^ I generally agree with a lot of your points, but only sleeping every other night is a horrible idea. I mean from time to time, yes, but humans are supposed to sleep every night. If you only sleep every other night as a regular practice, you're looking at serious chronic sleep deprivation.
TL:DR: ControlDaddy say, "Xorkoth, you crazy. I only slept four times, for more than an hour or so, in the last five weeks, while burning the meth crystal oils, and as it is plain to see, I am fit as a fiddle and right as rain!"
I would caution against relying on generalizations, especially this one, which is as broad as it could possibly be, regarding sleep. Sleep is something we barely
think we know anything about right now, in 2021.
You can test this out yourself, by pulling up some recent pubmed articles with keywords like chronotype, chrono-nutrition, circadian rhythm, cardiometabolic health, and epidemiology, and noting the current state of knowledge, and conclusions, perhaps you can also skim the rest of the articles. After a few you may also find that the latest findings relevant to these keywords indicate that circadian rhythms most significantly affect our cardiometabolic health, and in this single area of effect, it is further influenced by many factors, among them these examples:
- Diet, a tremendously complicated field of study in and of itself, where generalizations are not practically useful for the majority of people's individual diet
- Sunlight
- Artificial light sources, also including cell phone and tablet and especially those computer displays meth users tend to spend days plastered to consuming big, bright pornographic videos
- Socioeconomic factors, especially work and study schedules, and though not extensively researched yet, for our purposes I would keep in mind tweaking schedules
- Sex
- Age
- Ethnicity
- Chronotypes, a conjecture that is pervasive in modern sleep "science", and which many are critical of. It may be invalid or in other ways ultimately an arbitrary notion.
Before you think I am trying to hype a fringe body of critical scholars, check out similar criticisms of core methodologies, e.g. statistical hypothesis testing, common throughout the social sciences (and the core of most sleep studies), which are increasingly under review. It is one of the critical factors in creating publication bias and its progeny, non-response bias, which taken together form the five "diseases" threatening all science: "significosis, an inordinate focus on statistically significant results; neophilia, an excessive appreciation for novelty; theorrhea, a mania for new theory; arigorium, a deficiency of rigor in theoretical and empirical work; and finally, disjunctivitis, a proclivity to produce large quantities of redundant, trivial, and incoherent works."
- Time in history, my favorite areas of sleep study.
Fun fact: for almost all of humanities history, specifically all time up to the invention and proliferation of street lighting around the civilized world, it is theorized that our sleep cycles were naturally quite different than that of modern man. In many ways, it was more similar to that of apes. Generally, as dusk approached, people retreated to shelter that they would light if they could using fire, then torches, candles, lamps and so on. This was when an evening meal was usually prepared and consumed, social activity occurring throughout and continuing after for several hours. In some societies craftsmen would continue working trades in this period if the cost of artificial lighting was economical. Usually an hour or more earlier than our earliest bed times nowadays, our historical brethren would begin their first sleep. This was more like a long nap, with different durations being theorized, but resulting in people waking up in the sometime near the middle of the night. While many modern men and women feel afflicted, and often experience anxiety about their insomnia, there is no actual science that backs up that this kind of restless period is unnatural or unhealthy. Our predecessors may have used this time for contemplation, storytelling, lovemaking, singing, drumming, hand puppets, or other activities that are not diminished by a lack of light. Or, perhaps they also argued about the "correct" way one should attempt to sleep.
I can spin on for quite awhile on a subject I have many waking hours to contemplate, but hardly anyone reads a response even this long.
Instead, I will refer you back to my anecdotal counterargument in the TL;DR: and urge you to raise hell about that preposterous notion now that we share some specific ideas about sleep.
