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by Aurornis 566 days ago
> When I was younger, I was fascinated by various optimized sleep schedules.

I was also fascinated with alternate sleep schedules when I was younger. Some of the books and biohackers of the time made them sound like magical ways to get more hours out of the day.

Then every single experience report I found that was not coming from someone trying to sell me a book or get me to subscribe to their newsletter, YouTube, or other social media was extremely negative. Nobody who tried these had continued them very long. After going back to regular sleep schedules they felt significantly better. A common report was that they didn’t realize how badly sleep deprived they were until they stopped the alternate sleep schedule and went back to normal sleep.

A lot of the sleep biohacking reports follow a similar trend: People who try alternate methods of minimizing sleep don’t realize the negative effects until they quit. This is also true for people who rely on stimulants (caffeine or stronger) which mask feelings of sleep deprivation but can’t actually reverse the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
1 comments
safety1st 566 days ago
Okay, but none of that is relevant to the article. This article is about a genetic condition called FNSS which results in you getting a full night's sleep in less time. It specifically addresses the concern that there might be unobserved negative effects and that so far, we haven't found any. If you have FNSS there is no reason to try and force yourself to sleep for 8 hours a night and it is not something being sold on YouTube.
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theptip 566 days ago
You’re missing the point being made in this thread, which is that there might be subtle long-term impairments to the genetic condition described in the OP.

Indeed the article discusses this thoroughly, noting that since it’s a very small sample you can’t rule out anything but very strongly negative fitness impact.

There’s simply not enough data to rule out the hypothesis that folks with this condition are slightly sleep-deprived vs their theoretical without-mutation genotype baseline.

link