I AM NOT TIRED

It turns out, it's not only 7-year-olds who insist this.

Low power mode again today. Hey thanks for participating in yesterday’s poll. It was very helpful to me to see the results. I actually have a new one for today. It’s connected to yesterday’s newsletter; scroll down to see!

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I said, I’m not tired!

Let's start with a story. See if it sounds familiar, but be forewarned: There's a surprise twist at the end.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Let’s call the main character Sally. Sally sometimes gets overcommitted and overstretched. It’s not just work, it’s not just her family, it’s not just her social life, it’s not just her other interests—it’s everything together.

Something has to give, and Sally would be the first to admit that it's often her sleep schedule that goes first. She stays up late, gets up early, burns the candle at both ends.

Then the weekend comes, and she crashes.

She sleeps in, maybe gets to bed early. By Sunday evening, she feels rested, refreshed, and rejuvenated—ready to tackle the new week.

Now for the surprise twist.

It comes from an eye-opening article in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, which synthesized decades of research on what happens to our brains when we accumulate a sleep debt, and then try to make up for it.

In short, it's not what we think happens—and not what we've been taught to think over the years.

Instead, according to authors Zachary Zamore and Sigrid C. Veasey of the Chronobiology and Sleep Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, there are at least three crucial things to know:

• First, when we accumulate a sleep debt, we lose some of the subjective ability to judge how that lack of sleep affects us.

• Second, even though we don't realize it, objective tests show that we continue to have "deficits ... in vigilance and episodic memory" even after "2-3 nights of recovery sleep." Key: The deficits persist even if we feel "less tired" after recovery sleep.

• Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, studies suggest that this persistent sleep loss—even when we try to catch up on it—can lead to "heightened susceptibility to neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease ... and Parkinson's disease (PD)."

This is a really interesting, running nearly 10,000 words. Among other things, it brings home just how difficult and crucial it is to study what happens when people become sleep deprived:

• Difficult, because of the ethical and practical considerations.

  • (How can you measure sleep deprivation without causing it, and how can you cause it despite recognizing its significantly negative effects? As an account in The New York Times about the study pointed out, in some sleep-deprivation experiments on animals, the animals don't survive.)

• Crucial, because as Zamore and Veasey concede, "sleep disruption is an inevitable occurrence in modern societies."

  • (Simply knowing that sleep deprivation is bad for you doesn't change the fact that sometimes we run out of hours in the day, and have to make tough choices.)

For that matter, it would be no challenge to come up with many other studies describing additional negative effects of sleep deprivation. I've written about many of these:

• A study of young doctors working as hospital interns that found that those who had regular sleep habits had better moods and fewer depression symptoms.

• A study suggesting that people who sleep fewer than six hours a night have a 30 percent higher chance of becoming obese than those who sleep between seven and nine hours.

• And a study suggesting that lack of sleep ruins sex drive and wrecks testosterone levels in men.

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, even though I'm the person who wrote all these articles, I'm also sometimes the person who gives up sleep to write still more articles, because I can’t find time to get everything done during the day.

But at the same time, the idea that we might not actually feel the degree to which lack of sleep harms us—let’s just say it’s a scary notion. So with that, let’s call it a night.

And if you’re reading this first thing in the morning after getting up too early, you have my permission to go back to bed for a bit. Sally, too.

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Did you ever save a life?

Yesterday’s poll was very helpful. And yesterday’s newsletter was really about saving a life.

So here’s a new poll … about saving a life.

Why ask this, besides symmetry? Because one of the things I’m rolling out when I’m ready will be more of those “what was your earliest memory?” and “when did you find your true love?” style posts.

It’s occurred to me they might be easier to write if I ask people the question first — then cull through your answers and maybe quote some of them in the newsletter itself.

See? It sometimes takes me a while, but I do learn!

I’d love to see your answer, and if you’re up for a reply in the comments that would be great, too! You might also find your answer featured in a future newsletter.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• Multiple fires burning in Los Angeles County on Wednesday prompted evacuation orders and warnings and damaged more than 1,000 structures. Five people are dead, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Los Angeles. (CBS News)

• California’s insurance market was already teetering on the edge of insolvency for years thanks to catastrophic wildfires that have driven many insurers to stop writing new policies and drop existing ones. Wednesday’s wildfires could accelerate its collapse. (Politico)

• In a stunning admission, President Biden acknowledged that if he had stayed in the race and been reelected president, he might not have had the vitality to serve another four years in office even if he had won. “So far, so good,” he told USA Today in an interview released Wednesday. “But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” (NY Times)

• How did the soldier who exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas plan the attack? Partly by using ChatGPT, police said. An investigation of his searches indicate he was looking for information on explosive targets, the speed at which certain rounds of ammunition would travel and whether fireworks were legal in Arizona. (AP)

• Related-ish: The leader of a notorious neo-Nazi group used ChatGPT to inquire about attacking the U.S. power grid as a way to create a “power vacuum” in the U.S. , an intelligence briefing from the NYPD states. The briefing details messages allegedly sent by Rinaldo Nazzaro, aka online as Roman Wolf and Norman Spear, who is the the founder of the white supremacist and accelerationist paramilitary group known as “The Base.” (Daily Dot)

• Some H-1B workers say they feel insulted by debate over visa holders: “Those words are really kind of concerning, actually,” one H-1B visa holder said about being called "cheap labor." (NBC News)

• President Carter’s funeral is today at the National Cathedral in Washington. I know this is an unusual thing to share, but in honor of the occasion here’s Dan Aykroyd playing Carter on SNL as an all-knowing, well-meaning technocrat who is able to answer Americans’ answers on everything from an obscure piece of U.S. Post Office machinery to how to come down from a bad trip on acid. (SNL/YouTube)