Alexey Guzey

I find many people in my life seem very precious about their sleep, in a way that I am not.

I also can sometimes endure a day that I detect fatigue in myself. I don't necessarily love it, but I'll note it easy to go to sleep early the second day if I am tired the day before, and if something happens that causes my sleep to feel shorter than i'd like, I don't really worry about it at all.

Same reason I don't really concern myself if I detect notes of hunger in my system. Meh. Sometimes I've fasted a long time, usually I don't fast at all, but I really don't concern myself with "oh my gosh i have not eaten in {recent hours} I am STARVING" energy.

Anyway, I suggest this article to most people I find myself discussing sleep with, and enough people have said it was worth their time to read it, so I continue to share it:

[1] Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

The animal-ish part of a human existence is always interesting to me. Elsewhere in the comments I've seen sorta uncomfortable references to pressuring someone for sexual intimacy before bedtime based on this paper. Meh. Something that IS really nice before sleep is emotionally connected sexual intimacy, and I hope no one would want emotionally _dis_connected sexual intimacy from/for a partner, and I, personally, would make some big steps back if I thought a partner wanted something like... disattuned sex out of me.

This last paragraph…

This book has serious issues. https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ The only mention of daylight savings time in Why We Sleep is:

> In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after.

I don't see a specific study cited, but my ebook copy doesn't seem to have all the footnotes.

I pulled up the article you linked on sci-hub: https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18971502/ The only use of the number "24" refers to hours in the day, and its summary doesn't seem to match your claim:

> The incidence of acute myocardial infarction was significantly increased for the first 3 week-days after the transition to daylight saving time in the spring (Fig. 1A). The incidence ratio for the first week after the spring shift, calculated as the incidence for all 7 days divided by the mean of the weekly incidences 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after, was 1.051 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.032 to 1.071). In contrast, after the transition out of daylight saving time in the autumn, only the first…

I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0]

I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

From a previous post:

I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state

Particularly this section:

> “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...”

I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption.

I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me.

It doesn’t…

A major technique mentioned by the author is omitted from the article’s headline: co-working. She writes about benefitting greatly from logging on to a muted Zoom room with hundreds of other people to work at a set time. It’s interesting how this is effective for some people; for another anecdote, blogger Alexey Guzey wrote about a similar system [0] with a smaller group.

Psychiatrist Dr. David Burns writes at length about more techniques on addressing procrastination (called “do-nothingism”). He has a chapter on the subject in his book “Feeling Good,” and he wrote a similar passage online in an article for his podcast [1]. The methods he writes about that work best for me have been breaking down tasks into sequence of simple steps. This helps greatly for straightforward tasks, though it is less effective for difficult tasks that involve uncertainty and learning. These harder tasks require persistence and preferably time.

Separately, a personal technique I use is to really sell myself on the value of completing a task. The phrase, “discipline matters more than getting motivated” is thrown around a lot on the web, and though it has merit, I find motivation crucial to sustaining projects in the long-term (and also figuring out when it’s worthwhile to exit from a method or approach).

[0] https://guzey.com/co-working/

[1] https://feelinggood.com/2017/09/18/053-ask-david-i-dont-feel-like-doing-it-quick-cure-for-procrastinators/

+1 to this. Huberman has the bad habit of constructing grand narratives that match his beliefs about health and reality, and packaging them as podcast episodes based on science. The only problem is that "based on science" might mean a single low-powered study, which Huberman cites and over-generalizes as if it was rock-solid fact. See this[0] discussion on Huberman's subreddit for more context.

Another example is his episode with Matthew Walker (author of Why We Sleep), and his other episodes where he gives sleep advice citing Walker as an authority. The problem is that Walker's work is not good[1][2] (riddled with errors at best, fraudulent at worst).

To be clear: I'm sure a lot (if not the majority) of what Huberman says is correct, or at least matches our current scientific understanding. The problem is that some things are incorrect, and the layman has no way of knowing which is which (especially since all the content is presented with the same high-certainty "science-based tools" tone)

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/andrewhuberman/comments/smnnb0/criticism_of_andrew_huberman/

[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

> "Why we sleep" is, according to independent research, almost complete bullshit:

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

> https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Complete? I wouldn't say so - as others have noted, there's a few issues that the author of that blog post has with some small assertions made by Matthew Walker.

Whether that throws everything in the book into question is an interesting question, but if the whole book was 'complete bullshit' then I'd expect a more comprehensive debunking than that blog post.

As to the links you've cited there -- 1 and 3 are the same link (well, HN comments in (1) point to the actual story at (3).

The second link seems to agree with -- and be full of exactly the same myth debunking & recommendations that -- Matthew Walker makes. As it happens I'm about 80% the way through the book now.