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paper-machine comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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Comments (186)
Holy opportunity cost, Batman!
Well, it's not quite that bad - it's regularly remarked anecdotally that meditation substitutes to some degree for sleep. (Although I think that only gains you an hour at most.) And then there's the observation that you can meditate during your 'junk time', when you're not up to any real work, and the meditation might even improve you to the point of doing real work. That seems to work for me sometimes: I spend half an hour meditating, and then I can get in half an hour of work, when I would otherwise have spent the hour on Reddit.
EDIT: Please note that this really is just anecdotal information on what might reduce the cost of meditation; I regard it as plausible and consistent with what I know, but I wouldn't give the claims more than 75% confidence. Nor do I plan to read the relevant literature on meditation any time soon (unless someone wants to pay me).
I recently encountered an article on this: meditation, even in non-experienced meditators, appears to improve psychomotor vigilance on following tasks, and experienced meditators appear to sleep less than non-meditators.
Ah, I think I saw that one less. Worth noting that the second study in it, on the long-term meditators, is not controlled/randomized - so it's just correlational. (eg. maybe the less you sleep, the more you can afford the time to do meditation.)
Yep. Not a hugely strong claim, though I'm emailing the author for more information.
Update: The author replied, and doesn't know of any more conclusive studies in this respect.
I've started a multifactorial experiment for the next 360 days; I've decided one of the interventions will be meditation. Randomized on a per-day basis, and if that doesn't show any effect in the analysis, I'll try doing a before-after comparison.
If this is true, it puts my recent experience into context. After starting to meditate daily for 40 to 60 minutes, I noticed that my sleep requirement drastically reduced and I began waking earlier. Prior to this, I was a consistent sleeper, getting almost exactly 8 hours a night and not feeling rested if I didn't.
Most recently, I have been sleeping more like 6 hours a night and sometimes even less. I've also been waking up sometimes as early as 5:00am. I was expecting to experience some deficits after the 1st day or 2 of getting less sleep, but I've been continuing on like this for weeks now with no negative effects that I've been able to observe. This could be a form of bias (name, anyone?) though, much like people who have had alcohol will say they drive more carefully and thus aren't more dangerous, when in fact, they are.
Actually, sleep deprivation is known to damage self-assessment (case I'm thinking of was in a study inducing chronic sleep deficits); not sure if this has a name.