
Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death - sjcsjc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46223386
======
vichu
This seems intuitively incorrect especially if insomnia is linked "with
illnesses such as dementia and depression". If they are controlling for these
"confounding factors", it's highly possible that they're just eliminating the
side effects of insomnia that result in an early death. It would be intuitive
that someone that suffers from insomnia but suffers none of the major side
effects probably wouldn't have a higher mortality rate. If they remove these
controls, the results might look very different. If anyone can find the full
text of the study, it'd be nice to look at.

This also flies in the face of things like Fatal Familial Insomnia and
Sporadic Fatal Insomnia where patients soon die after suffering though months
and months of insomnia[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia)

~~~
marmaduke
The abstract doesn’t say anything really, only that a meta analysis of
existing studies reject null hypotheses that insomnia is linked to death. This
isn’t really that useful, and digging deeper requires looking into the details
of the studies. When all those results are pooled together, it only takes one
bad study to skew the meta analysis.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S108707921...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079218300741)

~~~
AlexCoventry
I think the null hypothesis is that insomnia is uncorrelated with mortality,
and the meta analysis failed to reject it.

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vinceguidry
Several times in my twenties I've found myself pretty depressed with no
seeming way out. Generally I'd find myself with insomnia that I'd try to
fight, thinking more sleep would help me break it.

At one point I stopped trying to fight the insomnia, instead just trying to
stay up as long as possible. I didn't have a job at the time.

After a few days of practically no sleep but all conscious activity, I'd be
playing video games or reading or whatever, I fell into a deep sleep for like
12-14 hours, and when I woke up, I felt refreshed like I'd never felt before,
and my depression, well it was gone.

I believe that, just as sleep clears out some brain cruft, not sleeping can
perform an inverse service that's almost as vital. The focus on "getting
enough sleep" as some kind of religious mantra is keeping us from doing that.

~~~
DenisM
Sleep deprivation has a well-established anti-depressant effect. Sadly it does
not last, the emotional state soon returns to the baseline. The temporary
reprieve could push you over the edge though, if you were close to it.

~~~
Retric
The risk is people are more likely to commit suicide when they are mildly
depressed than severely depressed. In a deep depression you lack the
motivation to commit suicide.

~~~
DenisM
That's true, but not specific to sleep deprivation - other methods of easing
depression such as SSRI also increase the likelihood of self-harm. I would
imagine sports can have similar effect.

My pet theory is that there are several conditions that look like
"depression", one of them is produced by the body to prevent self-harm
resulting from acute anxiety. This theory has two important consequences:

1) Trying to ease certain kinds of depression via medication or other direct-
action tools is likely to cause unintended side-effects (self-harm, anxiety,
mania) that the depression was there to prevent.

2) The body will fight back against any direct intervention, trying to
reinstate control over unbalanced psyche, e.g. building up tolerance to
medication. A more fruitful approach would be to locate and eviscerate the
underlying anxiety-inducing problem; the depression should then lift on its
own accord.

Like I said, it's just a pet theory, but it leads itself to validation.

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abalone
Don’t get too excited.

 _> But while the new report may lift concerns about an early death, it still
links insomnia with illnesses such as dementia and depression, reports The
Times._

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Apocryphon
I wonder how this gels with Matthew Walker’s book, which has received tons of
hype this year.

~~~
asianthrowaway
Haha I actually bought that book after hearing about it in a HN thread.

~~~
winrid
Oh gosh, so did I.

~~~
dorchadas
I went and got it from the library. It seems, from the article, that it's
entirely off-base with what his book claims.

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hoodwink
As someone who has struggled with sleep since childhood, I’ve been scared
stiff by popular media that every ailment known to man is going to afflict
me... underperformance, won’t develop muscle, won’t form memories, cancer,
heart attacks, ED, high blood pressure, whatever.

I’ve always felt fine despite sleeping 5 hours. I wonder if the bell curve of
what people need is centered on 8 hours and I’m just in the left hand tail
somewhere?

~~~
wincy
If it makes you feel any better in a weird way, Donald Trump supposedly sleeps
only 4-5 hours a night and he’s 72 years old and healthy.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/some-people-only-need-a-
few-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/some-people-only-need-a-few-hours-of-
sleep-2016-12)

~~~
onemoresoop
Well, first, almost everything Donald says is a lie or an exaggeration and I
doubt he sleeps 4-5 hours a night. Maybe on some nights but only he knows how
much he sleeps. Second, I don't know how healthy he is, he seems like his
mental faculties have declined drastically over the years. I watched some
earlier Donald interviews and he was a lot more articulate and certainly
seemed a whole lot more thoughtful, he was bragging less, etc. He totally lost
that ability to control himself.

~~~
saturdaysaint
His Twitter timestamps lend some credence to his claims about his sleep. Not
that anyone could believe he's doing anything productive in those hours.

~~~
onemoresoop
That still doesn't tell the whole truth. If I wake up every day at 4 am, how
much do i sleep?? Well, you can't tell because you have no information on when
I go to sleep.

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shittyadmin
This is pretty much in direct conflict with other articles I've seen posted
here.

Just a few weeks ago I had a few people telling me I was killing myself slowly
by only sleeping 5.5 hours/night often times, despite not caring if it'd
improve my mental performance.

~~~
pessimizer
HN is a den of health quackery and orthorexia.

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thanatropism
> A new report published by the journal Science Direct

This journo has no idea of how science functions. Probably thinks Google
Scholar is a journal too.

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mscasts
If sleep wasn't very, very important our bodies wouldn't prefer 7-9 hours of
sleep each day.

I have a hard time believing long term sleep deprivation doesn't lead to an
early death. If lack of sleep makes it harder to stay slim, increases chances
of dementia and diabetes well then these issues probably help shorten the life
expectancy?

I have a hard time believing this report.

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limeblack
So night shifts cause cancer[1] but sleepless nights not an early death? Seems
very unlikely.

[1]
[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320554.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320554.php)

~~~
pessimizer
Agreed; it seems very unlikely that night shifts cause cancer. Seems more
likely that the people working night shifts are either (or all of the below
plus):

\- more in debt than people who work day shifts (the primary cause of debt in
the US is medical), and are working night shifts for the differential pay;

\- that people working night shifts are less qualified than people who work
day shifts at the same salaries, lower qualifications are easy to associate
with relatively lower class origins, and sickness goes up as class goes down
(lack of preventative care, tougher living conditions)

\- or something as trivial as that people who work night shifts smoke more. At
night, there are fewer customers and there's more time between customers.
There's generally lower staffing, so both fewer coworkers to annoy with your
smoke and fewer coworker conversations to distract you from your need for a
cigarette. Also, poorer people smoke more.

Why does everyone assume that any correlation is causal, direct, and (a
specific callout) completely unrelated to class?

~~~
swsieber
Becuasw generally we are bad at probabilities at scale.

For this however, probably because of followup studies.

1) injecting mice woth cancerous cells and controlling their sleep. In sleep
restricted mice it hit faster and harder

2) Sleep impairment is known to increase pathway activity that cancer uses for
growth like inflammation

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ilovecaching
I have a question for you folks, do you ever enjoy not going straight to
sleep? I find the time when I'm laying in bed fantasizing to be very enjoyable
after a hard day of reality. If I were to immediately fall asleep, I'd lose
out on that hour of imagination.

~~~
vonmoltke
No, because when my mind goes idle it tends to start dredging up past mistakes
to beat me over the head with. Fortunately, since I started taking anti-
anxiety meds this tends to only happen with _recent_ fuckups (so this week has
been hard). My fantasizing at night tends to be a defense mechanism.

~~~
jonathanleane
Yeah this happens to me too. What meds, if I may ask?

~~~
vonmoltke
Venlafaxine 75mg ER

~~~
jonathanleane
Thanks. And watch that right flank!

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anon0938
Im just wondering, do anyone else of you not dream? Like i literally cant
remember when i last dreamt, whenever i wake up i just wake up.

Its like i skipped 6-7hours ahead during the night.

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ghukill
And one hundred thousand people finally just got a good night's sleep...

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LastZactionHero
Phew.

