> lying down with your eyes closed gets much of the benefit of sleeping
I'd heard this before from some source I must have regarded as credible, because I'd remembered it as "probably true" and told other people that it was probably true. This essay nudged me to look for decent sources for it myself.
A study that addresses this is "Sleep and rest facilitate implicit memory in a visual search task", Mednick et al., 2009, Vision Res[1]. In the morning, they gave a 50-minute learning task to three groups of slightly under-slept subjects. Later, the groups either:
-slept for 90 minutes
-rested for 90 minutes
-went about their day as usual.
Later still, the groups did another task that tested two things: how well they retained learning from the morning task, and how well they learned new things. Perhaps surprisingly, neither napping nor resting helped with retaining knowledge from the morning, but napping and resting both helped the subjects learn *new* things.
A search for papers that cite this paper[2] reveals...maybe mixed results for further research? There's a meta-analysis that combines ten small studies, some too small to report a significant effect with their number of participants, into a significant finding[3]. Seems fine, though they mention that their own pre-registered experimental replication didn't get a significant result.
tl;dr: yeah it's probably true, and there's a literature on it beyond Mythbusters.
Why is sex an exception? Is it a sort of unprincipled "people are going to have sex on the bed whatever we say, so we might as well say that's allowed so they're less likely to do other things"?
Maybe. Thought I'd always read that masturbating was supposed to make you sleepy, and maybe sex too... though personally it always made my insomnia worse.
If you're in the UK zopiclone is another option. The drugs are different here. It's great, actually totally cured my insomnia. Just having it in the drawer makes me sleep like a baby. I think it's the psychological security of having something that works so I know it'll never get that bad again!
> lying down with your eyes closed gets much of the benefit of sleeping
I'd heard this before from some source I must have regarded as credible, because I'd remembered it as "probably true" and told other people that it was probably true. This essay nudged me to look for decent sources for it myself.
A study that addresses this is "Sleep and rest facilitate implicit memory in a visual search task", Mednick et al., 2009, Vision Res[1]. In the morning, they gave a 50-minute learning task to three groups of slightly under-slept subjects. Later, the groups either:
-slept for 90 minutes
-rested for 90 minutes
-went about their day as usual.
Later still, the groups did another task that tested two things: how well they retained learning from the morning task, and how well they learned new things. Perhaps surprisingly, neither napping nor resting helped with retaining knowledge from the morning, but napping and resting both helped the subjects learn *new* things.
A search for papers that cite this paper[2] reveals...maybe mixed results for further research? There's a meta-analysis that combines ten small studies, some too small to report a significant effect with their number of participants, into a significant finding[3]. Seems fine, though they mention that their own pre-registered experimental replication didn't get a significant result.
tl;dr: yeah it's probably true, and there's a literature on it beyond Mythbusters.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2764830/pdf/nihms110976.pdf
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=20&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=2417554187687802495&scipsc=
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56033-6
Why is sex an exception? Is it a sort of unprincipled "people are going to have sex on the bed whatever we say, so we might as well say that's allowed so they're less likely to do other things"?
Yep.
Maybe. Thought I'd always read that masturbating was supposed to make you sleepy, and maybe sex too... though personally it always made my insomnia worse.
If you're in the UK zopiclone is another option. The drugs are different here. It's great, actually totally cured my insomnia. Just having it in the drawer makes me sleep like a baby. I think it's the psychological security of having something that works so I know it'll never get that bad again!