9 ms·

The big lie about sleep

64 points by xriddle 2y ago

Jensson 2y ago
> On the other end of the spectrum is Boulder County, Colorado, which you might call the sleep capital of America That city is famous for attracting a bunch of people who love hiking and climbing mountains. It isn't a good example here, it is just full of young people who love to exercise, of course they are healthier! Just having an average age of 28.5 years have a dramatic impact on sleep statistics! There are many other numbers in the articles that are strange, like here they compare average employed people to 13% of unemployed people, that could be true for a single population so it doesn't tell us anything! > in a 2020 study, 13% of newly unemployed people said they got four hours of sleep or less a night, half of what the average employed person gets
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >It isn't a good example here, it is just full of young people who love to exercise, of course they are healthier! Same how some Eastern European countries like Czechia top alcohol consumption per capita charts, when the numbers are pushed up by tourists going there to get shitfaced. Touristic cities that attract a lot of people for one thing or the other should just be excluded from some statistics.
  - morsch 2y ago
    What's the math here? Austria gets 2-3 times as many tourists per capita, but consumes 20% less. Tourists spent 56 million nights in Czechia in 2023, while the 10 million residents presumably spend a bit less than 365 nights in the country: how big of an impact could there be? I can see how the argument would apply to certain cities or resort regions, i.e. I bet Palma de Mallorca has a much higher daily consumption during the summer season than in the winter.
    - cko 2y ago
      No one is going to Vienna for a stag party, so tourists per capita may not tell the whole story.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  Not just young but very fit and athletic. It's hard to not fall asleep quickly if you've spent the day hiking. I am reasonably fit but felt very ashamed of my body when I visited Boulder.
caseyy 2y ago
I like that they let you subscribe with Apple Pay, but I wish I could just pay $0.50 for the one article. I would pay. It’d be much less friction than either finding a proxy to read it for free, or subscribing properly and the dealing with the unsubscribe process which can be very difficult.
- wincy 2y ago
  But if they did that they couldn’t send you to a retention specialist when you want to cancel! And automatically switch to your reissued credit card when the old one expires, counting on you to forget that subscription and be a lifelong customer and maybe even for a few years after if they’re lucky.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  I really think the major credit card companies missed a tremendous opportunity by not figuring out micropayments. They have the infrastructure to be the ones to figure this out, but they didn't.
  - erhaetherth 2y ago
    Just drop the flat fee. Stripe is 2.9% + 30c. If they did 3% and no flat fee, then on $1 you'd get 97 cents instead of less than 70. I assume the CC companies are charging a flat fee too...unless that's just Stripe's own thing.
herodotus 2y ago
Ok, I read the article. But I still don't know what the big lie is.
- jerlam 2y ago
  I think the big lie is that wellness companies, doctors, and sleep widget salespeople claim that you can improve your sleep with blackout curtains, less screen time, exercise, fancy tech, and a host of other strategies. But this article is saying that being healthier and richer improve your sleep more dramatically, and those are things that are not directly in your control.
  - joshuaturner 2y ago
    > that being healthier and richer improve your sleep Either that or, apparently, living in Nebraska or Minnesota
    - jerlam 2y ago
      It's not a very good article and I don't agree with it. If it was entirely wealth-based, the map should correlate to this map of counties ranked by personal income, but there are clearly differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties_by_per_capita_income#/media/File:Per_capita_personal_income_by_County.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties...
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    I don't see how proving that sleep correlates with wealth disproves that those things work whatsoever, because those things are expensive.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    I still don’t see any lie. You can have demography bias you for results and also take action for results, these aren’t mutually exclusive.
    - 2y ago
koolala 2y ago
Please the lie is probably to sleep how someone else tells you to so you can be a part of society.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Exactly. You are incentivized by societies structures not to sleep in or stay up late because we maximized business activity around the 9-5 paradigm.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
I keep telling my kids that a vastly overlooked trick to success is going to bed earlier and getting more sleep. That and gratitude (which is why our family has evening rituals around this).
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  It was so hard for me to actually do that as a kid. You basically wake up, off to school, off to extracurricular, off to dinner, off to homework, and off to bed if you want a chance at 8 hours of sleep. Five days a week of that and your parents probably fill up your weekends for you. Oh and I worked in high school so that was shoehorned in somehow. Staying up late cutting into sleep time was the only time of day I actually had any agency. College in contrast was amazing for sleep. No one pestering me out of rem because I was allowed to sleep in until my body said I had enough for the first time in my life. Even now after college I rarely get the luxury to sleep in anymore, and I mean really sleep in like until almost noon.
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    Too many extracurriculars / “overshcheduling” is an easy trap for people of all ages. So easy to sacrifice sleep because there is always something more fun or productive (short term) to do! Before our youngest was born I was just taking care of our boys when they weren’t in school and even with a schoolday’s worth of discretionary time, I still stayed up too late on the computer and didn’t get enough sleep. With the new baby, things reached a tipping point and I am now trying to make sleep a priority.. so far I am learning that yes it does feel bad “sacrificing” things for sleep, but I do feel better overall when more rested so how important were those things after all? This is especially counter intuitive when I’d defer sleep for “self soothing” activities but then being chronically under-slept was the leading cause of needing soothing!! Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    Similar problem for working parents, ever minute is spoken for. When everyone is asleep, the dishes are done, and you are alone it’s finally time to yourself. I like the phrase of having “agency” — that really captures the urge.
strictnein 2y ago
> When it comes to slumber, what matters most is how rich you are. Looking at their sleep map, that swath of good sleep down the middle of the country seems to go against that, and isn't mentioned in the article (unless I missed it). Most of Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Colorado aren't "rich", but they get the best sleep. Wisconsin is slightly worse than those, but still rather good, and likely the only reason they're not great is that it's the state with the highest alcohol consumption.
- Izkata 2y ago
  Even more interesting is how the swaths are angled across the whole country, at just about the same angle as when sunrise actually is: https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2022/03/18/sunrise-times-across-the-us/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2022/03/18/sunrise-time...
  - cootsnuck 2y ago
    I immediately thought temperature and humidity. But of course correlation yada yada causation.
- Perceval 2y ago
  The "worst sleep" map is just two demographics: African Americans and Appalachians. https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/charts/22 https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/charts/22 https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/783 https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/783
avalys 2y ago
Richer people are happier, healthier, live longer, less stressed, and have a better quality of life. Is this a surprise to anyone?
SamPatt 2y ago
>Big, structural changes such as better access to affordable healthcare, expanding income-support programs like the child tax credit, and implementing mental-health programs in schools would go a long way to ending the sleep-deprivation doom loop. Citation needed. All of these exist in some places and don't in others, in varying degrees, so in theory a study should be able to look at the effects.
- em-bee 2y ago
  this was my first thought. coming from a country that provides this, and having laws that don't allow you to work more than 48 hours a week (with overtime) helps a lot to make sure that people get enough sleep.
throwaway22032 2y ago
I genuinely think that people who spread the idea that your individual outcome is significantly dependent on the statistical average for a cohort you are in are responsible for a _lot_ of suffering and lost potential. Literally any effort you put in at all means that you are no longer the average in most cohorts. It's simply bad science.
robertlf 2y ago
Why post an article that's behind a firewall that only subscribers can read?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cbogie 2y ago
  to provide another example of the sane big lie but in the context of ‘being informed’
- zamadatix 2y ago
  It's not that way for everyone but for those it is you can prepend archive.is/ to the url and read it that way. Allowing paywall sites without ever mentioning the site almost relies on users doing the above is one of the policies I find most annoying on the site. Seems to trip most everyone up.
instagib 2y ago
https://archive.is/2gbWb https://archive.is/2gbWb So, the lie is that you can only do so much to improve your sleep while poor and working. It comes down to being rich, not being required to work, no boss, not submit vacation days a year in advance, able to get quality healthcare whenever needed or electively wanted, have time to exercise, meditate, and eliminate any worries or concerns with money that you rarely care about the costs. There’s a lot of sleep hackers I’ve looked into who dive into EEG scalp mounted machines worn at night, 8sleep active waterbed addon coolers with sleep data, or sleep bands/rings. The latest is tracking and improving HRV heart rate variability numbers.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > It comes down to being rich, not being required to work, no boss, not submit vacation days a year in advance, able to get quality healthcare whenever needed or electively wanted, have time to exercise, meditate, and eliminate any worries or concerns with money that you rarely care about the costs. You can have all of this and be middle class if that's what you prioritize instead of Keeping Up with the Joneses. You will likely not have both, though.
  - anotherhue 2y ago
    The Joneses became the central banks so good luck ignoring them.
    - seventyone 2y ago
      This is the reality that nobody wants to accept as the root cause of these problems
      - willcipriano 2y ago
        Hamilton is basically Sweeney Todd for the historically literate.
  - gtsop 2y ago
throw0101c 2y ago
If anyone wants to learn more I found Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker to be a good read: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Walker_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Walker_(scientist)
- veunes 2y ago
  Would you recommend some more? Really interested in that topic but find it difficult to find a good sources
  - WBrentWilliams 2y ago
    Try the classic from 1976 to get an idea of what thinking on this was at the time funding for sleep science started: Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep (Dement, 1976, 1978): https://archive.org/details/somemustwatchwhi00dem_3n2 https://archive.org/details/somemustwatchwhi00dem_3n2 (1978 edition)
- Barrin92 2y ago
  That book is full of scientific errors and probably one of the most misleading pop-science books in recent history https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
olliej 2y ago
Super disappointed by the article, but 100% because I read the title as "The big lie about sheep" and was super interested in finding out what _that_ lie was. Now I want that article to exist.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
why do you have to be rich for good sleep hygiene? all you need is ... ... a regular sleep schedule ... time to mediate before going to sleep ... a dedicated sleeping room ... a mattress that actively controls its temperature to help you cool down ... a light alarm clock ... avoid stress ... special heavy weight blanket ... a calm and silent environment and that's about it already. i would also personally recommend to avoid financial stress and hardship by instructing your family office or portfolio manager to invest more conservatively.
- veunes 2y ago
  For some of that you do not need to be rich. But agree calm and silent environment is indeed a luxury
unparagoned 2y ago
This is such a toxic take. There actually is a lot people can do to help their sleep. Framing it like they did makes it seem like there is nothing people can do. Then I think they got causation mixed up. Studies show that night owls have less self control, worse sleep and health habits.

64 points by xriddle 2y ago

> On the other end of the spectrum is Boulder County, Colorado, which you might call the sleep capital of America That city is famous for attracting a bunch of people who love hiking and climbing mountains. It isn't a good example here, it is just full of young people who love to exercise, of course they are healthier! Just having an average age of 28.5 years have a dramatic impact on sleep statistics! There are many other numbers in the articles that are strange, like here they compare average employed people to 13% of unemployed people, that could be true for a single population so it doesn't tell us anything! > in a 2020 study, 13% of newly unemployed people said they got four hours of sleep or less a night, half of what the average employed person gets

Rinzler89 2y ago
>It isn't a good example here, it is just full of young people who love to exercise, of course they are healthier! Same how some Eastern European countries like Czechia top alcohol consumption per capita charts, when the numbers are pushed up by tourists going there to get shitfaced. Touristic cities that attract a lot of people for one thing or the other should just be excluded from some statistics.
- morsch 2y ago
  What's the math here? Austria gets 2-3 times as many tourists per capita, but consumes 20% less. Tourists spent 56 million nights in Czechia in 2023, while the 10 million residents presumably spend a bit less than 365 nights in the country: how big of an impact could there be? I can see how the argument would apply to certain cities or resort regions, i.e. I bet Palma de Mallorca has a much higher daily consumption during the summer season than in the winter.
  - cko 2y ago
    No one is going to Vienna for a stag party, so tourists per capita may not tell the whole story.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
Not just young but very fit and athletic. It's hard to not fall asleep quickly if you've spent the day hiking. I am reasonably fit but felt very ashamed of my body when I visited Boulder.

caseyy 2y ago

I like that they let you subscribe with Apple Pay, but I wish I could just pay $0.50 for the one article. I would pay. It’d be much less friction than either finding a proxy to read it for free, or subscribing properly and the dealing with the unsubscribe process which can be very difficult.

wincy 2y ago
But if they did that they couldn’t send you to a retention specialist when you want to cancel! And automatically switch to your reissued credit card when the old one expires, counting on you to forget that subscription and be a lifelong customer and maybe even for a few years after if they’re lucky.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
I really think the major credit card companies missed a tremendous opportunity by not figuring out micropayments. They have the infrastructure to be the ones to figure this out, but they didn't.
- erhaetherth 2y ago
  Just drop the flat fee. Stripe is 2.9% + 30c. If they did 3% and no flat fee, then on $1 you'd get 97 cents instead of less than 70. I assume the CC companies are charging a flat fee too...unless that's just Stripe's own thing.

herodotus 2y ago

Ok, I read the article. But I still don't know what the big lie is.

jerlam 2y ago
I think the big lie is that wellness companies, doctors, and sleep widget salespeople claim that you can improve your sleep with blackout curtains, less screen time, exercise, fancy tech, and a host of other strategies. But this article is saying that being healthier and richer improve your sleep more dramatically, and those are things that are not directly in your control.
- joshuaturner 2y ago
  > that being healthier and richer improve your sleep Either that or, apparently, living in Nebraska or Minnesota
  - jerlam 2y ago
    It's not a very good article and I don't agree with it. If it was entirely wealth-based, the map should correlate to this map of counties ranked by personal income, but there are clearly differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties_by_per_capita_income#/media/File:Per_capita_personal_income_by_County.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties...
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  I don't see how proving that sleep correlates with wealth disproves that those things work whatsoever, because those things are expensive.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  I still don’t see any lie. You can have demography bias you for results and also take action for results, these aren’t mutually exclusive.
  - 2y ago

koolala 2y ago

Please the lie is probably to sleep how someone else tells you to so you can be a part of society.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
Exactly. You are incentivized by societies structures not to sleep in or stay up late because we maximized business activity around the 9-5 paradigm.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

I keep telling my kids that a vastly overlooked trick to success is going to bed earlier and getting more sleep. That and gratitude (which is why our family has evening rituals around this).

kjkjadksj 2y ago
It was so hard for me to actually do that as a kid. You basically wake up, off to school, off to extracurricular, off to dinner, off to homework, and off to bed if you want a chance at 8 hours of sleep. Five days a week of that and your parents probably fill up your weekends for you. Oh and I worked in high school so that was shoehorned in somehow. Staying up late cutting into sleep time was the only time of day I actually had any agency. College in contrast was amazing for sleep. No one pestering me out of rem because I was allowed to sleep in until my body said I had enough for the first time in my life. Even now after college I rarely get the luxury to sleep in anymore, and I mean really sleep in like until almost noon.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  Too many extracurriculars / “overshcheduling” is an easy trap for people of all ages. So easy to sacrifice sleep because there is always something more fun or productive (short term) to do! Before our youngest was born I was just taking care of our boys when they weren’t in school and even with a schoolday’s worth of discretionary time, I still stayed up too late on the computer and didn’t get enough sleep. With the new baby, things reached a tipping point and I am now trying to make sleep a priority.. so far I am learning that yes it does feel bad “sacrificing” things for sleep, but I do feel better overall when more rested so how important were those things after all? This is especially counter intuitive when I’d defer sleep for “self soothing” activities but then being chronically under-slept was the leading cause of needing soothing!! Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
- nytesky 2y ago
  Similar problem for working parents, ever minute is spoken for. When everyone is asleep, the dishes are done, and you are alone it’s finally time to yourself. I like the phrase of having “agency” — that really captures the urge.

strictnein 2y ago

> When it comes to slumber, what matters most is how rich you are. Looking at their sleep map, that swath of good sleep down the middle of the country seems to go against that, and isn't mentioned in the article (unless I missed it). Most of Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Colorado aren't "rich", but they get the best sleep. Wisconsin is slightly worse than those, but still rather good, and likely the only reason they're not great is that it's the state with the highest alcohol consumption.

Izkata 2y ago
Even more interesting is how the swaths are angled across the whole country, at just about the same angle as when sunrise actually is: https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2022/03/18/sunrise-times-across-the-us/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2022/03/18/sunrise-time...
- cootsnuck 2y ago
  I immediately thought temperature and humidity. But of course correlation yada yada causation.
Perceval 2y ago
The "worst sleep" map is just two demographics: African Americans and Appalachians. https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/charts/22 https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/charts/22 https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/783 https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish/node/783

avalys 2y ago

Richer people are happier, healthier, live longer, less stressed, and have a better quality of life. Is this a surprise to anyone?

SamPatt 2y ago

>Big, structural changes such as better access to affordable healthcare, expanding income-support programs like the child tax credit, and implementing mental-health programs in schools would go a long way to ending the sleep-deprivation doom loop. Citation needed. All of these exist in some places and don't in others, in varying degrees, so in theory a study should be able to look at the effects.

em-bee 2y ago
this was my first thought. coming from a country that provides this, and having laws that don't allow you to work more than 48 hours a week (with overtime) helps a lot to make sure that people get enough sleep.

throwaway22032 2y ago

I genuinely think that people who spread the idea that your individual outcome is significantly dependent on the statistical average for a cohort you are in are responsible for a _lot_ of suffering and lost potential. Literally any effort you put in at all means that you are no longer the average in most cohorts. It's simply bad science.

robertlf 2y ago

Why post an article that's behind a firewall that only subscribers can read?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cbogie 2y ago
to provide another example of the sane big lie but in the context of ‘being informed’
zamadatix 2y ago
It's not that way for everyone but for those it is you can prepend archive.is/ to the url and read it that way. Allowing paywall sites without ever mentioning the site almost relies on users doing the above is one of the policies I find most annoying on the site. Seems to trip most everyone up.

instagib 2y ago

https://archive.is/2gbWb https://archive.is/2gbWb So, the lie is that you can only do so much to improve your sleep while poor and working. It comes down to being rich, not being required to work, no boss, not submit vacation days a year in advance, able to get quality healthcare whenever needed or electively wanted, have time to exercise, meditate, and eliminate any worries or concerns with money that you rarely care about the costs. There’s a lot of sleep hackers I’ve looked into who dive into EEG scalp mounted machines worn at night, 8sleep active waterbed addon coolers with sleep data, or sleep bands/rings. The latest is tracking and improving HRV heart rate variability numbers.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> It comes down to being rich, not being required to work, no boss, not submit vacation days a year in advance, able to get quality healthcare whenever needed or electively wanted, have time to exercise, meditate, and eliminate any worries or concerns with money that you rarely care about the costs. You can have all of this and be middle class if that's what you prioritize instead of Keeping Up with the Joneses. You will likely not have both, though.
- anotherhue 2y ago
  The Joneses became the central banks so good luck ignoring them.
  - seventyone 2y ago
    This is the reality that nobody wants to accept as the root cause of these problems
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      Hamilton is basically Sweeney Todd for the historically literate.
- gtsop 2y ago

throw0101c 2y ago

If anyone wants to learn more I found Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker to be a good read: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Walker_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Walker_(scientist)

veunes 2y ago
Would you recommend some more? Really interested in that topic but find it difficult to find a good sources
- WBrentWilliams 2y ago
  Try the classic from 1976 to get an idea of what thinking on this was at the time funding for sleep science started: Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep (Dement, 1976, 1978): https://archive.org/details/somemustwatchwhi00dem_3n2 https://archive.org/details/somemustwatchwhi00dem_3n2 (1978 edition)
Barrin92 2y ago
That book is full of scientific errors and probably one of the most misleading pop-science books in recent history https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

olliej 2y ago

Super disappointed by the article, but 100% because I read the title as "The big lie about sheep" and was super interested in finding out what _that_ lie was. Now I want that article to exist.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

why do you have to be rich for good sleep hygiene? all you need is ... ... a regular sleep schedule ... time to mediate before going to sleep ... a dedicated sleeping room ... a mattress that actively controls its temperature to help you cool down ... a light alarm clock ... avoid stress ... special heavy weight blanket ... a calm and silent environment and that's about it already. i would also personally recommend to avoid financial stress and hardship by instructing your family office or portfolio manager to invest more conservatively.

veunes 2y ago
For some of that you do not need to be rich. But agree calm and silent environment is indeed a luxury

unparagoned 2y ago

This is such a toxic take. There actually is a lot people can do to help their sleep. Framing it like they did makes it seem like there is nothing people can do. Then I think they got causation mixed up. Studies show that night owls have less self control, worse sleep and health habits.