I had a nice solid 9h each night until having a child. I find I am actually more creative (uninhibited) when I get less sleep. My brain is firing too hard on perfectionism when I get a good sleep, where I can be a lot more creative and free flowing when I am sleep deprived. I don't implement or debug well in that state though, so my cycle tends to involve writing the code and debugging on better sleep nights and having my ideas and catching up on admin if I have a bad sleep.

As someone who also favors long (even very long) sleep, but is planning to have a child, may I ask how old your child is, whether things have already gotten better sleepwise, or whether you think it will?

We're only planning for one, and my impression so far suggests that it's the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently, and that with one child the majority of the sacrifices are only temporary (and getting better as the child gets older), but it's always good to hear some experiences.

I'd offer a different perspective than others here: it really doesn't matter how many kids you have, nor how old they are.

If you ignore the initial 6-12 months (once they get into a regular sleep schedule), the impact for the parents for the rest of the time between 1 to 17 yrs-old is pretty much the same. The dynamics will change as they get older, but you'll still be spending considerable time on the various family activities: playing with them, having breakfast/lunch/dinner, going to the park, teaching new things, commuting to/from school, attending their friends' birthdays on weekends, helping with schoolwork, maybe teaching them how to code :), etc.

On top of that, you'll also need to find time for you and your partner, family, friends, hobbies, reading, etc. Add a full time job, a school that starts starting early morning, a fixed annual vacation calendar, and you pretty much don't have many hours left in the day.

Sure, some activities can be shared with your partner, and some can be delegated (family member, nanny), but the conclusion is still the same: time management becomes a lot more critical once you have kids.

Which then leads me to sleep. In order to dedicate enough time to a restful night of sleep, you'll need to prioritize things much more effectively, so you don't end cutting corners, and changing drastically your sleep patterns.

It's not how many kids you have, it's how old they are. The period of time between 0 and 6 months is very challenging from a sleep perspective unless you avoid taking responsibility for the child at night (e.g. by dumping nighttime responsibility on your intimate partner), which I view as generally unacceptable.

Initially children have no circadian rhythm, which is very difficult. Later, they are awake frequently for feeding or otherwise, which is also difficult. Once they settle into a routine, however, it's fine.

I would particularly advise the "cry it out" technique. This seems cruel, which is why I waited with my first-born until he was 14 months old to do it, at which point it took a mere 3 days for him to start going to sleep on his own and sleeping through the night. We did it with our second child at 5 months with the same level of success (at least for going to sleep - very young children still wake up in the night more than older ones).

After around 6 months old, the sacrifices you make for your children are significant but no longer revolve primarily around sleep or the lack thereof.

> I would particularly advise the "cry it out" technique.

If you can't stomach cry it out, you can try the pick up-put down method. Let them cry for 5-10 minutes, then soothe them, then put them back down when they're done crying.

Raw cry it out can be a little hardcore depending upon the kid too, I have one friend who tried it and their kid cried for an hour straight and started vomiting.

“Raw cry it” out isn’t recommended by anyone with any expertise that I’m aware of. Most “cry it out” is closer to your pick up/put down description: Put the kid down, soothe them if they’re still crying after 5 minutes. Repeat after 10 minutes. Repeat after 20 minutes. If it’s night time, continue 20 minute intervals until sleep. If it’s nap time, give up if it hasn’t happened within an hour and try again next time.

Leaving a kid to scream for a solid hour with no soothing is not a good strategy. The goal is for them to learn to self-soothe and to put themselves to sleep, not for them to learn what abandonment feels like.

Just make sure there aren't any reasons for the crying like milk protein allergy. That is very painful while lying still in the bed. Cow milk protein carries over from whatever the mother eats and requires her not to eat anything with cow milk protein for three weeks before it gets better. Not three days as we were told. The list of things you can't eat is very long, milk is used almost everywhere so there are baby formula that is safe to give your baby for extra food if it doesn't work out.

+1 to that. There are also foods that the mom can normally eat no problem, but the kid's either going to have allergies to, or more common just not be able to digest. For example, eat a lot of broccoli, and that is guaranteed farts. Farts by themselves aren't bad, but if it's keeping your baby's belly inflated and makes it hard to sleep, well there goes your sleep!

Little babies are fascinating. Have fun, explore, trust but verify. And lastly, your baby usually knows what's up, and you do too. Don't let the "common wisdom" to tell you otherwise.

Thanks, that helps. Again, if it's "just" for a year or two, then that's just a sacrifice you have to take as a parent. That's different if the lack of sleep would be sustained until the kid reaches, say, puberty, because 15 years is a whole different number in relation to my expected remaining lifetime...

I am laying next to our sleeping baby, who is about 6 months old. (He is our first and will likely be our only) I was terribly concerned about the lack of sleep as a first time father. Besides hearing “congratulations” when we told people we were pregnant, a close second was “sleep now, while you can.” We have had Very few “rough nights,” if you can even call it that, and for the last 5.5 months, my only sleep deprivation is almost exclusively self inflicted. We credit 1) our amazing baby, who seems to know that nighttime is for sleeping or eating only, and 2) that he sleeps with us in our bed.(Queue horrific gasps.)

He is breastfed, and still wakes up about 3 times during his 12 hours of sleep every night to breastfeed. However, that consists of him making minimal noise, and my wife either picking him up or rolling over and feeding him while they lay next to each other. They literally both sleep through most feedings. For his first few weeks of life, he simply slept on her breast, so it was even easier.

Honestly, after experiencing and witnessing this arrangement, I can’t imagine that nature had moms and babies doing anything differently for the last few thousand years. Our lives would have been more difficult if we had him in a separate room right now. If that was our arrangement, we could count on waking up to loud cries and walking to another room multiple times a night, and either comforting or feeding our baby, and then walking back to bed afterwards. If we were doing that, I think folks’ warnings would have been true.

This was not our plan, but it became our plan after having a very strong instinct to stay close to our newborn when we brought him home.

I used to think that we were significantly endangering our child with bed sharing, but then I found these articles from the Mother-Baby sleep lab at Notre Dame : http://cosleeping.nd.edu/articles-and-presentations/articles...

We don’t fit any of the risk factors associated with SIDS in bedsharing (drug or alcohol use, obesity, smoking, etc), and thus consider it statistically safe enough that the benefits far outweigh the risks. YMMV, but I recommend reading one or two of those articles/papers to balance out the blanket warnings against bed sharing that you will inevitably hear if you live in the US.

Enjoy parenthood. It’s been the best experience of our lives.

Making babies sleep separately is a very western thing. Most women in the rest of the world sleep with babies, and its safe because - obesity, women smoking or drinking are infrequent outside the western world.

For sids reasons you are supposed to be in same room for most of the first year even if you are not cosleeping, according to apa

All people are different as are the sleep patterns of babies, some give you no rest others are no fuss. As always it's also a question of how well you can handle it yourself and how lucky your in regards to health, e.g. baby blues depression can really make the months with a newborn very stressful.

Thanks for sharing this and congrats on the baby. Our first due October 6th and I feel like every day I read an article about how sleep deprivation will kill me and it's been bumming me out. Hopefully our baby will be a good sleeper fingers crossed. 3x/night sounds like a dream!

As a dad of two (3yr and 1yr), the simple answer is - it depends. One kid might sleep like a rock with little to no sleep training, and the other will not sleep for 2 years, no matter what you do.

After talking to a lot of dads (and I talk to A LOT of them - RadDadShow.com), the general consensus is that first year is going to be hell no matter what.

First they are little creatures who don't understand sleep, and they eat and sleep and poop on a 24h non-stop cycle. Then they become aware of sleep and start fighting it. Then they become even more aware and decide to read books and have lunch at 3am... it goes on.

In our case, couple things helped the most: no screens, no salt and sugar, and early bed time. This way, when your kids aren't hyped up and go to bed before they are fully exhausted, sleep becomes easier to manage.

Happy to answer some questions. Hope the above helps. Good luck, and as my friend Greg Gottesman said, if you consider a long-term horizon, it's completely worth it!

I think the big difference between having one and two, other than the baby/toddler phase being extended, is that with one, it is easier for one parent to look after them while the other does something non-child related.

It's obviously possible for one parent to look after more than one child but it feels like much more work, I'd say, than looking after a single child. On the other hand, if you have two children, they can play with eachother once they get to a certain age. Ours go and wake eachother up in the morning now rather than waking us up which is nice!

You will lose most of your free time the first few years if you have kids though. Not all of it, but life becomes much extremely interrupt-driven and is still that way even now ours are school age.

The first 3 months are basically a write-off. After that, it gets better every month (with the occasional sleep regressions).

Everything is back to normal now our kid is 2.5yrs

So this is my first child, about two and a half months old. We are in the peak of the being way behind on sleep. It's significantly harder to debug code I wrote before he was born now. I would say my wife does 80% of the night time stuff, I typically only wake up for one "handle" and she does the rest (1-4 depending on feeding timings). Certainly it is already on the curve of getting better, the problem is we are way behind. It's so, so worth it. But don't expect the same level of debugging ability, it's nice to have some slack in whatever you are doing professionally so you can have a few months of sub-peak output, if you can afford to engineer it.

Not the person you were replying to, but every kid is different. Our oldest (3.5) is a PITA and still wakes us up at least a couple of times most nights. This is an improvement over 6+ times a night for the first ~2 years. Our second has slept through almost from birth and is easy to get to sleep. We didn't do anything different, it's just luck of the draw from everything I've seen.

Good luck. Your biggest problem is that kids should be going to bed by like 7pm. When they got 4-5 you can push that to 8-830, but that's still pretty early. If you ever want to get anything done you're going to sacrifice sleep.

Second that. Super counter-intuitive point, at least in the American society, but little kids need a lot of sleep. Put them to bed early (start your dinner at 5, and bath right after), and they will get lots of rest, while giving you all the time to do something while they are asleep.

Yup. When my daughter was really young we tried keeping her up later, thinking she'd sleep in longer. Nope, just a really crabby child. Turns out if you keep them up too long they get a second wind and it's all downhill from there.

It so hard to say. Our oldest didn't learn how to sleep through the night until she was 7 years old. She typically woke up screaming around 1am every night. Even if we just let her scream, it always woke us up. Other kids slept through the night from early on. Maybe someday there will be some genetic test that will tell you where your kids lie on the spectrum, but it seems to be a crap shoot right now.

If possible, see if parents or in-laws will stay with you for a while in the beginning, when sleep can be really chaotic.

5 years to have both "back to normal" since that is how long it takes for kids to become school age. Unless you plan to hire a nanny, invest significantly in daycare, or you or your partner stops working, in which case one of you can probably be back to work after 3 months.

Having two kids was the worst time for me:

I was still totally inexperienced and I now had two kids waking me up.

Two things that helped me a lot:

- don't let a child fall asleep with anything they cannot have the whole night (speaking of >6-12 months). No music, no falling asleep in front of a screen, make sure they don't fall asleep while drinking their last meal for the day. By all means: tell stories, sing, and make sure they get milk before they fall asleep though. The reason is, as far as I know that we subconsciously verify that everything is ok multiple times a night. For small kids that means everything is like it was: if there was music or if dad or mom was in the room - that's what they'll expect during the night.

- small children have to learn to fall asleep. We understand that kids needs help to learn eating real food, walking, talking etc, but it seems at least in my culture we somehow expect kids to understand how to fall asleep. They usually don't, and so the parents get worried: is there anything wrong? Maybe the kid is still hungry? Or afraid?

Instead I've learned to be very clear with myself and my wife when we start teaching the kids to sleep:

- I make sure the child is ok: not hungry, happy etc

- when I put them to bed I make sure they only have things they can keep all night, generally one (safe) toy and a pacifier (don't want to defend pacifier much but what made me decide for it was a slightly lowered risk of SIDS according to one doctor)

- the I sing a small song, say a few words and leave the room. The words I say before leaving are the same, every time.

- I then walk outside and start a timer for 60 seconds, walk in (even if they are silent, verify they are ok, say the same words, walk out, start a timer for 180 seconds and wait. I do this until I'm sure they are asleep. In particular I keep visiting the room every three minutes even if they are happy. This reinforces the idea that you'll look after them. If they aren't happy I give them the pacifier and toy, say the same words, leave.

- next day: first 3 minutes (180 seconds), then 5 minutes intervals until they are asleep.

- increase by two minutes every day (but usually my kids get it by the second or third day: Dad has not left, he'll be back soon enough even if I don't cry so I can just relax and play with this toy.)

- for my first kid it took more like a week because I waited for too long before I started sleep training.

Edit:

- Do use a timer!

- Do walk in even if the kid is just falling asleep!

- Do use the timer once to verify that the kids are actually asleep after you think they fell asleep!

This is really interesting. Did you come up with this yourself or learn it somewhere?

Read it in a book by a Spanish doctor. I read it in Danish, but I think the original is called "Duérmete, Niño". It is written by Eduard Estivill and Sylvia De Béjar from what I can find using Google.

(I think people often misunderstand it so you'll find some people saying he argues that kids should cry it out or something, while the idea is rather to make them feel safe and enjoy bedtime.)

> my impression so far suggests that it's the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently

The most difficult time is right after the second child is born: you have two children who are incompatible in their needs, abilities, sleep schedules...

But think long-term: if you have only one child, then anytime it needs human interaction, it will turn to you. Two children, they can play together for a while... while you are doing something else (within hearing distance).

Here is a trick we used for a 6 months old child:

Make the child room accident-proof. Trivial things, such as the child stupidly crawling against the wall and hitting it by head, that's not a problem. Just make sure that the child cannot reach anything dangerous (sharp, breakable, poisonous, small enough to swallow), that there are no plastic bags, that the power outlets are filled with small plastic pieces, and that there is nowhere to fall from. To achieve the last one, instead of bed we simply have a mattress on the floor, surrounded by soft carpets, so the child can crawl from/to the "bed" anytime. Have a box full of safe toys in the room.

Now, when the child wakes up, as long as it is not crying, feel free to sleep. If the child is crying, breastfeed, change the diapers, then return to the room and continue to sleep. Choose five or seven random toys from the box, and put them on random places on the floor, about one step far from each other (the time your child spends crawling between the toys is also the time you spend sleeping). During the day, as long as your child is okay playing in the room, feel free to take a nap there; just remember to close the door.

You will not get long uninterrupted sleep this way, but you can get a long interrupted sleep and a few naps. Anyway, with breastfeeding, long uninterrupted sleep is impossible for a mother with little baby; but it gradually gets longer: a newborn will wake up several times during the night, but the 2 years old child can sleep the whole night.

And here is a trick we used for a 3 years old child:

She can play with tablet: there is Tux Paint and Scratch (where she only edits scenes) installed. In the morning she gets an apple and the tablet, and we get an extra hour of sleep. (Yeah, yeah, some people disapprove of little kids using computers, but I can't hear their opinions while I am sleeping.)

If you insist on long uninterrupted sleep, I imagine the following strategy could work: one partner goes to sleep N hours before the child, and the other handles the evening routine alone; then the second partner wakes N hours after the child, and the first one handles the morning routine alone (adjust N depending on how long the child sleeps and how long you want to sleep).

more creative but also more outgoing i've found

That too, which follows the disinhibition thing.

My schedule's similar to yours - designer echoing a need for a minimum of 9 hours, preferably 10, especially for any serious creative work. (Personally I also wonder if there's a link there, about needing increased hours for flexible creative thinking?)

(Work wise, I currently balance 2 very demanding start-up-y jobs, and learned the hard way that even 8 hours doesn't cut the sheer amount of energy that's needed to handle fires that come from both of those places. Cutting out every inch of social or leisure life before sleep ironically gives me my best weeks ... and I know as an introvert that's probably easier for me than some, but good lord. Sleep's one of those things I don't compromise on anymore.)

I need increased hours for thinking, but for some reasons my creativity peaks on the rare days I am sleep deprived!! It is weird, as I do not compromise on sleep either!

I wonder if others feel their creativity improved on sleep deprived days? I have never read anything about that.

Perhaps you might not be looking at other factors.

Why were you sleep deprived? Were you involved in other tasks that kept your mood up thus fostering creativity? Was it actually that the task at hand was so enjoyable that you had already been putting extra time to get it done? Did you have deadlines?

I've noticed that you're creative when you end up putting more time and thought to any activity. You can fool yourself thinking that you are not getting ideas after sitting down for just 5 minutes to do a task. But if you are deliberate in your efforts (possibly due to the kind of work or imminent deadlines), then ideas will come to your mind.

I find my creativity improved when my mind is tired, but once my focus returns and my dopamine levels are lower the following day, I tend to conclude that what my mind wanted me to create wasn't actually all that good...

I got the similar result, the thing thing my brain fancied earlier doesn't seem so great after the dopamine falls away.

But, I found that if I persisted with trying to create or refine the earlier idea, very often there was something good to be found, not always directly related. I might just be seeing a different part of the application code from a new perspective by trying to write a new feature using the same libraries, and go in and get a gain where they're used elsewhere.

I often feel more creative when hungover, for some reason. Since (for me, at least) hangovers mostly consist of feeling worn out from sleeping badly, I wonder if there might be a connection there.

I seem to remember Olivia Laing touching on the hangover--> creativity phenomenon a bit in her book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. I suspect most of the people she writes about in that book (e.g. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams) were chronically sleep deprived in addition to having drinking problems.

my company name is the result of a hangover, not a discernable moment between inspiration and telling my associate who sadly didn't come along because he was emigrating to Malaysia.

But I found hangovers equally assistive to quiet linear, procedural tasks, specifically reeling in telephone sales closes. I would say there's a combination of narrowed creativity, to talk around any already understood but surmountable objections, and the step by step almost rote procedure of confirming the customer's interests and the concessions where you have applied any, terms, and the okay, this is what I need you to do to deliver you x today.

Admittedly sometimes I found a excess of creativity arising from gallows humour, particularly if my customer happened to be likewise hungover - I would tease my favourite customers that they were getting my call in the morning, regardless of whether they signed by the end of a junket we held the night or weekend before. Colleagues kept immense Outlook calendars of sporting fixtures and rolled a feed individually for the latest on their customer's team affiliations.

I'm curious how many people on HN have been in corporate sales ever. Personally, I really enjoyed the experience. But I wasn't stuck with it, I was seconded to make sure that technical arguments actually were supported by the operations and development guys. I reckon if sales functions could level with the experience of the dev/ops teans, prior to calling, close ratios would be up all around. That's what my job was, basically.

Creativity can require you to turn off your logical "filters", and sleep deprivation can make those "filters" less effective (it tends to have the same effect on social "filters", unfortunately).

I can't understand such long sleeping, because​I found the very fact of being interested in learning something new or solving a problem, keeps me alert and awake, literally a adrenaline rush.

Intentional sleep deprivation is being investigated as a cure for depression, and is a known tripper for mania and hypomania (which are associated with increased creativity).

Sleep deprivation is linked to an increase in dopamine. I know this because I researched why I was able to concentrate better on nights with poor sleep compared to nights with great sleep.

Oddly enough, for people with ADHD, a poor sleeping schedule might actually help (in the short term) with concentration issues!

This!

I found in university, strangely through sheer accident, (during the first two years of my PhD program in physics) that I performed best on my final exams and written qualifiers with three hours of sleep.

I would sleep 3 hours after late-night study, drink a lot of coffee, and then be able to hyper-focus like a felon on a three-hour-long exam.

How was the recovery?

Not ideal, but in some cases manageable for several days.

Eg, I remember doing 3 qualifiers on Mon, Wed, and Fri in one week, so a small nap and then back to studying for the next one.

Not a fun week, that.

This phenomenon is usually followed by a deep slump in productivity after that dopamine rush wears off.

Oh absolutely, a day of poor sleep takes two days to recover from in my personal experience ;(

I think sleep deprivation is related to hypomanic episodes.

I'm jealous. 4-6 hours of sleep is a good night for me, punctuated at least once or twice a week with days I never actually get to sleep; I just sort of lay there in bed from midnight until the sun comes up again, maybe drifting to a weird loopy half-conscious state for brief periods. The only things that can bring my sleep schedule in line with "normal" amounts is if I do hard physical labor for 8-12 hours during the day, have sex, or drink about two beers and read for a half hour before bed. Basically this has persisted my entire life - growing up I'd read half a dozen books a week at night when I was supposed to be in bed and couldn't fall asleep.

On those nights when sleep just isn't going to come, I've given up on trying; I'll just go find something to do. All-night programming is a pretty good fit, although I've also spent entire nights painting and putting down flooring, or tinkering in my shop.

Have you tied pot? I have a similar problem with some nights were I can't sleep and if I smoke the right weed I'm out like a light.

Do you drink caffeine? I gave it up 100%, not even having a cup in the the morning, and sleep much much much better.

That sounds like a nice sleep schedule.

The main reason I don't follow something similar, is that I am fairly sure consistently sleeping longer than 9 hours per night increases the risk for serious health problems. I'd provide sources, but I'm on my phone

I have heard of that as a correlation without proven causation. People with health problems might need more sleep perhaps.

I believe it was a study done on workers in Japan, they found the sweet spot was 7 hours. People who slept 8-9 were at higher risk for health issues.than those who slept less.

Regardless, just as he said above: a correlation doesn't necessarily indicate a causation.

Could you provide a link?

What if the people who slept less happened to be from the working class who lead a more active life? And the ones who slept 8-9 were those of an older age group who might not be taking care of their lifestyle.

That would certainly be news.

It is; then the following day the opposite is news.

(Just like the affect of dark chocolate/red wine on cancer risk.)

Do you think your creativity improves on sleep deprived days, or do you think your system for assessing creativity is poor on those days?

I feel more creative when I have a lot of sleep. When I am sleep deprived, I produce many ideas of poor quality.

Great point! I just don't know. Maybe when I'm tired the ideas are of poor quality in average, but there are so many of them than a few gems are hiding. So I take notes and reevaluate later.

Same here.

I sleep about 9-10 hours, and I'm really more productive than when I had to be in office at 9 every morning (I can't sleep before 2)

How does that work if you work full-time? You come home at 6pm, enjoy your 1-2 hours of free time (including eating, showering, other housework), go to sleep, and wake up at 6am again...

Are you a teenager?

Haha. That was exactly my thought too :D

It seems the average age of respondents is somewhere in the early 20s whereas I’m more than double that.

If I get 6 hours straight through without needing to get up to pee then I’m doing well. 7 hours? Brilliant!

Thanks for the details. What does your sleep schedule look like (bedtime, wake time)? Do you have any sleep ritual (no phones two hours before bed), alarms, or anything that help you sleep longer?

You have evidence for that claim? No study I've seen seems to suggest there's any problem with sleeping more up to something like 12 hrs/night I think. National Sleep Foundation recommends 7-9 hours for adults, and I think I've seen studies suggesting that's on the low side. When you also account for natural variations within a population, a need for 10 hours of sleep doesn't seem ridiculous.

You do not seem to be talking of the same thing. He wrote:

> It may be indicative of a health issue

Now you write:

> No study I've seen seems to suggest there's any problem with sleeping more up to something like 12 hrs/night I think

So he said it may be an indication of an issue, and you write that it may not be unhealthy to sleep a lot. Those are two different things.

As for your claim: A quick search returns many hits related to issues caused by sleeping more than ~9 hours. I have not reviewed them (I spent 1 minute on this) so can't say if the studies well performed. Example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19473367 "Prolonged sleep duration (night-time sleep and daytime napping) may be associated with an increased risk of dementia."

But saying that no study would even suggest there would be a problem seems strange considering I found a bunch of them in a minute. Maybe you have done a deeper review of the studies and concluded that they are invalid, or?

I think the key here is "associated". Sleep deprivation has also been associated to dementia.

Yes, the link I gave pointed that out. I just questioned that he hadn't found a link since there are so many studies available. If there are associations between sleeping lock and many illnesses then of course sleeping long could be an indication of an issue.

IIRC there are negative effects of oversleeping; some mininal health issues, but cognition is the same as a 8-9hour sleep

I read a few studies when i started bodybuilding and that seemed to be the consensus

Also undersleep affects cognition to a signifiant degree, iirc it was 40% diminution day one, 60% day 2 on memory tasks (and you have the same health issues as oversleep, perhaps to a higher degree)

I did a brief search because I was curious who was remembering correctly here. There have been several studies correlating "long" sleeping with mortality, but the study I found that attempted to control for confounding variables[1] seems to suggest that most of the differences in mortality in the populations studied can be explained by "depression and low socioeconomic status". It seems like a lot more study has been devoted to undersleeping than oversleeping, and I can't find anything convincing as far as maximum healthy sleep time and effects of over-sleeping. One study I still want to look at but haven't gotten around to yet is the stuff the NSF produced in 2015 when making its recommendations about sleep duration.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/29/7/881/2708387

It appears there is indeed a link between short/long sleep and mortality. As you said, the possible causes are usually not reviewed. This concerns me as I do sleep 9h+ on average. (But then again I do have an eye-illness that require a lot of concentration to overcome)

> Conclusion: Both short and long duration of sleep are significant predictors of death in prospective population studies. > (...) > Future studies should be designed to answer the question whether sleep duration is a cause or simply a marker of ill-health. https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/33/5/585/2454478?sear...

> Long sleep was significantly associated with mortality, incident diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, stroke, coronary heart disease, and obesity. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1087-0792(17)3...

I do not have sleep apnea. I am just lazy and like comfort and productivity. I don't see why I should change if I have no evidence it is harming me.

You seem to have implied sleeping long offers productivity. Might it be the case others are equally productive at the recommended 8 hours? Might it be the case that you need two hours extra sleep per night to get where everyone else is cognitively with eight hours sleep? Because if that is the case then you are losing time, productive time, and may in fact be losing some of your life, depending on how one views it. You may be sleeping away 8.33% of your life needlessly. If that isn't worth it to you to save then happy dreaming to you.

Fair enough (and I don't see why you got flagged, as you contribute to the discussion; I upvoted all your comments, I hope ot helps)

Others could be as productive as me in 8h or 6h or even less for all I know. I just have not met such people. Most people I know sleep little and are by my own standards not productive (I mean I would never hire them, sorry if it is rude)

Your other point also makes a lots of sense: I may be losing 2h per day due to sleep. OTOH, I generally wake up by 11am, am done with breakfast and shower by 1 or 2pm, and start working for real by 4pm, so I'm already wasting time by myself :-)

But in a few hours of highly productive work, I often achieve my goals. When I don't, I very quickly find another way to get the results, because IT NEEDS TO WORK NOW!

Lazyness, impatience and hubris are my best qualities!

I think the point the poster was making is that it's possible the issue is with the quality of your sleep. Someone getting a lower quality of sleep will need more hours of total sleep every day to be as well-rested as someone with a higher quality but fewer hours of sleep.

Of course, that's not necessarily the case. Everyone has a different genetic need for and predisposition to sleep.

That's much different than your suggestion that there's a doctor-level health issue involved.

I've made two suggestions then that are not contradictory.

Everyone's different. I'll wake up after 7 or 8 hours without an alarm if I haven't had any crunch time recently.

A colleage of mine seems to do fine with 5 hours sleep, and another needs 9-10 hours like GP.

"seems to do fine with 5 hours of sleep"

i'm always very skeptical about claims like that, for three reasons:

1. people who claim to work perfectly with less than 7 hours of sleep regularly are often used to it but actually slightly under-perform (in regards to their maximum efficiency) without noticing the difference.

2. there's a bit of societal pressure to sleep less; people sleeping 8-9 hours are sometimes seen as lazy. thus people sometimes falsely claim to sleep less than they actually do (or see pt. 1), which reinforces the original point.

3. a couple of very smart and/or successful people sleep very little at night because they're so productive and successful and sleep would take time away from this - what they forgot to mention are the frequent naps throughout the day.

you are right though that everyone's different. not only genetically - mental, physical and emotional exhaustion differ between jobs and hobbies. though i agree with some others here that sleeping much more than 10 hours regularly may be a sign of health problems or - nowadays more likely due to ubiquitous screens - poor sleep quality.

He definitely seems like the exception to the rule. Whereas if I've slept 5 hours I'll be ready to pack in at 4pm he's still fine.

And I'm pretty sure its not an act as he's older than me, consistently competent and I've known him like this for years,running the same schedule.

Probably just on one extreme of the bell curve.

sleep durations follow a normal distribution in the populace. 8hrs only happens to be the average, but certainly not true for every one.

sleep start times and sleep wake times also follow a normal distribution.

don't assume.

No, not more creative. In fact I stated the opposite and was hoping to find the reason why.

But cognitively enhanced and more productive, hell yeah. I know my track record. I have little doubt about that.

I can't stand people that prescribe life changes to others. Too many people do this. I used to have a friend that was sooo prescriptive. Every god-damn minute of my life analyzed. What sucks more is that people like this get into every damn institution until we have laws banning behaviors. 1984