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Ask HN: Most accurate scientific book on human sleep?

by gautamsomani on 7/14/24, 6:53 PM with 44 comments

• by Aurornis on 7/15/24, 1:31 AM

  Books like “Why We Sleep” and podcasts like Huberman Lab are kind of like a junk food version of science: They deliver some bits of information that can be helpful, but they’re so coated in stretched truth, overconfidence, and stories crafted more to sound good than to be accurate that it’s not really accurate science material.

  In a case like yours (difficulty sleeping) that might actually be fine, to be honest. A lot of people find relief from simply feeling like they understand a subject, rather than from having absolute accuracy of information. The confidence begets a feeling of control, which diminishes anxiety, which indirectly leads to better sleep.

  These podcasts and materials often follow a pattern of suggesting some specific protocol based on loose interpretations of some underpowered study. The actual power of these supplements on routines is almost always much lower than the host says (Huberman is one of the worst at this) but the confidence with which the protocol is prescribed is often enough to convince people that it will work. The protocols and supplements turn into rituals and routines, which are cues for sleep, indirectly establishing a healthier sleep cycle with cues for relaxation.

  On the other hand, some people get more anxious after consuming this material because they feel like not sleeping well is killing them, which creates more anxiety, which then worsens sleep.

  I’ll let you decide which category you’re in.

  For actual material on the subject: Sleep science and research isn’t as much about practical lifestyle tips as you might expect. The material that would be more helpful, practically speaking, is to pursue therapy-like modalities and relaxation techniques. You will find much more material about practically improving sleep from the therapy angle than you will from reading deep science on sleep architecture.

• by pedalpete on 7/14/24, 11:11 PM

  Why We Sleep has some issues, but for a primer, it's a good intro.

  I read that before I got into working in the neurotech/sleeptech space.

  The Cambridge textbook The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams[1] I found surprisingly approachable. I've long had an interest in neuroscience, so it wasn't a completely new subject to me, but it wasn't a bad read.

  I'm a life-long insomniac, you didn't go into the details of your sleep problems, and I initially read Why We Sleep because I was trying to understand sleep and fix my own problem. Unfortunately, I it's still all the same CBT-I stuff, sleep hygiene, etc etc.

  We're not working in insomnia, I haven't found anything in the peer-reviewed literature which is convincing that anyone is near a solution in this space.

  [1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neuroscience-of-sleep-a...)

• by dnissley on 7/15/24, 3:11 AM

  Science is good, but it probably won't tell you how to fix your sleep. Especially not a book which is highly generalized. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Nerd the hell out. That probably means reading papers, but it also means trying out stuff like breathing exercises, meditation, yoga nidra, etc. It might even mean transforming your entire life and worldview. Attempting to find the most accurate scientific book on a subject is laudable in some respects, but also a severely limited approach if that's all you're doing. I wish you well on your journey.

• by gandalfgreybeer on 7/15/24, 2:33 AM

  Might be relevant but there was this old submission [1] debunking the facts behind "Why We Sleep"

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

• by softwaredoug on 7/15/24, 12:27 PM

  I really enjoyed "The Sleep Solution" by Chris Winter

  It's less catastrophizing about bad sleep than Why We Sleep, has a good sense of humor, lots of great information about Insomnia and other problems. Unlike "Why We Sleep", Dr. Winter is a practicing sleep doctor so has perhaps more practical perspective.

  https://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Solution-Why-Your-Broken/dp/039...

• by vehicles2b on 7/15/24, 2:51 AM

  A disclaimer is that I haven't read "Why We Sleep". Nonetheless I recommend the book "Sync" by Steven Strogatz (2003) -- particularly chapter 3 on sleep -- which describes a neat coupling of when we sleep / when we wake up to our body temperature which oscillates with a period of roughly 24 hours. (See figures on pgs 81 and 83.) Much of this discussion on sleep is derived from "isolation" research in the mid 1970's by Elliot Weitzman and Charles Czeisler, experiments in which subjects were isolated from all sense of time including daylight, clocks, and the news, to study their sleep cycles in the absence of external information telling them the time of day.

• by lccerina on 7/15/24, 9:43 AM

  Sleep researcher here. The most detailed you can find would be "principles and practices of sleep medicine", but that would not give you direct advice on how to solve your problems, more a general understanding of that.

  If it's Insomnia, consider a cognitive behavioral therapist. If it's something else, look for the right expert. It can be also an external condition (e.g., do you live close to railways, airports, chemical plants?), diet and lifestyle, genetic factors etc... Without knowing what is your main sleep complaint is difficult to advice you.

• by jrvarela56 on 7/15/24, 1:52 AM

  I used to have sleep issues and got rid of them with meditation. I got to a point where I could meditate 10-20 min straight and that was enough to quiet my mind into sleeping.

• by ffhhj on 7/15/24, 1:12 AM

  If I go to sleep before 11 pm, even if I'm sleepy, I'll have severe insomnia and won't be able to sleep until 3-5am the next day. But if I go to sleep at 12am, I'll automatically wake up at 6am perfectly rested. I say sleep science got it wrong at the minimum 8hr sleep to be healthy, just find your body's sleep schedule and follow it. As with water, only drink when thirsty and in rest, long before/after eating or exercising.

• by dhruvkar on 7/15/24, 5:04 PM

  Sleep is rest.

  Rest and Activity go hand-in-hand.

  I had sleep issues for 10+ years. I couldn't fall asleep most nights, would wake up tired, couldn't function without severe caffeine, which would lose efficacy over time and cause even more sleep issues and mind-bending headaches.

  Sleep issues were just a symptom. It was my life (Activity) that needed fixing.

  Look to your life -- if you fix things there, you'll fix your sleep.

  If you want to talk further, feel free to reach out on email.

• by kernx16 on 7/15/24, 2:17 AM

  I dug into this quite a bit for a while. A book that I found pretty good, albeit at times redundant, is "Say Goodnight To Insomnia". The author has studied sleep, specifically insomnia, for a good chunk of their life and uses CBT to conquer insomnia. The book also talks a bit about myths around sleep which I found interesting.

• by kva on 7/17/24, 5:01 PM

  A somewhat niche but good book on sleep-disordered breathing is "Life Saving Sleep" by Barry Krakow [1].

  If you have a ton of sleep problems, you should probably catalog them, and try seeing a somnologist or getting an in-lab sleep study.

  [1](https://www.amazon.com/Life-Saving-Sleep-Horizons-Treatment/...)

• by LolBatmanHuntsU on 7/15/24, 8:26 AM

  It's a bit cliche but the most accurate book is the one you can write for yourself.

  Seriously, make yourself a guinea pig, experiment and have fun. All whilst making note of how things are affecting your sleep.

  Here are some starter experiments:

  -no tech within 1 hour of bedtime

  -do household chores or go for a walk/run a few hours before sleeping

  My last tip for all of this is to have self-compassion, a majority of things won't work but that's the methodologies problem not yours. Decide if you want to tweak it or move on.

  Good luck and best wishes.

• by ides_dev on 7/15/24, 6:36 AM

  I enjoyed reading Life Time by Russell Foster [1]. Professor Foster is the Head of Oxford’s Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology and the founder and Director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Institute. In it he covers lots of aspects of sleep and ways to try and improve it.

  [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58417761-life-time

• by TastesLikeChckn on 7/15/24, 8:09 AM

  Learn to meditate. One hack I use is to listen to a Delta rhythm trance which is the deepest brain speed. It is so powerful that the task is to stay awake. I made my recordings using Gnaural, which may still be available. When in this state you can reprogram your unconscious. Wear earbuds or headphones lay in bed, without committed diligence, you will be sleeping.

• by arihantparsoya on 7/15/24, 3:49 AM

  Have you been exercising?

• by sabrina_ramonov on 7/15/24, 2:47 PM

  reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art helped me more than Why We Sleep and other sleep books. I have sleep apnea and have tried many solutions, including mandibular devices. Putting on mouth tape to force myself to breath through my nose did the trick. No sleep doctor or sleep dentist ever mentioned this inexpensive solution to try.

• by JSDevOps on 7/14/24, 8:52 PM

  Id be interested in this also

• by wateroutflow on 7/15/24, 10:57 PM

  What kind of sleep problems?

• by nonameiguess on 7/15/24, 5:53 PM

  The long and short of it is that it's basically impossible to do interventional studies on sleep deprivation in which you can see longitudinal as opposed to acute outcomes. Interventional studies are all short duration because no research subject is going to be willing or probably even able to comply with long-term sleep deprivation, and interventional studies on the order of decades over which things like cancer and death tend to happen are rare anyway simply because you can't intervene in a research subject's life for that long a span of time.

  So understand the limitations of observational epidemiology studies. Correlations are observed between some outcome of interest (i.e. cancer and death) and a variable or variables these may or may not be impacted by (i.e. duration, quality, and regularity of sleep). If you observe a positive correlation, well, what causes it? Maybe poor sleep gives you cancer. Maybe cancer gives you poor sleep. Maybe a life full of terrible stress gives you both poor sleep and cancer. The researchers can't possibly know. This type of research is done to find interesting correlations that can then be investigated further by conducting interventional studies.

  This is what the public doesn't seem to understand. Observational studies in nutrition and exercise science and what not are always being posted to Hacker News, but these are not really meant for public consumption. They're meant to suggest avenues of further research by other scientists. You see the same thing with various classifications by standards bodies, for instance, the IARC carcinogen thing. They classify compounds as possibly carcinogenic not to warn people off of using them, but to suggest to other researchers what they should bother and not bother looking into.

  Unfortunately, as I stated in the first paragraph, it is hard to go further with sleep science. The problem with the book "Why We Sleep," caveating here that I haven't read it personally, is I'm pretty sure it goes beyond what the evidence warrants in order to state with far too much certainty that losing sleep causes a whole lot of bad outcomes when we do not know that to be true. My engagement with this largely goes back to the earlier Hacker News threads about this book and the Barbell Medicine and Stronger by Science podcasts going into fairly detailed debunkings of it and breakdowns of what we really know about sleep deprivation and poor sleep.

  Treating insomnia is a different matter. People with insomnia will definitel consent to interventions, including long-term interventions. Whether or not any evidence exists for various interventions other than pharmaceutical sleep aids, I'm not all that aware of. Out of all the over the counter supplements people recommend, I'm pretty sure melatonin is the only one known to work, but it has drawbacks in that it tends to leave you drowsy when you wake and some people report wild and disturbing dreams. I'm sure it's worth trying, though.

  There is plenty of pop sleep hygiene advice out there. I have no idea what sort of evidence other than anecdote it really has behind it, either, but it's also harmless to try. The standard keep your room cool, remove all lights, commit to a regular schedule, be in bed 30 minutes before you plan to sleep, all that that I'm sure you've heard before. I know my wife is trying a bunch. I'm not sure how well it's working. I used to be an insomniac when I was a kid. Now I'm not. I didn't really do anything. That seems to be common as well, or at least a lot of podcast hosts reported the same thing. They were insomniacs. Now they're not.

  Granted, I run 60 miles a week, lift four days a week, and rock climb three days a week. I'm sure a lot of people will just say that much exercise is going to make you tired. I do believe evidence suggests that, but I was just as active as a kid.

• by bwb on 7/14/24, 10:30 PM

  Try: https://shepherd.com/book/why-we-sleep (even though it is general it is still great imp).

  Or, this book by this scientist on sleep: https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-science-of-dreams

  It is heavily about dreams but touches on so much more.

• by helph67 on 7/14/24, 9:51 PM

  Not books but hints. I use and recommend magnesium just before bed. "Magnesium: The Most Powerful Relaxation Mineral Available" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/magnesium-the-most-powerf_b_4...

  From 2017 "Israeli firm 2breathe has developed a smart sensor and complementary app to help those who have difficulty nodding off" https://geeknewscentral.com/?s=2breathe