I’ve been considering the topic of sleep deprivation studies lately and there’s one thing that bugs me…
Most of these studies are conducted this way: Take some sample of people with normal sleep patterns, let’s say 11 men approximately 20 years old. Measure and otherwise observe their metabolic rates, reaction times, general alertness, etc… Then cut their sleep back to, let’s say, 4 hours a night for one week, and repeat the observations. Not surprisingly, they observe a degradition in performance.
Now I look at this and say, well 4 hours a night is a bit extreme. This is a lot like pumping 100 times the equivalent dose of saccharin into lab rats and saying, “See! We have a problem!” It occurs to me that there may be a threshhold where there’s a rapid falloff in performance and maybe four hours is well past that threshhold.
It seems like a better experiment would be to control the number of hours before the deprivation starts and choose a more rational deprivation target. Essentially, limit your group to exactly 9 hours of sleep each night for three weeks, then measure the benchmark performce. Then cut the sleep back to 7 hours per night for three weeks and repeat. Then reverse the process. 7 hours a night for another three weeks (for a total of 6 weeks in a row with 7 hours per night). Measure performance. Ramp the sleep back up to 9 hours per night and recheck performance. I suspect that an experiment such as this would reveal that the effects of mild sleep deprivation (that most people experience in our modern culture) has little or no effect.
Furthermore, and on a more personal note… The studies need to look at people like myself who, by normal standards, have been depriving themselves of sleep for years. I typically average less than 6 hours of sleep per night. It’s been that way for me for about ten years or more. I don’t deprive myself of this sleep due to some over achiever lifestyle, I simply don’t seem to require more sleep than that. Usually if I try to go to sleep before my brain and body are ready, I’m restless and I just lie there. My sleep patterns are sometimes irregular. I’ve frequently (about twice a month) stay up all night. Usually, when this happens the next night I’ll probably sleep for about 8 or 9 hours. The key thing is that I rarely feel overly tired. I never suffer the symptoms commonly associated with sleep deprivation. I never fall asleep in meetings (no matter how boring and monotonous they are). I’m very quick witted and my reaction times are excellent (based on relative performance observations). I lead a very active lifestyle with lots of exercise. I almost never get sick.
I have managed to accumulate several weeks in a row of 8 or more hours of sleep per night on several occasions and it is after this that I begin to experience deteriation in performance. In other words, too much sleep seems to affect me the way not enough sleep affects other (normal) people. I assume this is because, in these situations, my sleep is not that restful.
My point is that I feel very certain that if I (and others like me - I know of a few) were a part of these sleep studies, the results would be neutral or give the reverse conclusion.
The reason that I’ve been thinking about this lately is that my wife wants me to go see a sleep doctor. She’s concerned, based on the sleep deprivation study reports, that I may be killing myself. I’m not convinced that I’ve actually got a problem that needs fixing…