#SleepComfort #Evolution #NeckSupport
Hey everyone! 😄 Have you ever wondered why, even though sleep is super important for us, evolution hasn’t led to humans being able to sleep comfortably while sitting? Especially when we think about those cramped airplane seats! ✈️
Here are a few thoughts on this:
– **Neck Support**: Our necks struggle to hold up the weight of our heads when we’re in a sitting position. It’s like trying to balance a bowling ball on a tiny stick—definitely not easy! 🎳
– **Evolutionary Trade-offs**: Throughout human evolution, we’ve been more focused on being able to stay alert and fend off predators. Comfort while sitting probably wasn’t at the top of the priority list for survival. 🦁
– **Design of Airplane Seats**: Have you tried dozing off in those narrow airplane seats? It feels like a game of Tetris, trying to fit your body into a space that was clearly designed without the idea of sleep in mind. 💤
– **Cultural Habits**: Different cultures have different ways of resting. For instance, some people can snooze in a squat! But here we are, battling with a stiff neck or waking up slumped over. 😅
Thinking about all this makes me curious! What’s your take on it? Have you found any clever ways to get comfy in those seats, or do you have any tips for catching some quality Z’s while sitting? 🤔💭
Let’s share our experiences! What do you think makes comfy sleep while sitting so tricky? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
#SleepTips #TravelComfort
Animals have been sleeping for like 500 million years, we have been sitting in airplanes for fifty. (And even humans sitting at all is recent in evolutionary terms)
This must be a personal thing because I can kind of sleep just fine sitting up straight. The trick is to imagine your back and neck as a spring that dampens motion traveling up it. It also helps to have something to focus on like music basically I start meditating and after about 30 minutes I’m not exactly awake but I’m not fully asleep either, but time passes by much quicker, I feel rested afterwards, and I’m able to react to the movements of the vehicle I’m on be that a plane, a bus, or a truck someone else is driving.
> waking up with a cricked neck
waking up with a cricked neck doesn’t kill you, and waking up without a cricked neck doesn’t help you have more children, so evolution [by natural selection] is not very interested.
Evolution provided an excellent solution to this problem: sleeping while lying down.
You’ve nailed it in your question, really. Our necks, in fact our entire vertebral columns, aren’t optimized for being upright. It’s a structure originally designed for walking on all fours that was repurposed for standing straight. We’ve only been doing this for the last couple million years, while our more distant ancestors had been going around on all fours for hundreds of millions. We get by, but it’s still got its kinks to work out.
As for airplane seats, they’ve been a part of our evolutionary history for a much shorter time than walking upright. It’s literally only been a century. There hasn’t been nearly enough time for selection pressure to do something about it. So, if we want to feel okay after a long sleep, we have to lie down and give those neck and back muscles a good rest.
It’s hardly an evolutionary pressure that will make any significant difference in the likelihood of those who can versus those who cannot surviving to reproduce.
Evolution happens in the opposite way that you’re thinking it does. Creatures don’t grow and develop traits that are advantageous. They have random mutations that cause that particular animal to procreate more than the previous iterations. Eventually either everyone else dies off, or the new version just overtakes the old in population density.
If we lived in a world that suddenly stopped people from being able to sleep properly and people were dying off in droves from sleep deprivation, there may be some people out there who are more resilient in being able to sleep, and their children are the only ones that survive. After a few generations, we all just sleep like that.
Evolution by natural selection doesn’t perfect organisms. The ones that are best at surviving long enough to leave more offspring will have a bigger genetic contribution to the next generation. That’s it, that’s the big whoop.
There are countless examples of imperfections such as why is our food hole so close to our air hole or why our bone structure in our feet is the way it is which can cause plenty of issues…
Evolution doesn’t plan ahead and is far from perfect.
Evolution isn’t about optimizing everything that is good and getting rid of everything that is bad. It’s about traits that improve survival well enough that it they continue to be passed on, even if it isn’t what would be considered “perfect.”
I sleep just fine on an airplane or other situations where I am sitting. The inability to do so is not universal.
I sleep like a baby during my flights back and forth across the Atlantic. And even better when on trains
That’s not how evolution works.
First of all, people sleep upright a tiny minority of the time.
Secondly, they’ve only been doing it that tiny amount of time since what, the invention of the train? That’s not enough time for major evolution in humans.
And third, what would the pressure be? Being able to sleep upright doesn’t offer a significant survival or sexual advantage, so how would it get selected as a trait?
You need more service members in your life.
Those guys learn to sleep anywhere, anytime, and without much notice.
Evolutionary chairs are such a recent invention they haven’t had to time yet to really effect anything
If sleep is so important, why do we need to pretend to sleep in order to fall asleep?
>why hasn’t evolution seen humans be able to sleep comfortably while sitting?!
I can sleep comfortably pretty much anywhere.
Join the army. You’ll learn your most important skill is sleeping in any position. Sleeping, standing up, squatting, etc.
Evolution doesn’t discern what is better for animals. It doesbt magically fix issues we face. It’s all just random mutations so we haven’t randomly mutated to sleep comfortably in any position
Evolution doesn’t work that way. It can be unintuitive to to us, put evolution is not a workshop with an engineer that can tinker with the biological machine, or add on new features. Rather evolution is a strainer, a filter. Lots of things get poured in, and only some of them go through.
“If [beneficial thing], why hasn’t evolution given humans the [ability we don’t have].” will always simply be a counter-factual.
We don’t shoot lasers out of our eyes either, not because it wouldn’t be useful, but rather because it wasn’t necessary to pass through the strainer.
Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years. Human civilization has existed for around 10,000 years. Aircraft have existed for 100 years.
There really hasn’t been enough time to evolve to any aspect of human civilization, let alone the extremely modern need to sleep while sitting in small uncomfortable seats on long journeys! Other than some small stuff like Europeans’ ability to digest milk as adults.
Wtf kind of question is this? I don’t see how being able to sleep better sitting would improve your overall reproduction probability. So, no increased dissimination of that particular gene(s).
Because evolution doesn’t work like that. Evolution doesn’t have a plan, and it doesn’t operate by logic. Evolution is random chance only. The successful chances are able to reproduce and survive in their environment. Unsuccessful chances die off.
You have to look at it as not why haven’t we evolved this benefit but what detriment does not having it involve. Which is that there is basically no detriment to not have such and “advantage”
We haven’t lived in trees for millions of years. There is no advantage to this trait evolutionarily. A human able to sleep on the ground and defend his turf is going to be a lot more rested and fit than one needing to sleep upright in some tree. This is one of the reasons we are a social species, we can group together and defend each other at night and let people fall fully asleep without fear of falling out of a tree or being eaten by a wolf.
Evolution takes millions and millions of years to occur. Humans have not co-existed with things like airplanes long enough for evolution to happen.
Edited to add: it’s the same reason why our bodies have not evolved to remain relatively thin while consuming an excessive amount of calories that we now have constant access to. Our bodies are still adapted to prepare for the next potato famine.. storing onto any fat, etc. that it can as to prevent us from starvation.
Evolution isn’t about making comfier animals. It’s about what helps you pass on your genes and what doesn’t, either socially (birds that have the right markings to attract mates) or physically (giraffes with longer necks get more food and survive to reproduce at a higher rate than those with short necks). Cricked necks affect neither.
Take a few long haul flights from the US/ Europe to Asia. You’ll figure it out. I can’t *not* fall asleep on planes now.
To the evolution naysayers…it’s happened…can confirm as I have personally fallen asleep sitting while at medieval times dinner show
Having a big brain helps you reproduce more than being able to sleep sitting upright helps you reproduce.
Is this a real question? Evolution didn’t know airplanes would be invented…
What would be the positive selection pressure for such an advancement?
Evolution doesn’t just do stuff we think would be handy. It is a path dependent process based entirely on reproductive fitness, nothing more, nothing less.
Evolution takes millions of years and requires evolutionary pressures, but even if it didnt being able to sleep in a seat more comfortably provides zero evolutionary advantages. Evolution doesn’t just do whatever would make life a little easier.
Because out in the wild you just didn’t sleep on seats, you slept in your shelter with your tribe on your grass bed near the fire. You were doing good if you even *had* proper seats.
Humans can sleep pretty well anywhere.
Can confirm from personal experience that humans can sleep; laying down, sitting, and standing.
I imagine squatting or couching would be possible as well but have no experimental evidence to support this.
If sleep is so important to us why do I suck at it so much? Oh, because it’s a helpful survival attribute for at least a few members of the tribe to be alert to every possible threat.
when you’re sitting, you’re waist and lower back is essentially supporting you’re entire upper body. this makes it hard to get restful sleep because now you’re blood pressure will be slightly elevated to compensate for the awkward position you’re putting your body through for 8 hours.
Chairs were invented well after the stone age and didn’t become a common thing for most people to own until the last few hundred years. Far too short a time for evolution to have any effect.
We haven’t been flying long enough, give it another 10-20,000 years (seriously, evolution isn’t quick)
Because having a stiff neck provides no survival advantage, if you were living in a jungle or a savannah, with nothing but a spear to defend yourself from other animals, and no cushioned seats to be found anywhere. Those are the kinds of conditions evolution developed human physical traits in, and that is nothing like modern life in a developed country. We evolved to sleep on the ground, possibly on a bed of leaves, and there has not been enough time or need to develop new traits for our species via natural selection since then.
So, I’ll start by saying that I am no expert, but I would argue that humans aren’t evolving in the sense that other animals do. Any mutations won’t really make us more likely to survive. Everyone just keeps living their life, even if they have something that would have naturally killed them without any interventions. I’d say evolution isn’t all about having the neatest abilities, but developing traits that make you more likely to survive and make offspring similar to you. Now, nearly everyone survives and passes on their genetic traits whether they are beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint or not.
The single most important question for evolution is “does it help you make more babies?”
Unfortunately, waking up with or without a kinked neck doesn’t really affect our ability to procreate. So if someone is born with a mutation that lets them sleep sitting up, there’s no inherent reason that person is going to have more children to pass on that gene than anyone else.
I think u have evolution mixed up. A quick crash course in evolution for you
1) evolution occurs super slowly over many generations, a single person doesn’t just evolve like a Pokémon, every time someone is born, they end up with small genetic mutations, and for this mutation to become an evolutionary trait for the whole species, then it needs to be passed on to offspring, and there offspring need to pass it on to there offspring, and so on and so forth until a large proportion of the population has this same trait that came from that original persons mutation they were born with
2) for this trait to be passed on to several generations and spread amongst the population via breeding, the trait needs to be advantageous enough to increase the chances of this particular human from breeding and producing offspring to pass it on to, and this advantage needs to be a very significant advantage, enough that people without the mutation have trouble breeding as much as the mutant people and therefore these mutants can start producing a majority of the populations new offspring.
So although having a strong enough neck to support the skull while sleeping upright, and therefore being able to sleep on a plane with ease would be nice, would it be a significant enough advantage that it would make breeding and passing these mutant genes to offspring, much much easier then everyone else who doesn’t have the gene?
Will sleeping while sitting make you better at having kids/ help you live long enough to reproduce?
If not, then natural selection won’t select for that trait, as it won’t give you any advantage of the competition or against the risk factors of life
Reminds me of Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, it’s remarkable and completely changed the way how I thought evolution worked.
Because sleeping sitting up in airplane seats was not a thing on the Savanna millions of years ago.
There are not enough occasions where we can ONLY sleep upright that it would be a reproductive advantage. Planes are entirely new by evolutionary standards, and we don’t spend more than a handful of nights on them anyway.
The fact is, having one or two nights where it’s hard to lie down just doesn’t create enough selective pressure to adapt how we sleep.
My brother in law was in the army. He was in the mountains for months and didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in a bed. He had to sleep leaning to a tree most of the time.
When his service ended, he couldn’t sleep in bed for a long time. He slept against the wall with his legs and arms crossed and the side of his head against the wall.
Sometimes evolution is nature’s apathetic shrug while handing in a multiple choice exam that wasn’t studied for… It hits gold every once in a while, but for the most part “Eh, good enough” is evolution’s mantra.
This thread has no definitive answer as to why sleep has not changed due to evolution.
Take both examples, past when early humans, had to really be aware of not dying.
Present, humans have ample to time to sleep however much.
With that said, in both situations, sleep should have evolved to become less and and less.
In both situations, sleep is less required due to environmental impacts.