Paul — That quote from Kripke is interesting. I think it’s a little bit of a red herring, though. Life expectancy is one measure of health, but it’s complicated by the fact that we do such a good job, these days, of keeping sick people alive. And I’m not just talking about people sick enough to be in the hospital, but about all the people with diseases that used to be fatal and now are “manageable,” and thus chronic.

Steve — I’m sorry, that sounds rough. Grieving does throw off most basic daily patterns — sleeping, eating, working. I hope it’s getting better for you. I agree with you about working long hours, but there are lucky people for whom the work is its own reward.

Sort of related — A while ago I had an idea for a science fiction setting: a planet of intelligent creatures (could be human, doesn’t really matter) with the peculiar physiological property of not being able to reset their sleep-wake cycles. Wherever you were born, your cycle would be set to that time zone and you couldn’t readjust when traveling east or west. It was fun to think about how that might affect trade, economic development, and various other social issues. Unfortunately I’m not a fiction writer, so I never did anything with it.

I usually work to 3am or 4am and sleep very late and have done that for 10 years and my life is such that that it is ok for me to do that. I mentally peak from about 10pm to 2am. I would usually be one of the late night visiters to this blog. My brother literally lives on planes though and is never in any one time zone long enough to adjust. I tell him it must be bad on his health. He is younger than me but starting to look older.I believe in a lot of sleep though and would tend to agree that anything under 8 hours a night will wreck your health eventually. Being an athlete I prefer, and often need, 10. While I have no hard scientific proof I would say that many or most of the health and mental problems of people today are largely due to lack of sleep and bad diet.

My philosophy is that there is simply no reward this life can offer you that it worth working 18 hours a day for, and no amount of money will get your health back.If you die your company or institution will get along just fine without you. Success is being able to achieve goals or achieve more with more efficient work and shorter hours not more. People totally confuse long hours with productive, effective or creative hours. This is simply not true in creative work like physics or mathematics or writing, or in many things. Just because you have worked 12 hours straight on something or on some problem does mean you have necesarily gotton anywhere with it at all. Short bursts of effort work best(at least with me) then giving the mind a break from it. I also believe such problems are solved in your mind when you sleep and new ideas emerge, not when you are at your desk.

Sleep also has a powerful healing effect but it remains something of a mystery. For some reason if we don’t have rem sleep/dreams we can’t survive or function.

Citrine. I agree I’m pretty lucky to function this way. When you say “…think of the potential destructiveness resulting from a malevolently clever person having all those extra hours to plot and plan their misdeeds.”, I think you already did when you mentioned Margaret Thatcher! (I’m hoping you’d never compare me to that evil woman! Besides, my hair is a mess when I get out of bed!). As I get a little older though, I am finding that I need a touch more sleep, and it’s a little annoying!

People who are able to take short naps always seem well-refreshed after them (my Father-in-law can lie down on any surface, fall asleep immediately, and wake up fifteen minutes later ready to take on the world). Unfortunately, I’ve never been a napper. I always wake up with a mouth tasting like the bottom of a bird cage and feeling disoriented and a bit grumpy.

Thanks for the link Paul. I guess I could have done the same. What got to me was that the journalist didn’t follow it up or, if they did, didn’t represent it in the article. If it was good work they should have presented it; if not, they shouldn’t have even mentioned him

JoAnne, your love of sleep is indeed well documented. I recall being very impressed that you managed to come out for a drink when we both realized we were randomly at Fermilab, in neighboring hotels, late one night earlier this year. Looking back at my Orange Quark post about that, I notice two things. My title was “Why Aren’t I asleep yet?” and my post was time-stamped at 2:29a.m.

Euan. Such visits don’t really make things worse for me, but when I travel it certainly adds to the disruption of all normal patterns.

Dissident. I wouldn’t say sleep deprivation and workaholism are desirable to physicists. You are right that they are, to some extent, part of our professional culture (at least in the U.S.), but this is true in a variety of other professions.

Certainly when I’m tired, creative and analytic abilities go. That’s why I tend to use these times for “busy work”.

There are interesting cultural differences in how people describe their work. Physicists do work an awful lot (a crazy number of hours per week). However, one thing I noticed when I moved to the U.S. were the diametrically opposite manners in which people (not just physicists) talk about their work habits.

In the U.K., the ideal is to be very successful (which undoubtedly requires a lot of hard work), but to say things like “I worked until about 5 yesterday, then went home, played a bit of footy, went out for a few bevvies, grabbed a late night curry, and felt a bit wooly this morning, so only got in around noon. Fancy a pint tonight?” In contrast, in the U.S., the ideal seems to be to never refer to having gone out, watched a movie, had a beer, played a game, generally had fun, or done anything except worked and grabbed 3 hours of sleep. Even people who work as much as we do seem compelled to exaggerate their working hours and play down relaxation time (which in academia, when taken, should involve ascetic pursuits like hiking).

Makes you wonder where theoretical physicists could have been by now, given a less self-defeating “professional” culture.

“You may have heard somewhere that 8 hours of sleep per night is necessary to be healthful. This just is not so. In our studies in San Diego, the average adult is actually asleep only between 6 and 6.5 hours a night. Moreover, The Cancer Prevention Study II showed that people who sleep 6.5 to 7.5 hours live a bit longer than people who sleep 8 hours or more Footnote - click to read. The shorter sleepers lived longer! Even people who slept as little as 3.5 hours lived longer than those who slept 8 hours or more. Certainly, if you get only 6.5 or 7 hours of sleep a night, you are probably sleeping enough.”

Found at the first google link; Perhaps I have a career in journalism ahead of me?

Benevolent smarts + requiring little sleep is a great combo! On the other hand, think of the potential destructiveness resulting from a malevolently clever person having all those extra hours to plot and plan their misdeeds.

I’m always interested in the effects of afternoon naps (schedule permitting) on one’s productivity. There seems to be a universal dip in mental acuity in the early afternoon. A siesta is considered acceptable in some cultures, but not in the USA. It seems that one has to be always busy, frenzied and overscheduled to justify one’s existence as a productive person and taking time to sleep is seen as an act of laziness. After a certain threshold rate of busyness, one’s energy input yields diminishing returns. In my own life, I’ve learnt to spot the times I’m most alert and try to schedule my most energy-intensive activities accordingly.

It’s hard to believe that such radical changes in sleep habits in the last ~100 years wouldn’t make a difference in our physiology. (I’ve read an estimate that the average American gets 1-2 fewer hours of sleep a night than their counterparts a century ago.) Chalk it up to cheap artificial light and cheap round the clock entertainment.

These large cohort studies are generally done without a control group, and I think they are best construed as exploratory — mainly useful for identifying problems to study more rigorously. They can yield some interesting results, but they’re not the gold standard in medical research, and sometimes they can be misleading. For example, the justification for hormone replacement therapy to prevent cardiovascular disease in post-menopausal women came from a cohort study, but a randomized controlled trial later demonstrated pretty convincingly that HRT not only doesn’t protect against CVD, but actually increases the risk. So while these large cohort sleep studies are interesting, I have more faith in the ones that take healthy people and muck around with their sleep patterns to see what happens — and those do seem to show changes in hormonal function.

Yawn. Time for bed.

As one whose has spent the last thirty years working shift work, the internal clock still does not want to adjust to those ungodly hours, but that’s part of life and part of the disruption to family, and social life, as well.

Circadian rhythms

Your other points are really quite interesting in terms of weight gain and such. The “metabolic clock” must take a beating as well, re-arranging sleep cycles and such I would think. Age too, has a bearing.

I find the wee hours more productive in terms gathering a perspective views of research that I had been doing previous.