Some is better than None

[azurelunatic]

I will not be linking the clickbait article that has inspired this entry, and the individual responsible for the clickbait headline should have their journalistic license taken away, shredded, shot, and burnt.

The claim of the headline is that six hours of sleep is the same as None sleep.

Deep in the article, the point is finally addressed: after two weeks of inadequate sleep, the six hours of sleep contingent (having racked up 28 or so hours of sleep debt apiece) finally started performing as badly as the people who had been up for two days straight. The thing that alarmed the writer the worst was that the people who had two days awake were pretty aware that they were not doing great, but the 28 hour cohort thought they were doing fine. (They were not.)

Six hours is not enough sleep. It is not enough sleep to stay functional in the long term. But it is still better than no sleep. (Fatal insomnia is a prion disease, but inadequate sleep and driving is still extremely dangerous.) Even a little rest can help, as long as you're not awakened in the middle of a sleep cycle.

(I throw legos at the no-naps contingent of institutional sleep police. Naps are our body's way of making sure that we GET ENOUGH FUCKING REST and you can sit on those legos.)

Comments

[kore]

It is amazing how much of society is invested in enforcing rigid sleep schedules that don't fit most people (could it be....capitalism??)

+1

[jesse_the_k]

“Needing to sleep” is stigmatized as

• weakness
• unsophistication
• doddering age
• incompetent youth
• laziness

I blame the allure of cocaine

Re: +1

[kore]

I have actual delayed sleep syndrome whatsit and chronic sleep onset insomnia, but I got told I was "lazy" even all thru college! I only start to perk up at about 9 pm and I've been that way since I was a kid. But no doc ever took it seriously. I really wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn't been struggling with sleep deprivation all through school and later jobs.

Re: +1

[jesse_the_k]

That's so wrong! I am sorry their normate bigotry limited your life path.

I seem to have a limited amount I can sleep in a day. If I nap, my night-time rest is docked by the length of that daytime snooze.

[elwinfortuna]

If six hours equals none sleep, I would have died a long time ago, because I get six hours or more of sleep maybe once or twice a week. I tend to be in a pattern where I sleep between 4 to 5.5 hours a night, then have a catch-up night where I sleep 8 to 10 hours (sometimes with chemical aids). And sometimes I nap on those days where I've had particularly little or particularly poor sleep. But I don't feel chronically sleep-deprived, and while I generally feel more well-rested on the days when I've had 8-10 hours of sleep, I'm not usually excessively sleepy on the days when I've had less.

When I was a teenager, I functioned fine on seven hours of sleep, and tended to consider seven hours as about right for me. But as I've aged, I need even less sleep. Honestly, I think if I got a solid six hours of sleep a night, every night, I think I'd be about perfect.

My dad was (and presumably still is) much the same -- he didn't sleep much at night but napped during the day a fair bit.

[azurelunatic]

And there are also articles about how too much sleep is bad for people too! Where by "bad for people" I'm pretty sure it's an indicator rather than causative, where people who have serious illnesses tend to need more sleep!

Nap addict.

[ravan]

My daily sleep requirements are about 8.5 hours. But I can't get to sleep at night before about 1:30 am or later, and I get up at 8:30 am for work. So, every afternoon or evening, I get a nap of about an hour and a half. If I don't get a nap, I still can't get to sleep before 1 am, even if I lay down at midnight. So I nap most days.

[kaberett]

It is almost! as though! as with food! the "first get enough, then worry about the fine tuning". YES having a regular sleep cycle genuinely is as best we can tell tediously very good for most people, BUT ALSO IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE A REGULAR SLEEP CYCLE THAT INVOLVES NAPS but also, crucially, first you get enough.

[silveradept]

Some sleep is much better than None sleep, and the headline writer should have their editing and composing privileges revoked until such time as clickbait headlines have been excised entirely.