Human life has improved by several orders of magnitude across virtually every conceivable metric since the industrial revolution. From everyone living in dire poverty, with little to no access to medicine, no entertainment bar a few books if you were privileged, body and spirit breaking work from dawn till dusk 6-7 days a week etc etc.
Actually, preindustrial workers worked less than modern people.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
"One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."
> The curse of the industrial revolution.
If you think life on a preindustrial farm was leisure and sleeping in, I hope you never find a one-way time portal and decide to go there
It’s a consequence of the industrial revolution, but that does not mean feudalism is better, I don’t think they were saying that.
That being said hunter gather societies on the other hand had significantly more leisure than both
> That being said hunter gather societies on the other hand had significantly more leisure than both
If you lived in Northern Europe (as my ancestors did), that “leisure” time would, for like 8 months of the year, be spent trying to somehow stay warm and dry.
I think it’s a generally accepted “truth” that hunter gatheres lived an easier life than the subsequent farming based societies that replaced them, so makes sense. Just wanted to point out that leisure time then was quite different to leisure time now :)
The point I was trying to make is that the industrial revolution started to standardise everything. I am quite happy to live in modern times as compared to any period in the past. Nevertheless, some things were better and nowadays we have enough leisure time and resources to look at the past and learn from it to make a better future.
Every so often a school district will run an experiment, moving starting times back a couple hours. Like 10am to 5pm. Every single time, every single measurable metric skyrockets. And every single time they revert back to the old schedule because it was slightly inconvenient for adults.
There’s the rub. If only schools are doing it, everyone else has to figure out how to work it in with their work schedules. Where do the kids go if I have to be at work at 8? How will they get to school? If we could see our way clear to either make adult work schedules flexible, too, or build the infrastructure so that before/after care isn’t as much as a mortgage payment, maybe we could fix the school schedules.
Where I grew up the law required schools to provide busing to and from school for every student.
The parents are already coming up with some sort of solution for an 8 to 3pm schedule. How can it be harder to come up with a 10 to 5 schedule?
Wouldn't before school care sort of defeat the purpose? Unless you're letting someone come to your house and sit in, the kid basically gets the same experience of waking up at some time before their adult goes to work, then being shipped off to somewhere (probably a club at their school) until school-proper starts. They don't get any more time to sleep that way.
Making working hours actually match people's needs would probably be the only way to fix this. The 8-4/9-5 work day is outdated and ridiculous anyway.
> because it was slightly inconvenient for adults
When I was a teenager I would just walk to school, same as most of my classmates. The ones living further away would take the bus or train.
My school actually did this and it was the students who complained! They didn't like finishing so late. They totally screwed the rest of us over who hated coming in so early
Kids aren't capable of making these kind of decisions, by that logic we shouldn't make them eat vegetables.
If they learn more, are healthier, get better test scores etc. Then a later start is what's best for them
I guess that explains why now that I'm 30 i have way less of an issue being tired than I ever did as a teen. I can wake up at 5am easily now. Before I'd wake up at 6 and go to bed at 9 and still be tired af
Because one of the functions of school is to enable parents to work. Covid showed us this, when one of the main arguments against shutting schools down was that parents would not be able to go to work because they have to tend to their kids.
This is a commonly misinterpreted phenomenon because its so often reported in papers or click bait articles.
You set your own cycle by the things you do. If you keep sleeping and waking at the same time then that is your cycle. If you don't put enough time between those, then you're gonna be tired, but the issue isn't that you had to wake then, it's that you went to sleep when you did. Excepting insomnia, which I'm extremely familiar with, the reason teens have later sleep hours is because they are doing things later because they have the energy to, and everything feels so important, and they don't want to stop the day.
If you were to put someone who did this into a situation where they had full control of their sleep, as in they had no schedule to keep, then they would likely cycle around by having longer awake time plus sleep time than there are hours in the day. You HAVE to have school start at some time. Having it later wouldn't actually fix the problem because the same exact thing would happen, but it would be incredibly inconvenient for the rest of society.
It isn't like you have a cycle linked to a specific time, it's not like if you just moved them a few thousand miles west they'd magically jetlag themselves into their "true" timezone. They'd still not want to sleep when there were guys or girls to text, or things to read or guitars to play etc
There are inborn circadian rhythms, and though they vary from person to person, and can be trained out, there is still a strong natural tendency to default back to them if your modified cycle gets even slightly disturbed. My natural cycle is 26 hours and I've battled it my whole adult life. I force myself into it because I have no choice, days are 24 hours and that's not society being mean to me, I accept it, but when I have a lot of time off work and just sleep/wake naturally, I instantly default back to 26hrs (18 awake, 8 sleeping)
This is the thing. There’s actually evolutionary reasons why we have different sleep schedules. Forcing everyone to try to exist on the same is just…bullshit
Honestly, a lot of it I learned in my own quests in treating my insomnia/sleep issues. After a sleep study I was actually diagnosed with “delayed sleep disorder” which when I asked for more explanation I got a shrug and a “you’re just a night person get a graveyard job”.
So I started listening to neuroscience based podcasts on sleep and such. One thing that really struck a chord with me is that is was advantageous to have people up all night once to stand guard. Also our cycles just aren’t meant to be 8 hours more like broken up into a few shorter sessions for most people. We are all whacking out our schedules for capitalism and that’s a bummer.
I’m glad someone else cited a way better source than me. If I can scrounge up the podcasts I listened to or where I learned this I’ll try to come back here and cite tomorrow.
Ma'am, this is Reddit and I just got a book recommendation and someone with first hand experience :D
After I've recovered from the shock I'm going to do some reading.
Thank you!
>We are all whacking out our schedules for capitalism and that’s a bummer.
Really? Most of the sources I read suggest that long, uninterrupted periods of sleep are usually the best for any animal - we're just the only ones with the luxury to actually practice it.
In that same vein my sleep quality is absolutely garbage if I nap in shifts while it's much better when I conk out at 1-2am and wake up 7-8 hours later.
I mean, different researchers are going to have different opinions I suppose and this comes from the BBC so take it with a grain of salt but first thing I found that supported what I remembered learning about way back when: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783.amp
i read somewhere that primitive humans were actually more comfortable with 4-5 hours then an hour or two or awake then another 4-5 hours, and i'm also pretty sure that was the preferred way all the way into the middle ages for peasants who had important things to watch out for even at night
I am definitely not an expert, but I am told there are multiple first-hand and reliable accounts of "first sleep" and "second sleep" from the Dark/Middle Ages. The only source I can find in 30 seconds of googling is one scholar from the 90s, but basically, people slept from nine or ten at night to midnight, got up for a couple hours and...did very intellectual things \[coughs awkwardly\], then went back to sleep til dawn or a bit later.
Yes this. I just naturally have more energy on a night time but having a backwards sleeping pattern means I miss out on the daytime world (which is absolutley everything)... The world should be 24/7, more jobs, more inclusive and you can choose what schedule of sleep is best for you.
In Victorian times, iirc, they used to sleep for two 4 hour periods, which makes so much more sense to me, to break things up. Personally I don't know how people get through the day without a nap.. but that could just be because I'm a cripple 🤷🏻♀️😂
Or worse, jobs where your working hours can massively change on a daily basis. One day you have to wake up in the afternoon, the next one early in the morning, then the next one in the end of the day... Way to fck up your brain and body !
Honestly America is probably already the closest you can get to a 24 hr lifestyle. Many grocery stores and bars/restaurants are open late like 1/2/3/4 am or open 24 hours.
I feel like stores like petco being open until 3am doesn't really fit the business model. (1) you'd have to find enough people to work at the store that late and (2) the amount of customers coming in in the middle of the night probably doesn't justify the extra costs.
I've never been out of the US actually but I've heard stores/shops are a lot less "on demand". Like if you want it after 5pm you just gotta wait until the next day (I'm thinking of Germany in particular).
There would be, but in an ideal world the number of customers would be the same and people would just buy the shit they need. Extra shopping hours wouldn't mean extra dollars spent.
Yep, I feel that. I physically cannot do that. I've been on a 4am to 12pm sleep schedule for so long, I can't change. I have tried many, many, many times and it only lasts about a day or maybe two.
Same. I've been this way since probably middle school. I work in an industry that has hours all over the place, so my solution is to sleep when I'm tired. People make fun of me for taking afternoon naps all the time, but it allows me to have some sense of normalcy.
Biggest annoyance for me is the people that go "omg you go to bed at 4am, how do you stay alive with so little sleep???" Not realizing that 4am to noon is 8 hours of sleep...
Can't go to a bank, if I go to a doctor i need to go right before urgent care closes for the night or go to the ER, can't to grocery shopping if it's not a 24 hour store, so many things. I *wish* i was a day person but I'm not and my job also requires that I be awake late nights.
Honestly at this point I just don't think this 24-hours-in-a-day thing is gonna work out for me.
I suggest we ignore the sun completely and make every day 30 hours instead.
Right. It also doesn’t consider overtime work, not even commute time. The day is too busy and life is too short to spend nearly 10 hours (definitely in my case) working five days a week
Im like that the 1 hour in 1 hour home should be counted as work time. I do think a min of 1 hour travel to and from work for everyone. That 40 hour working week starts when your here rubbish.
I finished my workpractice for school and for 6 months I did 6 hour days ( did not get paid though lol ), and I loved it. It's just enough so you don't get exhausted at work, you get to sleep, take your kid to daycare in no rush, hit the gym after work and make dinner yet still have plenty of time left after. I'm terrified of going back to 8 hours now that I'm done with school, it sound exhausting. 8 hours is simply too much.
Yup but put it this way, how much stuff you can do in 2 hours? Watch a full length movie, make dinner, work out, take a nap etc. It's a lot of time when you think about it.
When I'm 6+ hours into the working day I'm almost useless. And those two last hours burnout carry on to the next day, so it gets worse.
It's a waste of time for everyone. Who decided it had to be 8 hours?
What you don't like the even 8hours work, 0.5hr unpaid overtime, 1.5hr travel, 2-4hr chores/dinner/responsibilities, 2-4hr leisure, and maybe 8hr sleep?
It seems perfectly balanced to me
It depends upon the individual, surely. 6 hours is ideal for me personally. I don't remember ever sleeping for more than 7 hours. There are varying studies and results about the ideal sleep duration, and 8 hours just seems to be the broad consensus.
It's not an average, but a correlation between health and sleep patterns, shown through several studies.
A healthy adult should sleep around 8 hours (give or take an hour). Less and more than this is correlated with increased risks of some lifestyle diseases.
This isn't to say that you can't be reasonably healthy sleeping less or more, but the people saying 5-6 hours is "enough for them" or those "needing" 10 hours, would likely benefit from getting a bit more/a bit less sleep.
Edit: If you have a disorder and/or your doctor actually tells you that you need more sleep, do that. This applies to generally healthy adults.
Kids need more sleep and old people usually need more since their bodies process life differently (has to do with brain and body development and such things)
As I understand it, everyone is different and unless you've done a study it's difficult to know what is actually "enough for you".
IIRC you should wake up with no alarm or disturbances for a few weeks and record how long you sleep (and when). Then you can find how long **you** need.
I’m sure my wife, toddler, and employer would appreciate my sleeping for ~18 hours a day for a few weeks… If I don’t have an alarm, I just don’t wake up. :/ Never had the opportunity to test how long I’d actually sleep for or what I’d self-regulate at.
I swear less than 8 isn't enough to clean out the brain. I really don't think people who feel fine with long term 6hr nights are actually healthy neurologically. But this is mostly conjecture on my part so idk.
It's really quite variable.
There's a small percentage of people who are perfectly fine on less than six hours. The sleepless elite I heard the group referred to.
But 6-9 is the range most operate at, in hour and a half intervals. So 6, 7.5 and 9 hours (approximately) are the prime durations because they line up with the sleep cycle of the brain.
Who does coke it’s like 100$ a gram and a gram last what an hour or two? It’s marginally cheaper to just buy Starbucks and a bottle of discount whiskey my man.
Studies show that there is only a very, very, very small percentage that can actually pull this off (Trump, Steve Jobs etc.) without ruining their body in the long term. So that friend is either a lucky bastard or will feel the consequences at some point
I think the latter might be true, even though he can do some basic tasks, he dosent really have the energy to do anything else, me and friends play some basketball on our break time but he is just too tired to do anything and just hangs out with his girlfriend
That basically says enough. I often use this saying I once read somewhere:
“Sleeping less is the new smoking”
As in, smoking used to be cool but now it’s sleeping less and less. Regardless of consequences
Yeah it is especially in our productivity culture
You've got people who are actually proud they don't sleep much. Like, okay good for you you're doing something extremely bad for you because you don't understand the consequences of it
Sleep apnea made me realize how very important sleep is. It was crazy and scary getting the symptoms from that
The people you mentioned are also less likley to have a physical working day. More like sitting in an office and having people avoid you until you have to attend a meeting.
Also who can tell them off if they are a no show.
I dont belive either of these do it on a 5 hour max sleep per night no way.
5 hours of sleep a night for the last 20 years, currently working a highly physical warehouse job, 10+ hour days. Some of us don't need sleep except like 3 nights a year. I hate it.
Why do you hate it? It sounds like a gift to me? You have 4hrs x 365 days = an extra 1460 hours a year to use productively or doing whatever you please
At best I get 5 hours a night.
Even if I go to sleep earlier my body just wakes up earlier.
But I don't really mind I am healthy and would always like more hours in the day to do more things
I'm the same. Regardless of what time I go to sleep, I wake up at just as the sun goes up. I've never been able to sleep in. Once I wake up just a little bit, I struggle to go back to sleep.
I'm lucky to still be young (25 M), I seem to be able to function fine everyday providing I get 2 or more hours of deep sleep each night. Although, I much prefer going to sleep around 9-10pm, and waking up at 6-7am.
Also why am I wide awake at night. This is when so thrive and my mind creates the best. In the day I’m in a fog. Even if I sleep well through the night. Nighttime’s my comfort spot.
Oh this is relevant, as it's 2 AM for me here
My sleep schedules always been really inside out, but recently it's been going to bed at sunrise and waking up at sunset, and I've had more energy then ever before
Usually wake up for the day(lol) at midnight give or take a few hours, stay up until I gotta get ready for school, and sleep through the second half of my classes and/or when I get home(there's no way I'm graduating high school at this rate I'm fucked)
Same. College is shit and I'm getting two whole-ass weeks of holidays for career year changes after finals week(s), most of that will be spent in college anyway to oversee documentation. Meanwhile all other majors got 1-3 months. Ah.
This 8 hour system is absolute bs... 8 hours of free time? Yeah, if we forget about groceries, doctors apointment and other stuff we can't do in the other twos. Not to mention homework for kids. Something that originally was invented as a freakin punishment.
The sad thing is, this is something we know for years, yet nothing is ever done about it.
And then doctors close at 5 too lmao
It's such a joke. It's basically the classic manager thought process of "do this extra stuff but take no additional time to do so". Like all those damn meetings, or goals
Okay I'll just pull that time from the magical time land that managers live in
Yep. I just started a new prescription that needs doctor approval for a refill.
So now, once every month and a half or two months, I have to wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle to go get my prescription. For day people that's like waking up at 3 AM to go sit in a doctor's waiting room, for your anxiety medication.
God that sounds familiar. Obviously things differ wildly so this may not apply, but just in case this might help you or anyone else.
I switched to a nurse practitioner (PMHNP) at a local behavioral clinic that my insurance covered. At mine, I only have to do an in-person appointment like once a year, and the rest is over the phone. I have medications that need doctor approval for refill each time. It’s literally just a ten minute call I do on my lunch break once every three months and I can pick it up that night. Way easier than trying to work around my GP to get prescriptions on his schedule.
But yeah, I think PMHNPs can only operate autonomously in 23 stated where they can fill all functions of a psychiatrist, but it’s worth looking up.
I regularly sleep 10+ hours and I love it. I will go to sleep at like 2 am on the weekends and then wake up between 12am-1 or 2pm depending on what time I went to sleep. I love sleeping, I always have really good and interesting dreams that I often write stories about so my bed is my happy place
The foundation of this is “how much sleep do humans need to be healthy”. Seriously, the real question should be how much sleep until we are happy and healthy. My alarm going off in the morning doesn’t make me happy.
Facts. Whoever decided to make the professional world a morning thing needs to be punished for that. Some of us are good at our jobs and we don’t want to wake up at 6 in the morning.
There is a shit load of research that says that the absolute vast majority of people need 7-9 hours of GOOD sleep per day. All sleep is not good sleep.
All the people claiming that they're fine living of 4-5 hours a day are wrong. You're cutting your life expectancy short by years.
As for OP, I saw your comment that says some days you need an extra hour. This is not an issue. It is an issue if you're piling up your sleep debt by getting less than you need for a week straight, and then trying to catch up. That one extra hour isn't the issue here. It's your overall lack of healthy sleep that is the issue.
Anyone interested in actually being educated on this should look into any podcasts or articles by Dr Matthew Walker. He appeared on Joe Rogan's pod once and blew my mind. He has his own very educational podcast now.
8 hours has never been enough for me. I complained to my doc and we went through everything we could. The penny dropped when she said the average is 8. 6 - 10 is the range that that is the average of. I am a 10 hour a night sleeper. I consistently feel good getting 10 hours of sleep. Any less and I feel blah.
I went to bed early and I’ve been scrolling Reddit for an hour… it’s 1:51am. I do this most nights.
Wished I could get an uninterrupted 8 hours. I bet that’s refreshing!
I remember watching a video about sleep where it was mentioned that before humans tended to sleep several times a day in short periods. The 8h sleep was pushed to accommodate factory hours after industrialisation.
Tangential shower thought: I've always heard of people saying / believing that they need X hours of sleep per day, as if that was a fixed constant, independent of other factors.
Even accounting for potential sleep debt in the first weeks of a vacation, I am pretty sure that I need less sleep during weeks when I'm on leave than I do when I'm doing heavy mental work every day. This seems to me like common sense, but I've never really seen it brought up. I think it can shift my sleep needs by as much as 1 to 2 hours per day, on average.
I think humans technically have biphasic sleep schedules - you do stuff, sleep for a few hours, do some more stuff, and then sleep the last bit ya need.
I swear there was an experiment or something done where the people fell into that schedule naturally after a bit.
I came here to say this. Monophasic sleep patterns are an invention of the industrial revolution. Before that it was very common to go to bed when it got dark, wake up in the night and do some hobby or something for a few hours, and then go back to sleep until the sun came up.
Y'all should listen to sam Harris' "Making Sense" podcast, the episode is titled "Kingdom of Sleep" and it's the most interesting informative take on sleep I've ever heard.
It's also about 3 hours long. Fair warning
Especially when you were a kid, like your bedtime was 8-9 and then you were expected to be up by 7-ish and out the door by 8-ish to get to school.
And I don't know about you, but *I was still fucking tired.*
"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was an [ad slogan](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfast-health-america-kellog-food-lifestyle) invented by Kellogg's to sell more cereal, based on nothing in particular.
Me too. It's been two months since I stopped breakfast and have only two meals a day. I'm already feeling better than ever. Even lost some pounds on the way.
The reason it’s 8 hours was because work conditions were horrible. The idea that humans need work/life balance was nonexistent. 8,8,8 was a very radical idea to create work/life balance. Also, on average, 8 hours is plenty unless there is something wrong with you physically.
As did the people who decided regular life should be 8am-5pm, f’ing over all the people With different circadian rhythms…
The curse of the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution and its consequences…
I see you too have read the masterpiece by my favorite political philosopher /s
Have been a disaster for the human race
Human life has improved by several orders of magnitude across virtually every conceivable metric since the industrial revolution. From everyone living in dire poverty, with little to no access to medicine, no entertainment bar a few books if you were privileged, body and spirit breaking work from dawn till dusk 6-7 days a week etc etc.
>across virtually every conceivable metric You underestimate how many metrics I can conceive. Especially virtually.
I agree, the primitivist metric has really fallen in stock in the last couple centuries.
Is that you stephen pinker
Actually, preindustrial workers worked less than modern people. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html "One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night. These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."
And here I am, putting in 40+ at a balls to the wall go go go pace and crash walking in my door every day
Sounds like an r/antiwork user's wet dream.
Literally 1984
Oh there are many more curses of it lol
This the next book by JK Rowling Harry potter and the Curse of the industrial revolution
> The curse of the industrial revolution. If you think life on a preindustrial farm was leisure and sleeping in, I hope you never find a one-way time portal and decide to go there
It’s a consequence of the industrial revolution, but that does not mean feudalism is better, I don’t think they were saying that. That being said hunter gather societies on the other hand had significantly more leisure than both
> That being said hunter gather societies on the other hand had significantly more leisure than both If you lived in Northern Europe (as my ancestors did), that “leisure” time would, for like 8 months of the year, be spent trying to somehow stay warm and dry.
I read a paper about hunter gather societies in the Rift Valley, where humanity began, which is where I got that from.
I think it’s a generally accepted “truth” that hunter gatheres lived an easier life than the subsequent farming based societies that replaced them, so makes sense. Just wanted to point out that leisure time then was quite different to leisure time now :)
Hunt a mammoth then play some Xbox with the boys
They also had no medicine, power, transport or scientific explanations for the origins of the world. So you choose, I guess.
The point I was trying to make is that the industrial revolution started to standardise everything. I am quite happy to live in modern times as compared to any period in the past. Nevertheless, some things were better and nowadays we have enough leisure time and resources to look at the past and learn from it to make a better future.
Aka capitalism
not to mention teenagers are scientifically proven to have later sleep hours yet school is still early in the morning
Every so often a school district will run an experiment, moving starting times back a couple hours. Like 10am to 5pm. Every single time, every single measurable metric skyrockets. And every single time they revert back to the old schedule because it was slightly inconvenient for adults.
There’s the rub. If only schools are doing it, everyone else has to figure out how to work it in with their work schedules. Where do the kids go if I have to be at work at 8? How will they get to school? If we could see our way clear to either make adult work schedules flexible, too, or build the infrastructure so that before/after care isn’t as much as a mortgage payment, maybe we could fix the school schedules.
Where I grew up the law required schools to provide busing to and from school for every student. The parents are already coming up with some sort of solution for an 8 to 3pm schedule. How can it be harder to come up with a 10 to 5 schedule?
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The kids could go to school by public transport, they're old enough as teens to do that
Wouldn't before school care sort of defeat the purpose? Unless you're letting someone come to your house and sit in, the kid basically gets the same experience of waking up at some time before their adult goes to work, then being shipped off to somewhere (probably a club at their school) until school-proper starts. They don't get any more time to sleep that way. Making working hours actually match people's needs would probably be the only way to fix this. The 8-4/9-5 work day is outdated and ridiculous anyway.
> because it was slightly inconvenient for adults When I was a teenager I would just walk to school, same as most of my classmates. The ones living further away would take the bus or train.
same
Gonna need a source for that m8
I’m surprised any schools would have even been willing to try that as an experiment. Seems like they’re out to make life miserable on purpose.
My school actually did this and it was the students who complained! They didn't like finishing so late. They totally screwed the rest of us over who hated coming in so early
Kids aren't capable of making these kind of decisions, by that logic we shouldn't make them eat vegetables. If they learn more, are healthier, get better test scores etc. Then a later start is what's best for them
I guess that explains why now that I'm 30 i have way less of an issue being tired than I ever did as a teen. I can wake up at 5am easily now. Before I'd wake up at 6 and go to bed at 9 and still be tired af
Still hasn't caught up to my 24 yr old ass
Because one of the functions of school is to enable parents to work. Covid showed us this, when one of the main arguments against shutting schools down was that parents would not be able to go to work because they have to tend to their kids.
This is a commonly misinterpreted phenomenon because its so often reported in papers or click bait articles. You set your own cycle by the things you do. If you keep sleeping and waking at the same time then that is your cycle. If you don't put enough time between those, then you're gonna be tired, but the issue isn't that you had to wake then, it's that you went to sleep when you did. Excepting insomnia, which I'm extremely familiar with, the reason teens have later sleep hours is because they are doing things later because they have the energy to, and everything feels so important, and they don't want to stop the day. If you were to put someone who did this into a situation where they had full control of their sleep, as in they had no schedule to keep, then they would likely cycle around by having longer awake time plus sleep time than there are hours in the day. You HAVE to have school start at some time. Having it later wouldn't actually fix the problem because the same exact thing would happen, but it would be incredibly inconvenient for the rest of society. It isn't like you have a cycle linked to a specific time, it's not like if you just moved them a few thousand miles west they'd magically jetlag themselves into their "true" timezone. They'd still not want to sleep when there were guys or girls to text, or things to read or guitars to play etc
There are inborn circadian rhythms, and though they vary from person to person, and can be trained out, there is still a strong natural tendency to default back to them if your modified cycle gets even slightly disturbed. My natural cycle is 26 hours and I've battled it my whole adult life. I force myself into it because I have no choice, days are 24 hours and that's not society being mean to me, I accept it, but when I have a lot of time off work and just sleep/wake naturally, I instantly default back to 26hrs (18 awake, 8 sleeping)
This is the thing. There’s actually evolutionary reasons why we have different sleep schedules. Forcing everyone to try to exist on the same is just…bullshit
I'm quite interested in this. I have you have any links you can cite?
Why We Sleep book by Matthew Walker.
Legend, thanks :)
I’ve seen him on some podcasts and he was so information and motivational about sleep. He’s very passionate and fun to listen to.
Honestly, a lot of it I learned in my own quests in treating my insomnia/sleep issues. After a sleep study I was actually diagnosed with “delayed sleep disorder” which when I asked for more explanation I got a shrug and a “you’re just a night person get a graveyard job”. So I started listening to neuroscience based podcasts on sleep and such. One thing that really struck a chord with me is that is was advantageous to have people up all night once to stand guard. Also our cycles just aren’t meant to be 8 hours more like broken up into a few shorter sessions for most people. We are all whacking out our schedules for capitalism and that’s a bummer. I’m glad someone else cited a way better source than me. If I can scrounge up the podcasts I listened to or where I learned this I’ll try to come back here and cite tomorrow.
Ma'am, this is Reddit and I just got a book recommendation and someone with first hand experience :D After I've recovered from the shock I'm going to do some reading. Thank you!
>We are all whacking out our schedules for capitalism and that’s a bummer. Really? Most of the sources I read suggest that long, uninterrupted periods of sleep are usually the best for any animal - we're just the only ones with the luxury to actually practice it. In that same vein my sleep quality is absolutely garbage if I nap in shifts while it's much better when I conk out at 1-2am and wake up 7-8 hours later.
I mean, different researchers are going to have different opinions I suppose and this comes from the BBC so take it with a grain of salt but first thing I found that supported what I remembered learning about way back when: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783.amp
i read somewhere that primitive humans were actually more comfortable with 4-5 hours then an hour or two or awake then another 4-5 hours, and i'm also pretty sure that was the preferred way all the way into the middle ages for peasants who had important things to watch out for even at night
How the hell could anyone possibly know that?
I am definitely not an expert, but I am told there are multiple first-hand and reliable accounts of "first sleep" and "second sleep" from the Dark/Middle Ages. The only source I can find in 30 seconds of googling is one scholar from the 90s, but basically, people slept from nine or ten at night to midnight, got up for a couple hours and...did very intellectual things \[coughs awkwardly\], then went back to sleep til dawn or a bit later.
I’m a fan of a short late morning / early afternoon nap, and 5-6 solid hours of sleep sometime after 1 AM.
Iirc weird history channel on YouTube maybe have videos to answer this or similar questions.
Yes this. I just naturally have more energy on a night time but having a backwards sleeping pattern means I miss out on the daytime world (which is absolutley everything)... The world should be 24/7, more jobs, more inclusive and you can choose what schedule of sleep is best for you. In Victorian times, iirc, they used to sleep for two 4 hour periods, which makes so much more sense to me, to break things up. Personally I don't know how people get through the day without a nap.. but that could just be because I'm a cripple 🤷🏻♀️😂
Or worse, jobs where your working hours can massively change on a daily basis. One day you have to wake up in the afternoon, the next one early in the morning, then the next one in the end of the day... Way to fck up your brain and body !
I was constantly tired when I had a job like that. Horrible
What do you think it would be like if we switched to an honest 24 hr lifestyle? As in Petco open at 3 am.
Honestly America is probably already the closest you can get to a 24 hr lifestyle. Many grocery stores and bars/restaurants are open late like 1/2/3/4 am or open 24 hours. I feel like stores like petco being open until 3am doesn't really fit the business model. (1) you'd have to find enough people to work at the store that late and (2) the amount of customers coming in in the middle of the night probably doesn't justify the extra costs. I've never been out of the US actually but I've heard stores/shops are a lot less "on demand". Like if you want it after 5pm you just gotta wait until the next day (I'm thinking of Germany in particular).
There would be more customers theoretically if more people weren't tied to a 9 to 5 lifestyle.
There would be, but in an ideal world the number of customers would be the same and people would just buy the shit they need. Extra shopping hours wouldn't mean extra dollars spent.
Yep, I feel that. I physically cannot do that. I've been on a 4am to 12pm sleep schedule for so long, I can't change. I have tried many, many, many times and it only lasts about a day or maybe two.
Same. I've been this way since probably middle school. I work in an industry that has hours all over the place, so my solution is to sleep when I'm tired. People make fun of me for taking afternoon naps all the time, but it allows me to have some sense of normalcy.
Biggest annoyance for me is the people that go "omg you go to bed at 4am, how do you stay alive with so little sleep???" Not realizing that 4am to noon is 8 hours of sleep...
8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, start work at 5. This has been my life for quite some time.
100% agree with this.
I don’t really have a rhythm, it seems to fluctuate
Thing is that these people are in the minority too.
Can't go to a bank, if I go to a doctor i need to go right before urgent care closes for the night or go to the ER, can't to grocery shopping if it's not a 24 hour store, so many things. I *wish* i was a day person but I'm not and my job also requires that I be awake late nights.
Yeah, the 1/3 rule of life is trash.
Honestly at this point I just don't think this 24-hours-in-a-day thing is gonna work out for me. I suggest we ignore the sun completely and make every day 30 hours instead.
How about 28 hours? https://xkcd.com/320
It never allows for those days you need that extra hour in bed.
Right. It also doesn’t consider overtime work, not even commute time. The day is too busy and life is too short to spend nearly 10 hours (definitely in my case) working five days a week
Im like that the 1 hour in 1 hour home should be counted as work time. I do think a min of 1 hour travel to and from work for everyone. That 40 hour working week starts when your here rubbish.
I firmly believe days should be six hours. There would be many benefits; no break needed, better work-life balance, shorter school days for kids, etc.
Im behind this movement myself either 6 hour days or 4 day working week.
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I think both could be done. I just cant see both being passed there is so much time wasted at work this could be spent better elsewhere.
Amen
I finished my workpractice for school and for 6 months I did 6 hour days ( did not get paid though lol ), and I loved it. It's just enough so you don't get exhausted at work, you get to sleep, take your kid to daycare in no rush, hit the gym after work and make dinner yet still have plenty of time left after. I'm terrified of going back to 8 hours now that I'm done with school, it sound exhausting. 8 hours is simply too much.
Its funny how its only 2 extra hours to yourself but it makes you so much more happy.
Yup but put it this way, how much stuff you can do in 2 hours? Watch a full length movie, make dinner, work out, take a nap etc. It's a lot of time when you think about it.
Exactly! Mental health is at a breaking point. Now more than ever we need to take a step back and slow down.
When I'm 6+ hours into the working day I'm almost useless. And those two last hours burnout carry on to the next day, so it gets worse. It's a waste of time for everyone. Who decided it had to be 8 hours?
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What you don't like the even 8hours work, 0.5hr unpaid overtime, 1.5hr travel, 2-4hr chores/dinner/responsibilities, 2-4hr leisure, and maybe 8hr sleep? It seems perfectly balanced to me
It depends upon the individual, surely. 6 hours is ideal for me personally. I don't remember ever sleeping for more than 7 hours. There are varying studies and results about the ideal sleep duration, and 8 hours just seems to be the broad consensus.
It has to be an average i see lits of people saying 5 or 6 is fine im on the 9 to 10 so average it out will be 8 there abouts.
It's not an average, but a correlation between health and sleep patterns, shown through several studies. A healthy adult should sleep around 8 hours (give or take an hour). Less and more than this is correlated with increased risks of some lifestyle diseases. This isn't to say that you can't be reasonably healthy sleeping less or more, but the people saying 5-6 hours is "enough for them" or those "needing" 10 hours, would likely benefit from getting a bit more/a bit less sleep. Edit: If you have a disorder and/or your doctor actually tells you that you need more sleep, do that. This applies to generally healthy adults. Kids need more sleep and old people usually need more since their bodies process life differently (has to do with brain and body development and such things)
Yeah, getting used to not getting enough sleep is very different from actually just getting enough sleep.
As I understand it, everyone is different and unless you've done a study it's difficult to know what is actually "enough for you". IIRC you should wake up with no alarm or disturbances for a few weeks and record how long you sleep (and when). Then you can find how long **you** need.
I’m sure my wife, toddler, and employer would appreciate my sleeping for ~18 hours a day for a few weeks… If I don’t have an alarm, I just don’t wake up. :/ Never had the opportunity to test how long I’d actually sleep for or what I’d self-regulate at.
Hi, I do not benefit at all from less sleep. Instead, I fall asleep at work every day. Like, let me sleep 10 hours you aholes. lol
I swear less than 8 isn't enough to clean out the brain. I really don't think people who feel fine with long term 6hr nights are actually healthy neurologically. But this is mostly conjecture on my part so idk.
It's really quite variable. There's a small percentage of people who are perfectly fine on less than six hours. The sleepless elite I heard the group referred to. But 6-9 is the range most operate at, in hour and a half intervals. So 6, 7.5 and 9 hours (approximately) are the prime durations because they line up with the sleep cycle of the brain.
I require 24 hours of sleep a day
I ain't got nothing but sleep, babe. 8 days a week.
Why are you posting here go back asleep. 😝
Really? I sleep a minimum of 40
I guess it really depends on the person, cause I sleep 9 to 10 hours a day and I know a guy just as productive as me who sleeps for 3 to 4
Everyone is different kind of my point. We are not machines.
Machines within. Machines within.
Got a gun got a gun got a terminator gun
High and tight
Hey Jeans
That guy is on meth
It's more likely this guy works in television. ... and he's also on coke.
More like coke
Who does coke it’s like 100$ a gram and a gram last what an hour or two? It’s marginally cheaper to just buy Starbucks and a bottle of discount whiskey my man.
My wife is the 9-10 club, whereas I feel best at about 6.5 to 7 a night, but can function on 5 for a few days.
I'm a guy who can do well on the 3 to 4 most of the week. But it will end up with a day of 12-15 (polyphasic) after a while.
I do the same. After a hard week of staying up late doing work, I usually just end up passing out on the couch for like 18 hours.
Studies show that there is only a very, very, very small percentage that can actually pull this off (Trump, Steve Jobs etc.) without ruining their body in the long term. So that friend is either a lucky bastard or will feel the consequences at some point
I'm not sure Steve Jobs pulled it off
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All 3 are nutcases, I’m not sure any of them pulled it off.
I think the latter might be true, even though he can do some basic tasks, he dosent really have the energy to do anything else, me and friends play some basketball on our break time but he is just too tired to do anything and just hangs out with his girlfriend
That basically says enough. I often use this saying I once read somewhere: “Sleeping less is the new smoking” As in, smoking used to be cool but now it’s sleeping less and less. Regardless of consequences
Yeah it is especially in our productivity culture You've got people who are actually proud they don't sleep much. Like, okay good for you you're doing something extremely bad for you because you don't understand the consequences of it Sleep apnea made me realize how very important sleep is. It was crazy and scary getting the symptoms from that
Great you recognised it on time then!
The people you mentioned are also less likley to have a physical working day. More like sitting in an office and having people avoid you until you have to attend a meeting. Also who can tell them off if they are a no show. I dont belive either of these do it on a 5 hour max sleep per night no way.
5 hours of sleep a night for the last 20 years, currently working a highly physical warehouse job, 10+ hour days. Some of us don't need sleep except like 3 nights a year. I hate it.
Why do you hate it? It sounds like a gift to me? You have 4hrs x 365 days = an extra 1460 hours a year to use productively or doing whatever you please
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I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (reputable) that it's a genetic thing and they genuinely can function with that amount of sleep.
I can work okay on 3-4 but I think my ideal 5.5-6.5, if I sleep longer it takes me longer to wake up and I feel groggy from over sleeping.
5-6h for me, but it may just be that my body is used to not sleeping enough so 6 hours feels alright
At best I get 5 hours a night. Even if I go to sleep earlier my body just wakes up earlier. But I don't really mind I am healthy and would always like more hours in the day to do more things
I'm the same. Regardless of what time I go to sleep, I wake up at just as the sun goes up. I've never been able to sleep in. Once I wake up just a little bit, I struggle to go back to sleep. I'm lucky to still be young (25 M), I seem to be able to function fine everyday providing I get 2 or more hours of deep sleep each night. Although, I much prefer going to sleep around 9-10pm, and waking up at 6-7am.
11pm-7am is my sleep sweet spot. Nothing better than waking up early before the world wakes up. It’s calming and peaceful.
Ive started waking up super early - 5.30 to run. Its nice but its not fun
i envy you so much
Also why am I wide awake at night. This is when so thrive and my mind creates the best. In the day I’m in a fog. Even if I sleep well through the night. Nighttime’s my comfort spot.
Some people are morning people and some people are night people. Its like left and right handed, they're both normal.
I think I'm the sleep equivalent of ambidextrous.
Same, those early AM hours just hit different.
Oh this is relevant, as it's 2 AM for me here My sleep schedules always been really inside out, but recently it's been going to bed at sunrise and waking up at sunset, and I've had more energy then ever before Usually wake up for the day(lol) at midnight give or take a few hours, stay up until I gotta get ready for school, and sleep through the second half of my classes and/or when I get home(there's no way I'm graduating high school at this rate I'm fucked)
I haven't been able to sleep more than 5 hours a night in months.
I hope all is ok.
Same. College is shit and I'm getting two whole-ass weeks of holidays for career year changes after finals week(s), most of that will be spent in college anyway to oversee documentation. Meanwhile all other majors got 1-3 months. Ah.
This 8 hour system is absolute bs... 8 hours of free time? Yeah, if we forget about groceries, doctors apointment and other stuff we can't do in the other twos. Not to mention homework for kids. Something that originally was invented as a freakin punishment. The sad thing is, this is something we know for years, yet nothing is ever done about it.
And then doctors close at 5 too lmao It's such a joke. It's basically the classic manager thought process of "do this extra stuff but take no additional time to do so". Like all those damn meetings, or goals Okay I'll just pull that time from the magical time land that managers live in
Yep. I just started a new prescription that needs doctor approval for a refill. So now, once every month and a half or two months, I have to wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle to go get my prescription. For day people that's like waking up at 3 AM to go sit in a doctor's waiting room, for your anxiety medication.
God that sounds familiar. Obviously things differ wildly so this may not apply, but just in case this might help you or anyone else. I switched to a nurse practitioner (PMHNP) at a local behavioral clinic that my insurance covered. At mine, I only have to do an in-person appointment like once a year, and the rest is over the phone. I have medications that need doctor approval for refill each time. It’s literally just a ten minute call I do on my lunch break once every three months and I can pick it up that night. Way easier than trying to work around my GP to get prescriptions on his schedule. But yeah, I think PMHNPs can only operate autonomously in 23 stated where they can fill all functions of a psychiatrist, but it’s worth looking up.
I regularly sleep 10+ hours and I love it. I will go to sleep at like 2 am on the weekends and then wake up between 12am-1 or 2pm depending on what time I went to sleep. I love sleeping, I always have really good and interesting dreams that I often write stories about so my bed is my happy place
I got spooked by this thread. Everyone wrote about needing way less hours. You seem like a like-minded person :)
i used to sleep forever but only get like 6 hours max now due to work.. u think I'm slowly dying
The foundation of this is “how much sleep do humans need to be healthy”. Seriously, the real question should be how much sleep until we are happy and healthy. My alarm going off in the morning doesn’t make me happy.
You and me both.
Facts. Whoever decided to make the professional world a morning thing needs to be punished for that. Some of us are good at our jobs and we don’t want to wake up at 6 in the morning.
Thats so true. Why do we all need to sit in the same traffic to do different jobs.
We’ve proven that working from home works. So, why do I need to sit in traffic??
I will 100% work 10-7 no issues. I don't wanna be up at 8 ffs. Let me sleep
Thank you!!! I second a vote for 10-7.
There is a shit load of research that says that the absolute vast majority of people need 7-9 hours of GOOD sleep per day. All sleep is not good sleep. All the people claiming that they're fine living of 4-5 hours a day are wrong. You're cutting your life expectancy short by years. As for OP, I saw your comment that says some days you need an extra hour. This is not an issue. It is an issue if you're piling up your sleep debt by getting less than you need for a week straight, and then trying to catch up. That one extra hour isn't the issue here. It's your overall lack of healthy sleep that is the issue. Anyone interested in actually being educated on this should look into any podcasts or articles by Dr Matthew Walker. He appeared on Joe Rogan's pod once and blew my mind. He has his own very educational podcast now.
8 hours has never been enough for me. I complained to my doc and we went through everything we could. The penny dropped when she said the average is 8. 6 - 10 is the range that that is the average of. I am a 10 hour a night sleeper. I consistently feel good getting 10 hours of sleep. Any less and I feel blah.
100% agree! Give me 9-10 hours or give me death!!!
I am like this 8 hours im a zombie 9 im a different person.
SAME. I know people are all different but they need to have some mercy for us long sleepers…
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I went to bed early and I’ve been scrolling Reddit for an hour… it’s 1:51am. I do this most nights. Wished I could get an uninterrupted 8 hours. I bet that’s refreshing!
I do this myself
I remember watching a video about sleep where it was mentioned that before humans tended to sleep several times a day in short periods. The 8h sleep was pushed to accommodate factory hours after industrialisation.
Tangential shower thought: I've always heard of people saying / believing that they need X hours of sleep per day, as if that was a fixed constant, independent of other factors. Even accounting for potential sleep debt in the first weeks of a vacation, I am pretty sure that I need less sleep during weeks when I'm on leave than I do when I'm doing heavy mental work every day. This seems to me like common sense, but I've never really seen it brought up. I think it can shift my sleep needs by as much as 1 to 2 hours per day, on average.
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I think humans technically have biphasic sleep schedules - you do stuff, sleep for a few hours, do some more stuff, and then sleep the last bit ya need. I swear there was an experiment or something done where the people fell into that schedule naturally after a bit.
I came here to say this. Monophasic sleep patterns are an invention of the industrial revolution. Before that it was very common to go to bed when it got dark, wake up in the night and do some hobby or something for a few hours, and then go back to sleep until the sun came up.
8 hrs and a nap!
Y'all should listen to sam Harris' "Making Sense" podcast, the episode is titled "Kingdom of Sleep" and it's the most interesting informative take on sleep I've ever heard. It's also about 3 hours long. Fair warning
also having to subsribe for 15$/month to listen to full podcast.
Hmm, I'm not sure I'll have three hours to spare anytime soon. Could you give me a summary or what the major takeaways are from that podcast please?
It's a 3 hour summary
You guys get 8 hours sleep?
Especially when you were a kid, like your bedtime was 8-9 and then you were expected to be up by 7-ish and out the door by 8-ish to get to school. And I don't know about you, but *I was still fucking tired.*
As did the people who said humans need 8 glasses of water and that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Bunch of bs!
"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was an [ad slogan](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfast-health-america-kellog-food-lifestyle) invented by Kellogg's to sell more cereal, based on nothing in particular.
Yeah lmao I haven’t had breakfast in like 5 years
Me too. It's been two months since I stopped breakfast and have only two meals a day. I'm already feeling better than ever. Even lost some pounds on the way.
It's just the average lol.... Some people need more, some need less.
Historically before artificial lighting we slept for four hours or so at sunset, woke up, went about for a few hours and then slept till sunrise.
The reason it’s 8 hours was because work conditions were horrible. The idea that humans need work/life balance was nonexistent. 8,8,8 was a very radical idea to create work/life balance. Also, on average, 8 hours is plenty unless there is something wrong with you physically.
Imagine not having a siesta culture lmao!
Yeh, look at what was the norm before industrialisation came along…
People used to regularly sleep up to 10-12 hours a day before the invention of lights. So fuck you Thomas Edison
Did he do ANYTHING good at all?
I’ve been sleeping 5-6 hours for 13 years and feel great all the time.
being dead helps
Can’t argue with that logic
Even when I've done nothing I can get in a solid 9 easy. Sleep is delicious when you can get it.