One thing that stuck with me from the book Stroke of Insight (memoir of brain scientist who has and recovers from stroke) was how intently she prioritized sleep when everyone else kept trying to drag her out of bed.
In a more mundane context, I've been fortunate to organize my schedule such that I don't use an alarm to get up in the morning. So I can let my body figure out how much sleep I need.
When my wife had our children, she (and I) were handed them, stuck in a room, then distrurbed for tests and briefings every 90 minutes for 3 days.
How anyone can recover from something as savage as childbirth is beyond me. It is no small miracle that she was able to walk, let alone care for two new babies and herself (with my help, but there's only so much I can do to assist with breastfeeding or healing of major trauma).
At one point I asked all the nurses to leave and not come back for 6 hours in very angry tones.
The same thing happened to my mom in her 50s after 6 hour quadruple bypass surgery. They basically kept her awake for two days doing tests every hour after her surgery. She eventually started hallucinating from lack of sleep. It just seems so inhumane.
We had to keep our daughter on a photocopier looking device for bilirubin as well as the tests. Nobody told me how common this is so I also got to enjoy a feeling of panic and dread while that was going on.
Phototherapy is so scary looking, but the NICU nurses made it clear to my wife and I that everything was going to be fine. That said, seeing your newborn in that state after you just welcomed them to the world is a real brain blast of trauma. I still remember the feeling as you described: hollow dread and fear.
I dress it up in other terms but this is ultimately my primary complaint about Scrum. It uses peer pressure to moralize about acceptable sleep patterns.
I'm completely ignorant here, but my understanding is that Scrum is (perhaps at a high, reductive level) a software workflow/collaboration tool. Genuinely curious how that ends up being used to moralize about acceptable sleep patterns.
If you don't show up at a particular time in the morning then you're a horrible person and not a Team Player. Every day, year after year.
Good teams make it after everyone would have reasonably absorbed their coffee. But some teams get pushed earlier. Particularly if there are people in EST, CST, and definitely if you've got people in India, where 9 am PST is when you should be reading your kids bedtime stories.
Scrum doesn't dictate any particular time for team meetings. But if you choose to work on a geographically distributed then someone will be inconvenienced regardless of the chosen methodology. You're not special.
What about standups? Are you implying that having to be somewhere at a certain time in the morning impedes your ability to go to sleep at a reasonable time so you can get a healthy amount of sleep?
There you go moralizing about acceptable patterns of sleep.
Crepuscular and nocturnal predators require tribes of humans to have some number of members who are tuned to be either awake before sunrise or awake long after sunset. Without people with genes to go bed late and wake up late we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
In modern society the former are lionized and the latter are villified as making bad choices.
I can pick when I go to sleep and wake, I've worked 3rd shift, 9 - 5 and resturant hours with no issue.
Wouldn't a tribe that is able to do as I can have the greatest evolutionary advantage and thus outcompete the tribes requiring specialization like you describe?
Lucky you. Whatever I do, if I'm forced to be out of bed before 8 AM, I'm going to be completely useless for few days. Usually I wake up around 9:30 to get good sleep. And whatever I do, I'm simply unable to go sleep earlier than midnight, even if I lay down, I just can't sleep for hours. It's 0:29 where I live and I'm just turning on Netflix after a failed try at sleeping - even though I'm pretty tired as I didn't sleep enough yesterday.
Unfortunately, not everyone has quite the same natural flexibility you describe. "Shift worker syndrome" has been known for decades, though a fortunate subset of people just seem immune.
Yes. Isn't that obvious? Everyone has different natural sleep patterns, some have later cronotypes. Meetings set too early in the day for your body's preferred time to be asleep will result in having to wake up with an alarm to attend them.
My team moved our daily standup later in the day to accommodate my delayed sleep phase and it's been extremely helpful to getting a full night's uninterrupted sleep.
>> So I can let my body figure out how much sleep I need.
This is why my doctor advised (during a bout of insomnia a few years ago) not to use those "blackout" shades. They completely confuse your brain. My doctor said to sleep with the blinds open so your body can naturally reset its clock with the sunrise and sunset. Thankfully, this was in the Summer in a midwestern state, so I got back on track, but I still had to make some adjustments when daylight savings and Winter started.
Your strategy was the other recommendation my doctor said to use. Anything that allows your body to naturally find its biorhythm is the best.
Or use a 35,000 Lumen corn light (one I use https://a.co/d/idyzuiW ). Stopped a family from falling into depression regularly throughout the year. They are fanatical about getting the light because they don't want to go back.
The benefit of such a powerful lightsource is that you can get roughly the same amount of light you'd get from a summer sun. That seems to be what you need to stave off seasonal affective disorder.
For waking up you'd need some kind of timed control, either old-school mechanical or maybe a smart relay. I've found that a single well-placed smart bulb programmed to ramp up over the course of 15 minutes works well to wake me up, but I'm pretty sensitive to light during sleep.
The benefit is that it's much much brighter. Human eyes adjust to any amount of light so they'll "look" similar, but unconsciously it makes you happier.
Where I live the days are very long during summer, and short during winter. If I wake up by sunlight it's either like 4 in the morning in summer, or soon now like after 9 in the morning.
What happens when the sun sets at 18:00 in the winter? I like the idea, but I feel like most people won't go to bed that early, and use artificial lights to go about their evening, thus negating a lot of the effort. Or am I misunderstanding?
Context: I struggle with insomnia and use blackout shades.
Artificial lights also interfere with sleep. If you’ve ever been 100% off grid, or even a place where you have minimal phone usage and little artificial light you will feel sleepy more correlated with when the sun sets, even if it’s at 1800.
I’ve found blackout shades useful for when I’m not sleeping a schedule correlated with the sun (eg work at 4 am) or external artificial light (streetlamps).
During the Winter, I tend to stay more active. I play several sports, do weight training and do indoor rock climbing to sort of wear myself out. So in Winter, I adaptively change the signals my body is using that tells it when its time to go to sleep.
My diet also changes in the Winter. I cut off caffeine at noon and restrict phone and screen time in favor of physical activities in the later afternoon. It takes about two weeks for my body to adjust fully to the changes, but then its fine throughout Winter. Even when I'm getting less sunlight because the sun is going down sooner.
I never knew how much your diet will affect your sleep and biorhythms until I started making changes. Even small changes can have big effects on your sleep cycles.
Can you elaborate a little about your diet adaption in terms of food classes (carbohydrates, fat, proteins, ...) if it isn't only the coffeine intake you modify? Thanks!
In this day and age where you have limitless distractions/entertainment we often ignore our "less sexy" biological needs to the detriment of our mind and body. We need to treat Sleep/Nap/Rest as a "job" and not as something extraneous.
Instead of the current practice of arranging our biological needs around our work we should revert back to pre-industrial era practices where our work was arranged around our biological needs and nature's rhythms. A good way to start is to eat only when feeling hungry, nap/sleep when feeling tired/sleepy and in general listen to the body/mind needs irrespective of context.
This is spot on. These things are a delicate balance as well. When I sleep well, I can control my feeding patterns much better. When I eat well, I tend to sleep better. Exercise affects both of those, and is affected back.
Work is constantly nudging this balance in the wrong direction, putting us into a vicious cycle of accelerated death and suffering.
I may be making this sound worse than it feels though, probably because I'm writing this in between bouts of high fever. I honestly can't complain all that much from the life I lead but I do wish I could make it work much better around my physiological needs.
Thanks. I upvoted you because this is all great advice. I'm politely going to decline it though. Not because I don't think it's valuable but mostly because I already have alternatives to achieve those results that I know work better for myself.
Unfortunately right now I don't have the time to follow through with most of it. Life happens, and right now it just happens to be happening more or less all at once. Urgency trumps priority.
Furthermore, I'm a night owl. I have at different times in my life tried to change it. I followed all the advice I could find (including a lot of the things you mention). Ultimately, if I have to wake up early in the morning for work, I might end up with a cycle of 8h on the first night, with some luck another 8h, then it goes down to 6-5h, 2h and in some occasions an all nighter to top if off.
My current sleep deprived cycle is one of relatively regular 5-6h per night. It's not very good but mostly because of the time I have to be awake.
If I could wake up at 9:30-10:00 every day, I would be able to sleep those 5-6h per night and be in top shape. I know because I've done it for a few months in the past. I was at top physical and mental shape, consistently.
Waking up at 7:00-8:00, even if I could sustain 7-8h per night, I'd still be sleepy, tired and unfocused for the most part. My brain suffers and so does my body.
At this point I just decided to accept light sleep deprivation vs. the worse alternatives.
I suggest you watch Dr. Satchin Panda's (he is the Circadian Rhythms researcher) videos (they are short TEDx ones) at the minimum. He gives a simple 6-step process which you might find very relevant.
Note, though, that people with eating disorders can easily not feel hungry for days at a time for no reason or conversely never not feel hungry no matter how much they have eaten.
Some people with depression or C/PTSD can sleep 14+ hours a day and not feel rested.
Many people are so dysregulated that "listening to their bodies" and "embracing what is natural" are potentially self-destructive activities.
So, keep your own body's limitations in mind. If you are affected by something that has pushed you off the track, at the very least, be aware of it before you go charging full steam ahead.
I can easily eat nothing for a day or two, though my longest was 3 days. Working out has been helpful because now I have an intellectual need to ensure I get enough calories and my macros. I can also way overeat if I have things I like available because there’s never really a “stop” signal that’s not being physically full. The only times I experience a “yeah ok I’m good now” is with extremely rich cheesecake sickening me (having still overeaten it) or 70% dark chocolate boring me. The later along with green apples are the only snacks I dare to keep around, because I’m not all that interested in eating them lol.
If I tried to go to bed when I’m tired, I’d end up doing so 2-4 hours later than the previous day, end up being awake at night and sleeping (poorly) during the day until it cycles back around and the insanity repeats all over again. Even if I’m extremely tired for some reason, it still takes at least an hour to actually fall asleep, followed by waking up multiple times during the night to toss and turn. The phenomenon of my head hitting the pillow and the next day showing up happened once when I was traveling, and was wonderful.
I’ve historically been very poor at recognizing when I’m being emotionally affected by things or stressed, which I would describe as feeling more like an android that a human, though that’s improved these past few years.
Listening to my body is still important, but I can’t intuitively just understand what it’s “telling me”, rather I need to track the consequences and intervene.
Incidentally, I am both autistic and spent much of my childhood trying to manage that hazards of my parent’s unstable emotional states rather than my own.
Every so often—maybe once a quarter—I wake up just feeling like a million bucks, like I can do anything, and I go through the whole day like that. I get so much done, and feel awesome the entire time.
I have wondered, at times, if other people feel like that more often (and some, maybe never!). I’m pretty sure I’d be emperor of the planet if I felt like that even one day a week.
I think better advice would be poor people to boldly explore and challenge their bodies limitations, and discover what they are capable, and what works for them.
What you are pointing out are extreme cases which is generally a small subset. So before jumping to this conclusion one should first setup one's daily life around circadian/natural rhythms and in general establish a healthy relationship between ourselves and the environment we are embedded in. This is fundamental to everything else.
In fact many doctors themselves are now saying that drugs are overprescribed and you don't need them for most (not all) cases. Watch the following documentaries;
I'm not going to take unsolicited homework from this site, especially one that is pushing an agenda in response to a statement that is clearly positive but cautious in response to your previous statement.
> A good way to start is to eat only when feeling hungry
LOL, that's what everyone riding the "western diet" blood sugar roller coaster is already doing.
If the diet doesn't reflect the environment our biological needs evolved in, acting without self discipline, eating based on how you feel, is a sure path to obesity, diabetes, and NAFLD.
I think the charitable interpretation is that they're drawing a distinction between physical hunger and emotional hunger.
I "feel" like I could go for a bacon cheeseburger basically 24s hours today. I feel like I could eat another right after I finished the first. All of that is emotional.
That is pretty different than symptoms true physical hunger. My stomach starts to grumble after 24 hours without food. After about 48 hours I feel lethargic and cognitively disordered.
I think that a majority of Americans confuse the two because it has been years or even decades since they actually experienced the symptoms of insufficient calorie intake
For me the best change was when I got used to feeling peckish most of the time. I feel better when I am slightly hungry than after I eat, especially if it's a large meal. With that feeling as my baseline, I really can tell when I need to eat.
> LOL, that's what everyone riding the "western diet" blood sugar roller coaster is already doing.
I don’t think so. In my observation a lot of people eat because it is time to eat, or because others are eating, or because they are bored, or because food is at hand.
> acting without self discipline
That is a curious thing to say. Not eating when one is not hungry takes a lot of self discipline. “Eat only when hungry” is a whole bunch of not eating.
> I think you're underestimating just how hungry people feel
Possible. Or people have no clue what hunger really is.
But still the advice didn’t say “eat every time you are hungry”. It said “A good way to start is to eat only when feeling hungry.” That is actually a prohibition. The advice is equivalent with: do not eat when you are not hungry.
It also in the very sentence admits that this is not the only rule to be followed. That’s the “A good way to start”. Meaning that there are other things to be aware of. One of them being what you eat as you mention.
It can be good advice with additional conditions. For example I now eat whenever I feel hungry but only for the half of the time that I'm alive. For the other half I just don't eat at all. The only exception I make is for tea and occasional coffee with milk.
One day I'm eating only till 4PM and the next one after 4PM and so on.
Already lost 10 pounds in 2 months from being slightly overweight with no additional lifestyle changes and almost effortlessly because it's surprisingly easy to distract myself from eating for few hours.
I think we are tuned to eat when we want but also to the food not being available all the time.
Do you believe it has helped to vary the eating window (one day before 4pm, the next day after)? What do you believe would happen if you kept it the same every day (e.g. eating only before 4pm)?
> It can be good advice with additional conditions. For example I now eat whenever I feel hungry but only for the half of the time that I'm alive. For the other half I just don't eat at all. The only exception I make is for tea and occasional coffee with milk.
You're effectively saying "It's good advice if I ignore it half the time", with your positive outcome stemming from the time spent ignoring it and not eating altogether.
It's silly and harmful advice. Feelings are inherently irrational, we shouldn't advise people to act on them.
When it comes to diet, what you eat largely governs how it makes you feel. The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being the diet.
I think the essence of this advice is to avoid eating for social, customary or emotional reasons.
So what I wrote basically is totally unrelated because, you can get away with all of that and eat for any stupid reason if you restrict yourself to doing it just half of the time.
Who would've thought that sleep is good for you, right? Apparently we needed several million dollars in research to find out.
> The findings, published today in Nature, could help to guide care for people after a heart attack,
This is just hilarious. Remember to get enough sleep after a life-threatening heart attack, folks!
But your comment resonates very much with me. I am tired of this capitalist culture that reduces the human essence to value output and shames people for not pretending to be working hard enough. Part of the reason I like working from home is that I can take that fucking 20-minute nap after lunch and be infinitely more productive throughout the rest of the day.
I do think it is sad that people are so out of touch with their bodies and the idea of self ownership that they need an authority figure to instruct such simple tasks.
I think there is a huge component of trained helplessness resulting from consumerist culture and social subservience.
So how do you know to convince a person who doesn't feel it and yet needs it, without the research? If it's a treatment plan, it needs to have clear reasons behind.
Im not sure I understand your question. Who is trying to convince who?
Ultimately, individuals are responsible for managing their own health. Thinking it is the doctors job and responsibility to keep them healthy, and not their own is the root of most problems.
I think that 99% of the bottleneck is not research for basic health, and the value of research is vastly over stated for things like nutrition, health, and exercise.
A new study isn't going to convince people people to stop being obese, exercise, and take care of themselves. A study that shows that sleeping longer or eating a Mediterranean diet has a 5% improvement in some metric has almost no specificity to you.
Research is important for the 1% of the time your health is already in crisis, When you are picking between medications or interventions after.
Even then, personal data on what works for you should always trump the research, because it is statistical in nature, usually with extremely high variability. If drug A works 51% of the time drug B works 49% of the time, the difference between them is almost meaningless. You want to know which drug your body responds to. In the clinical context, I think people and doctors overvalue how much time and effort to spend figuring out where to start, and undervalue how much effort to spend responding to personal data if it works or not.
It is still pretty basic stuff. You shouldn't need a bunch of mouse studies to tell you to rest after a heart attack. The article is literally about the body's natural drive to rest and sleep so that it can heal after major injury.
Also interesting: deep sleep therapy where you keep the patient asleep for days or weeks. Mixed results back then; I imagine they didn't have good ways to differentiate the patients who would be helped vs harmed by the therapy.
I've found that after a hard workout at the gym I sleep better and longer. That's certainly not a life-threatening injury but working out to exhaustion does create micro-injuries to muscle tissues which then have to heal (leading to growth).
Yep, I usually average more deep sleep (10-15m) during times of regular workouts. I typically fall asleep much faster as well, though I don't typically have issues with that.
I had this question as well. Anecdotally, I've been on various anti-TNFa drugs for the past three or four years, and I feel like my sleep hasn't been impacted (and if anything has improved). Definitely no insomnia. I can nap like a champ!
> Given the findings, [...] clinicians need to inform patients [...] after a heart attack, says Rowe. This should also be considered at the hospital, where tests and procedures would ideally be conducted during the daytime to minimize sleep interruptions.
#1 - For most patients, it ain't merely "tests and procedures" which interfere with sleeping in a hospital at night.
#2 - After a major injury, it ain't just nighttime when you need to sleep. Again, most hospitals seem determined to make that as difficult as they possibly can.
In a more mundane context, I've been fortunate to organize my schedule such that I don't use an alarm to get up in the morning. So I can let my body figure out how much sleep I need.
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