gym for a couple of years. When Covid came along I couldn't go any more so I started doing "the plank" at home, that plus the "side plank" and some push ups have kept me going the last four years. And it's totally free and I can do them basically anywhere e.g. on holiday.
> A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick
I'm still fairly young so I probably shouldn't be so quick to say – maybe I'll have to eat my hat in the next decade or two – but I feel like this is also one of those "it's not the thing but how you use it" type situations. I have always used un-ergonomic fairly spartan wood chairs and stools without problem.
What I do, that I don't see everyone else do, is adjust my position a lot. Since I find the chair slightly uncomfortable, I have like a million different positions I can sit in and I rotate through them naturally throughout the day. I haven't seen any science on it but it would make sense that variety helps prevent damage caused by prolonged exposure to one position.
That might help to some degree, but I bet actually exercising your back muscles regularly will have a larger effect.
I mean I'm sure of it. It seems like common sense we've forgotten. Stress the muscles, eat a generous amount of protein, they will grow and get stronger. Do stuff that doesn't stress them as much, they will stay weak and that will lead to complications.
Similar to how the discussion around obesity has become so complicated, in a country where the #1 cause of death is heart disease. It is not complicated, obesity leads to heart disease, to reduce your risk, you must become less obese. Yet we insist on complicating the topic.
It’s crazy to think about how little
we actually know about how the human body functions- not even to say what an “optimal” sleep position might be, but even a high quality study on how different sleep positions might affect the physiology of the body. I have yet to find any real serious scientific analysis of this.
"not even to say what an “optimal” sleep position might be"
As with most things, maybe there isn't one optimal solution,as otherwise we all would have found out about it, by now and all use it?
Human bodies and minds are quite different.
So what is comfortable to one person might not work for the next person. Maybe people have pain in the back or in the neck, forcing them into other positions. People with stomach problems rather lie on their stomach. Some people people sleep alone, others together.
I know my sleeping position varies a lot and there is no single best one for me.
"Optimal" depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.
"Slept well and wake refreshed" might be one version of it, but "slept like an infant in the womb and awoke younger and healthier" would be more optimal, if currently in the realm of science fiction.
I love sleeping in the "lookout posture". I get very restful sleep. However after a couple of days it leads to a lot of pain in my back. I'm guessing some tendons get overstretched. No idea how to work around it though
I should try the reverse with the elbow outward. Seems doable. The Tibetan kneel seems a big too hardcore though :)
I have actually used that Tibetan kneel once! I was exhausted and had to sit on the floor for a while and then I just fell asleep like that. It surprised me enough that I've tried to recreate it but it seems I can only do it when I'm really tired.
Maybe it's a matter of habit and I can learn to do it if I try often enough.
I bought a very strange mattress six months ago. This isn't an advertisement -- I can't strongly recommend it -- but it's called SONU Sleep. It has a "channel" along the top that you can lower your arm into when sleeping on the side. I got it due to persistent shoulder pain from side sleeping. Gradually I've adjusted to it and am now sleeping better.
But that's an argument against my usual paleo heuristic: this sure isn't how we evolved to sleep over millions of years. I wonder if I'd sleep well in orbit.
It has been a difficult adjustment that has taken months. I've had neck and shoulder pain while learning to use it. It sure isn't for everyone. I got the firm mattress, but it is still softer than I like. And it's at a premium price that may not be worth paying if you already sleep well on a conventional bed.
Life expectancy of 53 does not usually mean nobody makes it to 60. In the early 1900s[1], life expectancy at birth in England was 53, but at the same time, as long as you survived until you were 20, your life expectancy had increased to over 60. If you lived to 50, you could expect to become 70.
To the parents point, you sort of made their point. “If you made it to x”. By having fewer older members of their population they likely had few joint problems reported overall. I would expect any reasonable study to control for this variable but a survey would not.
Life expectancy is such a consistently deceptive measurement that I often wonder why it's not been replaced. Surely there must be more useful ways of quantifying lifespans, something like a "median age of currently living people"?
Point estimates in general are deceptive. It's difficult to capture the nuance of a full distribution with a single number.
I've had some luck with upper and lower percentiles, e.g. 5 % and 95 %. These cover 9 out of 10 people, which is large enough to be meaningful, yet not so small it's difficult to estimate.
Is that true? I thought there was evidence for setrong divisions of labour as soon as agriculture came along. That brings surplus and, with it, social stratification.
A lot more people used to farm as a percentage of the population. Even in the last century, especially in communist countries where pay was low.
Small subsistence farmers were much more common. You might own a small plot, and some pigs, cows an even a horse. Or if really poor work on someone else's land. Just being around animals exposes you to many more dangers, like getting kicked or even infections from cleaning waste.
How many times do you think somebody’s penis has to be attacked by insects before preventing that becomes the main “figure of merit” for evaluating sleeping positions? I think it is not very far from 1 time.
I’m sure there are some great points in this paper but this bit of un-evidenced bit of speculation turned me off:
> It has been noted that guide dogs working in towns breathe the same pollutants as humans yet do not have asthma. Could this be because when they lie on their chests the kickback from the upper ribs keeps the corresponding vertebrae mobile, allowing the sympathetic system to work efficiently?
Or could it be one of the many other physiological differences between humans and dogs ?
I think the author notes that this is mostly a collection of anecdotal observations, but linking a primarily inflammatory disorder like asthma with musculoskeletal problems is a bit far fetched in my layman’s opinion. Sounds a bit like chiropractic quackery to me.
He lists his profession as a physiotherapist so probably crossed into the chiropractic side a bit, some of his personal photos are a little hippy-ish.
The article is also premised on one large appeal to nature (tribal people untainted by modern society do it therefore it is natural and therefore good). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
Appeal to nature is bad as a source of ultimate truth, "nature does it this way therefore it must be better." But it's good as a source of hypotheses, "nature does it this way, perhaps we should try it?" This paper seems more like the second.
I don't see the difference between those two statements absent scientific data. That's merely a useful seed of an idea, not a sufficient premise for an argument.
To add to the anecdotes, I have been sleeping on a flat rice straw tatami matt (without anything else) for 2 months. It's pretty hard and I have bruises on my ribs, but I have way less back and neck pain than before. I usually fall asleep in position similar to Figures 4 and 5 in the paper.
The reason I started doing this is that after moving to a new house I bought an expensive memory foam mattress which made my back hurt every morning.
For my entire life I slept in one of those postures ("the lookout"). I had a bunch of problems (pain in the chest, pain in the back, some problems with my knees not loaded symmetrically, my feet getting "extended" for quite a long time causing problems with Achilles). I also had a problem with restlessness -- these positions cannot be maintained for long without moving, I would be changing my position very frequently.
Couple of years ago I have injured my ACL and had to learn to sleep on my back. Now I am much happier sleeper. Now I generally do not move at all during night (I wake up exactly as I have fallen asleep and my sleep tracker tracks way less movement). All of the pains gone.
I use a very thin pillow when sleeping on my back. I find sleeping without pillow a bit uncomfortable. Although I am sure I could get used to my head being pushed back a bit, I still dislike the head just resting on the hard mattress and trying to naturally roll left/right. The pillow helps me keep my head looking straight ahead (almost vertically).
As to mattress, I prefer a mid-to-hard latex mattress with a cover.
In the article, the lookout position involves the lack of a pillow. One can imagine that the additional height of the pillow would cause you to raise your head, lower your chest, and arch your back, potentially causing the issues you reported.
That being said, this is an article of anecdotal observations by a physiotherapist - it is not the result of any kind of study.
It is really thin pure goose down pillow. Folded, it is less than 1/4in when compressed. I don't think the height of the pillow makes a huge difference.
As a back sleeper, get a pillow or cushion under your knees/legs. Otherwise the arch of your back is in constant stress when you sleep and can lead to back problems. You can guess how I know.
That doesn't sound like good advice. Your hip flexors are likely very tight/shortened, so you put a pillow underneath your knees/legs to prevent them from stretching at night and thereby make them even more shorter?
> There's no plausible reason to suppose that Tibetans or "tribesmen" have more natural sleeping positions than "civilized" (i e. White) people.
So Tibetan tribal society is likely to have exposed its members to the same level of furniture and mattress adverts as the average American or European then?
The interesting point of this article to me is not the positions but the sleeping surface. Due to my newborn I’ve been sleeping on the floor on a thin yoga mat for over three months and my back and joints feel great. The pressure from the hard ground is like stretching while you sleep. Took a few weeks to get used to it though.
I have a Japanese futon mat[1] under my bed that I roll out if I have muscle soreness. If it weren’t for my partner (who insists on sleeping in a bed) I would sleep on the floor 100% of the time. After getting used to floor sleeping I can never feel truly relaxed in a bed-I feel like the padding is putting pressure on my lumbar spine.
The text referencing Figure 2 seems to mistakenly swap the top and bottom images.
When the legs are in the reverse recovery position (fig (fig2,2, bottom), the penis lies on the lower thigh and is protected. In this position the Achilles tendon of the leading foot can be inserted in the gap between the big toe and the first lesser toe to help correct a bunion.
Note that the top picture in Figure 2 shows the Achilles tendon of the leading foot between the big toe and adjacent toe of the trailing foot. I would conclude then that the top position is actually the one that protects the penis.
Figure 1 also has the images the wrong way around, though it's harder to see because they're meant to be side-by-side. I think it's a problem with the HTML conversion.
It's odd that the paper goes to great lengths to talk about protecting your penis from insects but at the same point seems to ignore women completely - all the illustrations depict men. Having met women (shocking, I know), bust size can be a significant factor in ergonomics so it would be interesting to see how that factors into it. Also anecdotally, pregnant belly-sleepers frequently rely on cushioning and people may prefer certain sleeping positions after having given birth or suffering from certain ailments. I'm also certain that waist size (esp. obesity) may alter preferences.
It's an interesting paper but given the lack of substance this feels more like a school presentation than something you'd find in an academic journal.
> Also anecdotally, pregnant belly-sleepers frequently rely on cushioning
I mean, undergoing pregnancy is in and of itself not great for one's health (especially without modern healthcare), so I don't know how much that specific thing should be factored into healthy lifestyle choices.
In particular, pregnancy puts a lot of pressure on internal organs in a way that means one should not be surprised to have only one working sleeping position by the third trimester. At that point it's governed by Newton and another growing human, not choice.
(To be clear, I'm not saying pregnancy is a bad lifestyle choice, just that pregnancy is not kind to the human body.)
> I don't know how much that specific thing should be factored into healthy lifestyle choices.
I'm pretty sure the average human is not healthy, even in the societies analysed, especially if you factor in injuries, disabilities or pregnancy. If anything the perfectly "healthy" able body is the exception to the human experience.
So yes, if we want meaningful advice on healthier sleeping postures we should take various illnesses, disabilities, ailments and conditions into account.
At least this seems like a fair consideration if we already dedicate this much text to reducing the risk of insect bites on your penis.
Yes, I wondered about this as well. I understand why the author might not have observed women sleeping, and certainly wouldn't have photos, but one might at least mention it (especially given all the attention to the penis). Bust size & placement for sure has a significant effect on where arms can be placed, among other things.
It seems that the author's observations are primarily from various camping-equivalents, more so than home life.
To my sibling commenter, whether pregnancy is or isn't "healthy" isn't quite the point, IMO. Various stages of pregnancy do occupy a non-trivial part of many people's lifespan and significantly change the ergonomics of sleep. Given that humans have been getting pregnant for a long time, it is a big miss to not even mention that it hasn't been considered. Academic training tries to impress on most authors that they should mention what they're ignoring and why, not least to set up the citation train for the future and support grant applications.
The images for Figure 2 are reversed. Both the caption and the description in the paragraph below refer to the bottom image while describing the top one.
"Pillows are not necessary". It is but good position in sleep depends on an individual itself. Some people find pillows essential for comfort and proper spinal alignment
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadBut I’m also very much in shape with no excess weight, snoring is generally correlated with ill health and being overweight.
Also, my previous cats preferred to sleep on my chest, so they trained me to sleep without a lot of motion. Currenrly, one cat likes to sleep on my legs and overheats them, resulting in a lot of movement at night; the other cat will only briefly visit at night, but will help me stay in place for naps on the couch.
At first, it was hard to sleep on, but I'm lazy, and so I kept it. That was a good decision. Today, I have a much softer mattress, and let me tell you, I'm suffering.
Whenever I go camping in the summer, where I'm not in need of any insulation, I usually opt for just a simple, thin, foam sleeping pad, and it works wonder. The first couple of nights it's usually quite rough, not uncomfortable mind you, just hard to sleep as it's not as superficially comfortable, but after the initial acclimation my back's so much better.
I never got used it. The slightest sound from outside would wake me. Sleeping on the side was a daily chore. I learned to sleep on my back and snore like a lion.
Switched recently a soft mattress with shoulder support. Sleep on my side like a baby.
Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates.
Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).
> This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction
This is just one person noting in public what could be a correlation, and then all the rest (confirming correlation, establishing causation) is up to someone else!
"Figure Figure11 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow" - Of course it is without a pillow, it's a mountain gorilla! What is this clarification?
"To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a doorframe." - Would it not be better to say "you may have to hold on" or "newbies"? It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.
Tribes people don't live instinctually. They have culture, like us. The critique here is our culture could benefit from observing how their culture does it.
You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."
Nevertheless, after reading the article I have seen that the clarification about the gorilla sleeping without a pillow made perfect sense in its context, because it has not been added to provide any additional information, but it was added for emphasis, in a context where the sleeping positions in modern environments were contrasted with their correspondents that are common both in non-modernized environments and for similar primates.
Moreover, I interpret his phrase "To start with" as having the same meaning as your suggestion "newbies".
Using a door frame in the beginning is indeed good practical advice for achieving the full squat position for those who are not used to it.
So, gorila sleeping position implies exactly nothing for my sleeping position.
Funny old world.
That doesn't follow at all. Gorillas are well known for their habit of making nests. Making pillows isn't difficult.
(I don't use any of these positions, but I most commonly nap on a heated wooden floor in an insect-free environment. Oddly enough, I also support my temple on the dorsal surface of a wrist; it had never occurred to me that in addition to comfort, it keeps both ears free?)
Lack of practice causes a "special physiological feature": ankle inflexibility. For some people it would take a significant amount of time stretching the ankles every day to recover enough ankle flexibility to squat, and that could perhaps still be insufficient, as joint mobility is established based on the range of motion used in childhood.
So at which point/age do some of us stop doing that type of squat before "use it or lose it" kicks in?
That's how science works. Show sources/data/experiments or gtfo
It is fine, indeed should be encouraged, to put some papers in the system that don't have formal data but do record common-sense observations. If people don't like them, then they can trump opinion with data in the scientific process.
If that's the only thing you want to consider, sure. As a layman it's probably a good principle, and more so in engineering. But you'll have to shave off some significant works of science from history if you do that.
You can read more about those steps at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
A theory is also a contribution to a field as long as it tested (not necessarily in the same publication).
Even an observation to a field can be a contribution if it helps people generate new theories and then test them.
Next, the acceptability of journal papers without conclusive experiments varies across fields. In some fields, such as observational sciences (e.g., astronomy, ecology, sociology), observational studies are common and valuable contributions to the literature. These studies often involve collecting and analyzing data from real-world observations, surveys, or existing datasets without the need for controlled experiments. In such cases, it is perfectly acceptable to publish papers based solely on observational data.
When you say, "is not enough," the question I respond with is "enough for what?" It's fully acceptable to publish a paper with observations in order to stimulate interest and encourage further research in the area. It's not necessary for a journal to require final results.
Finally, consider some of these famous and important papers which were published as observations without conclusive results. Should they have held back and waited until conclusive results were available?
1. Edwin Hubble's "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae"
2. Albert Einstein's "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity"
3. Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"
From my perspective, the way I see your comment is this: give me scientific evidence that walking is beneficial to my health.
We lose our identity when we disconnect from Nature. I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants": https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-t...
That's where we are.
Well, yes, but that's a standard quality of B.S. It's plausible, and intuitive. When you actually start trying to prove it out, though, you discover it's wrong.
True, there is a category of "no duh" scientific findings, like walking is beneficial to one's health, that do align with our intuition. But where science really shines is when the evidence points to something counterintuitive.
I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?
And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.
This story is interesting, but doesn't shock me a whole lot from the perspective of losing our touch with nature, because we now have an understanding that our ancestors fluctuated between carnivory and herbivory quite a lot. If these population changes in gut bacteria can be caused in such a short span of time, it seems likely that it can also be reversed.
I really regret listening to that piece of advice. As I observe my baby daughter, I realize how natural that squatting position is, and how much knee and hip mobility we really have.
It's why weightlifters have elevated heels, and why great squatters tend to have short femurs (and/or be short in general).
Now walking barefeet in the city is not recommended because of glass and dogshit everywhere, but through a path in the forest and over rocks it is much more fun (and healthy for my joints) without shoes. That is, if you relearned how to do it. You cannot walk barefeet, like you do with shoes. Also, if you started walking barefeet over 20, your skeleton and muscles in the feet will never really adopt again, like they would if you do it as a child. So if you have childs, let them go barefeet wherever and whenever possible (also in the snow for a short time).
[1]https://www.csp.org.uk/frontline/article/thank-you-csp
You can find more on her website or book "8 Steps to a pan-free back".
I figure few habits will give you a weaker back than sitting at a desk for longer periods of time.
A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick, but supportive ergonomic chairs are part of the long term problem IMHO.
And deadlifts are not the only solution. I started out using just a backless stool and it helped a bit (can't slouch!), but what really sorted me out was using the "lumbar machine" at the gym for a couple of years. When Covid came along I couldn't go any more so I started doing "the plank" at home, that plus the "side plank" and some push ups have kept me going the last four years. And it's totally free and I can do them basically anywhere e.g. on holiday.
I'm still fairly young so I probably shouldn't be so quick to say – maybe I'll have to eat my hat in the next decade or two – but I feel like this is also one of those "it's not the thing but how you use it" type situations. I have always used un-ergonomic fairly spartan wood chairs and stools without problem.
What I do, that I don't see everyone else do, is adjust my position a lot. Since I find the chair slightly uncomfortable, I have like a million different positions I can sit in and I rotate through them naturally throughout the day. I haven't seen any science on it but it would make sense that variety helps prevent damage caused by prolonged exposure to one position.
I mean I'm sure of it. It seems like common sense we've forgotten. Stress the muscles, eat a generous amount of protein, they will grow and get stronger. Do stuff that doesn't stress them as much, they will stay weak and that will lead to complications.
Similar to how the discussion around obesity has become so complicated, in a country where the #1 cause of death is heart disease. It is not complicated, obesity leads to heart disease, to reduce your risk, you must become less obese. Yet we insist on complicating the topic.
https://bldgblog.com/2007/02/sleep-labs-of-the-soviet-empire...
As with most things, maybe there isn't one optimal solution,as otherwise we all would have found out about it, by now and all use it?
Human bodies and minds are quite different.
So what is comfortable to one person might not work for the next person. Maybe people have pain in the back or in the neck, forcing them into other positions. People with stomach problems rather lie on their stomach. Some people people sleep alone, others together.
I know my sleeping position varies a lot and there is no single best one for me.
"Slept well and wake refreshed" might be one version of it, but "slept like an infant in the womb and awoke younger and healthier" would be more optimal, if currently in the realm of science fiction.
I should try the reverse with the elbow outward. Seems doable. The Tibetan kneel seems a big too hardcore though :)
Maybe it's a matter of habit and I can learn to do it if I try often enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024260 Sept 19, 2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531484 Aug 20, 2022
But that's an argument against my usual paleo heuristic: this sure isn't how we evolved to sleep over millions of years. I wonder if I'd sleep well in orbit.
> I tried to carry out surveys to collect evidence but they were meaningless, as tribespeople give you the answer they think you want.
Could they simply have higher thresholds for complaining?
Presumably they're also, on average, younger than "civilised" peoples. Life expectancy for an Amazonian Tribe was just 53 years. https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/how-to-eat-like-an-amazo...
Muscle and joint issues are a symptom of aging. If nobody's making it to 60, then aging really isn't the same issue.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-...
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[1]: Not counting the years of the Spanish flu!
I've had some luck with upper and lower percentiles, e.g. 5 % and 95 %. These cover 9 out of 10 people, which is large enough to be meaningful, yet not so small it's difficult to estimate.
I.e. the conclusion that people there don't usually live past 60 seems like a fallacy.
> It has been noted that guide dogs working in towns breathe the same pollutants as humans yet do not have asthma. Could this be because when they lie on their chests the kickback from the upper ribs keeps the corresponding vertebrae mobile, allowing the sympathetic system to work efficiently?
Or could it be one of the many other physiological differences between humans and dogs ?
I think the author notes that this is mostly a collection of anecdotal observations, but linking a primarily inflammatory disorder like asthma with musculoskeletal problems is a bit far fetched in my layman’s opinion. Sounds a bit like chiropractic quackery to me.
The article is also premised on one large appeal to nature (tribal people untainted by modern society do it therefore it is natural and therefore good). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
What are you talking about, Willis?
https://www.webmd.com/pets/cats/asthma-symptoms-cats
The reason I started doing this is that after moving to a new house I bought an expensive memory foam mattress which made my back hurt every morning.
Couple of years ago I have injured my ACL and had to learn to sleep on my back. Now I am much happier sleeper. Now I generally do not move at all during night (I wake up exactly as I have fallen asleep and my sleep tracker tracks way less movement). All of the pains gone.
As to mattress, I prefer a mid-to-hard latex mattress with a cover.
That being said, this is an article of anecdotal observations by a physiotherapist - it is not the result of any kind of study.
There's no plausible reason to suppose that Tibetans or "tribesmen" have more natural sleeping positions than "civilized" (i e. White) people.
So Tibetan tribal society is likely to have exposed its members to the same level of furniture and mattress adverts as the average American or European then?
The porters shown in the article are "camping", so to speak, i.e. not in their typical sleeping postures.
[1] https://www.futonbedsfromjapan.com/
When the legs are in the reverse recovery position (fig (fig2,2, bottom), the penis lies on the lower thigh and is protected. In this position the Achilles tendon of the leading foot can be inserted in the gap between the big toe and the first lesser toe to help correct a bunion.
Note that the top picture in Figure 2 shows the Achilles tendon of the leading foot between the big toe and adjacent toe of the trailing foot. I would conclude then that the top position is actually the one that protects the penis.
It's an interesting paper but given the lack of substance this feels more like a school presentation than something you'd find in an academic journal.
I mean, undergoing pregnancy is in and of itself not great for one's health (especially without modern healthcare), so I don't know how much that specific thing should be factored into healthy lifestyle choices.
In particular, pregnancy puts a lot of pressure on internal organs in a way that means one should not be surprised to have only one working sleeping position by the third trimester. At that point it's governed by Newton and another growing human, not choice.
(To be clear, I'm not saying pregnancy is a bad lifestyle choice, just that pregnancy is not kind to the human body.)
I'm pretty sure the average human is not healthy, even in the societies analysed, especially if you factor in injuries, disabilities or pregnancy. If anything the perfectly "healthy" able body is the exception to the human experience.
So yes, if we want meaningful advice on healthier sleeping postures we should take various illnesses, disabilities, ailments and conditions into account.
At least this seems like a fair consideration if we already dedicate this much text to reducing the risk of insect bites on your penis.
It seems that the author's observations are primarily from various camping-equivalents, more so than home life.
To my sibling commenter, whether pregnancy is or isn't "healthy" isn't quite the point, IMO. Various stages of pregnancy do occupy a non-trivial part of many people's lifespan and significantly change the ergonomics of sleep. Given that humans have been getting pregnant for a long time, it is a big miss to not even mention that it hasn't been considered. Academic training tries to impress on most authors that they should mention what they're ignoring and why, not least to set up the citation train for the future and support grant applications.
As a bonus, in that position, the penis is protected from instects.
Did that little observation, erm, stand out to anyone else?