7 ms·

How much can an extra hour's sleep change you?

106 points by nickpyett 13y ago

Peroni 13y ago
I will. As soon as my son becomes a teenager I have every intention of remaining asleep beyond 7AM. Until then, I'm at his unlimited, energetic mercy.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Oddly, our teenager did the "sleep in" thing for about six months, now he bounces out of bed at 6:45 most mornings and 6:00 when he is going to rugby training!
  - statusgraph 13y ago
    Probably a pretty girl in his first class :)
    - Miyamoto 13y ago
      My school offered a few tracks. The earliest track had you out of school earlier, but classes started at 7AM. Everyone took that track at my school because people could get out earlier and do things when it's still light outside. I regularly woke up at 5:30AM with no trouble. It's not really uncommon for teenagers to wake up at 6AM. For some weird reason that changes in college, and everyone gets lazy and sleeps in. (despite college usually offering superior choice of schedule)
- esw 13y ago
  I'm right there with you. Thanks to my infant and a merciless cat, it's been a couple of years since I've slept past 4:30am. I try to get to bed early as often as possible, but it's hard to simply 'give up' and go to bed at the end of a long day when you've finally got a moment to yourself.
  - cgs 13y ago
    Kick the cat out of the bedroom. Best thing I did to improve sleep quality.
  - chrismonsanto 13y ago
    Do you have an automatic feeder for the cat? I use the Crown Majestic (search on Amazon) and it works pretty well--my cat stopped sniffing my face at 6am...
    - esw 13y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion. We leave food out all night, so it seems to be less about wanting to be fed than wanting (me specifically) to be up and downstairs.
    - mulletbum 13y ago
      I bought the same feeder in the hopes that this would occur, but it seems my cat just can never get enough. So I run into the trade off between health (my cat's) and sanity (my own). I would still suggest the feeder to everyone to try however, it really is a well made product that could easily fix bad habits in your animals feedings.
      - ag80 13y ago
        My threshold for the number mornings the cat on a diet begins the wake-up call is rapidly approaching the point at which I get around to building some sort of time-release RFID tag access-controlled (two cats, only one on a diet) feeder.
  - junto 13y ago
    I'm in the same boat. Two children both under four and two cats. I used to be a real night owl. Now I'm in bed at 9:30 pm almost every night. Cats are better now. We have confined them away from our bedroom At night and we used a water spray (fine mist) which put them off scratching at the door. After a week or so of getting wet they stopped scratching. Tried the old water spary trick on our oldest child when she kept waking me up at 5 am. Didn't work. Made her cry. Just kidding! :-)
frogpelt 13y ago
I often wondered about sleep recommendations that focus on the amount of time. I realize that if you try to sleep for seven hours instead of six you are likely to get more sleep. But my problem is that not every person is getting the same quality of sleep in that period of time. If I sleep seven hours I may be getting as much rest as another person who sleeps six or a person who sleeps eight or nine hours. Sleep is another of those things that is not one-size-fits-all and I guess having a sleep study done is the only way to find out for sure what you need individually.
- crazcarl 13y ago
  There are some products out there that attempt to measure sleep quality via leaving your phone on the bed, or wearing a bracelet. I'm not sure of the accuracy, though. I hope these will get even better (maybe a non-intrusive headpiece that can measure brainwaves?) in the future.
  - pa5tabear 13y ago
    I have the Sleep Bot app and it measures movement and sleeping time and graphs the data. It doesn't give any analysis, however. Do you have advice for a better analysis of my sleep each night?
joonix 13y ago
Doesn't matter for me. I hardly get much deep sleep due to anatomical issues essentially blocking my airways. I can't afford the surgery (even though I have insurance) nor will my government contribute to it (even though it would increase my productivity multiple times over, meanwhile they throw trillions at universities offering useless degrees). But yes, we have a culture that doesn't value sleep. I know of people who schedule emails to be sent in the middle of the night just so they appear to be working all the time. Construction can begin at 7AM in NYC, waking up hundreds of people in surrounding buildings. Gas leaf blowers emit one of the most stressful drone sounds out in the suburbs, causing stress to dozens of neighbors, so one man can clear a pavement of dead leaves quicker. And just this morning over Manhattan, a helicopter hovered at 6AM for at least an hour. An hour, sitting there, hovering, for God knows what reason, awaking possibly thousands of people early, causing possibly millions in lost productivity today.
- peacemaker 13y ago
  You can really feel the anger in your comment and it resonates with me. I am a light sleeper and constantly amazed at what we as a society deem acceptable when it comes to noise at certain hours. Why does the fire truck needs to blast its horns at 3am on a Tuesday going down a large empty street? There is no need and in some countries that would be against noise pollution laws. Doesn't seem to matter here. Leaf blowers and lawn mowing at 7am on a Sunday are also a major annoyance yet I understand that some people, especially older people, like to get up early and who am I to complain that they do? They say having a major lack of sleep is comparable to being intoxicated yet there are no protections in place to prevent it. Instead we wax on about "pulling an all-nighter" like it's a competition on who can be the most sleep deprived. We live in a strange world.
  - joonix 13y ago
    Yes. I actually got into confrontations with the leaf blowers once (the manager, and the property owner). I also called the police because they are clearly violating the city's own noise ordinance. Nobody cares, the owner called me and told me that it doesn't matter because the work day starts at X a.m. What about people who work odd shifts, or students? Resistance is futile. I just started using wax earplugs and find they make a huge difference and actually drown out a lot of noise.
jbrooksuk 13y ago
My FitBit tells me that my average sleep time is 7.5 hours. That's pretty good for me since I'm a light sleeper. My girlfriend moving in bed wakes me up. Worse than that is that if I do have a lie in, or I sleep longer than 8 hours — yes, I recorded sleep before my FitBit — I'd end up with headaches all day and night, worsening my sleep the next night. 7.5 hours seems to be my perfect sleep duration. I've never been able to have a lie in, even when growing up with my parents and going through puberty. I'd want to lie in, but my parents would have me up by 8:30 every day. 9AM on rare occasions. I wonder if that's got anything to do with it.
dorfsmay 13y ago
Note that you can use it to your advantage too. Bad allergy? Sleep less, it'll raise your corti??? and reduce the effect of the allergy. Not a long term solution, but works well when you are at the pick of it.
- ryusage 13y ago
  I think it would be the opposite effect actually. Sleeping less, according to the article, seems to increase inflammatory and immune system responses, which are what cause allergies. So sleeping more, presumably, may decrease a person's allergic reactions. Of course, this whole article is based on a really small sample size...I would take it more as a suggestion than a solid scientific result.
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 Sleep deprivation increase the levels of cortisol which is in part why you tend to put on weight when not sleeping enough. Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory. I wouldn't be surprised if chronic lack of sleep increase inflammatory, due to some other mechanism, but for sure, short bouts of sleep deprivation has worked wonder for me to stop allergic reactions (I'm talking sleeping less than 4 hours/24 hours period - I usually need between 7 and 9 hours).
- lportion 13y ago
  I find this hard to believe. I have contact dermatitis and it noticeably gets worse when I am not sleeping well.
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 I'm not talking about not sleeping well, I'm talking about sleep deprivation, less than 4 hours, when I normally need between 7 to 9 hours. Also, we are all slightly different, what works for one person might not work for another (we are all an experience of one).
robg 13y ago
With our technologies for stress monitoring, I've been amazed at how much naps seem to reduce stress. You go from being pretty high to pretty low within twenty minutes.
- elwell 13y ago
  Naps usually leave me feeling like crap with a headache; especially on hot, dry days or if I had just eaten.
cliveowen 13y ago
I don't believe all of this claims about sleep. I sleep 10 to 12 hours a night and I always feel like shit. Even when I had to go to school, I used to sleep 8 hours a night and I was drowsy for most of the day.
- skizm 13y ago
  > I don't believe it when research claims X because of personal experience. That's a horrible way to look at any research conclusion. Have you considered you are possibly oversleeping? 7.5 hours might be a magic number (exactly 5 rem cycles) as opposed to 6.5 which will put you waking up in the middle of a rem cycle. Studies can be faulty for a whole bunch of reasons but dismissing a body of work because your little n=1 experiment didn't sync up with their conclusion is just willful ignorance.
  - cliveowen 13y ago
    I don't see how one can oversleep, if you don't need anymore sleep you just wake up, that's how it works.
    - skizm 13y ago
      First of all, that has nothing to do with the point I made in my last comment; which is you can't dismiss peer-reviewed research based on personal experience. Second, that is not how it works. There are varying levels of sleep. Some better than others. When your body doesn't need to go through rem sleep anymore it is sufficiently rested but that doesn't mean you feel like a ray of sunshine and immediately jump out of bed. There are other factors which make a person want to stay in bed longer than they should which leads to shitty non-rem sleep. Too much of this makes you feel groggy.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  Have you talked to a doctor about that? Specifically an expert in respiratory issues might be able to help.
landakram 13y ago
I know there's a lot of research in the effects of sleep deprivation on health, but the study referenced in the article had only 7 participants, segmented into two groups. Doesn't that seem like a really small sample size?
- jbkkd 13y ago
  Agreed. Although seemingly true, this article makes you wonder twice whether this has any scientific basis.
ExpiredLink 13y ago
> So we asked seven volunteers ... The volunteers were randomly allocated to two groups. Ahem
dkl 13y ago
Deep sleep sounds restful, but during it our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don't get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost. Compacting garbage collection.
- elmilagro 13y ago
  Yeah, if I drink any form of caffeine, this deep sleep is less effective. I can tell if I am on a caffeine binge working all the time, my days blur into one.

106 points by nickpyett 13y ago

I will. As soon as my son becomes a teenager I have every intention of remaining asleep beyond 7AM. Until then, I'm at his unlimited, energetic mercy.

arethuza 13y ago
Oddly, our teenager did the "sleep in" thing for about six months, now he bounces out of bed at 6:45 most mornings and 6:00 when he is going to rugby training!
- statusgraph 13y ago
  Probably a pretty girl in his first class :)
  - Miyamoto 13y ago
    My school offered a few tracks. The earliest track had you out of school earlier, but classes started at 7AM. Everyone took that track at my school because people could get out earlier and do things when it's still light outside. I regularly woke up at 5:30AM with no trouble. It's not really uncommon for teenagers to wake up at 6AM. For some weird reason that changes in college, and everyone gets lazy and sleeps in. (despite college usually offering superior choice of schedule)
esw 13y ago
I'm right there with you. Thanks to my infant and a merciless cat, it's been a couple of years since I've slept past 4:30am. I try to get to bed early as often as possible, but it's hard to simply 'give up' and go to bed at the end of a long day when you've finally got a moment to yourself.
- cgs 13y ago
  Kick the cat out of the bedroom. Best thing I did to improve sleep quality.
- chrismonsanto 13y ago
  Do you have an automatic feeder for the cat? I use the Crown Majestic (search on Amazon) and it works pretty well--my cat stopped sniffing my face at 6am...
  - esw 13y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. We leave food out all night, so it seems to be less about wanting to be fed than wanting (me specifically) to be up and downstairs.
  - mulletbum 13y ago
    I bought the same feeder in the hopes that this would occur, but it seems my cat just can never get enough. So I run into the trade off between health (my cat's) and sanity (my own). I would still suggest the feeder to everyone to try however, it really is a well made product that could easily fix bad habits in your animals feedings.
    - ag80 13y ago
      My threshold for the number mornings the cat on a diet begins the wake-up call is rapidly approaching the point at which I get around to building some sort of time-release RFID tag access-controlled (two cats, only one on a diet) feeder.
- junto 13y ago
  I'm in the same boat. Two children both under four and two cats. I used to be a real night owl. Now I'm in bed at 9:30 pm almost every night. Cats are better now. We have confined them away from our bedroom At night and we used a water spray (fine mist) which put them off scratching at the door. After a week or so of getting wet they stopped scratching. Tried the old water spary trick on our oldest child when she kept waking me up at 5 am. Didn't work. Made her cry. Just kidding! :-)

frogpelt 13y ago

I often wondered about sleep recommendations that focus on the amount of time. I realize that if you try to sleep for seven hours instead of six you are likely to get more sleep. But my problem is that not every person is getting the same quality of sleep in that period of time. If I sleep seven hours I may be getting as much rest as another person who sleeps six or a person who sleeps eight or nine hours. Sleep is another of those things that is not one-size-fits-all and I guess having a sleep study done is the only way to find out for sure what you need individually.

crazcarl 13y ago
There are some products out there that attempt to measure sleep quality via leaving your phone on the bed, or wearing a bracelet. I'm not sure of the accuracy, though. I hope these will get even better (maybe a non-intrusive headpiece that can measure brainwaves?) in the future.
- pa5tabear 13y ago
  I have the Sleep Bot app and it measures movement and sleeping time and graphs the data. It doesn't give any analysis, however. Do you have advice for a better analysis of my sleep each night?

joonix 13y ago

Doesn't matter for me. I hardly get much deep sleep due to anatomical issues essentially blocking my airways. I can't afford the surgery (even though I have insurance) nor will my government contribute to it (even though it would increase my productivity multiple times over, meanwhile they throw trillions at universities offering useless degrees). But yes, we have a culture that doesn't value sleep. I know of people who schedule emails to be sent in the middle of the night just so they appear to be working all the time. Construction can begin at 7AM in NYC, waking up hundreds of people in surrounding buildings. Gas leaf blowers emit one of the most stressful drone sounds out in the suburbs, causing stress to dozens of neighbors, so one man can clear a pavement of dead leaves quicker. And just this morning over Manhattan, a helicopter hovered at 6AM for at least an hour. An hour, sitting there, hovering, for God knows what reason, awaking possibly thousands of people early, causing possibly millions in lost productivity today.

peacemaker 13y ago
You can really feel the anger in your comment and it resonates with me. I am a light sleeper and constantly amazed at what we as a society deem acceptable when it comes to noise at certain hours. Why does the fire truck needs to blast its horns at 3am on a Tuesday going down a large empty street? There is no need and in some countries that would be against noise pollution laws. Doesn't seem to matter here. Leaf blowers and lawn mowing at 7am on a Sunday are also a major annoyance yet I understand that some people, especially older people, like to get up early and who am I to complain that they do? They say having a major lack of sleep is comparable to being intoxicated yet there are no protections in place to prevent it. Instead we wax on about "pulling an all-nighter" like it's a competition on who can be the most sleep deprived. We live in a strange world.
- joonix 13y ago
  Yes. I actually got into confrontations with the leaf blowers once (the manager, and the property owner). I also called the police because they are clearly violating the city's own noise ordinance. Nobody cares, the owner called me and told me that it doesn't matter because the work day starts at X a.m. What about people who work odd shifts, or students? Resistance is futile. I just started using wax earplugs and find they make a huge difference and actually drown out a lot of noise.

jbrooksuk 13y ago

My FitBit tells me that my average sleep time is 7.5 hours. That's pretty good for me since I'm a light sleeper. My girlfriend moving in bed wakes me up. Worse than that is that if I do have a lie in, or I sleep longer than 8 hours — yes, I recorded sleep before my FitBit — I'd end up with headaches all day and night, worsening my sleep the next night. 7.5 hours seems to be my perfect sleep duration. I've never been able to have a lie in, even when growing up with my parents and going through puberty. I'd want to lie in, but my parents would have me up by 8:30 every day. 9AM on rare occasions. I wonder if that's got anything to do with it.

dorfsmay 13y ago

Note that you can use it to your advantage too. Bad allergy? Sleep less, it'll raise your corti??? and reduce the effect of the allergy. Not a long term solution, but works well when you are at the pick of it.

ryusage 13y ago
I think it would be the opposite effect actually. Sleeping less, according to the article, seems to increase inflammatory and immune system responses, which are what cause allergies. So sleeping more, presumably, may decrease a person's allergic reactions. Of course, this whole article is based on a really small sample size...I would take it more as a suggestion than a solid scientific result.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 Sleep deprivation increase the levels of cortisol which is in part why you tend to put on weight when not sleeping enough. Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory. I wouldn't be surprised if chronic lack of sleep increase inflammatory, due to some other mechanism, but for sure, short bouts of sleep deprivation has worked wonder for me to stop allergic reactions (I'm talking sleeping less than 4 hours/24 hours period - I usually need between 7 and 9 hours).
lportion 13y ago
I find this hard to believe. I have contact dermatitis and it noticeably gets worse when I am not sleeping well.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9415946 I'm not talking about not sleeping well, I'm talking about sleep deprivation, less than 4 hours, when I normally need between 7 to 9 hours. Also, we are all slightly different, what works for one person might not work for another (we are all an experience of one).

robg 13y ago

With our technologies for stress monitoring, I've been amazed at how much naps seem to reduce stress. You go from being pretty high to pretty low within twenty minutes.

elwell 13y ago
Naps usually leave me feeling like crap with a headache; especially on hot, dry days or if I had just eaten.

cliveowen 13y ago

I don't believe all of this claims about sleep. I sleep 10 to 12 hours a night and I always feel like shit. Even when I had to go to school, I used to sleep 8 hours a night and I was drowsy for most of the day.

skizm 13y ago
> I don't believe it when research claims X because of personal experience. That's a horrible way to look at any research conclusion. Have you considered you are possibly oversleeping? 7.5 hours might be a magic number (exactly 5 rem cycles) as opposed to 6.5 which will put you waking up in the middle of a rem cycle. Studies can be faulty for a whole bunch of reasons but dismissing a body of work because your little n=1 experiment didn't sync up with their conclusion is just willful ignorance.
- cliveowen 13y ago
  I don't see how one can oversleep, if you don't need anymore sleep you just wake up, that's how it works.
  - skizm 13y ago
    First of all, that has nothing to do with the point I made in my last comment; which is you can't dismiss peer-reviewed research based on personal experience. Second, that is not how it works. There are varying levels of sleep. Some better than others. When your body doesn't need to go through rem sleep anymore it is sufficiently rested but that doesn't mean you feel like a ray of sunshine and immediately jump out of bed. There are other factors which make a person want to stay in bed longer than they should which leads to shitty non-rem sleep. Too much of this makes you feel groggy.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Mithaldu 13y ago
Have you talked to a doctor about that? Specifically an expert in respiratory issues might be able to help.

landakram 13y ago

I know there's a lot of research in the effects of sleep deprivation on health, but the study referenced in the article had only 7 participants, segmented into two groups. Doesn't that seem like a really small sample size?

jbkkd 13y ago
Agreed. Although seemingly true, this article makes you wonder twice whether this has any scientific basis.

ExpiredLink 13y ago

> So we asked seven volunteers ... The volunteers were randomly allocated to two groups. Ahem

dkl 13y ago

Deep sleep sounds restful, but during it our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don't get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost. Compacting garbage collection.

elmilagro 13y ago
Yeah, if I drink any form of caffeine, this deep sleep is less effective. I can tell if I am on a caffeine binge working all the time, my days blur into one.