Was this study better science that disproved the existing body? Or poorer science? Or is there something problematic about sleep in Chennai? Or special about the people in Chennai?

The full paper states:

> An enormous body of research, mostly conducted in sleep labs in rich countries, documents severe negative impacts of sleep deprivation on a range of outcomes from attention and memory to mood and health (Lim and Dinges, 2010; Banks and Dinges, 2007).

> While experimental evidence on the impact of increasing sleep in field settings is scarce, there is a widely-held belief among researchers and the public that reducing sleep deprivation would lead to improvements in economic outcomes (Walker, 2017).

> To document these priors, we surveyed 119 experts from sleep science and economics who predicted sizable economic benefits, including a 7% increase in work output, of increasing sleep by half an hour per night from the low levels observed in our setting.

Social science is fun.

While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.

As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.

Anyway, I get by through a combination of sneaking naps, trying not to sabotage myself by eating/living poorly, and catching up when I can.

I suspect the people in this study do the same. They probably doze when on public transportation, or trying to get the kids to sleep, you'll lay down with them and sleep a little. These stolen moments add up. Also, learning to recognize the signs of mental fatigue - if you can't get rest, then, you have to slow down and double check everything, not get irritable, and defer major decisions.

I can write new applications (atrociously) on basically no sleep, so I'm pretty skeptical "sit at this desk and enter these things" swings one way or the other (or even has much of an ability to quality check - at least the compiler will yell at me when I'm egregiously wrong).

I'd be far more interested if these people could be trusted to run heavy machinery on that schedule, or engage in a creative or hands on task like carpentry or welding. I suspect the results would be quite different.

Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.

The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?

Do they, though?

You shouldn't, and a great many in the US don't.

Personally I hated it at the time, because getting up early is not my thing, but now I appreciate the time I got to talk with my parents on my way to school thanks to that schedule arrangement.

Also to offset this early getting up, we jus went to bed earlier, like at 9pm or 10pm max, so not sure it really made a difference on anything.

> The combination of changing sleep patterns in adolescence and early school start times leaves secondary school classrooms filled with sleep-deprived students. Evidence is growing that having adolescents start school later in the morning improves grades and emotional well-being, and even reduces car accidents. Opponents cite costly adjustments to bussing schedules and decreased time after school for jobs, sports, or other activities as reasons to retain the status quo. While changing school start times is not a costless policy, it is one of the easiest to implement and least expensive ways of improving academic achievement

https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/181/pdfs/educational-ef....

Of course, most kids lived on farms, some even had chores before going to school, and early to bed, early to rise was normal.

We had a few antenna TV stations, no cable, VCRs weren't around for the average family, and of course no Internet.

We also didn't have city street lights / ambient light, street noise, the sound of neighbours.

People have gotten up early to do farm work for aeons, and go to sleep early too. In fact, to be more precise, staying up past 8 or 9pm is an urban / modern aberration.

Point is, staying up late is the problem. Nothing more.

Now of course, society has changed, so maybe change is needed. However, there is also a lot of counter literature on even TV as a sleep depriver. And now we have phone in bed, with a glowing screen, keeping a mind active.

My point? OK, change the time. However, will kids just stay up even later?

Or, as they do now, will they think "I should go to sleep now, or I will be tired tomorrow, but just one more text..."?

Stealing hours later is a lot easier, because any amount of sleep will still break up the day compared to none.

The other reason of course is that the real trick is just staying up longer then your parents: that's the only truly unsupervised freedom you have as a kid.

Eating too much, borrowing more money than you should, eating junk food, staying up too late, being addicted to your phone, texting whilst driving, perhaps these are all the same problem?

And like any animal, we need to be trained to control ourselves, when young, for our own good?

I mean with most clocks also being internet connected computers it wouldnt be too hard to make a system where you measure time in hours after average sunrise in a tike zone.

That is where I live right now it's sunrise +3.

I'll reschedule the daily 'standup' to SR+3.5, the banks open at SR+3 and close at SR+11.

One major consequence I can see is that now we have north south timezones on top of east west.

This would break in the extreme north or south where there are days without a sunrise.

At no point did I cite biology. Instead, I validated that different wake-up times have existed in the past, and in fact still do.

When does the garbage man, the builder, the mechanic get up? The blue collar man? It isn't 8am, that's for sure. People I know in these professions of start work at 7am. Or earlier. I see them get to sleep by 9pm.

Get to sleep sooner, discipline yourself, as with anything else, it's just that easy.

Or that hard?

In France kindergarten and primary school starts at 8:30 and ends at 16:30. Mid and high school at 8 or 9, never earlier.

This is very early for children and teens, really not physiological.

My high school started at 08:10 (I think) and elementary school at 08:15 and those were the earliest starters in the neighbourhood. University luckily started around 9.

In terms of salary a school teacher would make less or the same as McDonalds worker.

For example, McDonalds Ukraine pays an entry level worker -14 000 UAH ($500) monthly for 40 hours per week. School teacher makes minimum 5000 UAH ($180), +bonus(10-60%). Teacher who was awarded a "highest category" certification (that would be a very experienced one) and who will get all the possible bonuses and raises will make around 14 000 UAH, roughly.

Workers, cleaning personnel would make in the same ballpark 9000 - 14000 UAH ($300-500) at least in Kyiv. Selling phones in the store, work at supermarket also has a similar remuneration.

Average doctor salary (not nurse) is 9000 UAH, at least officially.

The reason is - most those highly skilled and highly educated workers that I've mentioned are paid by the government which does not have funds and desire honestly to treat these people well. They are remnants of decaying public infrastructure - Ukraine has de jure free universal health care and a very big amount of government-funded seats at state universities. Still it is better to work at school than at the factory probably.

You just have a stereotype of how certain things work, everything is not like US/Western Europe structurally. Higher education is not a ticket to a better life everywhere.

How's the new president doing? At first it seemed like a joke, but the little concrete things i've read about him post-election seemed OK.

New president I think is a bit better than the previous three but the whole situation kind of shows two things: 1) There is not much you can do in the country where oligarchs control everything. 2) There is still not much ideas for the future except some sort of a neoliberal 'reaganomics', further privatization and generally disengagement of the state from any meaningful public good iniatives.

1. They are different chemicals.

2. They are administered by different means (inhalation is vastly more impactful than swallowing a tablet).

3. The doses for pharmaceuticals are much lower.

By repeating this argument you create prejudice against those of us who live with ADHD and rely on medication to function normally.

That's rich. Here's a prominent psychiatrist's view (who btw, supports and does prescribe amphetamine adhd medication):

"There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. On the one hand you have anti-psychiatry activists who will say that using Adderall for ADHD is exactly like giving kids crystal meth; on the other you'll have people who say that obviously normal amphetamine is okay, but meth-amphetamine is a demonic substance that will hijack your brain and destroy your life. The truth is more complicated.

Methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more effectively than unsubstituted amphetamine, but I'm not sure how much that matters since people take different doses of both, and a high dose of unsubstituted will end up with more reaching the brain than a low dose of meth. It seems to inhibit the dopamine transporter more effectively, which might matter, but I'm not enough of a pharmacologist to know how much. Meth takes effect more quickly, which seems to increase addictiveness in a sort of behaviorist sense where the sooner a stimulus gets reinforced, the more rewarding it will feel.

I think there's been a little bit more research since then, but the general takeaway - that the science doesn't support the vast gulf between these two drugs in the popular imagination - still seems true."[0]

[0]https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

Note that you are also creating prejudice against an already marginalized group of people, a subset of whom may have undiagnosed ADHD.

I wonder how much research was done at the time and has been done in retrospect.

Anecdotal, but I spent years not sleeping through university and sleeping in airports or on the train. Studied engineering and did a lot of hackathons and events and stuff. I figured out then that I didn't need full cognition or excellent decision making. I needed more hours cranking out work. I spent years sleeping just a few hours and often not sleeping on Saturday at all.

I do a lot less of that now as work never has 2AM deadlines but it is as though I am permanently in that 80% functionality state. I never felt that I got out of that state. I have never regained my ability to be detail oriented. I am still reliant on the crutches of spell check and Grammarly and my IDE to make sure I don't do something stupid. I use task lists for every little thing in my day.

So it is not that it does not impact cognition (at least in my case), it is that you get used to that impaired state and can't find a way back.

Only a year and a half removed from that, so maybe it takes more time, but I still feel heavily optimized for output over quality, even though that is no longer needed.

My baseline cognition was already impacted. More sleep just did not repair it.

I cannot tell you if a change in my sleeping habits was the result of all that, if it has been a coincidence or if it preceded any improvements - but it certainly didn’t hurt the process.

Today, I don’t need therapy or medication anymore, can focus good enough on my work and in the stories my significant other tells me. I don’t get nervous anymore anytime I have to wait in a line, I do fewer mistakes, I can read a book and feel less bored, more happy. It’s something I had to learn, but I needed some help with that. It’s worth a try!

Today, I also realize a significant decrease in performance and happiness if I get a single night of bad sleep. Before I knew how my days could really feel, I didn’t care about that - but I’m sure I had been impacted badly, nevertheless.

This is your first advice. Anyway, no need to get pedantic. Fact is you're carelessly suggesting the use of some pretty heavy and specific medicine, to someone you don't know, based on a few words of text he wrote on an anonymous internet forum.

My sleep was somewhat destroyed from having kids. Not that I was extremely underslept, but my brain somehow stopped sleeping deeply it felt like. I awoke from every minute sound the kids made.

Today theyr'e 7 and 9 and I still wake from silly sounds.. Some sounds the kids make is like driving a knife through my ears. It is getting better but still...

The upside from this is now I don't need anywhwre near 8 hours of sleep anymore! 7 hours is almost too much, 6 works perfectly most of the time. 5 hours though is when I get into zombie-mode during daytime.

If you feel this has impacted your life to the point where you need to hide your identity, maybe you should try therapy or a medical examination. Or just get more sleep

I personally would always put more faith in someone who carefully checks their work than someone who thinks they don't need to. The second person is making mistakes and just doesn't realize it.

It is noted in many sleep science studies that you cannot “recoup” lost sleep so this is plausible.

So I am not surprised if merely looking at sleep amounts fails to explain differences.

Maybe 27 minutes is just not enough? I’m sure the results would be different if they started to get 7 hours instead of 5.5.

    > ... only 5.5 hours per night ...
    > ... increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night ...

- Noise pollution

- Air pollution and ventilation (PM2.5 and CO2)

- Bed comfort

- Temperature and humidity

Its possible that the home environment is so bad, that any increase in sleep yields no improvement. By contrast the workplace might be comparatively better controlled.

Getting rid of fossil-fueled cooking, power generation and transport solves some of these issues.

What is the expected amount of sleep for a healthy person that spends 8 hours in bed?

It means that the TV is in the bedroom.

> When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.

Or is it “When I temporarily find myself in an environment with stress-levels similar to those of the people in the study I a) start to perform like them on modern day tasks and b) start to sleep like them.”?

If you consider taking 30 minutes of a 6 hour shift to nap, that means they have to be 10% more productive for the 5.5 hours after the nap. I'd suspect hawthorne here, even though it didn't show up in the night treatment group, but it would be interesting to see if this productivity increase is sustained in the long run.

>In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.

Time spent napping >> time in bed. They're sufficiently exhausted by mid-day to get higher quality rest than they would by spending the same time in bed.

If you're tired, you're better off getting up at your normal wake time, then taking a nap later.

This indicates to me that they found something better to do, than this study.

Same. I have a hard line at 6 hours. Over 6 and I'm good, less than 6 and I'm dead all day. I don't use an alarm and wake up naturally after around 7 hours of sleep, but that last hour I'm normally aware of the lighter sleep stage I'm in.

>In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.