How about — instead of making sleep more "efficient" — we engineer our lives to provide decent amount of sleep and not stress over having more and more of the waking hours to do stuff.
After all, we live in the age of abundance.
(Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
How about engineering the society/civilization(?)/world so that "all can" work hard (8hrs), rest hard (8hrs), live hard (8hrs) and die hard when the eventuality arrives?
Don't know why you got downvoted for this. My whole life I have been shaving my sleep time to try to cram more of what I want to do into my day. I used to wake up an extra couple of hours before school so I could squeeze in extra gaming time. On holiday I regularly sacrifice sleep to extreme levels to do more.
This isn't some kind of box ticking behaviour with its roots originating from toxic hustle culture, simply the adverse effects of sleep deprivation don't outweigh my enjoyment of things. And when my sleep debt finally catches up with me, I sleep my heart's delight.
From experience, I have friends who share in my world view and threshold for sacrificing sleep for pleasure and I have met people who think are mortified by this behaviour. My immediate family are all willing to sacrifice sleep on the drop of the hat notably - waking up at the crack of dawn to send/accompany someone to the airport is simply modus operandi. My wife is very keen to protect her sleep on the flipside and so when we travel together our decision frameworks need to accommodate both MOs
Ironically sometimes I'm most protective of my sleep during the weekly grind (and also training for fitness) because then my performance matters. If my only short term downside is discomfort from fatigue, I'll regularly trade that for more "uptime"
I hear you, but the thing is, what do you achieve by "cramming" more "doing" in? Do you also switch to those nutrient rich powder meals to save an extra hour or two prepping and eating food too?
Are not all of those things that could be optimized away an opportunity to let yourself feel, relax and simply be?
The examples you bring up (like waking early to do something for someone you care about) has nothing to do with the topic of engineering for consistently reduced sleep, imho.
I never said we couldn't and I did not refer only to work: it's still the wrong goal in my mind.
"Fun" is usually defined as something providing instant gratification (through hormonal response), though there is fun in retrospect too ("I was scared like shit, that was fun"). And while it's nothing to sneeze at and we should always have some, you can achieve the similar with different medications or narcotics (if the goal is "have more fun").
But I wouldn't optimize for that: we can achieve plenty in our lives, including having plenty of fun, by just being ourselves.
As in, get the sleep you need. Do the work you must and the work you enjoy. Have the fun you want.
While our lifetimes are short, they are not that short. Even if we got 10% more of the waking hours, that won't be the thing that makes your life worthwhile or not. If you spent the other 90% making it worthwhile, that'll do.
Why is it not a survival advantage? Probably because we didn't work 18 hour days, the extra wakeness would just be used for rest.
Night shifts that anyone can do are still needed if you need tribal watchers, and normal 8hr sleeping people can wake upnand fight when needed.
In terms of the gene, I am suprised how rare it is (90 families?) given I have met someone who needs only 4hr sleep.
Another point is less sleep doesn't mean you can do 2 more hours work a day. That is another vector: how much work per day (physical, mental) can be done.
There's a plausible hypothesis that sleep is the thing that evolved precisely to stop us doing things for any more time than is strictly necessary. That is, sleeping is safe.
Yes, but evolution didn't account for the need for those TPS reports to be ready by tomorrow morning and Bob over there is already 48 hours into his shift (don't worry he's on salary, the overtime is free).
I don’t think any serious biologists agree with it. There is a hard physiological need to repair cellular damage from metabolism, UV (this a big deal in unicellular species), etc. If this theory was correct, and it is possible to do it entirely while awake, there would be species (apex predators in particular) that would have evolved without the need for it, like everything that is not a hard requirement. But this is not the case.
There must far more to it than that. As soon as sleep is a thing, it can be optimised for different goals. Since animals have widely varying sleep requirements, there's clearly some evolutionary factor that influences sleep length.
That is, though sleep might have physiological requirements, it doesn't mean that the amount of sleep is not influenced by non physiological effects.
I'm constantly amazed by the ability of biologists to be amazed by the reach and ingenuity of evolution.
The primary reason is that calories used to be a very valuable commodity to come by and predators expend a lot of them when they're hunting or exploring, which includes us humans. Also the reason cats nap a lot.
Only 90 medically identified families. The condition is probably far more likely than just those medically identified. And people typically do not mention abnormalities that positively affect them to their doctors.
“All organisms occupy a niche, and the better adapted to that niche, the more ‘fit’ and the more likely that organism will reproduce, passing on the characteristics that fit that particular niche. While we may simplistically think of each organism occupying a single niche, realistically nearly all occupy at least two. Daytime and nighttime are different and distinct niches, creating an evolutionary push and pull that would make a perfect ‘fit’ impossible. Evolutionarily, being forced to evolve into two separate niches at the same time forces an organism to develop structures and functions that fit neither fully” [1].
We didn’t evolve for a world with artificial lighting.
The night niche doesn't require artificial lighting though.
Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active. We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
> Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active
Decent for us. Great for our predators and prey.
> We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
The point of the article, which granted is a hypothesis, is that the adaptations it would take to be good at night would make us no more than good during the day. Nature has clearly selected against jack of all trades species.
On the day/night balance, I was looking at cats as an example of a species that sleeps in smaller chunks and splits activity all around night and day.
Reading the article I thought there should be more weight given to behaviors different from sleep to adapt to the other niche, and also that being perfectly adapted to a niche doesn't sound like a benefit in the first place. My understanding is that most species have an evolution process slow enough that they never completely fit a niche but also have enough versatility to move around.
I'm thinking dogs, bears, crows, racoons, migratory birds etc. where adaptation happens, but not to a degree they can't move out from their niche.
For the afficionados, there's an excellent paper titled "The neurobiological basis of narcolepsy" published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience which examines the relationship between orexin and sleep as it relates to narcolepsy patients: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6492289/
In narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), patients have severely diminished orexin levels. This appears to cause them to inappropriately enter REM sleep.
OP notes that the mutation lowering the sleep requirement causes an increase in orexin. I wonder whether the increased orexin could be inhibiting REM and perhaps facilitating a more restful architecture of sleep. Alternatively, perhaps elevated orexin levels during the day cause wakefulness such that you just don't need as much sleep, regardless of how efficient the sleep is.
It would be interesting to compare sleep tracking data of people with and without this mutation to see if there are significant differences in time spent in different sleep stages.
> Alternatively, perhaps elevated orexin levels during the day cause wakefulness such that you just don't need as much sleep, regardless of how efficient the sleep is.
As noted elsewhere ITT, there is a strong biological need for sleep, and its main role is very likely to reduce reactive oxygen species (though the amount needed vary by genetics)
Orexin levels increase the noradrenaline ones, which is one of the few antioxidants able to reach neurons (along with melatonin) and by this way also increase slow wave sleep, making it more efficient. So yes, this could be a way they would need less sleep.
If there was in fact a safe pathway to only needing 2 hours of sleep I would 100% use it and consider it a zero to one innovation. Although I think it would also come with a lot of pushback. One of my favourite questions to ask people is "if there was a way that allowed you to not sleep and be completely fine, would you take it?". Surprisingly (or maybe not) most people will answer no and say they like sleep to much.
I think most people aren't trying to squeeze the maximum amount of time efficiency from their day. They don't like sleep because they need it, they like sleep because its synonymous to relaxing. So less sleep means less relaxing.
I like sleep for several reasons, I like to cuddle with my spouse, I like a set amount of time where I don't have to think or worry about anything, and I love dreaming.
Of these, only dreaming strictly needs sleep, however, I think the healing that occurs in deep sleep should be added as a need.
And according to my smartwatch, I spend around 2 hours dreaming and 1 hour in deep sleep each night, although this varies quite a bit night to night. I don't think trying to reduce these is a good idea.
That means light sleep is the candidate for reduction. However, I have researched this before and the most consistent answer I get is that we don't really know what the 5 hours spent in light sleep is for. It seems unlikely that it's just for conserving energy, the body rarely does things for only one reason.
So my bet is that we might find a way to reduce light sleep by around 2 hours a night, which is what this article is suggesting. But it's unlikely that we'll go much further without causing problems. And even if someone does discover a way, there's no way I'd try it without at least a few decades of evidence that it doesn't cause Alzheimer's or some other old age disease.
Count me in with you - I'd definitely say "yes" to less sleep. But, if it were a general invention, I don't think it would work as well as you say. Beyond the usual economics issue[0], for me the value of not sleeping is entirely conditioned on everyone else sleeping.
It's not that I don't like to sleep. It's that I also like me-time, autonomy, lack of other people's demands or expectations, and the only time to get that is when most people are sleeping, so the house is quiet and I can be sure no one will randomly want something from me[2]. Relaxation, unwinding, deep thinking, self-actualization are all competing with sleep for that limited amount of time. Everyone else not sleeping would cut into that for me.
--
[0] - Any generally available trick or change that allows someone to get ahead economically, quickly becomes a requirement. See e.g. working longer, coffee, cars, double-income households, increasingly also stimulant meds. It's a textbook Red Queen's Race[1]. "Less sleep" would be so profound a win that it would turn from "hack" into global standard pretty much in an instant.
You may take it and be happy, but what is more likely to happen is workplaces enforcing 18/h workday (because hey, people don't need to sleep much anymore) so most are forced to take it and work more for not much salary raise. I bet such evolution would lead to a even hardcore exploitation of humans and I don't want to live in such a world.
My first reaction is to wonder what the downside of such a gene is. Perhaps there is no downside for the individuals that have it, but these individuals serve a particular purpose to the greater civilization and lack other capabilities that benefit humanity as a whole. If there is a trade-off perhaps it is not at the individual level.
Maybe it's similar to the idea that we can just eradicate mosquitos with no negative effects. Is that really true?
Both my parents go to bed around 1am and wake up at 7am, and so did all of my grandparents. My kids on weekends go to bed around 1-2am as well but do sleep in, and my average is about 4-5 hours a night…
As for me, I’ve had sleep issues all my life and found the only way to fall asleep within 20 minutes is to stay up until exhaustion. But lately I’ve been gaining back my time and pushing even further - once every one or two weeks I’ll skip a night of sleeping, staying up around 36 hours straight. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and have zero side effects so far. In fact I end up sleeping over 10 hours the next day without waking up in the middle (which /never/ happens otherwise).
That one sleeps 4-5h per night also sounds like one light/deep/REM sleep cycle, of which there would typically be two in an idealised 8h-ish "night".
There are hypotheses out there that a single 8h block of sleep is a myth - possibly socially induced by industrialisation and 3x8 shifts - and that waking up in the middle of these 8h is a normal thing.
"waking up" here may mean anything from near-consciousness sleep to actually waking up and possibly do shit for an hour then going back to bed; or even for some, splitting sleep in two 4-hour blocks spread around the 24h day.
In parent's post it may be that one 4h block is done, then social pressure (work/child schedules) pushes one to continue with this one-block schedule.
It may even look appealing as triggering sleep through exhaustion superficially appears to help with sleep in the short term. Long term it gets exhausting but this perceptually becomes the new normal, especially when the symptoms of this kind of sleep deprivation aren't that obviously tied to sleep habits, the naively expected ones being masked by external pressure (schedule), habit bias (normalisation of deviance through repetition), exogenic (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) or endogenic (adrenalin, cortisol, dopamine).
The main problem is then that by the time symptoms are impacting the situation is deeply anchored; worse, because the root cause is non-obvious it is often misdiagnosed.
I don’t think 8 hours is a myth, but more like that was what was observed in the 60s when the Stanford Sleep Research Centre by William Dement ran their first experiments on keeping people in white rooms without stimulation until their bodies found a natural rhythm.
It would be interesting to know if those experiments have been replicated and if there were any deviations!
I sleep 6 hours a night, always have and almost certainly have FNSS.
What's interesting is my daughter has similar symptoms as you and has been diagnosed with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD). She's recently been prescribed a dose of melatonin which she takes an hour before the time she wants to go to sleep.
Interesting you say that - I'm also prescribed melatonin... but I chose to mostly skip it to stay productive i.e I only take it when I /need/ to go to sleep because I need to get up early for something the next day.
But for me, 5mg does tend to knock me out and I can barely stay awake after an hour of taking it.
I've read that in cave studies when isolated from any direct indication of time people will naturally sleep longer every other day like this. However, I have severe sleep issues that leave me disabled and the main issue seems to be that I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm and can't sleep outside the rotating times but in some ways my body is still synchronized to the sun (I do much worse when awake at night). So I worry you could also potentially end up with severe circadian issues unless you are completely blind, although if you always wake up at the same time whenever you do sleep that would hopefully help prevent issues. Sleeping in late some days makes circadian issues more likely.
Taking more than 20 minutes to get to sleep is not that unusual as I understand it. I think 30 minutes minutes is quite common even in people who sleep fine. 4-5 hours is very short though. One of my parents also slept little and there is also dementia on that side of the family (I have some memory issues as well already). I don't know how much previous gnerations slept but I suspect there may be not so benign genetic short sleep issues as well. At least some issues may have susceptibility and a triggering event, with tech making the triggering event more likely. That would be another question about benign familial short sleep, if it increases the susceptibility to more severe issues.
Reading one of William Dement's books on sleep, 20 minutes to fall asleep should be the amount of time to try (otherwise get up and do something else until you're actually tired, because there's no point in wasting 2 hours in bed awake).
Interesting on the dementia and sleep... though all my grandparents lived to old age, and my dad who I know hardly sleeps is in his 80s and doesn't really have memory issues. Hopefully that keeps up!
I was like that, and among other remedies (like actually fixing the problems in my life that bother me), my latest last-resort is brisk walking to exhaustion, even very late in the evening. If it's 10:30 and I know I'm in a bad mood to sleep, I just go for a walk in the park for 2 hours and I fall asleep very fast when I return.
It's not ideal and I plan to switch to running, but I'm at a bad place where my cardiovascular fitness is not good enough and if I run for 30 minutes to exhaustion my heart rate stays elevated for more than one hour and running is just too activating.
Walking for 2 hours seems very wasteful right now, but it's what it takes to calm me down enough to fall asleep.
A Gut Bacteria" is also a rather interesting approach to solving sleep problems.
Does anyone have experience related to this?
"The company ( FitBiomics ) has already commercialized two products. Their flagship offering, V•Nella, helps metabolize lactic acid and reduce fatigue, while Nella targets sleep health - a crucial market considering that 100 million Americans suffer from insomnia.
"Within 10 to 14 days of daily consumption, consumers feel the difference," Scheiman notes. "They have less daily fatigue interfering with their daily life, more energy, and some people are tracking cardiovascular benefits on their wearables. We hear really cool anecdotal feedback like, 'Hey, I no longer have to take a nap in the middle of the day, or I no longer need coffee in the middle of the day.'"
I experienced a similar change (more energy and steadier energy levels throughout the day) after switching to a plant-based diet, which has been shown to change one's gut microbiome over a few weeks.
I'm not really convinced that removing the need for sleep would result in me being more productive primarily because I'm not an always-on computer.
The average day for me has huge differences in terms of my productivity at any given moment. I need downtime anyway, if I didn't sleep I believe that I'd end up vegging out in some way because I'm not doing 24 hours of flashcards.
The discussions on here also always seem to centre around a very stereotypical "I am a vat for my brain" way of thinking. Realistically whilst sleeping other things are going on, muscles are recovering, digestive processes are going on, other forms of growing, etc, it's not just the brain.
There are also things like circadian rhythm, sunshine, etc. I woke up early today and had a few hours of darkness, I can feel my mood and brainpower improving as the sun rises.
Yah, but if you needed 2 hours less of sleep, there'd still be myriad advantages.
Times when it's not possible to get enough sleep: you'd be less sleep-deprived.
And, if it's truly without negative side effects: maybe you get 20 minutes more useful time per day and increase your ratio of conscious relaxation to useful time. I'd call that a pretty big win.
It's interesting but I feel as if the discussion is a bit flawed because it feels very binary, i.e. sleep 8 hours = have 16 hours non sleep, sleep 6 hours = have 18 hours non sleep, and we assume that each hour is the same regardless, but it won't be.
It feels a bit like - well could I engineer myself to require 1500 calories a day instead of 2000. Maybe. But as a result there would definitely be some downside, maybe I'd be less physically strong, or have less endurance, or have a bit less processing power, or have to rest more, etc. If we straight up designed a more efficient body, then I'd rather keep eating 2k and be "more powerful", or maybe I'd go to 4k!
Maybe I can sleep for 2 fewer hours and retain the same or more productivity. Or maybe I could sleep for the full amount of hours but be more well rested and as a result be more productive in the awake time. That sort of thing.
Yah -- note that I didn't posit that things would be the same at the margin (120 minutes more conscious time without other downsides yields only 16% of "useful" time and assumes the rest goes to minimally useful relaxation and recreation).
> There is no free lunch.
Selective pressure and evolution are pretty good at optimizing... but not perfect. What they optimized for, also, is not quality of life in the modern world. It's likely there are a whole lot of free lunches available, or at least big wins with relatively low opportunity costs.
It's certainly not great to discard potential improvements because of an assumption that what we have must be optimum.
Sorry, I edited my post a bit so what you've quoted isn't there any more but I agree fully with what you're saying.
I guess what would be cool is being able to play with the sliders. People already do this in other ways, for example people at the extreme end of bodybuilding or strongman are almost certainlhy explicitly shortening their lifespans for a shorter term benefit, calorie restriction looks like it lets you go the other way, etc.
Maybe you could even fiddle and have 16 hours of sleep and overclock your brain for the other 8 being super-intelligent, lol.
It might make sense to just drop the term optimization when discussing natural selection.
It's not like "Natural Selection" was given an ecological niche and optimized from scratch the being for that niche. That mental model implies there's not much to be done and any changes would produce a less useful product.
A more apt term would be "Refactored" or even "Patched".
It's more like a giant ugly legacy software system was added to, and the result was just enough to keep going in the new system.
I like that analogy better because it implies: 1. There is room for optimization, and 2. Any minor change is likely to break things far away due to the continuous re-patching and legacy cruft. Both of which seem correct.
> "Natural Selection" was given an ecological niche and optimized from scratch the being for that niche
I think you are conflating natural selection the process with organisms that are a result of natural selection.
Natural selection isn’t a process that is intentionally made by anyone, but a way we describe a simplified model slew of complex processes.
Also conflated is what you are optimizing for. The only thing natural selection optimizes for is survival. That’s it. Nothing else matters expect which individuals survive long enough to pass their genes to the next generation. As a result niches develop and as each generation survives compared to their peers their survival strategies are optimized.
Optimization perfectly describes what is happening to the survivability and reproduction of certain genes.
You appear to be working backwards. That there was a niche and evolution somehow crafted an organism to fit that niche. That is misleading. Genes replicate, and in a certain context some genes survived and replicated better than in some other context. So genes evolved in that new context creating a niche.
You're right about the mechanism of course, but the language and mental model I see over and over is that it a bespoke optimization that ignores the fact that it was incremental changes, and that some adaptations are no longer beneficial because they were created for an environment that no longer exists.
Unless there's some huge evolutionary inefficiency that can be artificially hacked. But it's a big if. If there was it would be possible to get some benefits without significant or no downsides.
You don't? I'm also in an area with mostly darkness in the winter and I have to say I do feel depressed, and I wish it was always summer. I think it's the worst aspects about my location. Otherwise I think it's great.
From the name I assume you are from Finland, which I am not, but supposedly Finnish people are the happiest in the World - which I'm not sure if it's actually true. The joke is that every Finnish person after seeing the study wonders why they are the only unhappy one.
If sunlight improves your mood, add more lights to your place? Around my desk where I spend a lot of my time I have lights with a combined power of 150 watts and it's noticeable
Productivity is irrelevant: when you have young children, any given amount of time where you can be awake and functional is incredibly valuable - particularly if it works outside the hours your children sleep.
Like I'll settle for "tired but no accruing sleep debt".
Teenagers have to get up too early. Teenagers experience a shift in their circadian rhythm and also require more sleep than before puberty. School schedules do not account for this shift.
Not treating the children will only level the playing field. My two daughters, 5yo and 3.5yo, both sleep from "as late as they can get away with" to "about an hour earlier than parents would like to wake up".
Also, whoever came up with the idea of nap hour in kindergartens has a special circle of hell reserved for them.
"preemptive administration of low-dose aspirin during sleep restriction reduced pro-inflammatory responses. Specifically, aspirin reduced interleukin-6 expression and COX-1/COX-2 double positive cells in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated monocytes, as well as C-reactive protein serum levels."
"aspirin-induced reduction of inflammatory pathway activity in sleep-restricted participants was paralleled by decreased wake after sleep onset and increased sleep efficiency during recovery sleep"
> The UCSF group hypothesizes that this elevated level of orexin expression partially explains reduced sleep
So, one possible line of investigation would be a table of mammals, their sleep cycles, their orexin levels, and the numbers of copies of orexin and it's regulators in their genomes. For example: compared to humans, elephants have a lower cancer risk. Turns out they have significantly more copies of p53, a tumor supressor gene (1).
Perhaps a similar, somewhat parallel construct exists: elephants sleep 3-4 hours a night. Maybe they have more orexin? Maybe they have different copy numbers or mutations of the relevant genes in the pathway?
As above, so below. These lines of thinking sees sleep as a hygiene factor for maintaining bio stasis. We also process experiences and “simulate” effects of potential actions in the waking state. These “software-level” sleep activities seems less quantifiable in terms of sleep-time efficiency. If I get an evolutionary advantage from better consolidated experiences through longer dream sessions, how would that compare with more “face-time” with lions and famines in my waking state?
There is a nasty “all things being equal” fallacy hidden in this line of thinking.
My question is, if sleeping less (with FNSS) offers so much advantage, why haven't we all evolved to sleep less with FNSS? If a mutation offers a distinct advantage, natural selection will force us to adopt it sooner or later.
There is a theory that sleeping more hours was not a determining factor in survival [1]. Homo sapiens mitigated sleeping on the ground as a risk by sleeping in groups.
> However, too much deep sleep is dangerous. REM is the stage of sleep in which we experience dreams, so our muscles become paralyzed to avoid acting out these dreams. In his “social sleep hypothesis,” Samson suggests that our ancestors mitigated the risk of deep sleep by sleeping in large groups with at least one person on guard.
> “Human camps are like a snail’s shell. They can pick it up and move it around with them,” Samson says. Our ancestral hunter-gatherers might have slept in groups of 15 to 20 around a campfire, taking turns staying awake and watching over the others.
Humans already sleep far less than other mammals, so that seems to be the case. It also might be evidence that attempting to get by with less has costs. Sleep debt has a range of troubling symptoms including psychosis, so risks involved in experimentation are significant.
I've always wanted to reduce my sleep requirement. These days I naturally sleep for 8 hours. It's not completely wasted; my brain often figures out difficult problems while I sleep. But if I could do something relaxing like playing a game or socialising instead that would be great.
I did try polyphasic sleep when I was younger but it didn't work out. Having my sleeping patterns so far off the standard made me really unhappy.
Hey, discussion of orexin receptor stuff! As someone with clinically-diagnosed insomnia, I've been lucky enough to/unfortunate enough to have to try the orexin receptor antagonist sleep aids for a while. As recent, on-patent drugs, they are very, very expensive ($360/month was the number marked on the receipt slip, not that that means much in the US; I certainly wasn't paying that)... and they work. They really, really do work. I was prescribed them because I tried every single other class of sleep aid on the market and they were mostly ineffective, had massive side effects, or were benzos (temazepam: best sleep of my life, but better not use it for longer than a month!).
This stuff? Orexin receptor antagonists? They work. Holy crap, do they ever work. Sleep quality better than the Z-drugs, great tolerability, no massive disruption going off them... when these things go off-patent they're going to be massive. Sleep quality was not perfect (maybe 80% of "normal"? I don't know) but that is absolutely minor compared to the alternative.
(And for the record, I'm off them now due to other stuff clearing up such that I don't need this level of sleep assistance anymore. Not because I can't afford them.)
I guess that's a long-winded way to say that if you're going to do questionably-advised sleep biohacking, orexin receptors are probably the place to start.
>(And for the record, I'm off them now due to other stuff clearing up such that I don't need this level of sleep assistance anymore. Not because I can't afford them.)
If it was available over the counter for, say, $50/month -- do you think you would be taking it just for the improved sleep quality?
Also, what was the specific name of the drug you had such a good experience with?
Yes, it was noticably lower quality than "good normal sleep" (80%?). Better than I got on eszopiclone (60%?) or zolpidem (40%??), worse than trazodone (90+%, but woke up every day like I'd been hit in the head with a frying pan) or temazepam (150%! amazing! but tolerance within a month and then addiction soon after if one is stupid enough to push back on a benzo, so no good).
How long have you been taking them? I've heard that an almost universal side effect is terrifying night paralysis on occasion. Have you experienced that yet?
Yeah, this is is true. I've been taking for 3 months now --best consistent sleep of my life, but definitely occasionally the most terrifying sleep paralysis I've ever experienced, or even heard of.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but ~1-2 nights of absolute terror per week is totally worth it compared to how it used to be (getting maybe ~1 good night of sleep every couple weeks.)
I did not experience night paralysis while using lemborexant.
I can think of a few reasons I might have avoided it, but who knows for sure. I wasn't on it that long (about a year? not going to look it up), I as a general rule do not remember my dreams unless I'm interrupted, the underlying cause of my total insomnia was pharmalogical, I've always had some level of sleep disorder, I've been on every other sort of sleep aid, I used it with melatonin... who really knows.
> As recent, on-patent drugs, they are very, very expensive ($360/month...
Expensive is always relative to one's income. But, to put that number into perspective relative to another medication given for a good night's sleep:
I'm the parent of a narcoleptic. The meds to get a good night's sleep, Xyrem, are in the $15k / month range. The recently approved generics are 1/2 that.
Xyrem is just the brand name for GHB. The company that currently owns the rights (Jazz Pharmaceuticals) pled guilty to felony misbranding in 2011, and in 2013 raised the price by 841%. More recently, in 2017, they sued multiple other companies attempting to produce generics, before settling on an exclusive licensing agreement with one of them. Ironically the headline on their website is "Improving Patients' Lives", but I imagine they aren't reducing the price because Xyrem makes up 74% of total sales [1]. The entire thing reeks of PE--tons of acquisitions.
Is it really possible? Taking 16 waking hours to 20 waking hours would make my 40 remaining years into 50 remaining year equivalent. I will attend to this.
Some combination of the title and the submission domain triggered my tick even more than usual around the use of “AI”.
It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll regard any artifact as artificially intelligent if the broader context fails a pretty low bar for intelligence of any kind.
> Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS), a benign mutation that allows them to sleep 1-2 hours less than the recommended 7-9 hours, without experiencing the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Sleep deprivation is one concern, but there’s a more subtle impact on cognitive functions (working memory, creativity, deep focus), overall health (particularly the endocrine and immune systems), and long-term health outcomes (such as an increased risk of dementia).
When I was younger, I was fascinated by various optimized sleep schedules. However, I noticed a stark contrast: many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day. They needed that—not just to function in daily life but to achieve the deep focus required for their work. Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
Some suggest that one of sleep's key roles is to help the brain regenerate. Chronic sleep deprivation, in turn, is linked to a higher risk of dementia. For anecdotal evidence: Churchill and Thatcher, known for boasting about sleeping only 4–5 hours a night, experienced significant cognitive decline later in life.
This is true, I was neighbours with one of the top mathematicians in my uni and he slept what felt like an excessive amount everyday.
I definitely underperformed academically due to sleep deprivation and I probably benefited greatly during my revision period because I had a very strong sleep routine.
That said, I entered my final exam having only slept probably less than two hours and that was 100% the right call because the extra cramming was necessary and drove the needle significantly.
Sleep deprivation affects many different things, some of which are salvageable with stimulants like caffeine, and certain functions are fairly unaffected. Exams that can be solved mostly with rote memorization are less impacted by sleep deprivation than exams that require spontaneous creativity. In any case, glad to know it went well for you!
> When I was younger, I was fascinated by various optimized sleep schedules.
I was also fascinated with alternate sleep schedules when I was younger. Some of the books and biohackers of the time made them sound like magical ways to get more hours out of the day.
Then every single experience report I found that was not coming from someone trying to sell me a book or get me to subscribe to their newsletter, YouTube, or other social media was extremely negative. Nobody who tried these had continued them very long. After going back to regular sleep schedules they felt significantly better. A common report was that they didn’t realize how badly sleep deprived they were until they stopped the alternate sleep schedule and went back to normal sleep.
A lot of the sleep biohacking reports follow a similar trend: People who try alternate methods of minimizing sleep don’t realize the negative effects until they quit. This is also true for people who rely on stimulants (caffeine or stronger) which mask feelings of sleep deprivation but can’t actually reverse the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Okay, but none of that is relevant to the article. This article is about a genetic condition called FNSS which results in you getting a full night's sleep in less time. It specifically addresses the concern that there might be unobserved negative effects and that so far, we haven't found any. If you have FNSS there is no reason to try and force yourself to sleep for 8 hours a night and it is not something being sold on YouTube.
You’re missing the point being made in this thread, which is that there might be subtle long-term impairments to the genetic condition described in the OP.
Indeed the article discusses this thoroughly, noting that since it’s a very small sample you can’t rule out anything but very strongly negative fitness impact.
There’s simply not enough data to rule out the hypothesis that folks with this condition are slightly sleep-deprived vs their theoretical without-mutation genotype baseline.
> I noticed a stark contrast: many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day.
I'm curious, in order to reach this duration, did they need to do some kind of exercise at some point in the day, to gain physical fatigue ? Or could they sleep this long whilst being (I exaggerate here) couch potatoes ?
> I'd love to be able to wake up at 6am, but just can't.
What does "just can't" mean, exactly? Just curious, because I felt that way, too, until I had a newborn and was forced to wake up with less sleep and discovered it was physically possible. Still felt awful all day, but it was possible.
I meant that I can't sleep 8 hours and feel rested. If I'm forced to sleep less than I need, I'd be sleepy and tired all day. Taking a nap helps but isn't always possible, and is even less time efficient.
For me, alarms simply don’t wake me up. I’m literally unconscious and not just asleep. That being said, I only need 6 hours of sleep a night and I can’t sleep any more than that. However, I also have delayed sleep entry. So, I usually stay up until 1am and wake up at 7am, with no alarm. If I want to sleep less than six hours, I simply won’t wake up. Famously, in the military, I was dragged outside, to the morning formation, and slept through the entire thing. It was entertaining enough that I didn’t get in too much trouble, but alarms simply don’t work for me. I ended up getting doctors orders to always get six hours of sleep, if possible, instead of the 4 hour minimum. I was always worried I would sleep through important things in a war zone; and I did. I just never got caught or admitted to it.
Do you have DST where you live? Do you suddenly adjust to the new time when travelling to a different timezone?
(All this to say that you sleeping 6h flat is plausible, but times-of-day are a human, social construct, and it's impossible for your body not to be able to adapt to going to bed earlier and waking earlier)
Never had an issue with time zone changes when going east, I just stay up later and then go to sleep. Going West, however, is hard. Going to sleep more than a few hours early is quite difficult.
I think this goes to say that you could potentially adapt to going to bed earlier than 1am (eg. if the above is the only thing that works for you to modify your sleep routine, just keep staying "up later by 4h" for 5 days straight, and you'll be going to sleep at 9pm on the 6th day). If it's related to daylight/nighttime, you can move locations to where days are shorter or the TZ is more misaligned (eg. don't go to Spain or France which are largely in the wrong TZ).
My entire point is that it's likely sociological for you: you either drink your last coffee at 7pm and this keeps you awake for another 6h, or you get into a routine at a particular time, or... As in, your original claim that you "simply can't wake up at 6am" seems unrealistic since "6am" is a thing that means different things in different locations.
I think they mean that having the time available for sleep at all is a bit of a luxury. A lot of people need to take care of their family, or work an extra job, etc and can't afford to sleep much extra.
I would physically not be able to do this. I think many people would have a hard time to sleep more.
Moreover, when I sleep more, I notice that I'm sharper and I find it easier to take on tough challenges: this means that sleeping longer makes me happier for the rest of the day. So I'm also willing to live a tougher life. So there's also a trade off with: yea, you have less time, but the less time that you have, you're happier. Or at least, that's my experience.
And not only are you happier, you're also more capable. So it's more easy to live according to your own rationality and it's easier to not live according to your emotions and instincts.
You say that like it's hard for an oversleeper to achieve their oversleeping. As an oversleepr, I'll suggest that it's the other way around. When you're an oversleeper, the thing that's hard is to stop sleeping after the socially normal amount of time.
> many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day.
Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.
Napping is also associated with dementia, I wonder if that's explained by sleep deprivation? Could be that you don't get as much (if any) deep sleep during shorter naps, compared to a full night's sleep.
> > Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS), a benign mutation that allows them to sleep 1-2 hours less than the recommended 7-9 hours, without experiencing the negative effects of sleep deprivation
> Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
You are making a mistake in thinking the aforementioned genetic variation “enables people to get by on less”. They just literally sleep less. I have a brother in law with this, and it’s a bit annoying for him as his wife needs the normal 8 hours a night. He cannot sleep 7-8 hours, only 6. He just reads in the bed for 2 hours a night. If he has too much to do, he skimps like we all do, but for him this is 4 hours a night during the week (needing to catch up on the weekend).
Other than sleeping less than others, he’s regular in every way. Very successful engineer, if it helps, certainly requires “deep thought” on the regular.
It is unfair, but so many genetic advantages are equally unfair.
This article makes me want to get a DNA test. In my family, it’s very common to sleep in the six-hour range. I personally sleep from 10 pm to 4:25 am every day, often waking up around 4:15 am before my watch vibrates to wake me.
If I sleep eight hours, I feel groggy, jet-lagged, and generally have a day where I’m slogging through molasses to get from one task to the next.
My wife has raised concerns about my sleep pattern, so I started using sleep-tracking tools like Fitbit and, more recently, an Apple Watch. She tracks her sleep too, and the big difference we’ve noticed is that I fall asleep within about two minutes, and my “sleep efficiency” using these tools is 98%. If I’m traveling and feel a bit jet-lagged, I can take a 20-minute nap (often without an alarm) and wake up feeling refreshed. She also seems to wake up a lot, most nights I "sleep like a log" and I only wakeup in the morning.
My mother has the same pattern but stays up later and sleeps about six hours into the morning. I used to do this too, but around age 23, I switched to an earlier bedtime and a consistent daily routine. When I became a “morning person,” I found I could code like crazy in the morning before “starting” my day, and this rewarding experience reinforced the habit.
I’ve tested this pattern in many ways, including not using an alarm (I still wake up around the same time for weeks at a time) and using a “light clock” I built with a Raspberry Pi to slowly brighten the room. Again, I wake up after roughly 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I use my Apple Watch to vibrate as a gentle reminder to start the day. On weekends, I keep the same schedule and use the extra time to read or hack away at side projects, often coding until the late afternoon when my wife protests enough that I need to stop and hang out or do my honey-do's.
About 10 years ago, during my annual checkup, my wife asked my doctor about this sleep pattern. The doctor asked me several questions, seemingly looking for signs of sleep deficit or dysfunction. In the end, he said I could do a sleep study but concluded, “If it works, don’t break it.”
As for productivity, I’ve found I can code effectively from 4:30 am to 8:30 am, then shower and work from 9 am to 6 pm without much trouble. I also practice intermittent fasting, typically eating only at 6 pm, with a protein shake around noon. This habit happened by accident—I realized breakfast slowed me down, and eating lots of carbs impaired my cognitive function and ability to code or handle complex tasks in the morning.
Before you ask, I generally don’t use caffeine or other stimulants. Occasionally, I’ll have one cup of coffee around 9 am as a social habit, but I recently stopped that again and actually feel better. I’ll most likely drop it again for a while until it sneaks back in again.
Thanks for sharing! I have severe circadian issues: non-24, except that my body also still in some ways follows the sun and I do much worse when awake at night. I've noticed that other accounts I've read from people who do well with around 6 hours of sleep are similar to yours and feature highly regular sleep times. From the reading I've done it seems there are a number of hormones involved in both sleep and waking activity with strong circadian rhythms and I suspect that at any given time I have a mix of night and day hormones. Of course people can famously fool themselves easily that they are getting enough sleep when they aren't but based on my experience I could easily believe it to be a superpower to have everything unusually well synchronized and I fully agree with your doctor's advice.
Kind of tangential, but some time ago now passed famous sleep researcher William Dement gave a presentation at Google TechTalks about healthy sleep and optimal performance that is a good overall review of what we know about sleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8
They talk about the people achieving full mental capacity with less sleep, but are there any studies on physical recovery in people with FNSS? Do they also experience improved rate of exercise recovery and muscle growth during sleep?
This paper totally ignores the human aspect of sleeping, there is a habit to it.
If we were able to be awake 20 hours a day we may still be miserable because of factors like the sun being down for ane even longer time while we’re awake.
I feel like this is one of those inane pursuits for productivity where that doesn’t fit at all, at least not for the thinking jobs.
Maybe in a dystopia big companies like amazon would use inventions like this to be able to let their employees work 20 hour work days or something.
Of course this shouldn’t discredit the linked article of being interesting or anything, just sharing my thoughts on the endless pursuit of productivity.
Many people spend a lot of time awake during the darker hours and not everyone is miserable. I actually enjoy both, so if I could operate 20h a day without any harm or loss, it would be a net win for sure (and I also love sleeping).
If you're required to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, gaining an extra hour or two per day could go toward leisure or recreation or exercise. Or maybe you're already sleeping only 6.25 hours a night, but it is having negative health and mood effects, and eliminating those negatives could improve quality of life without detracting from waking time.
204 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadAfter all, we live in the age of abundance.
(Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
This isn't some kind of box ticking behaviour with its roots originating from toxic hustle culture, simply the adverse effects of sleep deprivation don't outweigh my enjoyment of things. And when my sleep debt finally catches up with me, I sleep my heart's delight.
From experience, I have friends who share in my world view and threshold for sacrificing sleep for pleasure and I have met people who think are mortified by this behaviour. My immediate family are all willing to sacrifice sleep on the drop of the hat notably - waking up at the crack of dawn to send/accompany someone to the airport is simply modus operandi. My wife is very keen to protect her sleep on the flipside and so when we travel together our decision frameworks need to accommodate both MOs
Ironically sometimes I'm most protective of my sleep during the weekly grind (and also training for fitness) because then my performance matters. If my only short term downside is discomfort from fatigue, I'll regularly trade that for more "uptime"
Are not all of those things that could be optimized away an opportunity to let yourself feel, relax and simply be?
The examples you bring up (like waking early to do something for someone you care about) has nothing to do with the topic of engineering for consistently reduced sleep, imho.
"Fun" is usually defined as something providing instant gratification (through hormonal response), though there is fun in retrospect too ("I was scared like shit, that was fun"). And while it's nothing to sneeze at and we should always have some, you can achieve the similar with different medications or narcotics (if the goal is "have more fun").
But I wouldn't optimize for that: we can achieve plenty in our lives, including having plenty of fun, by just being ourselves.
As in, get the sleep you need. Do the work you must and the work you enjoy. Have the fun you want.
While our lifetimes are short, they are not that short. Even if we got 10% more of the waking hours, that won't be the thing that makes your life worthwhile or not. If you spent the other 90% making it worthwhile, that'll do.
But if you must, go for it!
https://medium.com/@yinonweiss/the-four-types-of-fun-a745ec5...
but also let's go, if a giraffe can sleep 2 hours so can I
Night shifts that anyone can do are still needed if you need tribal watchers, and normal 8hr sleeping people can wake upnand fight when needed.
In terms of the gene, I am suprised how rare it is (90 families?) given I have met someone who needs only 4hr sleep.
Another point is less sleep doesn't mean you can do 2 more hours work a day. That is another vector: how much work per day (physical, mental) can be done.
That is, though sleep might have physiological requirements, it doesn't mean that the amount of sleep is not influenced by non physiological effects.
I'm constantly amazed by the ability of biologists to be amazed by the reach and ingenuity of evolution.
Because you're more likely to hurt yourself while doing anything in the dark?
“All organisms occupy a niche, and the better adapted to that niche, the more ‘fit’ and the more likely that organism will reproduce, passing on the characteristics that fit that particular niche. While we may simplistically think of each organism occupying a single niche, realistically nearly all occupy at least two. Daytime and nighttime are different and distinct niches, creating an evolutionary push and pull that would make a perfect ‘fit’ impossible. Evolutionarily, being forced to evolve into two separate niches at the same time forces an organism to develop structures and functions that fit neither fully” [1].
We didn’t evolve for a world with artificial lighting.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7120898/
Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active. We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
Decent for us. Great for our predators and prey.
> We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
The point of the article, which granted is a hypothesis, is that the adaptations it would take to be good at night would make us no more than good during the day. Nature has clearly selected against jack of all trades species.
Reading the article I thought there should be more weight given to behaviors different from sleep to adapt to the other niche, and also that being perfectly adapted to a niche doesn't sound like a benefit in the first place. My understanding is that most species have an evolution process slow enough that they never completely fit a niche but also have enough versatility to move around.
I'm thinking dogs, bears, crows, racoons, migratory birds etc. where adaptation happens, but not to a degree they can't move out from their niche.
Cats are crepuscular. The niche hypothesis predicts they'd sleep most of the day and night.
> not to a degree they can't move out from their niche
No animal I know of can't survive outside its time niche.
In narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), patients have severely diminished orexin levels. This appears to cause them to inappropriately enter REM sleep.
OP notes that the mutation lowering the sleep requirement causes an increase in orexin. I wonder whether the increased orexin could be inhibiting REM and perhaps facilitating a more restful architecture of sleep. Alternatively, perhaps elevated orexin levels during the day cause wakefulness such that you just don't need as much sleep, regardless of how efficient the sleep is.
It would be interesting to compare sleep tracking data of people with and without this mutation to see if there are significant differences in time spent in different sleep stages.
As noted elsewhere ITT, there is a strong biological need for sleep, and its main role is very likely to reduce reactive oxygen species (though the amount needed vary by genetics) Orexin levels increase the noradrenaline ones, which is one of the few antioxidants able to reach neurons (along with melatonin) and by this way also increase slow wave sleep, making it more efficient. So yes, this could be a way they would need less sleep.
I think most people aren't trying to squeeze the maximum amount of time efficiency from their day. They don't like sleep because they need it, they like sleep because its synonymous to relaxing. So less sleep means less relaxing.
Of these, only dreaming strictly needs sleep, however, I think the healing that occurs in deep sleep should be added as a need.
And according to my smartwatch, I spend around 2 hours dreaming and 1 hour in deep sleep each night, although this varies quite a bit night to night. I don't think trying to reduce these is a good idea.
That means light sleep is the candidate for reduction. However, I have researched this before and the most consistent answer I get is that we don't really know what the 5 hours spent in light sleep is for. It seems unlikely that it's just for conserving energy, the body rarely does things for only one reason.
So my bet is that we might find a way to reduce light sleep by around 2 hours a night, which is what this article is suggesting. But it's unlikely that we'll go much further without causing problems. And even if someone does discover a way, there's no way I'd try it without at least a few decades of evidence that it doesn't cause Alzheimer's or some other old age disease.
It's not that I don't like to sleep. It's that I also like me-time, autonomy, lack of other people's demands or expectations, and the only time to get that is when most people are sleeping, so the house is quiet and I can be sure no one will randomly want something from me[2]. Relaxation, unwinding, deep thinking, self-actualization are all competing with sleep for that limited amount of time. Everyone else not sleeping would cut into that for me.
--
[0] - Any generally available trick or change that allows someone to get ahead economically, quickly becomes a requirement. See e.g. working longer, coffee, cars, double-income households, increasingly also stimulant meds. It's a textbook Red Queen's Race[1]. "Less sleep" would be so profound a win that it would turn from "hack" into global standard pretty much in an instant.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
[2] - Because of strong societal expectations of behavior, such as not calling or bothering people past 20:00-22:00.
Maybe it's similar to the idea that we can just eradicate mosquitos with no negative effects. Is that really true?
Both my parents go to bed around 1am and wake up at 7am, and so did all of my grandparents. My kids on weekends go to bed around 1-2am as well but do sleep in, and my average is about 4-5 hours a night…
As for me, I’ve had sleep issues all my life and found the only way to fall asleep within 20 minutes is to stay up until exhaustion. But lately I’ve been gaining back my time and pushing even further - once every one or two weeks I’ll skip a night of sleeping, staying up around 36 hours straight. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and have zero side effects so far. In fact I end up sleeping over 10 hours the next day without waking up in the middle (which /never/ happens otherwise).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
That one sleeps 4-5h per night also sounds like one light/deep/REM sleep cycle, of which there would typically be two in an idealised 8h-ish "night".
There are hypotheses out there that a single 8h block of sleep is a myth - possibly socially induced by industrialisation and 3x8 shifts - and that waking up in the middle of these 8h is a normal thing.
"waking up" here may mean anything from near-consciousness sleep to actually waking up and possibly do shit for an hour then going back to bed; or even for some, splitting sleep in two 4-hour blocks spread around the 24h day.
In parent's post it may be that one 4h block is done, then social pressure (work/child schedules) pushes one to continue with this one-block schedule.
It may even look appealing as triggering sleep through exhaustion superficially appears to help with sleep in the short term. Long term it gets exhausting but this perceptually becomes the new normal, especially when the symptoms of this kind of sleep deprivation aren't that obviously tied to sleep habits, the naively expected ones being masked by external pressure (schedule), habit bias (normalisation of deviance through repetition), exogenic (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) or endogenic (adrenalin, cortisol, dopamine).
The main problem is then that by the time symptoms are impacting the situation is deeply anchored; worse, because the root cause is non-obvious it is often misdiagnosed.
Don't ask me how I know.
Also, not a physician, just saying: take care.
I don’t think 8 hours is a myth, but more like that was what was observed in the 60s when the Stanford Sleep Research Centre by William Dement ran their first experiments on keeping people in white rooms without stimulation until their bodies found a natural rhythm.
It would be interesting to know if those experiments have been replicated and if there were any deviations!
What's interesting is my daughter has similar symptoms as you and has been diagnosed with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD). She's recently been prescribed a dose of melatonin which she takes an hour before the time she wants to go to sleep.
That appears to have helped somewhat.
But for me, 5mg does tend to knock me out and I can barely stay awake after an hour of taking it.
Taking more than 20 minutes to get to sleep is not that unusual as I understand it. I think 30 minutes minutes is quite common even in people who sleep fine. 4-5 hours is very short though. One of my parents also slept little and there is also dementia on that side of the family (I have some memory issues as well already). I don't know how much previous gnerations slept but I suspect there may be not so benign genetic short sleep issues as well. At least some issues may have susceptibility and a triggering event, with tech making the triggering event more likely. That would be another question about benign familial short sleep, if it increases the susceptibility to more severe issues.
Interesting on the dementia and sleep... though all my grandparents lived to old age, and my dad who I know hardly sleeps is in his 80s and doesn't really have memory issues. Hopefully that keeps up!
But thanks - I'll keep an eye on that one
I was like that, and among other remedies (like actually fixing the problems in my life that bother me), my latest last-resort is brisk walking to exhaustion, even very late in the evening. If it's 10:30 and I know I'm in a bad mood to sleep, I just go for a walk in the park for 2 hours and I fall asleep very fast when I return.
It's not ideal and I plan to switch to running, but I'm at a bad place where my cardiovascular fitness is not good enough and if I run for 30 minutes to exhaustion my heart rate stays elevated for more than one hour and running is just too activating.
Walking for 2 hours seems very wasteful right now, but it's what it takes to calm me down enough to fall asleep.
"The company ( FitBiomics ) has already commercialized two products. Their flagship offering, V•Nella, helps metabolize lactic acid and reduce fatigue, while Nella targets sleep health - a crucial market considering that 100 million Americans suffer from insomnia. "Within 10 to 14 days of daily consumption, consumers feel the difference," Scheiman notes. "They have less daily fatigue interfering with their daily life, more energy, and some people are tracking cardiovascular benefits on their wearables. We hear really cool anecdotal feedback like, 'Hey, I no longer have to take a nap in the middle of the day, or I no longer need coffee in the middle of the day.'"
https://archive.md/XOmx5#selection-827.0-839.405
The average day for me has huge differences in terms of my productivity at any given moment. I need downtime anyway, if I didn't sleep I believe that I'd end up vegging out in some way because I'm not doing 24 hours of flashcards.
The discussions on here also always seem to centre around a very stereotypical "I am a vat for my brain" way of thinking. Realistically whilst sleeping other things are going on, muscles are recovering, digestive processes are going on, other forms of growing, etc, it's not just the brain.
There are also things like circadian rhythm, sunshine, etc. I woke up early today and had a few hours of darkness, I can feel my mood and brainpower improving as the sun rises.
We are not bots, this stuff is analogue.
Times when it's not possible to get enough sleep: you'd be less sleep-deprived.
And, if it's truly without negative side effects: maybe you get 20 minutes more useful time per day and increase your ratio of conscious relaxation to useful time. I'd call that a pretty big win.
It feels a bit like - well could I engineer myself to require 1500 calories a day instead of 2000. Maybe. But as a result there would definitely be some downside, maybe I'd be less physically strong, or have less endurance, or have a bit less processing power, or have to rest more, etc. If we straight up designed a more efficient body, then I'd rather keep eating 2k and be "more powerful", or maybe I'd go to 4k!
Maybe I can sleep for 2 fewer hours and retain the same or more productivity. Or maybe I could sleep for the full amount of hours but be more well rested and as a result be more productive in the awake time. That sort of thing.
> There is no free lunch.
Selective pressure and evolution are pretty good at optimizing... but not perfect. What they optimized for, also, is not quality of life in the modern world. It's likely there are a whole lot of free lunches available, or at least big wins with relatively low opportunity costs.
It's certainly not great to discard potential improvements because of an assumption that what we have must be optimum.
I guess what would be cool is being able to play with the sliders. People already do this in other ways, for example people at the extreme end of bodybuilding or strongman are almost certainlhy explicitly shortening their lifespans for a shorter term benefit, calorie restriction looks like it lets you go the other way, etc.
Maybe you could even fiddle and have 16 hours of sleep and overclock your brain for the other 8 being super-intelligent, lol.
It's not like "Natural Selection" was given an ecological niche and optimized from scratch the being for that niche. That mental model implies there's not much to be done and any changes would produce a less useful product.
A more apt term would be "Refactored" or even "Patched".
It's more like a giant ugly legacy software system was added to, and the result was just enough to keep going in the new system.
I like that analogy better because it implies: 1. There is room for optimization, and 2. Any minor change is likely to break things far away due to the continuous re-patching and legacy cruft. Both of which seem correct.
I think you are conflating natural selection the process with organisms that are a result of natural selection.
Natural selection isn’t a process that is intentionally made by anyone, but a way we describe a simplified model slew of complex processes.
Also conflated is what you are optimizing for. The only thing natural selection optimizes for is survival. That’s it. Nothing else matters expect which individuals survive long enough to pass their genes to the next generation. As a result niches develop and as each generation survives compared to their peers their survival strategies are optimized.
Optimization perfectly describes what is happening to the survivability and reproduction of certain genes.
You appear to be working backwards. That there was a niche and evolution somehow crafted an organism to fit that niche. That is misleading. Genes replicate, and in a certain context some genes survived and replicated better than in some other context. So genes evolved in that new context creating a niche.
I'd like to deprecate that mental model.
I can't relate at all. Where I live the days are consumed by darkness in the winter and I see no effect on my mood or brainpower.
From the name I assume you are from Finland, which I am not, but supposedly Finnish people are the happiest in the World - which I'm not sure if it's actually true. The joke is that every Finnish person after seeing the study wonders why they are the only unhappy one.
Like I'll settle for "tired but no accruing sleep debt".
I suppose you can full dystopia it, go the other way, make them need 12-16 hours a sleep a day whilst you only need 4 ;)
Teenagers stay up too late anyway so I'd say this sort of thing would be a good way to hopefully reduce the effects of sleep deprivation.
Also, whoever came up with the idea of nap hour in kindergartens has a special circle of hell reserved for them.
"preemptive administration of low-dose aspirin during sleep restriction reduced pro-inflammatory responses. Specifically, aspirin reduced interleukin-6 expression and COX-1/COX-2 double positive cells in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated monocytes, as well as C-reactive protein serum levels."
"aspirin-induced reduction of inflammatory pathway activity in sleep-restricted participants was paralleled by decreased wake after sleep onset and increased sleep efficiency during recovery sleep"
But, bleeding and strokes :(
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-dose-aspirin-inflamma...
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/low-dose-aspirin/about-low-dose...
So, one possible line of investigation would be a table of mammals, their sleep cycles, their orexin levels, and the numbers of copies of orexin and it's regulators in their genomes. For example: compared to humans, elephants have a lower cancer risk. Turns out they have significantly more copies of p53, a tumor supressor gene (1).
Perhaps a similar, somewhat parallel construct exists: elephants sleep 3-4 hours a night. Maybe they have more orexin? Maybe they have different copy numbers or mutations of the relevant genes in the pathway?
(1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5061548/
> However, too much deep sleep is dangerous. REM is the stage of sleep in which we experience dreams, so our muscles become paralyzed to avoid acting out these dreams. In his “social sleep hypothesis,” Samson suggests that our ancestors mitigated the risk of deep sleep by sleeping in large groups with at least one person on guard.
> “Human camps are like a snail’s shell. They can pick it up and move it around with them,” Samson says. Our ancestral hunter-gatherers might have slept in groups of 15 to 20 around a campfire, taking turns staying awake and watching over the others.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-strange-sl...
I did try polyphasic sleep when I was younger but it didn't work out. Having my sleeping patterns so far off the standard made me really unhappy.
This stuff? Orexin receptor antagonists? They work. Holy crap, do they ever work. Sleep quality better than the Z-drugs, great tolerability, no massive disruption going off them... when these things go off-patent they're going to be massive. Sleep quality was not perfect (maybe 80% of "normal"? I don't know) but that is absolutely minor compared to the alternative.
(And for the record, I'm off them now due to other stuff clearing up such that I don't need this level of sleep assistance anymore. Not because I can't afford them.)
I guess that's a long-winded way to say that if you're going to do questionably-advised sleep biohacking, orexin receptors are probably the place to start.
If it was available over the counter for, say, $50/month -- do you think you would be taking it just for the improved sleep quality?
Also, what was the specific name of the drug you had such a good experience with?
> Sleep quality was not perfect (maybe 80% of "normal"? I don't know)
I know it sounds ridiculous, but ~1-2 nights of absolute terror per week is totally worth it compared to how it used to be (getting maybe ~1 good night of sleep every couple weeks.)
They work very well for me and I've noticed no side effects.
I've been taking them about 2-3 years now.
FWIW, I found Dayvigo to work better than Quviviq but they both do the job.
I can think of a few reasons I might have avoided it, but who knows for sure. I wasn't on it that long (about a year? not going to look it up), I as a general rule do not remember my dreams unless I'm interrupted, the underlying cause of my total insomnia was pharmalogical, I've always had some level of sleep disorder, I've been on every other sort of sleep aid, I used it with melatonin... who really knows.
Expensive is always relative to one's income. But, to put that number into perspective relative to another medication given for a good night's sleep:
I'm the parent of a narcoleptic. The meds to get a good night's sleep, Xyrem, are in the $15k / month range. The recently approved generics are 1/2 that.
Xyrem is basically GHB? A 500 ml bottle of GBL used to be what, 50 euros?
I know the medication is pharmeceutical grade, but are these people insane?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Pharmaceuticals
1) Neuroscience of Sleep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sleep
2) Sleep Epigenetics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_epigenetics
3) Sleep deprivation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation
4) Familial natural short sleep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep
Some combination of the title and the submission domain triggered my tick even more than usual around the use of “AI”.
It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll regard any artifact as artificially intelligent if the broader context fails a pretty low bar for intelligence of any kind.
So a bit of a false positive for your mental model.
Sleep deprivation is one concern, but there’s a more subtle impact on cognitive functions (working memory, creativity, deep focus), overall health (particularly the endocrine and immune systems), and long-term health outcomes (such as an increased risk of dementia).
When I was younger, I was fascinated by various optimized sleep schedules. However, I noticed a stark contrast: many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day. They needed that—not just to function in daily life but to achieve the deep focus required for their work. Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
Some suggest that one of sleep's key roles is to help the brain regenerate. Chronic sleep deprivation, in turn, is linked to a higher risk of dementia. For anecdotal evidence: Churchill and Thatcher, known for boasting about sleeping only 4–5 hours a night, experienced significant cognitive decline later in life.
I definitely underperformed academically due to sleep deprivation and I probably benefited greatly during my revision period because I had a very strong sleep routine.
That said, I entered my final exam having only slept probably less than two hours and that was 100% the right call because the extra cramming was necessary and drove the needle significantly.
I was also fascinated with alternate sleep schedules when I was younger. Some of the books and biohackers of the time made them sound like magical ways to get more hours out of the day.
Then every single experience report I found that was not coming from someone trying to sell me a book or get me to subscribe to their newsletter, YouTube, or other social media was extremely negative. Nobody who tried these had continued them very long. After going back to regular sleep schedules they felt significantly better. A common report was that they didn’t realize how badly sleep deprived they were until they stopped the alternate sleep schedule and went back to normal sleep.
A lot of the sleep biohacking reports follow a similar trend: People who try alternate methods of minimizing sleep don’t realize the negative effects until they quit. This is also true for people who rely on stimulants (caffeine or stronger) which mask feelings of sleep deprivation but can’t actually reverse the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Indeed the article discusses this thoroughly, noting that since it’s a very small sample you can’t rule out anything but very strongly negative fitness impact.
There’s simply not enough data to rule out the hypothesis that folks with this condition are slightly sleep-deprived vs their theoretical without-mutation genotype baseline.
I'm curious, in order to reach this duration, did they need to do some kind of exercise at some point in the day, to gain physical fatigue ? Or could they sleep this long whilst being (I exaggerate here) couch potatoes ?
I need 10 hours every day, so even if I go to bed at 10pm, I'd wake up at 8am, which is "late" for most people.
I'd love to be able to wake up at 6am, but just can't. It doesn't feel like an advantage.
What does "just can't" mean, exactly? Just curious, because I felt that way, too, until I had a newborn and was forced to wake up with less sleep and discovered it was physically possible. Still felt awful all day, but it was possible.
(All this to say that you sleeping 6h flat is plausible, but times-of-day are a human, social construct, and it's impossible for your body not to be able to adapt to going to bed earlier and waking earlier)
My entire point is that it's likely sociological for you: you either drink your last coffee at 7pm and this keeps you awake for another 6h, or you get into a routine at a particular time, or... As in, your original claim that you "simply can't wake up at 6am" seems unrealistic since "6am" is a thing that means different things in different locations.
Moreover, when I sleep more, I notice that I'm sharper and I find it easier to take on tough challenges: this means that sleeping longer makes me happier for the rest of the day. So I'm also willing to live a tougher life. So there's also a trade off with: yea, you have less time, but the less time that you have, you're happier. Or at least, that's my experience.
And not only are you happier, you're also more capable. So it's more easy to live according to your own rationality and it's easier to not live according to your emotions and instincts.
Again, just my experience.
Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.
> Living on less sleep might not affect immediate action (and in some cases, it might even seem to enhance focus on doing), but it can impair deeper, more complex thinking.
You are making a mistake in thinking the aforementioned genetic variation “enables people to get by on less”. They just literally sleep less. I have a brother in law with this, and it’s a bit annoying for him as his wife needs the normal 8 hours a night. He cannot sleep 7-8 hours, only 6. He just reads in the bed for 2 hours a night. If he has too much to do, he skimps like we all do, but for him this is 4 hours a night during the week (needing to catch up on the weekend).
Other than sleeping less than others, he’s regular in every way. Very successful engineer, if it helps, certainly requires “deep thought” on the regular.
It is unfair, but so many genetic advantages are equally unfair.
If I sleep eight hours, I feel groggy, jet-lagged, and generally have a day where I’m slogging through molasses to get from one task to the next.
My wife has raised concerns about my sleep pattern, so I started using sleep-tracking tools like Fitbit and, more recently, an Apple Watch. She tracks her sleep too, and the big difference we’ve noticed is that I fall asleep within about two minutes, and my “sleep efficiency” using these tools is 98%. If I’m traveling and feel a bit jet-lagged, I can take a 20-minute nap (often without an alarm) and wake up feeling refreshed. She also seems to wake up a lot, most nights I "sleep like a log" and I only wakeup in the morning.
My mother has the same pattern but stays up later and sleeps about six hours into the morning. I used to do this too, but around age 23, I switched to an earlier bedtime and a consistent daily routine. When I became a “morning person,” I found I could code like crazy in the morning before “starting” my day, and this rewarding experience reinforced the habit.
I’ve tested this pattern in many ways, including not using an alarm (I still wake up around the same time for weeks at a time) and using a “light clock” I built with a Raspberry Pi to slowly brighten the room. Again, I wake up after roughly 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I use my Apple Watch to vibrate as a gentle reminder to start the day. On weekends, I keep the same schedule and use the extra time to read or hack away at side projects, often coding until the late afternoon when my wife protests enough that I need to stop and hang out or do my honey-do's.
About 10 years ago, during my annual checkup, my wife asked my doctor about this sleep pattern. The doctor asked me several questions, seemingly looking for signs of sleep deficit or dysfunction. In the end, he said I could do a sleep study but concluded, “If it works, don’t break it.”
As for productivity, I’ve found I can code effectively from 4:30 am to 8:30 am, then shower and work from 9 am to 6 pm without much trouble. I also practice intermittent fasting, typically eating only at 6 pm, with a protein shake around noon. This habit happened by accident—I realized breakfast slowed me down, and eating lots of carbs impaired my cognitive function and ability to code or handle complex tasks in the morning.
Before you ask, I generally don’t use caffeine or other stimulants. Occasionally, I’ll have one cup of coffee around 9 am as a social habit, but I recently stopped that again and actually feel better. I’ll most likely drop it again for a while until it sneaks back in again.
Next solve going to the toilet and we're all set.
If we were able to be awake 20 hours a day we may still be miserable because of factors like the sun being down for ane even longer time while we’re awake.
I feel like this is one of those inane pursuits for productivity where that doesn’t fit at all, at least not for the thinking jobs. Maybe in a dystopia big companies like amazon would use inventions like this to be able to let their employees work 20 hour work days or something.
Of course this shouldn’t discredit the linked article of being interesting or anything, just sharing my thoughts on the endless pursuit of productivity.
Its main raison d'etre is we're all sleep deprived so engineering less sleep may provide health and wellness benefits.