Based on that data, I think a blanket suggestion that everybody should sleep 8 hours isn’t warranted. It seems that some people with illnesses or who are exposed to other stressors need 8 hours.
I would advocate that everybody sleeps enough to be fully rested instead of trying to sleep a specific number of hours that some authority considers to be right for the average person.
I think the same goes for daily water consumption. Optimize values like that in a way that makes you feel good on a daily basis instead of targeting a value that seems to be optimal for the average person.
What are your grounds for making this recommendation? The parallel suggestion that everyone should eat enough to feel fully satisfied doesn’t seem like a recipe for optimal health, so why think things should be different with sleep? Indeed, the analogy between food and sleep is drawn explicitly in one of the papers I cited, and it seems that a “wisdom of nature” heuristic (due to “changed tradeoffs”; see Bostrom & Sandberg, sect. 2) might support a policy of moderation in both food and sleep. Although this is all admittedly very speculative.
What are your grounds for making this recommendation?
Years of thinking about the issue that aren’t easily compressed.
In general alarm clocks don’t seem to be healthy devices. The idea of habitually breaking sleep at a random point of the sleep circle doesn’t seem good.
Let’s say we look at a person who needs 8 hours of sleep to feel fully rested. The person has health issue X. When we solve X than they only need 7 hours of sleep. The obvious way isn’t to wake up the person after 7 hours of sleep but to actually fix X.
That idea of sleep seems to both reflect the research that forcibly cutting peoples sleep in a way that leads to sleep deprivation is bad. It also explains why the people who sleep 8 hours on average die earlier than the people who sleep 7 hours.
If I get a cold my body needs additional sleep during that time. I have a hard time imagine that cutting that sleep needs away is healthy.
If we look at eating I also think similar things are true. There not much evidence that forced dieting is healthy. Fixing underlying issues seems to be preferable over forcibly limiting food consumption.
While we are at the topic of sleep and mortality it’s worth pointing out that sleeping pills are very harmful to health.
Based on that data, I think a blanket suggestion that everybody should sleep 8 hours isn’t warranted. It seems that some people with illnesses or who are exposed to other stressors need 8 hours.
I would advocate that everybody sleeps enough to be fully rested instead of trying to sleep a specific number of hours that some authority considers to be right for the average person.
I think the same goes for daily water consumption. Optimize values like that in a way that makes you feel good on a daily basis instead of targeting a value that seems to be optimal for the average person.
What are your grounds for making this recommendation? The parallel suggestion that everyone should eat enough to feel fully satisfied doesn’t seem like a recipe for optimal health, so why think things should be different with sleep? Indeed, the analogy between food and sleep is drawn explicitly in one of the papers I cited, and it seems that a “wisdom of nature” heuristic (due to “changed tradeoffs”; see Bostrom & Sandberg, sect. 2) might support a policy of moderation in both food and sleep. Although this is all admittedly very speculative.
Years of thinking about the issue that aren’t easily compressed.
In general alarm clocks don’t seem to be healthy devices. The idea of habitually breaking sleep at a random point of the sleep circle doesn’t seem good.
Let’s say we look at a person who needs 8 hours of sleep to feel fully rested. The person has health issue X. When we solve X than they only need 7 hours of sleep. The obvious way isn’t to wake up the person after 7 hours of sleep but to actually fix X.
That idea of sleep seems to both reflect the research that forcibly cutting peoples sleep in a way that leads to sleep deprivation is bad. It also explains why the people who sleep 8 hours on average die earlier than the people who sleep 7 hours.
If I get a cold my body needs additional sleep during that time. I have a hard time imagine that cutting that sleep needs away is healthy.
If we look at eating I also think similar things are true. There not much evidence that forced dieting is healthy. Fixing underlying issues seems to be preferable over forcibly limiting food consumption.
While we are at the topic of sleep and mortality it’s worth pointing out that sleeping pills are very harmful to health.