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Basiles comments on A very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: Elo 15 October 2015 03:29AM

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Comment author: Basiles 17 October 2015 07:29:43PM *  0 points [-]

I always wanted to see discussed the general opportunity cost of time lost due to extra/superior sleep, especially if given already small amounts of time left and the fact that your ineffective hours (assuming one's a night owl) may as well be spent on work while the more effective ones are the ones during which you 'should' sleep. I currently average <8 hours, meaning that I generally physically go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8, and I don't fall asleep easily so it's probably a lot less than 8 hours. If you have about 4-5 hours of free time left after work and you cut them down to 3 hours due to sleep, and then an hour of that is probably spent on exercise, I think the depressive effect may be quite strong.

Getting more sleep tends to make me just dislike my life more, which I consider a much more serious health hazard than merely feeling sleepy at times, something that I have, at this point, accepted as the fact of life for a night owl in a lark world, and an excuse to drink coffee.

I generally agree with something I read on Gwern's melatonin page: most people don't get sufficient sleep and that's going to stay pretty true for a while. I feel more could be accomplished in other avenues (work week, re-balancing of schedules) with greater effect than trying to train people into giving up a greater chunk of their life for this life-prolonging activity when the bigger issue is that a different chunk of their life is used up for a more useless activity and that they can't control their schedule.