If there is one genetic quirk that I am extremely envious of, it's definitely this one. From the article:
> But natural short sleepers actually seem to benefit from this quirk of their biology. Fu says researchers have found that short sleepers tend to be more optimistic, more energetic and better multitaskers. They also have a higher pain threshold, don’t suffer from jet lag and some researchers believe they may even live longer.
I'm the opposite, I guess I'd be categorized as a "long sleeper" - the "natural" length of my sleep is ~9 hours. I feel pretty chronically lethargic, and if I go under 8 hours for multiple nights in a row I feel completely awful and often end up getting sick.
A recent podcast episode I watched had a doctor who said something that stuck with me: "when it comes to sleep, it's about the quality, not the quantity". A small amount of high-quality sleep gives you more actual rest than a large amount of lesser-quality sleep, they said.
Not sure how true it is, but it seems to line up with my life. I'm also a long sleeper who's still often lethargic during the day. But I find that some (legal) inhibitory substances can bring me into what feels like a much more restful sleep, and I wake up feeling very refreshed and energetic for the whole day. My eyelids feel less heavy, I feel like a fog is lifted, and I just feel better in every way.
I suspect my average sleep quality just isn't very good.
Melatonin, benzos induce sleep but do not improve sleep quality for me.
Less stress, feeling content + antihistamines or alpha blockers (especially trazodone which has both) do induce much longer deep sleep and feeling refreshed and indeed total sleep duration has nothing to do with sleep quality.
Unfortunately, I believe antihistamines and alpha blockers are both associated with long-term negative health effects if used frequently. Very likely not as bad as daily benzo use, and melatonin is probably safest, but I believe it's not healthy to take any of those four on a regular basis.
It's tough to get a free lunch in the sleep department.
I know about the anti-colinergic scale and that first generation antihistamines are bad, but I use third generation antihistamines(levoceterizine), and I use sporadically.
But alpha blockers? I mean I don't use those anymore because trazobone and clonodine is antihipertensive and I don't want to mess with that, but I had no idea alpha blockers were bad for the brain.
I'm actually not sure about alpha blockers. I don't know if they're necessarily associated with long-term brain issues like anti-cholinergics are. According to Google, some alpha blockers may be associated with other long-term issues, though.
Weirdly, I tried ear plugs for sleeping a while back and I woke up feeling like a new person. It was amazing. Only stopped when I had kids. For anyone else reading maybe try earplugs.
Phenibut gives me terrible acidic dihareea and euphoria some 8 hours after taking it, I call it MDMA light.
Effects come 4 hours after taking it so anyone taking it for sleep needs to take the therapeutic dosage -- 150-300mg and not the 900mg recreational dosage and needs to take it a looong time before bed.
I think it's past the research chemical stage, but, yes, it's somewhat similar to benzodiazepines and I strongly recommend people not take it or any other GABAergic often. I'd very strongly recommend people not try to take phenibut to improve sleep.
This is why I was merely giving an anecdote of what it feels like when I'm very well-rested rather than suggesting a solution, and why I didn't want to name the substance in my anecdote. I'm still struggling with sleep quality. If I could just take a lot of phenibut all the time, I wouldn't have an issue, but I know I really shouldn't take it often, so I don't. (In part because I know I'd have an issue again once tolerance builds, in addition to some new issues.)
(Personally, weed makes it much, much harder for me to sleep.)
Perhaps you're not giving 'weed' the credit it deserves.
[IMHO]I'm so sick of people who purposely down play the medical and therapeutic effects of cannabis. That's what it should be referred to, since in this country [US] 'weed' is a generic term that generally has been used to describe anything bad, unwanted or something not worth keeping.
Which is completely different when we talk about medical grade high THC cannabis[in the US].
Stop thinking 'weed' is the same as taking a manufactured pharmaceutical pill. It's not, I don't have to site any references or link any sites to know the difference. If you feel differently, perhaps you'd be better off googling the differences to discover what millions of people have known for hundreds if not thousands if years. CANNABIS is a healing plant, full stop.
We can debate all day long about what plant may be better for this or that, but you're never going to convince me that 'weed' is not as effective for pain as a manufactured pharmaceutical pill.
Take care of your life, do as you see fit, I think there is a right strain and dosage for everyone to enjoy the benefits of cannabis.
Not all pharmaceutical drugs are bad, true, not all alcohol is bad, but if you take enough of it, it'll kill you.
Wow. I asked because I was curious if you were referencing phenibut. It gives me godlike sleeps. Obviously probably bad to use daily etc though. But melatonin etc don't even compete.
If the gene sequence is short enough, this is probably the best gene to do a clinical trial on the human use of CRISPR-Cas9 because it’s one healthy people would be willing to risk their hide to splice in. It’s essentially as close as we can get to a real-world superpower.
Yeah man, definitely! Just imagine that you have 2 more hours than other people for EVERY DAY.
OK, I also figured out that sometimes those 2 extra hours are pretty useless if I couldn't figure out my goal in the world. But still a pretty good 2 hour :/
It's like adding 1-2 hours to the commute, only worse because you can't listen to anything during that time and you have to do it on weekends, the days you WFH and during vacations too.
Evolution happens through reproduction, which tends to happen earlier in life. So if some gene confers an advantage in early life but a disadvantage later on, it's likely the disadvantage won't stop it from spreading.
If it's not widespread, it's either not an advantage that "matters" or maybe it possibly has some negative interaction with other traits that matter for reproduction.
Humans have much longer lifespans than other animals, so it must be an advantage for our descendants to have us around. Presumably this is because of grandparents providing childcare.
That's not true - evolution is about the best genes for survivability and reproduction continuing to be passed along. The evolutionary perspective here wouldn't be that there are downsides to this, but rather that people with this mutation are better able to survive and reproduce, so we'd expect it to be passed onto more offspring over the generations.
Yes, this happens in the long run. In the short term, when a single gene has massive benefit, there must be some negative effect too, otherwise the entire population would quickly get that gene and that's not what we see here.
You are going to live long enough and be able to reproduce with about the same probability all other things equal whether you need 3 hours or 10 sleep nightly. There's very little evolutionary pressure even if you would massively and hugely prefer one of those over the other.
The kind of non-survival genetics that could be selected for in the modern world are those that make multiple women (nature can be pretty sexist) want to throw caution to the wind and have babies fathered by a man with some desirable attribute. I have no idea if this actually happens in reality with heritable genes. Eg do basketball players pass on a greater than average amount of their genetics (more children with more women) by virtue of being tall making them more sexually desirable to those who might become single mothers? Plausible, I guess, but could easily be utterly false. I don't know how you'd test it even in the absence of ethical concerns.
Maybe the downside is that someone who sleeps less will also tend to wander during the night, which increased the risk of dying before the modern world.
I think that's down to risk management skills of an individual. It could also be the case that sleeping less means you're more aware of external threats and ambushes and you can be more productive.
> Using a technique known as optogenetics, in which cells are modified so they can be activated by light, the researchers focused light on neurons in the pons to stimulate those in which ADRB1 was expressed.
I feel like there's a Manchuria Candidate story waiting to written about this.
It is cool, but having fiber optics poking out of your head is pretty conspicuous.
Chemogenetics (RASSLs/DREADDs)[0] and magnetogenetics[1] allow for more subtle activation. The interesting magnetogenetics results from the mid 2010s were not well-reproduced in the late 2010s, but the physical principle seems sound to me. I'm still hopeful that the technique will see successful application in mammals. Being able to turn the effect off quickly by stopping the external stimulation (vs. having to wait for drug metabolism/excretion in the case of chemogenetics) seems very useful.
Edit: the magnetoreceptors I read about in 2018 were naturally occurring in some turbid-water-dwelling fish. If they don't work well outside the chemical environment of the fish brain, it may be a while before a suitable alternative receptor can be discovered/engineered and used effectively in mammals.
Skepticism about the utility of magnetogenetics is definitely warranted, given how much RF pollution there is in our environment. If your patients have to live the rest of their lives in a shielded room (or wearing a helmet) to prevent unintentional stimulation, then it's not a very good therapy. It could still be useful for preclinical research where you have more control over your subjects' environment, though.
I manage about 6 hours on average. Sometimes 3-4, sometimes but not often, even 7. Been like that for as long as I can remember.
If there's an advantage to this, it's yet to manifest itself in a way that I can recognize. Plus, it's boring because days aren't 28 hours long despite my needs. I would totally opt to need 8 hours if that would help me retain health and good looks.
Focusing on something often drags me down to 3-4 hours for up to 15 days or so. It's exhausting though and I bounce back to my medium after a good 6.5-7 hour sleep.
Looks like I might have this particular gene, Although I can sleep longer most nights I can make do with just 5-6 hours and find it enough to function (I do drink a cup of coffee every morning but an hour or so after waking up so I dont mess with my natural ability to wake myself up), my wife would always be envious how I am able recharge my batteries with shorter sleep spans. Would be interesting to confirm this if 23andme has a new custom report to test this for me.
This must be difficult to determine. I can get by great on 4 - 6 hours of sleep and wake up without an alarm. During the day, I'll have a bit of a post-lunch slump at the office, but I don't seem to get it at home. If I take a step back from work and friends (shared routines) then I settle into an 8 hour sleep schedule. I feel the longer sleep schedule is better for me, but I can do either. I wonder how many other people are in the same situation?
Now it would be interesting to see if both type of short sleeper from both gene similarly don't suffer any health effects and have the same health benefits, or if it's only one of them.
The way this gene effect was described, it doesn't make sense why they'd see no negative side effect, since it promotes "waking up". The other gene felt more like it allowed the brain to sleep more efficiently and require less sleep.
I'm interested in "how much less sleep" and two copies of the gene as compared to one.
Wonder what you would get if you were homozygous for both short sleep genes. Both of them seem to shave off about two hours, but my guess is that they wouldn't perfectly "stack" and you'd end up needing five hours.
People drop $60 on video games, $50 on going to a movie, $100 on lottery tickets, $500 on cigarettes, and $2000 on first-class flights every day, and most of these are no big deal, just a person spending their money on entertainment in their own life.
If they want to spend $60 out of mild curiosity on a genetic test, I don't understand why it merits some kind of particular scorn.
It’s the first thing I thought of when I read the headline. Capitalism has turned me into cynical asshole. How people spend their money is no concern of mine.
I think you've turned yourself into a cynical asshole - perhaps by posting too much. The key is to not believe Twitter, which is full of people who have never left the US blaming things on "capitalism", even when those things don't happen in other capitalist countries (eg France) or do in other not-capitalist ones (eg Vietnam).
As for the genetic tests, most of them update with new results after the first $60.
It already is. All humans have nearly identical DNA, and if anyone wants yours in particular, there is no way to stop them from getting it. Just takes a few hair strands.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
So, it puts me at risk to participate like that even under a pseudonym. But, if you really think people like me are why HN isn't what it used to be then I'll step aside. I wish this place had the community it used to have, too.
Personally, I do not read usernames and have never had the experience on H.N. of recognizing a username as I have on some other fora that have signatures, avatars, profile pages, and other such facilities to create an identity.
The culture of H.N. also favors giving technical, impersonal comments, which consequently leave out even more of a personal identity.
I have really never felt on H.N. that I was responded to in a way that connected me to anything I said prior; no one brought such a thing up.
For another point of reference, I do. Reading comments, I also see people refer to and recognize community members such as 'tptacek, 'rayiner, 'dragonwriter, 'DoreenMichele, and many others. For what it's worth, I also recognize your username. Given the number of people on HN, I'm sure there are others that really don't pay much attention, but I know for a fact that there are also those that do.
The reason I wondered was because I never had anyone reference anything I said prior to me, whereas I've had this happen on 4chan to me, a forum sans usernames because someone recognized my writing style or opinions.
I probably know where 50-100 hn posters work without even having to think about it hard. People have been posting here for a decade and do recognize each other.
> But natural short sleepers actually seem to benefit from this quirk of their biology. Fu says researchers have found that short sleepers tend to be more optimistic, more energetic and better multitaskers. They also have a higher pain threshold, don’t suffer from jet lag and some researchers believe they may even live longer.
I'm the opposite, I guess I'd be categorized as a "long sleeper" - the "natural" length of my sleep is ~9 hours. I feel pretty chronically lethargic, and if I go under 8 hours for multiple nights in a row I feel completely awful and often end up getting sick.