Althouse: "It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived..."

October 16, 2015

"It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived..."

"... if these groups that live without all these modern distractions and pressing schedules sleep less or about the same amount as the average Joe does here in North America."

18 comments:

john mosby said...: The takeaway is at the end of the article: the sleep trigger may not be light, but temperature. If the air around you cools naturally at night, you fall asleep. As the air warms up toward morning, you wake up.

If your central HVAC keeps the air around you at a constant temperature, you never get these cues and so your sleep is disrupted.

AGW propaganda?

Maybe not - I always thought leaving your thermostat at a constant temperature was more fuel-efficient than creating spikes and troughs when you come home and leave.

On the other hand, a house designed for its climate can do much of its own cooling and heating without consuming power: thick walls, windows positioned to maximize passive heating, big porches for cooling, etc.

JSM; 10/16/15, 8:12 AM
Sammy Finkelman said...: Do these people have elctric light bulbs?

The article says no.

They have small fires, and it says they go to sleep 3 or 4 hours after it gets dark (and ancient sources and tradition tell us people also used to go sleep sometime after it got dark - and it says they get up about one hour before sunrise.

And it says they sleep an average of 6 1/2 hours a night.

Now 4+1+6 1/2 = 11 1/2. I guess that's about right. An average night has about 11 1/2 hours (because of twilight) They probably also get up for about an hour in the middle of the night. I read people used to do so, and the second sleep was called "second sleep" and it will happen now also any time people get into a situation where they are not using electric lights and the nights and longer than average, and they rely mostly on natural darkness for their cues as to when the day starts and ends.

http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/

The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

Also:

Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family intentionally went an entire month with no electric light.

In the winter months, this meant a lot of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes “…I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am. This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days. When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.”

Moyer didn’t set out to reproduce our ancestors sleep pattern, it just happened as a byproduct of a lot of dark hours.

So the sleep was and is different anyway, even if it is the same total amount of hours.

One comment there is about a cabin in Alaska. Other comments are about females after menopause, who sometimes don't seem to need, or be able to use, much sleep.
There is also the interesting thing that some people can sleep for as little as 5or 10 minutes and feel completly refrsehed. (of course, sleep, and the drop in blood sugar and/or oxygen that goes with it, is needed for healing - rats forced not to sleep by being on a platform that falls into the waterif they stop mocving eventually die.)

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

A case has been made that maintaining such a sleep pattern may be important in regulating stress.[2]

Note 2 is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

There's a book by Roger Ekirch called:

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past available at Amazon.com for $7.14 (plus $3.99 for shipping) as a used paperback.; 10/16/15, 8:25 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: john mosby said...

I always thought leaving your thermostat at a constant temperature was more fuel-efficient than creating spikes and troughs when you come home and leave.

It is not. There are probably a few things where it is more efficient ( and less wear and tear on the system ) to leave it on for a few extra minutes rather than turning it off and on repeatedly. Anything that you can leave off for an hour or more is certainly more efficient turned off then on again when needed.; 10/16/15, 8:25 AM
Sammy Finkelman said...: Yes, body temperature also drops during the night, and most people sleep more comfortably when it is cooler. Temperature drops, blood sugar drops (or is supposed to drop) and probably oxygen saturation in the blood drops. This kind of thing is probably necessary for cell division.)

Proof: That's why diabetics have trouble whenever small blood vessels are reuqired, and with healing, and that's why male reproductive cells are kept outside the body, below body temperature (and killed by sitting on hot surfaces) and female reporductive cells are produced before birth, when maybe some otehr factor makes it possible); 10/16/15, 8:30 AM
MaxedOutMama said...: It seems to me that I only sleep more than 6 1/2 to 7 hours a day when I am ill or recovering from it.

The party lifestyle and young children certainly disturbs sleep, but otherwise it seems to me that our bodies do what they want to do, and not much overrides the pattern.

It may be that association between poor sleep and disease is not causative so much as correlative - not feeling well causes poor sleep, and then poor sleep causes you to feel worse. If the body is able to fix itself, pretty soon you get tired and sleep more, but in a disregulated system that doesn't happen.

This was an extremely clever study and I imagine it has made many sleep pundits very unhappy. There has probably been plenty of money around for studies to indicate that a higher use of prescription drugs to induce sleep is warranted.

There is another very interesting reference in the article to a previous study which indicated that hunter-gatherer societies are not that much more physically active than the average American.; 10/16/15, 8:30 AM
MaxedOutMama said...: Link to non pay-walled article RE energy expenditure:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120725200304.htm; 10/16/15, 8:33 AM
Original Mike said...: All the groups they studied (Tanzania, Namibia, Bolivia) live within 20 degrees of the equator, where the night length is constant across the year. Try checking Eskimos, or even Wisconsinites.; 10/16/15, 8:33 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "I read people used to do so, and the second sleep was called "second sleep" and it will happen now also any time people get into a situation where they are not using electric lights and the nights and longer than average, and they rely mostly on natural darkness for their cues as to when the day starts and ends..."

There's a section of the linked article on this topic (a topic I've blogged about several times). The study showed that the 2-part sleep pattern was not occurring with these people.; 10/16/15, 8:34 AM
Original Mike said...: Since I retired I get 2 to 3 more hours of sleep a night compared to when I was working, and feel much better for it.; 10/16/15, 8:35 AM
Original Mike said...: "I always thought leaving your thermostat at a constant temperature was more fuel-efficient than creating spikes and troughs when you come home and leave."

Seems to me that would only be true if there were hysteresis involved in the heating/cooling cycle, but I don't know where that would come from.; 10/16/15, 8:38 AM
john mosby said...: Original Mike and Iggy, I thought the whole point of a thermostat was to make only the incremental changes needed to keep the temperature at the set point. Short bursts of heating/cooling thruout the day, as opposed to a huge blast when you come home and have to give the entire house a double-digit temperature change.

I guess the math comes out the same, though? Changing all those cubic feet 20 degrees all at once versus changing them one degree at a time, 20 times?

There is also the human factor, though, of coming home and whining "it's so cold/hot!!!" then cranking the thermostat far more than it really needs. That could use up more power than letting the thermostat run itself.

JSM; 10/16/15, 9:31 AM
Original Mike said...: John - Say you set the temperature at 70 when you're home and 50 when you're away. I think the huge blast when you come home is offset by the time the furnace is off when the house is falling to its lower temperature after you turn the thermostat down. Now compare the "cost" associated with keeping the temperature at a high set point vs. the low. The house loses heat to the environment more quickly at 70 than it does at 50 (because of the steeper temperature gradient), thus it costs more per unit time to keep it at the higher temp vs. the low. That's my hypothesis, anyway. I'd do the math, but that sounds like work.; 10/16/15, 9:48 AM
MikeR said...: Really interesting article. The second sleep stuff made sense, and may still be true, but this is the scientific method: find a way to test it.; 10/16/15, 9:50 AM
mikee said...: Hotels used to be sources of 68F sleep in the summer, on vacations when I was growing up in the south.

Now they have motion sensor thermostats that cut off the AC after 30 minutes of no motion in the room, like when people are out for dinner or lying asleep in bed.

The hotel I work at get constant complaints in the summer from guests who fell asleep with the thermostat set at 68F, who wake up two hours later sweating in an 80F room.

Housekeeping routinely bypasses the energy-saving motion-sensor thermostats when cleaning the rooms, on manager's orders, and screw the electricity savings. It only takes a minute per room and keeps guests happier.

Thus does the world manage to overcome regulation, environmentalism, climate change and first world sleep problems via further oppression of the workers.; 10/16/15, 10:02 AM
Wilbur said...: I wonder how much Federal regulation exists regarding mandatory setting of thermostats throughout society. It might shock us, but then it really wouldn't.; 10/16/15, 10:31 AM
Quinn Satterwaite said...: Yet the hunter-gatherers included in the new study, which was published in Current Biology, were relatively fit and healthy... "

Shocking to find unexamined premises in the NY Times.

From here it looks like the mortality rate is is about 32 per 1000. So "fit and healthy" is an open question.
http://theskinnywhitebuddha.blogspot.com/2012/08/diet-and-disease-hadza-hunter-gatherers.html

the Hadza and San tribes in Africa, and the Tsimané people in South America — tend to sleep even less than many Americans...

“I think this paper is going to transform the field of sleep,” said John Peever, a sleep expert at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the new research. “It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived if these groups that live without all these modern distractions and pressing schedules sleep less or about the same amount as the average Joe does here in North America.”

Well except apparently that isnt accurate.
According to this source there is a lot of napping going on that appearently the NYT didnt take into account:
"PEOPLE SLEEP WHENEVER THEY WANT. Some stay up much of the night and doze during the heat of the day."
http://arumeruguidestanzania.com/hadzabe.html; 10/16/15, 10:49 AM
n.n said...: The solutions to first world problems are stop procrastinating and set priorities.; 10/16/15, 12:00 PM
Joe said...: It seems that the evidence suggests that the vast majority of people studying sleep are full of shit.; 10/18/15, 7:13 PM