is getting more sleep worth it?

[teamdonkey]

The two arguements i here from the media, wife, etc:

1. getting 8 hours sleep (or whatever is optimal for each individual) will increase your life span.

- I'm 29. If i assume i'll live until 75, and getting 1 more hour a night will increase that to 78, basically i'm trading 3 years worth of waking hours from now until 75 to gain an extra 3 years at the end. This is -EV (assuming i'm not doing high quality things with those 3 bonus years like posting on poker forums).

2. Getting more sleep will make you happier and/or more energetic for those hours you are awake.

- is this significant enough be a big deal? Enough to offset the loss from trading hours when i'm young and spry for hours when i'm old and viagra dependant?

[blaze666]

sleep is fo' suckerz. i get 4 hours sleep on weekends because of poker. i get up at 6am, and if i got up at 11am like most people, i have wasted 5 hours of my life. think about what you could do with 5 hours!

[AZK]

Great thread. Since if I could I would choose to sleep only a few hours a night (think about how much more you could do yada yada idea) Unfortunately, I can't. Sleep isn't just going to result in a logner life span, it's going to result in a healthier life. Your body will breakdown without it. Sure it'd be nice to only sleep four hours a night and for some people it's doable, but for most of the population it isn't.

[RunDownHouse]

If I don't get a minimum 7 hours, I literally doze off at work.

If I don't get 9, I'm frumpy.

I go to bed between 9-10 and get up at 4:30-5. Some people just need more sleep than others.

[ThaSaltCracka]

sleep is the cousin of death, get 6 a day.

[ClassicBob]

I slept until 4 today, and I wasn't up that late. I believe I went to sleep around 3. I really like to sleep, but when I get up at such an absurd hour, I usually get pissed at myself. Plus it's going to trap me into a cycle of poor sleeping habits. I'll have to pull an all-nighter tonight or something to get back to normal.

[Tron]

Apparently making more out of your sleeping hours is a learned trait... During the fall semester a hypnotist came to our school and he claimed that he only slept 3 hours a night, and is able to do so because he gets higher-quality sleep as a result of self-hypnosis. It would be pretty amazing if he were telling the truth because this guy was wild and showed no signs of slowing down. I suppose he had no reason to lie.

[DMBFan23]

[ QUOTE ]
The two arguements i here from the media, wife, etc:

1. getting 8 hours sleep (or whatever is optimal for each individual) will increase your life span.

- I'm 29. If i assume i'll live until 75, and getting 1 more hour a night will increase that to 78, basically i'm trading 3 years worth of waking hours from now until 75 to gain an extra 3 years at the end. This is -EV (assuming i'm not doing high quality things with those 3 bonus years like posting on poker forums).

2. Getting more sleep will make you happier and/or more energetic for those hours you are awake.

- is this significant enough be a big deal? Enough to offset the loss from trading hours when i'm young and spry for hours when i'm old and viagra dependant?

[/ QUOTE ]

FWIW, I find 2) to be the case whenever I happen to stumble upon extra sleep.

[mmcd]

I just woke up and feel great. Time to take a shower and go get some dinner.

[Dead]

I get 5 hours of sleep a day, maximum. Usually it's 3 or 4. And I don't get the dark circles underneath my eyes either.

[rmarotti]

did you just say "frumpy"?

[Rotating Rabbit]

Are you happy with getting 5 hours max or do you wish you had more? Personally I get grunmpy without at least 7.5 hours. A couple of days at 5 hours and I'm basically mentally ill.

[HtotheNootch]

I'll sleep when I'm dead.

[antidan444]

If I get anything less than 8 hours of sleep, I'm useless for the first few hours I'm up anyway.

That being said, I' know people who can run just fine on 5 hours daily (at least to this point in their lives).

[david050173]

[ QUOTE ]
Apparently making more out of your sleeping hours is a learned trait... During the fall semester a hypnotist came to our school and he claimed that he only slept 3 hours a night, and is able to do so because he gets higher-quality sleep as a result of self-hypnosis. It would be pretty amazing if he were telling the truth because this guy was wild and showed no signs of slowing down. I suppose he had no reason to lie.

[/ QUOTE ]

He has sample size issues. The hypnosis part is probably bunk. There is a range of hours of sleep that people need to be fully rested (something like 4-9 is 99% of the population). There is something to the quality of sleep argument though. There have been some studies reduced thier sleep requirments by 2-3 hours (8->5) by slowing reducing the amount of sleep they got. There were no side effects but it was only like a year study.

[mannika]

I remember that once there was some study done that suggested a correlation between getting less sleep and being more successful or something. Of course, the idiot newspapers that reported on it claimed that sleeping less would make you more successful. However, they obviously weren't bright enough to figure out that it's the other way around. It's just that people who are successful have shi<font color="red"></font>t to do and can't spend their days sleeping. Stupid newspapers.

[tbach24]

My new plan for summer: fall asleep late, wake up when I do. Oh wait, that's always my plan when home. Sleep rules.

[YourFoxyGrandma]

I like sleep, but it's such a huge waste of time. Probably not worth it.

[OtisTheMarsupial]

Everyone has a different need for sleep. Most people need 7-8 hours a night but some need 4 and some need 10.

Total lack of sleep leads to insanity.

[gorie]

i usually judge the value of sleep based on my tiredness.

[Blarg]

I think of it in a couple of ways -- in terms of quality time, and in terms of health.

I've known a few people who crowed about sleeping only 4 hours a night, and saying they were fine and they got a lot more done in their lives. You know what? They all looked like sh_it to me. Sallow skin; defeated looking faces; prematurely grey hair; big swings in energy from low to high, but mostly low; poor muscle tone.

Unattractive results on the health scale. No way would I want to trade with them.

And that feeds into the quality of life thing. Physically, they look bad and their behavior can reflect it -- as does mine, when I get too little sleep. And the mind is not separate from the body being abused. What's the use of having more hours, whether you're young or old, if they're low quality? Sure, maybe you can plod through more low-level work, but one of the first things that goes when you don't get enough sleep is the ability to think creatively and do higher level mental tasks. So are more hours as a zombie that great? Well, not to me. I'd rather have fewer hours well lived than more hours shuffling along looking for brains to eat.

Mood, growth and maintenance of muscle, blood pressure, creativity, and higher level mental functioning, are all negatively impacted by lack of sleep. Would I want to trade all that for living life at a lesser level, just more of it? Not really. I've always found the quality of work I can get done when I'm mentally at my peak almost bears no relation to the level of work I can get done when I'm feeling fuzzy, listless, or less than my best. For instance, I can get more from reading a poker book for two hours when I'm at my sharpest than I can from a dozen hours of reading one, even if I'm reading the same passages over and over, when I'm at less than my best. I identify more strongly with the "sharp" me, and frankly I like him better. He's a lot more fun to be around, for me and others, and lives a better life. I've often traded him in for the more tired, lifeless version of myself, and I've seen others do the same thing themselves and sing the praises of it, but I haven't been impressed by their results, or mine, when taking less than the best care of themselves. Some of them, frankly, I'm pretty sure are taking quite a lot of energy out of their lives and years off them -- at least, to judge from their appearance and actions. That's the kind of thing I want to run from, not aspire to.

[CrashPat]

I sleep as long as I can. I usually am not up until after noon, and I usually go to bed between 2 and 6. I generally get 8 to 10 hours of sleep but will on occasion dip to 6 hours or spike to 14. So what if I am "losing" time? It is not like I am productive when awake anyway.

[cockandbull]

do you think too much sleep has a different but equally damaging effect?

[Blarg]

I don't think you could define sleeping too much very easily, until you start to talk about sleeping so much that you can't sleep properly again that night, having thrown off your biological clock or something.

Even then, you'd have to figure that people who slept more but also went through more stress or more physical and/or mental exertion might sleep more but still fall asleep properly the next evening, so sleeping more than usual can be done without necessarily resetting your biological clock.

However you might finally determine you're "sleeping too much," if you were indeed doing so, the negative effects would have to be the indirect ones, I would think. I've heard of lack of sleep depleting the release of growth hormone and the repair and new growth of nerve and muscle tissue, of it contributing to high blood pressure, of it, when lack of sleep is chronic, shrinking the brain, and other negative things like that, but apart from the everyday anecdotes of feeling groggy from oversleeping, I haven't heard of physiological changes brought about by sleeping too long.

My guess is that, excluding people with significant depression, if you're still tired, you probably need more sleep, and that only becomes a problem when it interferes with your ability to live an ordinarily scheduled 24-hour day or throws off your circadian rhythm.

Personally, I'm usually in a little war over this with my own physiology. NASA discovered that people function best on 30-hour days, with 8 to 10 hours of sleep and the rest waking. That actually suits me perfectly. Unfortunately, the world is on a 24-hour cycle, and that leaves many of us out of sync a lot of the time. I can easily sleep for 10 hours even when feeling very good and energetic, and regularly get a big burst of energy at around 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. If I'm not very careful to tone everything down around 11:00, the ball starts rolling again, and I'll be lucky if my circadian rhythms don't get thrown off. That's the real health negative for me personally -- being forced to try to fight a personal physiology into a world that's always a few hours out of sync with it. It's not sleeping more than 8 hours that creates direct physiological negatives, unlike not sleeping enough hours; the negative effects are purely indirect.

[Sponger15SB]

I go to sleep when I'm tired and wakeup whenever.

Am I in the severe minority? I go to sleep at like 11-1 and wake up at 7:30-9

[Bluffoon]

I scrape by on as little as I can. You only have so much time on this earth. I am not wasting any more than i have to unconscious. Pass me another cup of coffee....

Ill sleep plenty when I am dead.

[Sponger15SB]

[ QUOTE ]
I scrape by on as little as I can. You only have so much time on this earth. I am not wasting any more than i have to unconscious. Pass me another cup of coffee....

Ill sleep plenty when I am dead.

[/ QUOTE ]

It seems like you'll be dead quicker this way?

But what do I know. Most likely nothing.

[Bluffoon]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I scrape by on as little as I can. You only have so much time on this earth. I am not wasting any more than i have to unconscious. Pass me another cup of coffee....

Ill sleep plenty when I am dead.

[/ QUOTE ]

It seems like you'll be dead quicker this way?

But what do I know. Most likely nothing.

[/ QUOTE ]

True but I could sleep two more hours a day and get hit by a truck next february. You never know. Im taking the sure thing.

[RacersEdge]

I'm a huge sleep fan.

I'm just running at 80% effective if I just get 6 hours - plus I need to catch up on the weekend. It's more about having focus and concentration than being "happy". This lets you excel at school, work, sports etc. Just being at 80% just let's me "get by" but not do anything above and beyond the minimum required.

Plus, there was a Time article a few months ago that talked about how your memory, knowledge, and skills increase when you have enough sleep - your body has time to re-wire itself while you sleep. I always feel this happening to me - I'm trying to figure something out, I go to bed and "sleep on it" - and my brain has had time to work on the problem during REM (I think ) sleep.

Get to bed.

[parappa]

I'm in a bind over this myself right now. The poker games don't even start to get good until at least 1 a.m. my time, so the answer is to stay up later. But in the summer, it begins getting light at around 4 a.m. and I have trouble sleeping in the day, because of light/noise issues. I'm constantly wondering whether to accept worse games and play better or accept better games and play worse. During this party reload I've dropped a level and am staying up late, knowing that I'm not that sharp, but I'm never sure.

[fnord_too]

There have been a lot of studies suggesting that the productivity loss from getting too little sleep wipes out the benefit of the extra time you gain.

Basically, I think it depends on the task at hand. If you are doing thoughtless repetitive tasks, lack of sleep won't hurt you much beyond quality of life considerations. For tasks that require mental alertness, I think getting sleep is well worth it.

I will probably be working on a couple of sleep studies if I stay at my current job (both for the US Army I think). Should be pretty interesting if it happens.

Personally, I get anywhere from 6-8 hours a night, and would love to get 8 every night. Also, when I exercize it is a lot harder to get by on 6 hours. And, at the risk of invoking Dynasty's dancing lock, I know when I am not well rested my poker game goes to crap.

[lucas9000]

getting too little sleep makes my waking hours less enjoyable. for me that answers the question right there. tsc paraphrased a quote i was about to post: "i never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death" (nas)