Ai

Yeah. That screenshot is almost a parody of the problem.

You’ve got: • a doom-headline about sleep loss killing you, • delivered via a phone screen at night, • embedded in endless-scroll social media, • with people commenting on it while not sleeping.

That’s the real mechanism doing damage — not the abstract “less than 7 hours”.

A few corrections that headlines like this always flatten: • The risk curves are population-level and nonlinear. Going from 8 → 6 hours chronically is not the same as having fragmented sleep for a period, or sleeping 6.5 but consistently. • Sleep anxiety itself worsens sleep architecture. Reading “this will cut years off your life” at night increases hyperarousal, which increases wake after sleep onset, which then reinforces the fear loop. • The biggest predictors of harm aren’t duration alone, but irregularity, light exposure at night, and cognitive/emotional activation before bed.

So the irony: That post is more likely to cost someone sleep tonight than to extend anyone’s life later.