Inspirada wrote: ↑Sun Jun 18, 2023 6:49 pm If you gave the average healthy 20 - 40 year old Cambodian person so much money that he or she never had to work, how many hours a day would he or she then spend sleeping?

It's like 14 hours a day, right? Something like that.

Personally, I’m feeling this is a loaded question, with a very general dig? What? at Cambodia and the native population as a whole?

However, sleep is a topic which is poorly understood by most people everywhere. In Asia, in particular, and in my experience, which in the main includes Cambodia, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Malaya, the social setup means that there is frequently much less respect for privacy than there should be. That doesn’t just mean not looking through folks windows, but also the broader concept that how I conduct my life should not impact my neighbours. Noise, for instance. Telephone calls at a ridiculous time of day (or rather, night)

The human animal is actually the product of a few hundred thousand years of evolution, and common to all. Religion, YouTube, TikTok, personal favourite transgender lady-boy pop troupe are recent aberrations among a bunch of more common physiological considerations.

What is little understood about sleep?
How many stages- roughly 4. They aren’t equal, and they each have a deeper purpose than just sleeping.
What is sleep inertia?
What happens if you cat nap for 15 minutes, versus taking a 1hour snooze, mid afternoon?
What about the old wives tale about hours of sleep before midnight- it’s not entirely just old crone gabble.
There is a thing labelled a WOCL. No amount of blaring tannoys at 5am are going to overcome that critically important time of day, or the physiological needs of an upright monkey, no matter how devoted you are.

There’s an old adage- sleep when you can, as you may not get another chance for a while. But it can be a double edged sword- if you grab a short nap, that can be beneficial. Likewise, a decent 2 ½ hour sleep. Yet a one hour nap can actually leave you feeling more knackered than before you closed you eyes, resulting in needing more catch up sleep, later.

During lockdown, I found myself often lapsing into a pattern where I seemed to be asleep for well in excess of 12hours, but broken, and with not much energy for even mental effort in the jumble of waking hours. I’m sure in years to come, there will be a realisation that there’s a lot more harm to come out of that period than is yet realised.

If you have poor sleep quality- lots of interruptions, poorly managed TV/Internet/smart phone usage, then you’ll be playing catch up. But humans are awful at storing sleep. We can’t. But we seem able to store more than ample amounts of exhaustion, and even use it against each other.