Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It sounds like choking in your sleep. In my case, I was doing this more than 70 times an hour - often multiple times a minute! My blood oxygen was as low as 67% - a threshold that would have me on a ventilator, were it happening in a hospital.
Until I got my apnea treated, I never slept well. I had not had a really good night's sleep in years, and I hadn't had a great night's sleep as an adult probably ever. In school - decades ago - I fell asleep in class regularly and napped every day. Despite this, I have been successful, but I can't help but wonder who I'd be if I hadn't had that problem. What's worse, because you do not actually sleep, whatever happens during sleep that repairs your body doesn't really happen. Sleep apnea massively increases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and many other serious conditions.
Sleep apnea is treated with CPAP - continuous positive airway pressure - from a machine that sits on your bedside. You wear a mask like Bane and it forces air into your throat and opens it, making it easier to breathe. CPAP is not a cure, because it doesn't fix the underlying anatomical issue, but properly calibrated it results in complete remission. I now sleep normally. From a sleep perspective, I feel amazing, better than I have in years. For the first time in my life, I can rely on feeling good in the morning if I get enough hours of sleep in. Even four hours on the CPAP is better than eight or nine hours without it. (Also, over time, your brain becomes conditioned that CPAP = sleep, and you zonk out within minutes of putting it on.)
It is costly and time consuming, yes, and CPAP machines are a huge lifestyle adjustment. But good lord, is it worth it. I have never felt or slept better. In the years since my diagnosis I have not slept a single night without my CPAP and I don't think I ever will again, unless some magical cure comes out.
If you have struggled with insomnia, snoring, or feeling wakeful after sleep, I beg you to get a sleep study and look into whether apnea, or another similar condition, could be the cause.
Relevant to this, people with a genetic mutation that adversely affects sleep end up developing dementia and dying early:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25001-fatal-f...
Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time.
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Running improved my sleep quality dramatically. Now the problem is, that if I take a day off running, my sleeping suffers. Curious if people that do weight lifting (which I'm considering) get great sleeps? Maybe I can alternate between cardio and weight lifting each day?
Some people seem to need a lot less sleep than others with no deleterious health effects. It would be very interesting to find out why.
"In a 2023 study, researchers in Brazil found that fruit flies that were sleep deprived showed overexpression mostly of genes that affected metabolism, glucose, triglyceride and levels of the hormone dopamine"
"After just one day of restricting sleep in mice, Rogulja could see fats in the animals’ intestines that weren’t entering circulation. After five days, their guts were filled with fat although their bodies were starved of nutrients."
This is interesting. People with Autism and ADHD often have gut issues and problems with dopamine etc. Maybe these deceases are caused by constant sleep deprivation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
I have just read this book and found it very interesting and helpful:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-...
So you can concentrate your energy on maintenance tasks, like memory consolidation and physical restoration, during the down time during which it is cold and dark -- when you can't effectively hunt and stay warm. If you did not do that, you would have to constantly allocate some energy towards these tasks, at the expense of more urgent ones. And the higher up you are in the food chain, the less risky it is to rest.
We work in the neurotech/sleeptech space, specifically with the stimulation which was VERY poorly described in this article where they discuss "pink noise".
They point to one small study in 7 participants, but slow-wave enhancement (increasing slow-wave delta power) has over a decade of research, including 4 recent papers in older adults looking at Alzheimer's both as a preventative measure and as management of symptoms (we can't say treatment yet, that's still many studies away).
We provide our technology to researchers, and are preparing our consumer product.
You can find more on our website, as well as links to a few of the more relevant studies at https://affectablesleep.com
How I describe the technology is that slow-wave activity is the synchronous firing of neurons, the hallmark and defining feature of deep sleep. We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase the electrical activity, increase the synchronous firing of neurons, which is like giving the glymphatic system an extra boost of power. This enhances the restorative function of the brain, without altering sleep time.
I should be completing our whitepaper which provides a more in depth look at the technology, the state of sleep, and a large chronological list of how the research has progressed over the last decade.
The periods of my life I was the most productive and learned the most were when those when I managed to sleep >=8 hours every single night, in a dark, silent environment. I still manage to sleep >=7 hours most nights, but I feel like it's getting harder to keep a baseline of 8 hours for every night. Don't know if my sleep needs changed over time due to aging, or if it's just a consequence of having more responsibilities.
There’s this one guy in Vietnam who literally doesn’t sleep ever.
https://www.news18.com/amp/buzz/meet-80-year-old-vietnamese-...
Google it. There’s a lot about him. It’s like the one thing that makes zero sense in all this research about sleep.
I saw this post where Andrej Karpathy asks if hyperbaric oxygen therapy might work like exercise by boosting oxygen to tissues, I wonder if sleep has any correlation.
When I take a supplement with sulforaphane, I feel like I need less sleep.
I feel refreshed in the morning. Strange.
Likely it also because your other body parts needs repairing, not just the brain and the brain tells you by being sleepy. Evolutionarily, why we don’t go on for 24hrs maybe because we have night time.
Because it defragments and cleans the brain.
We have no understanding of medicine.
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Extreme Sleep deprived people did hallucinate.
Nature may give us some hints to improve "AI" reliability.
The generations in my family are full of people who had dementia/Alzheimer's/auto-immune disorders. They all had anxiety, and they all had sleep disorders - I'm certain there is a connection among it all.
I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(