[axolotlgod]

Personally, I put very little stock in NYT health reporting articles. I am a public health researcher, and I have seen numerous NYT articles that just get fundamentals wrong. Though my field is not sleep studies, I can tell the conclusion of this article is essentially animal models[0] and longitudinal surveys[1] provide enough evidence to support hypothesis-driven studies in the future. But that's about it.

Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.

I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.

[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics

[1]: which suffer from different biases, like recall bias (https://catalogofbias.org/biases/recall-bias/)

[rramadass]

I know you mean well but we must be careful that we do not "throw out the baby with the bathwater".

The "great unwashed public" is incapable of understanding Scientific Nuances. Hence it is better in the interests of Public Health and Safety to project a simplistic and alarmist message when needed to get them to fall in line. It has always been this way in any matter of importance. This is actually much more important with those complex multifaceted subjects like Sleep, Fasting, General Health etc. It is made worse by the fact that the negative effects of these are imperceptibly slow, gradual but accumulate toward a unknown point when the "sudden collapse" happens.

This is why the jobs of Scientists/Researchers like yourself is so critical and crucial to the "Policy Makers". Your Scientific Knowledge drives your Belief which you distill and simplify to convince the "unwashed policy maker" who can then put out a decree for the betterment of the "unwashed masses".

[makeitdouble]

I get your point, but how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?

I'd imagine newborn parents would fall into that category for instance, and I never met anyone who just thought not sleeping isn't a big deal and it will all be fine.

[hattmall]

Pretty much everyone in professional services for major corporations fits this bill. Working for the big 4 and getting 5 hours of sleep is pretty much impossible. Adderall is essentially a requirement for everyone. Cocaine and Xanax for the more adventurous. That's not even getting into the actual finance companies and investment banks etc.

Same for emergency services in any major city or manufacturing facility. 24 on 48 off pretty much guarantees an all-nighter every 3 days. Then you can't really go to sleep when you get off at 7AM the next morning, because you need to get a good nights sleep on the second night because your next shift starts at 7AM.

I don't know how that works for your brain, but after the first couple months you just seem to adapt and your not tired all the time like you were in the beginning.

[rramadass]

>how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?

That is precisely the point. The insidiousness of Sleep Deprivation is well known. Sleep has multiple stages and some of them (eg. REM) are more important then others; thus it is the Quality of Sleep rather than the Quantity which actually matters (this is the main reason people sleep over a spectrum of hours rather than any fixed point; the body decides the amount of "restorative sleep" needed and 8 hours is just a heuristic average). Ever since all sorts of "Visual Display Terminals(VDTs)" like TVs, Computer terminals, Electronic/Neon billboards, Smartphones, Tablets etc. became commonplace Sleep Quality has suffered drastically (there is a direct correlation between VDT exposure and Sleep Quality). Almost all IT workers (in particular; Programmers) are sleep deprived. With the explosion of Smartphone/Tablet ownership Sleep Deprivation has become commonplace. I am beginning to see young children as young as 10 years have dark circles under their eyes!

Our Society and Economic Systems needs to be changed to accommodate our current Scientific knowledge about our Mind/Body w.r.t. Sleep/Exercise. The Human organism is highly adaptable and resilient but only upto a point.

[rramadass]

My above post seems to accumulating downvotes presumably because of the use of the phrase "unwashed public/masses"; don't people get a "pawky sense of humour" anymore? See also https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/irony-sa...