> 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.
> 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.
> > 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 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!
> 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.
> 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 ?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>(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).
It's notable that almost every animal sleeps in some way, even organisms that are away from sunlight (ie. creatures that live underground).
If you sleep 30% of the time, that's 30% of the time you aren't eating, mating, etc. Also, during sleep you are more vulnerable to predators. One would expect evolution to get rid of sleep in creatures who don't rely on sunlight cycles.
So, there must be some really good evolutionary reason for sleep.
> during sleep you are more vulnerable to predators
Marine mammals sleep unihemispherally [1]. Land mammals can burrow, et cetera, which explains why predation and injury risk decrease during sleep. (Counterfactual: "large animals that are not at risk for predation, such as big cats and bears, can sleep for long periods, often in unprotected sites and appear to sleep deeply" (Id.).
This is a fun thought experiment, but our working definition of life is something along the lines of heritable metabolizing, which dreaming doesn't so obviously serve.
A wild tangent but reading “heritable metabolizing” really hit me on the “are viruses alive” question.
I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”.
“Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”.
Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.
> “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”
I years ago saw a research talk by someone doing, IIRC, regional-sized evolutionary-time-duration multi-scale ecosystem simulation - they made the same call.
> So, there must be some really good evolutionary reason for sleep.
Just one, but partitioning activities in time allows for further specialization. For example, instead of having generalist eyeballs that are okay at seeing in light and dark, you can have specialist ones that are really good at one or the other. Then another species in the same area that utilizes similar resources can specialize in the opposite, reducing competition between the two species (this is called resource partitioning).
Then, once there's a chunk of the day that is less productive than the other, it makes more sense for the body to devote that time to various recovery mechanisms. Then that chunk of time is even less productive, making using that time for recovery even more attractive.
Repairing cellular damage (mitochondrial and main DNA) from oxidation thanks to slower metabolism is the main reason.
On a side note taking vitamin E (an antioxidant that passes the blood-brain barrier) seems to have slightly reduced the need for sleep for me.
It has a lot to do with diet and metabolism.
Cat's sleep 2/3 of the time, have a very high metabolism and spend a very short amount of time eating or catching prey. (compared to say, Cows who are chewing for as long as humans are sleeping)
So it's likely to conserve energy in situations where there is a limited food supply or constraints on what and when you can eat.
Then there's animals that hibernate, for similar reasons, over winter.
But that's only one aspect of sleep, there's also the file indexing and disk defragging that goes on when you're not running any applications.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Is there some really important reason many animals have brains in their head (versus elsewhere in their body), or is it that many species happen to be derived from some ancestor who had that trait.
Another way to ask this would be how much of a benefit would be not sleeping? It's difficult to preserve food, but I guess there is no limit on how much energy you can expend pursuing a mate.
Maybe; my point though is that there are a lot of these common traits. I don't think these traits (e.g. need for sleep) being shared is necessarily because it's globally optimal.
Parent is suggesting that sleeping must be good on the macro level. That does imply that it must also be good for the animal, right? In order to statistically benefit the population, the benefits to any given animal must statistically outweigh the costs. It can’t be all bad for all animals and still be good for the whole.
But sleep can be partially bad for some animals, they can be more prone to becoming prey while sleeping (though Google tells me sleep also prevents nighttime activity where predators have the advantage). There are definitely evolutionary adaptations around sleep to make it safer, sleeping in trees, sleep patterns & duration, hypnic jerk, etc.
I don't know why this is downvoted. It's entirely feasible that weaknesses in a species (or its individuals) may be beneficial for the ecosystem and hence survival of the species in the long term.
E.g. rabbit population being culled by predators may prevent the rabbits from eating their feed plants to extinction.
I work in the sleep space, particularly enhancing slow-wave sleep - the synchronous firing of neurons which define deep sleep, the most restorative and vital component of sleep.
Only focusing on the amount of time asleep is a significantly limited viewpoint, but I believe this will change in the coming years as we gather more knowledge of sleep and access to EEG data about our brain activity during sleep increases.
Only measuring sleep time is like measuring the health of a persons diet is by measuring how much time they spent eating, but of course, looking at macronutrients, calories, is the right way of doing it.
I'll be writing more about this in the coming months, but my current thinking is that the concept of "can we sleep less" isn't the correct approach, and can be dangerous. At AffectableSleep.com - we increase the efficiency of deep sleep, and much of the research (https://affectablesleep.com/research) focuses on enhancing deep sleep in sleep deprived individuals (I'll post more research soon). This doesn't mean we should be sleeping less. A lack of quality sleep is already an epidemic in society, and massively underreported because the focus of the sleep industry has been the amount of time asleep, not the restorative functions of sleep.
Our goal isn't to help you sleep less, and we will need to be very clear in our marketing, but rather to ensure the sleep you get is as restorative as possible.
Of course, like any technology, some people will use it for negative purposes, which I believe would be to just "get by" on less sleep, rather than optimize your health through better sleep.
The headband has eeg sensors which monitor brain activity looking for slow-waves (synchronous firing of neurons which define deep sleep).
30 degrees from the peak of a slow-wave we "interrupt" the brain with a brief 50ms pulse of sound. In response to this interruption, your brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. Resulting in more restorative deep sleep without changing the sleep time.
Is that the sort of description you were looking for?
Yes, sounds really interesting, as an older adult that worries about diminished ability to recover during sleep, would love to try this out. Thank you !
There is quite a bit of research related to our stimulation and memory in older adults, as well as 3 dementia and Alzheimer's studies which I haven't posted yet a few papers can be found at - https://affectablesleep.com/science
It seems your company produces a deep sleep headband. I'm interested in these sorts of products because I want more deep sleep (for myself, and for family) while lifestyle factors (mostly kids) make that very difficult.
The last product I tried was the Philips deep sleep headband (which, unfortunately, never appeared in Netherlands, I had to import it from the US even though Philips is a Dutch company).
The main problem I had was that the headband is not compatible with ear plugs. Without ear plus, I get woken up very easily, either by outside traffic or by people in the household going to the toilet. The sound insulation in my house is terrible, and it cannot be improved short of tearing down all the walls and rebuilding them. So now I use a pair of really good ear plugs, and I also put a noise cancelling head phone over that to block out extra sounds.
Would it be possible to combine a deep sleep headband with a good ear plug? Or better: would it be possible to combine with that, and also noise cancelling headphones?
Our headband uses bone conduction speaker within the headband which sits in the middle of your forehead. Absolutely ear plugs are compatible. Wearing headphones should be fine, there is nothing in, covering, or near your ears.
I'd be keen to hear about your experience with the Philips product. We've spoken to some of their researchers, but I've never met a consumer who had one. We've spoken with many people who had the Dreem headband which had similar technology in some markets (not the US).
You can reach me at pete[at] you know the domain - if you're willing to share your experience.
Whoop does sleep tracking, measuring the amount of time you sleep and trying to put a "score" to what that means for your health essentially computing based on time asleep and HRV.
Affectable isn't only measuring. We actively alter your brain activity in real time which increases the restorative function of sleep. You don't sleep longer, it's not about falling asleep faster. Research has shown a 14% increase in HRV during stimulation, we've had 3 positive alzheimer's studies (1 - MCI, 1 - removal of Amyloid, 1 - increasing deep sleep in people with ALZ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
“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.
> Getting a bad night of sleep now and then is annoying, but not a health risk. However, chronic poor sleep may increase the likelihood of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even cancers of the breast, colon, ovaries and prostate. [0]
Is it entirely possible that yes you can get 2 hours less sleep, but you're at higher risk of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc.? I don't see anything discussing long term effects of less sleep in comparison in TFA.
> Instead, the risks are concentrated in medium to long term health of individuals who undergo therapy. As of now, we simply don’t have enough data to profile risk factors. More experiments are needed to know if “FNSS for all” is too good to be true.
> Which calls this out but says we don't have enough data to know
I don’t know if that is true, that section to me reads as we don’t know if there are long term effects with FNSS therapy because they haven’t been study yet, specifically to the therapy. Not necessarily how FNSS or FNSS therapy is related to other sleep health studies.
There is a good reason why this would be selected against by evolution: being awake increases metabolic rate--how many calories you use every day. Humans have only had abundant food availability for a short time, not long enough for evolution to adapt.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not convinced we need to engineer sleep in the general population. Once shorter sleep times are available to everyone, they’ll be expected and then simply assumed just as cars are right now in most of the US.
COVID affected my sleep, but I wouldn't classify it as “long COVID” Does anyone have interesting insights or resources about this? I’ve found a references, but HN is one of the best resources to ask for this.
It seems to improve over time, and I don't have any trouble napping during the day. However, my main issue is fragmented sleep: I wake up a few times at night but can fall back asleep easily. I used to sleep continuously, so I’m curious about what part of the brain this could be affecting and how can this be changed. I tried melatonin [1] in different dosages, from extra low to relatively high.
I’m fairly certain COVID was the cause since the symptoms coincided with the infection. Of course, statistically speaking, it could be a coincidence involving other factors, but I’m not planning to dive into a PhD analysis of it, yet!
had the same thing coincide with covid, but much harder to fall asleep once disrupted. Melatonin only seems to last for an hour or so, so I would take one to go back to sleep after a disruption
The one I like to take at night is Life Extension 300mcg (.3mg) 6 hour timed release (they make a bunch of different ones), which is the closest to natural melatonin release of any supplemental melatonin I've seen, although it sounds like there is massive variation between people in how much makes it to the blood from a given dose. There are a couple of ways to use melatonin and for circadian use a small non-delayed dose earlier may be better (or use both):
I have had issues waking up more frequently when taking melatonin. It sounds like while not common this side effect is not that rare either. Based on my severe sleep issues (primarly circadian) I suspect that one part of "sleep issues" for many people is actualy waking up issues and that the detailed process around waking up has a bigger influence than is currently appreciated. I suspect one reason that melatonin is helpful is that it sets the stage for a better wake up, however if something causes this wake up procedure to start after not enough sleep it can be more difficult to get back to sleep. The delayed release seems to help quite a bit to limit the chance of this happening for me, although it does still happen at times. I'm not sure if melatonin is a particularly good option for staying asleep.
Unfortunately, there aren't particulary good options. Magnesium is the easiest and as effective as anything for me but unfortunately a high enough dose to be effective will also make me tired the next day. However, if your diet is low on magnesium then just increasing that some might help or possibly you won't have the issue with tiredness the next day. baclofen helps me but has issues and I certainly would not recommend it for your case.
A short (few minutes) nap mid day helps the circadian rhythm but longer naps can make it harder to stay asleep at night. If you nap for longer periods, multiple times, or later in the day that is the first thing I would suggest changing. I'm not sure what length causes more trouble but I think getting to sleep but staying asleep as briefly as you easily can is the ideal (though if you will naturally wake up after a bit longer that might be better than an alarm).
I also noticed covid made my already bad sleep worse when I had it (most likely covid, not confirmed by test; cold or flu usually give me better sleep for a day or two). However, I didn't notice any lasting issues (I still have severe sleep issues but it was just that first week of covid that they seemed to be different from usual). I wonder if it could be just your memory of how you sleep that changed after you noticed it due to the disruption. As long as you can easily get back to sleep and aren't staying awake for long it should not cause trouble and is not uncommon. If you feel rested there is nothing to fix while worrying about it or trying to change it could case worse trouble.
These are my thoughts anyway, hopefully something in there is helpful :).
Speak for yourself. I love sleep and wish I could sleep more. Sometimes I think the only purpose of being awake is to get food and shelter for more 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did a lot of sleep hacking in college, trying to sleep as little as possible so that I could spend time with friends, play video games, and (ostensibly) study.
Now that I'm working a job where I do overnight deployments, often work 12-14 hours days, and have a couple of kids who don't sleep well, I hate my past self for not sleeping while he could. You never know when circumstances will drive you into unplanned sleep deprivation. Doing it to yourself for low-to-mid-level time gains isn't worth it.
This is one of the bigger failures of modern society. This information should've been pervasive but back then it wasn't. It arguably still isn't, perhaps for the highly educated.
Back when I studied (15 years ago), if I knew that I'd have the short-term memory issues that I do now, I'd never have done what I did just in order to study longer.
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.
It bums so much that the "solution" to people suffering sleep deprivation is always trying to find something to sell them and not remove the causal problems: noise and light pollution, limited opportunities for proper nutrition and physical activity, insane work hours requirements and excessive commute time, etc...
The best advice I ever received, and will give again. It has really served me well.
In the words of John Lennon, let it be.
Sleep when you're tired, work and play when you're not. The constrination and worrying about it, how much time you have for what, etc. is the single biggest driver for the stress and loss of sleep. Let go of that, let if flow, it will.
I was responding to this:
> Sleep when you're tired, work and play when you're not.
I don’t get tired on a good cadence so this doesn’t work for me. I have to follow a schedule that’s independent of how awake, motivated, or tired I feel.
I'm not saying anything about your schedule. You do you.
What I am saying is adding another layer of stress and yet another thing to optimize on top of all that does nothing but make it worse.
In terms of the analogy you gave: I'm not saying drink milk, I'm saying stop worrying about it and drink oat milk. Spend that energy elsewhere in your life in things that are more easily effected by your efforts.
I think I agree with what you’re saying - adding systems on top of something that doesn’t need it isn’t worth it. I agree; however, some folks can’t “just” follow their natural tiredness to manage their sleep.
Lots of people can’t do that, we need to manage our sleep. The thing that helped me not worry about sleep was the routine. But that needs to be maintained and tweaked. I don’t worry about it, but have to think about it.
Do you have a health condition that requires you to manage your sleep? Pragmatically how does that shake out?
I was not speaking to those with medical conditions or similar. It was more general advice that helped me in the past for those who don't have sleep conditions, but are giving themselves one because they're needlessly worrying about or optimizing it.
this is the correct answer for sleep. learning this has been more effective than any medicine that currently exists. if you're reading this and think this approach doesn't apply to you - it does. and the great thing is that it fixes much more than 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.
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.
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.
Absolutely they would. It's soooo easy to lose sleep, and unfortunately getting it back isn't really a thing, not unless you want to use up more time. I guess we need to keep reducing the need for sleep until it's short enough it can be conveniently done anywhere, anytime!
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?
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.
The Taylorism (and eugenics) people would have a field day with this.
Are there any good sci fi stories or novels on reducing or eliminating sleep through better chemistry?
Given the impetus of the article is we're all chronically sleep deprived, I wonder what kind of (Swiftian?) political solution there might be to collectively improving sleep health.
Certainly the current commercial solution is drugs and lots of them.
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
Maybe I skipped something, but the article went on about sleep efficiency without touching on sleep quality.
Things like apnea and even a bad pillow/mattress combination can make someone's sleeping hours pretty miserable, and that's much easier to control and spread awareness than promoting gene therapy
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?
not all hours sleep/awake hours are equal - for example, I may be more work productive late at night, a better listener/learner in the mornings and better sleeper post meals, in the bath tub, travelling (my kids used to love falling asleep in the car).
Wonder if we could engineer multiple sleep intervals through out the single day (e.g. power napping, siesta's). There is plenty of dead time for me during the day that could be swapped out for sleep.. the question is at what cost to the body & mind?
Yeah, optimize yourself to make every available dollar for your corporate / government masters. Or just sleep 8+ hours a night like you're supposed to according to decades of published research. Which way western man/woman?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.