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A comment on Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist. Parent comment

Re:Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading ... by Thriptic on Sunday June 17, 2018 @02:40AM (#17331154)
>Right. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived.

100% this. If you habitually get poor sleep it becomes your new normal and you forget what it's like to be well rested. I used to get between 3 and 6 hours per night for years and my cognitive skills plummeted. At one point I switched to getting 8 hours per night and problems which previously seemed extremely difficult became trivially easy almost immediately.

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Re:Eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading ... by Silhouette on Sunday June 17, 2018 @07:10AM (#17331860)
If you habitually get poor sleep it becomes your new normal and you forget what it's like to be well rested.

And this can be deceptive if the whole effect happens more than once. Suppose you really need 8 hours of sleep but have habitually been getting only 6 for a long time, and that has become your baseline for reference. Then something happens and you're only getting 4 or 5 hours instead for a while, and you feel obviously worse. After some time that effect reverts and you're back to getting 6 hours, and relatively speaking, you feel great! See what a difference it makes when you get enough sleep in a night! But in reality, you still aren't...

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