8.14am: Got up at 7.30, drove my daugther to school, and checking my mail again…
Josh: it all depends on how involved you are in what you are doing, and then, it’s like imagination and loci. A lot resides in your capacity to marvel at things. If you find something really marvelous, you will stay awake to have a look at it, study it, work on it.
If you are not surprised by anything, then nothing will drive you to sleep less than the 8 hours a night that everyone more or less needs…
P.
Maybe that is the problem. I’m still trying to change my life around, but it’s slow going. The last experiment didn’t work out, so I’m just starting over in California now. 
Well, good luck with this nth start…
What is the problem exactly with your hands ?
P.
Repetitive strain injury… it’s slowly getting better though.
Is it wrist injury (the kind of injury you get by typing on a keyboard) ?
If so, this kind of injury has always been puzzling for me, because it seems to be quite widespread in the US, but quite unheard of in France…
At some point I was thinking of what the difference could be between American and French people and wondered if nutrition could be a factor…
P.
From my experience working in Austria (which is not necessarily like France), people in the US seem to work a lot more. I worked 12 to 16 hours per day at my own business for years, without ever taking a day off. In Austria, the office was often empty and I’ve never seen people take so many vacations. At a similar company in the US, people might work until 10pm or midnight some days without even getting extra pay. Bosses also play tricks on the workers like buying cheap pizza for lunch so that employees won’t take a long break when they leave the office. Normally, one gets just two weeks of vacation per year. If you have to take a month or two off due to an injury, you might lose your job.
I have a friend from the US who went to Eastern Europe to hire some programmers. He wanted to put in really long hours with them, because his time was limited there, but they said “we will only work eight hours per day”. I don’t think that many people would say that in the US, but would just accept that they should work more hours.
When I was a truck driver in 1999 (to save money to travel around the world), I was on duty 112 hours per week. It was seven days of 16-hour shifts, and then one day off. Then seven more days of 16-hour shifts. It is legal to drive 80,000 pound (35,000 kilo) trucks for that many hours per week if the trucks are carrying agricultural products. Actually, the trucks were sometimes loaded to 100,000 pounds (45,000 kilos) – that weight wasn’t legal, but there was nothing the drivers could do. The drivers are literally worked to the point of psychological horror. You could hear them on the radio literally begging to stop working, but they were told “bring the load in to the factory now”, even though people were dying on our routes as a result of these policies. After a while, I was falling asleep at the wheel with my eyes open and was having hallucinations that the grim reaper was tapping me on the shoulder while I was driving. When I quit that job due to exhaustion and some other things, they didn’t pay me a large part of my salary, because the system is rigged to keep you working if you want to get paid. Anyway, it’s an example of US work mentality…
I prefer the European way of “less work” and “workers’ rights”, but the US way is to keep the population working relentlessly with as few benefits as possible.
There are some other factors in what happened with my hands, but I think that US workers probably work a lot more hours than in most places in Europe.
I don’t know if that is the reason why the problem might be more widespread here in the US, but that would be my first guess.
Greetings, guys!
I’ve got one question for you. Actually, I’ve got one problem. I go to bed at 9 p. m. … I’m tired as a dog, but unable to fall asleep. So sometimes, it takes even one hour to fall asleep. I don’t understand, but it’s not all. I always wake up at 4 a. m. (± 10 minutes… I’m not exaggerating or what, I always look at my mobile what time it is). It’s been already one week of happening this to me every night. I was thinking, what changed. What meals I ate or what, and everything is always the same. I even tried to avoid pills for allergy… Everything… Even when I try to exercise, really hard, to get tired, I still wake up at that particular time.
I’m always dreaming about some ■■■■■■■■. Today, I was sitting on the train station, and my teacher came to me and asked “Where are you going?” and I woke up. 
I don’t understand. And always, it’s something stupid, not nightmare or what.
Do you have any idea what to do? It really makes me feel tired, because I’m unable to fall asleep again, and when I am, sometimes it takes really long. I get up at 05 : 40 a. m, so I just try to have 8 hours of peaceful sleep, but I can’t
Thank you for your answers. I was looking for some studies on the Internet, but no valuable results.
I’m feeling really embarrassed right now, because it sounds idiotic, but I’ve got no idea left.
Is it possible that you are overtraining? Too much exercise can disturb sleeping patterns. It happened to me a long time ago when I was training for a long bicycle trip.
Another thing that I’ve found is that using computers late a night can make it hard to fall asleep. It might be due to looking at a bright light which makes the body think that it’s daytime.
Interesting take. I think you may be on to something.
With reference to deep sleep, and rem sleep, and the formation of memory…
I ran a few experiments of my own a few years back. The uberman sleep schedule being the most interesting of the lot, that’s the one where you only sleep for 25 minutes once every four hours. I lasted 10 days, it’s quite bearable after the first week, but I didn’t experience any kind of heightened energy like some people report. Though I did experience the commonly referenced extremely vivid dreams, and on nearly every nap.
Anyway, I did some investigating later on. Studies seem to suggest that REM sleep is where memory formation is consolidated, and (grain of salt on this second one) that it’s somehow chemically necessary for short term homeostasis.
The first makes intuitive sense, neural networks are only growing when they’re firing…
The second offers a convenient explanation as to why sleep deprived individuals jump straight into REM, without passing through deep sleep in their first cycle. As well hinting the symptoms observed in prolonged REM deprived mice, which is to say, massive cellular death. (Not gradual but all at once… oddly)
(grain of salt on all what follows)
Deep sleep, on the other hand, is a weeding out of the static noise inherent in such a chaotic system. It’s primarily concerned with the hippocampus, which we can think of as our day to day active memory. This is a structure with particularly plastic neural networks in the sense that they can build up and decay very quickly. It’s chiefly concerned with what is unique and interesting, and it communicates with nearly every part of the brain.
The thinking is that your first cycle of deep sleep prunes the hippocampus of its weak networks simply by not firing anything new for a while (also weakening, but not obliterating stronger networks, the mechanism is elegant because it’s not clever) then REM sleep kicks in and overclocks the remaining networks, both transmuting corresponding networks in less plastic areas of the brain into something more substantial, and shielding the networks still within the hippocampus against the next round of pruning.
Interesting discussion. Personally, I am monophasic. I aim for 8 continuous sleep hours, versus 16 of continuous awake hours per 24 hours. I very rarely take naps. I am not influenced much by day/night cycles. I just need my full continuous block of 7.5 or 8 sleep hours, no matter what time that is taken. Anything, less than that, and I can’t perform 100%. And even if I perform well, I know that the long term implications of less than 7.5 hours, won’t be great.
I ‘ve also read about alternative sleep options here: (great article)
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
like the uberman (30’ per 4h), but I guess that won’t work for me. I consider, 30 minutes sleep per 4 hours, to be more like a torture and not much of a rest. 30 minutes only cannot even evoke much of a REM stage. So, it’s hard for me to comprehend how people manage the Uberman schedule, while being fully functional.
Nodas
Here is some more information about sleep and health: Just a few nights of bad sleep upsets your brain.
Dr Simon Archer, who helped run the experiment, found that getting an hour's less sleep a night affected the activity of a wide range of our volunteers' genes (around 500 in all) including some which are associated with inflammation and diabetes.…Sarah Reeve, a doctoral student who ran the experiment for us was surprised by how quickly their mood changed [after the reduced sleep experiment].
“There were increases in anxiety, depression and stress, also increases in paranoia and feelings of mistrust about other people”, she said.
“Given that this happened after only three nights of sleep deprivation, that is pretty impressive.”
Here’s another related article: Lack of sleep boosts levels of Alzheimer’s proteins
Chronic poor sleep has been linked to cognitive decline, and a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis explains why: As a wakeful brain churns away through the night, it produces more of the Alzheimer's protein amyloid beta than its waste-disposal system can handle. Levels of the protein rise, potentially setting off a sequence of changes to the brain that can end with dementia.“This study is the clearest demonstration in humans that sleep disruption leads to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease through an amyloid beta mechanism,” said senior author Randall Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology. “The study showed that it was due to overproduction of amyloid beta during sleep deprivation.”