I want a better sleep schedule but not bad enough to put it into practice. My day is full of stuff, and when my wife goes to sleep is when I feel like it's finally quiet enough to get some programming done. Or do whatever I want.
My sleep cycle is that I go 4 days until I have to take a longer sleep (10 hours) and the rest of the time I operate on 6-7 hours of sleep. I usually wake up at 7-7:30 and I usually go to bed at 12-1 or 9-10 on my long sleep days. It's inconsistent and I worry about that fact.
The biggest blocker for me is my time alone and distraction free. I like and want distractions to be gone when I work on personal projects. Early morning doesn't get me that as my wife wakes up at 5:15 (maybe if I woke up at 4?). If she's up and I'm up there are interactions which is great. And then there's text messages from friends and family and work chat all day. I can mute both and do but it's there, beckoning me for my attention. To take my focus...
Look I know what the answer is for me. I need to replace work time with project time. My life would be in more balance if I had my 9-5 chunk of time where I do what I like doing (vs work stuff) so I don't feel like I'm living 3 lives in a single day.
That implies my personal projects make enough money to have a family on. Not true now so the grind continues.
> I want a better sleep schedule but not bad enough to put it into practice
This sums up the issue. Most people could get decent sleep if they wanted to or even made a basic effort, but their current poor-sleep compromise isn’t bad enough to make them want to give anything up. Or they don’t understand what they’re losing because it has been so long since they tried a reasonable sleep schedule.
> That implies my personal projects make enough money to have a family on. Not true now so the grind continues.
Consider giving up the side projects for a month or two. Side projects are one of the topics where people think they’re going to miss it more than they actually do. A month or two of total disconnectedness won’t sink your side projects, but it’s long enough to test the waters of a healthier sleep schedule.
You may find that after getting your sleep under control, your daily efficiency and energy levels improve such that you’re getting your work done faster, spending more quality time with your spouse, and ultimately freeing up a nice slot of usable free time in the day that could spend on side projects without wrecking your sleep schedule.
For a great many people their sleep schedule is not something they control. You have to work when your boss needs you to work. The specific hours you sleep on a given day will change randomly (ie I had to be in at 0500 rather than my normal 0630 today).
>> such that you’re getting your work done faster
So? Lots of people (most people?) work in jobs where speed is largely irrelevant. Working faster just means doing or being assigned more work, not going home sooner or getting any more free time for sleep.
- A vtubing engine for virtual production (film, improv, streaming)
- https://storyteller.io , tools for streamers (in-stream TTS, deepfaked gifs, a voxel camera), which should be done this weekend
I don't think I could prepare for YC or any other sort of funding any other way, short of quitting my other responsibilities. There's not enough time in the day, so you have to give up something.
I'll sleep more when I'm funded or when I'm dead, basically.
>> I want a better sleep schedule but not bad enough to put it into practice
> This sums up the issue. Most people could get decent sleep if they wanted to or even made a basic effort
Agreed.
> but their current poor-sleep compromise isn’t bad enough to make them want to give anything up. Or they don’t understand what they’re losing because it has been so long since they tried a reasonable sleep schedule.
I think that just like with Diet or Exercise with sleep the feedback loops are longer/delayed and that stops people from engaging in overwhelmingly healthy behavior - because the habit is harder to form.
I think that there's a reasonable definition of "healthy sleep schedule" in "any sleep schedule you can maintain without an alarm clock (and also maybe stimulants).
If we go by that metric, then the entire modern world has been built such that nobody will have a "healthy sleep schedule". I have to start work when I start work regardless of when I would be best suited to rising without my morning alarm.
Observation more than anything. Countless jobs that people make a living doing have their schedules set by a larger bureaucracy. This leads to people needing to set their life schedules around that job, rather than their natural rhythms.
> when my wife goes to sleep is when I feel like it's finally quiet enough to get some programming done
I tend to do this when I want to work on my hobbies, but then the relationship with my wife suffers. We enjoy going to bed together, it's part of the ritual of being a couple. I tried going to bed, then after she falls asleep getting up, but by then I'm too sleepy myself.
That's also a dimension. I feel bad that she goes to bed alone when I stay up. We say good night and it's nice but then I leave to stay up. It feels off balance from my perspective, although she is used to it and has adapted.
I have a similar schedule, but go to bed slightly earlier. I sit next to my wife in bed and code on my laptop for 2 hours before sleep. It's kind of the best of both worlds, but ergonomically imperfect. I'm definitely more productive at my desk, but have the same issues as you describe.
That seems like a really bad idea. You’re setting yourself up for sleep problems by associating your bed with work, and programming in particular is not a great thing to be doing just before bed, as it gets your brain really worked up.
If your wife is sleeping that whole time, what are you really gaining? The laptop screen light is probably affecting her sleep, and you’re possibly creating issues for yourself. It sounds like multitasking where you end up with two things in a mediocre state instead of giving full focus to each.
Agreed, plus the screen glow is bad for your sleep cycle and eyes as well.
I don't think there's an easy solution. Either your side projects suffer, or your relationship. I choose to keep my relationship healthy, but at some point, if you keep postponing every project and hobby, frustration starts to mount and that's not good for relationships either.
I also really appreciate my time alone after my wife goes to bed, but we have a 3 month old baby now and I’m assuming once she’s a couple years older that’ll no longer be an option. I also have a hard time deciding between doing something fun for myself (like playing a video game) guilt-free or getting work done during that time.
As an aside, I’d think our sex life would be better if we went to bed together. As it stands right now it’s something we need to specifically decide to do, and I’m guessing with couples that go to bed together there’s more of an assumption there.
> we have a 3 month old baby now and I’m assuming once she’s a couple years older that’ll no longer be an option
Starting from right now, it's no longer an option for you, if your share of parenting responsibilities is a fair one and you don't just dump the caregiving of the baby unto your wife.
So kiss your spare time goodbye starting from right now. Until your daughter is old enough that she can play on her own for extended periods of time without constantly needing attention, and that's a long road ahead in the future.
Whenever this reality gets me down, a smile from my daughter and some playtime with her is enough to bring joy to my life. I love her. But my hobbies suffer and this frustrates me.
Actually it’s worked out really well so far - my wife would go to bed around 9 and I’d stay up until after midnight so I could handle her and do the first feeding of the night.
The past few weeks she’s largely been sleeping through the night though, so that system is no longer needed. I’m a photographer and this is my off season so I’ve been watching the baby during the day until her daycare starts in a few weeks. It’s on the way to my wife’s work so in the short term I don’t think our schedules need to change quite yet.
We're about to enter into the phase of our lives where we want children. This year will be the year we start, erm, trying.
I know I need to get balance into my life because a child will be very destabilizing to my current lifestyle. * sigh * It feels like I don't have enough time to buy my own freedom.
This perfectly describes my situation as well. I've been pondering this subject for some time now but I don't see a way out. In my case I could get that focus time if I simply got rid of almost all of my hobbies and interests. That way it would be feasible to dedicate 1 or 2 hours per day to the disciplined pursuit of just a single activity. But that's about it.
The other day I had what I consider an extremely disciplined day. I woke up at 7am, was at the bouldering gym at 8am, went straight to work from that at 10:00am and worked until maybe 6:00pm. Then I went home, immediately started to make food and took care of some tax stuff, planning for upcoming vacations, and so on.
At the end this leaves me with more or less no time for anything on that day. So essentially bouldering in the morning was my theme on that day and that's it. But of course I don't want to accept this and then I'm disappointed that I didn't dedicate any time to my 5 other hobbies.
> In my case I could get that focus time if I simply got rid of almost all of my hobbies and interests.
The problem is that the human mind doesn't work like this. You're interested in the stuff you're interested in, and your brain is probably wired to find interesting things.
If you simply say "I'll work during business hours, then spend time with my family, then sleep" you're probably going to be healthy... and disappointed. You cannot switch off your brain, some friend or acquaintance will show you something they did and suddenly it's on again -- you have a new hobby!
Note I don't give side-projects in the sense of "I could make a living out of this" a real consideration. That's what my regular work hours are for. I want to spend the rest of my time doing things I enjoy, not simply look for an angle to make more money.
"Eating a large protein/fat based breakfast with as few carbs as possible as soon as you get up regardless of being a "breakfast person" or not"
As much as this might have helped you, this advice isn't going to work for everyone. Breakfast being the most important meal of the day was an advertising slogan, after all, and it isn't like dieticians are going to try to convince someone to eat breakfast if they are generally healthy.
For me, your advice means that I eat more during the day. I'm most hungry in the evening, so that's when I eat more.
There might have been some truth to the importance of breakfast, but it's completely outdated advice for most people. People are sitting down for 90% of their lives, with the occasional slow walk to the coffee machine or car, but eating like they're working in the fields for 10 hours every day.
I dont think nutrition-wise breakfast really makes any difference and I'm likewise extra triple skeptical of corporate "advice" but it has helped greatly to modulate my sleeping patterns.
It helps my body get attuned to falling asleep and waking up when I schedule it.
First few times it feels horrible but it's worth fighting through that knot in my stomach.
For whatever reason I cannot do this. Every time I think I have my sleep schedule stabilized, and I'm falling asleep at night and waking up 7.5 hours later with perfect mental clarity, inevitably I can only hold onto it for a few days in a row. Then it slips; the bedtime drowsiness arrives later, and later, and later in the evening. Eventually I end up shorting my big sleep at night to make it to work on time, and shortly after that I crash, the schedule goes to hell for a few days during which I am biphasic or worse, and then it stabilizes at a new earlier time again. Lather rinse repeat for my entire adult life.
So far I haven't found a magic solution to this. Monitoring my diet certainly helps, and so does regular exercise, and so did greatly restricting my caffeine intake, but nothing seems to stop the slow, steady drift of the sleep clock into the future. It's like my body just ignores the daylight cycle and does whatever it wants.
What I did instead was talk to my manager, explain the situation, and gain an OK to essentially work for one big block of time in a day wherever it falls. That didn't solve the sleep drift, but it did relieve most of the associated social pressure and stigma. But I'd like to solve this properly, since it's a massive pain even when mitigated in this way, and I might not be so lucky to have a support network at my workplace in the future.
> but nothing seems to stop the slow, steady drift of the sleep clock into the future.
I've always struggled with this. When I was still in school (pre-university) was the most extreme. I would stay up late on Friday nights (01:00-02:00) then sleep until at least midday on Saturday. By Sunday night I couldn't sleep until 03:00-04:00 so got a very short sleep before Monday.
There was a reason for it back then: night time was when I could use the internet. Because there was no pressure to get up early the next day, I would spend as long as I could online. I wonder if this caused my later problems or if they were innate.
Later in uni it was normal for me to be completely nocturnal. I overslept my alarm every single morning, which just became more and more of a joke as it would go off a mere hour or two into my "night". I remember well the first time I "lost" a day. Woke up and made a cup of tea and it was already dark. I hated it. I hated that other people had actually done stuff that day and all I'd done was slept.
Now I'm older I find it much easier to stay on top of. At some point something in me switched and now I can't stand it if I'm not ready to do something by 09:00. I remember my brother expressing a similar sentiment when he was 12 (me being 15 and in the aforementioned weekend routine). I wonder why it took me until my late 20s to feel the same way.
I'm reading Why We Sleep and it sounds like your circadian cycle isn't syncing.
Basically our internal clocks are not exactly 24 hours (can differ by even a few hours) so your body relies on some signals like sunlight and a meal in the morning to resync.
I had this problem too. For me it was solved by dimming lights and screens right down about 4 hours before I went to sleep and routinely eating as soon as I got up (especially when my stomach felt knotted).
I used to think my body had a 25 hour schedule lol.
Interestingly, I recall reading that when they've experimented with having people live in caves, absent of sunlight, for extended periods, they did tend to shift their "day" length to 25 hours.
I’ve been doing the former for over a decade, and something similar to the latter for half that time.
Despite that, any time I turn the alarm clock off on holidays, my sleep cycle tends to shift a few hours forward. My energy levels seem to correlate with the hours when I sleep as much as they do with their number.
I’ve concluded that I’m (a bit of) a night owl living in an early bird world. I’m fine with it, because a couple of hours is not an enormous difference, but it means I’m rarely at my fullest focus or energy levels, especially early in the day.
And the experience has convinced me (n=1) that the early bird/night owl dychotomy is primarily biological.
i agree - i do the same (although i do take 30 minutes extra on the weekends if im being honest).
> but it means I’m rarely at my fullest focus or energy levels, especially early in the day.
At the moment I'm trying to lean into this. I have the brain power and focus to work late at night, so I use that to do the mental work of planning/organising the evening before (clothes laid out for the mornings task, breakfast/lunch made in advance, gym bag packed, etc etc) and decide what I'm doing the following morning. I've found that it's the perfect time to go to the gym, do the "long" dog walk, scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush etc; anything that can be somewhat autopiloted but requires physical effort.
I've been doing it for about 6 months now to great effect (so far)
That’s eerily similar to what I’ve been doing for years now.
After the first year of very difficult morning workouts, I moved gym time to after work, and it became significantly easier.
I do as much preparation as possible the evening before. After a while, all those minor things became deeply embedded into my routine. As long as you keep it up at the start (and other responsibilities don’t intrude), it gets easier and easier.
One of the good things about growing older is knowing yourself better, and learning how to use that knowledge to your advantage.
In the middle of my life I am grateful that I've finally worked out a decent sleep system. It took a lot more than people realize but diet, exercise, regular schedule, stress management, and bedroom environment all played sometimes surprisingly important factors. Worst part is it's going to be different for everyone, but IMO totally worth the potential years to figure it out. Only advice I can offer is to use the scientific method, keep everything as static as possible and change one thing at a time but to get a real impression of that one thing changing it might take a couple weeks.
Can you give more details? In such discussions there are always a lot of people who struggle with this but very few who actually succeeded in fixing their sleep.
I think personally diet and exercise made the biggest impact. A diet that works for your body not your ideology, lots of real experimentation needed here and stop ignoring how you feel. For me getting off of carbs and doing light keto seems to be what my body wants.
Mix in some light exercise. Nothing crazy here, with all the health tracking available these days just aim for the minimums shown there. Doesn't have to be every day, just shoot for the majority of the week.
You might be shocked at how improving these two makes a difference. Do not take these to extremes, just aim for a better baseline than what you are doing now.
Also I'm speaking as an american here, and I was especially bad in these two areas. YMMV.
For me it mostly helps avoiding any food, and specifically carbs, a few hours before going to sleep. I guess otherwise the body wants to stay more awake to digest the food.
I stopped having late dinners and didn't notice much change. Eating fruits (e.g. carbs) sometimes 1-2 hours before sleep also doesn't seem to impact my sleep, so I guess YMMV.
I'm one such person. I've had multiple sleep studies performed over my adult life and none of them found anything substantial / actionable, yet I would wake every morning feeling like I hadn't slept at all, like I hadn't recovered.
Blackout curtains and a comfortable sleep mask.
A comfortable pillow.
Cleaning up my diet.
My phone goes on "wellbeing mode" at 9pm every night.
I get into bed consistently between 9 and 10pm and I read for 60-90 minutes every night before falling asleep.
I follow a consistent, no excuses, strength and conditioning training program.
Happy to expand on any of this.
I would add that I am in my early 40s and that we have 3 children in the house that are under 3 years old. There are complications here, but, despite that, all of the above remains in place, and I actually feel rested today and like I am recovering when I sleep.
What was your experimentation process like? I am in bed for 9-10 hours a night but only 3-5% of my sleep is deep. It’s awfully frustrating because of mood swings and inability to focus. I’ve been trying for a couple years now, but can’t nail anything down.
It was a slow, frustrating process. I'd reckon that, for me, 80% of it is nutrition and exercise and the other 20% is sleep hygiene (and I would include some specific supplementation in the hygiene category). I believe that consistency with the major contributing factors is where I found long-term success. The minor factors are there to aid the major ones.
I used to wear sleep trackers to bed and I also had (have?) very poor deep sleep. I've left the sleep trackers out of the equation for a couple of years now, so I can't really comment on where I am today, other than to say that I wake up feeling refreshed. A little groggy, for sure, but I don't feel extreme fatigue like I used to.
I don't like making drive-by, blanket recommendations about this stuff when it starts to wade into medical advice / specific nutrition or supplementation, but... My last sleep study (way back in early 2016) pointed me in the direction of blood work. There was a thought that I may have thyroid dysfunction (I don't, or at least I didn't). I understand that it's fairly common and is a source for sleep troubles for many.
I'd also encourage you to look into ZMA or zinc supplementation if you're an active person. I don't have any specific sources that I can point you to, unfortunately. There's a little controversy here, too, to be aware of, because there is a lot of marketing hype around ZMA, about it being a "testosterone booster" (a zinc deficiency will lower your testosterone, hence supplementing it "boosts" your testosterone) and also in terms of the recommended dosages (zinc has an antagonistic relationship with copper, iron, and magnesium -- you can easily overdo it and create other mineral deficiencies). Having said that, and again just speaking for myself, I think that ZMA or zinc alone, after everything else was in place, is the thing that pushed my sleep quality over the edge from "meets goals" to "exceeds expectations".
I really, really want to make it abundantly clear that I don't think taking ZMA or zinc before bedtime will work for people that don't have these other major factors in place and/or don't have a (training-induced) deficiency to begin with.
In terms of my experimentation process... I didn't keep a notebook but I can sort of walk you down the path that I took.
I started with exercise but for years I was only doing cardio. I was a competitive distance runner from 12 to 18 and then maintained the habit until I was 25. Then I abruptly stopped running. I picked it back up at 32. Distance running specifically because I really knew nothing else. In my late 30s, I picked up strength training. Today, I maintain a clear balance between strength and conditioning. Endurance work is only used to develop or maintain specific physiological adaptations.
Also around that 32 mark, I realized that frequent alcohol consumption wasn't doing me any favors. Of course I already knew this but I wasn't serious about it before this point. Today, I try to strictly limit alcohol intake to Friday / Saturday evenings with limits of no more than 3 drinks per night and no alcohol after ~8:30-9pm. I'd wager that I average 2-4 drinks per week today and I find that this doesn't appreciably impact my sleep.
I also noticed a big difference when I started to tap the brakes on my caffeine intake. Dr. Walker's book on sleep, which also comes with it's own controversy, highlighted something very important to me: The quarter-life on caffeine is ~12 hours. That realization was enough to get me to take rate limiting caffeine seriously.
By the time we had our twins, I was 38. I had dialed in my nutrition and exercise to a healthy place at this point. But my sleep quality was still lacking. I knew that I needed to really focus on it if I was going to survive the first few years of multiple young children. That's when I started to look into hygiene factors.
I run hot. Higher body temperatures can disrupt sleep. I stopped eating after 8pm. We bought "cooling" sheets. I started to sleep with a lightweight comforter. I started wearing cotton boxers and socks to bed. We invested in a fairly expensive mattress. I started to actually feel comfortable in our bed. I also invested in a pillow that didn't leave me waking up with a tight, sore neck. The sheets, comforter, and pillow went through a trial and error process.
One of our twins is highly susceptible to sleep disruptions from light. Once we figured that out, we outfitted our bedroom (they were still sleeping in their cribs in our room at that time) with blackout curtains. That made an immediately noticeable difference. Waking up that following morning, my wife and I both looked at each other and wondered why we'd waited so long. Now every bedroom in our home has blackout shades or curtains.
It's an agonizingly slow process. And I think it's also very subjective, especially the nutrition and exercise pieces. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr. Andrew Huberman but he has his own podcast, as well as multiple podcast appearances, where he gets into improving sleep / sleep quality. I'd recommend checking those out. Should be easy enough to find on YouTube.
Funny you mention it... Last week I started a fantasy series that has completely hooked me and I'm finding myself staying up a little bit later than usual as a result...
When I studied at school, at 10 pm I used to turn off my phone and read some book for 30 minutes—1 hour. For some reason it worked! However, I did it for 3 weeks, then back to my "normal" lifecycle.
I put quite a bit of effort into managing my reading backlog so that I always have a handful of books that I am interested in reading ready to go before I finish the one I am currently on. Also, if I read 50+ pages of a book and it is not capturing my attention, I will put it back on the backlog queue and move onto the next.
For me, Melatonin (just 300mcg, a very small dose) and cutting out caffeine and chocolate are sometimes required.
Two less obvious things that work for me:
- Massage the back of my neck rigorously before sleep. Probably this improves blood flow to the brain.
- Unlock the window handle slightly, to get a constant flow of air towards the head. Probably I need more oxygen (or lower CO2) than usual because this doesn’t work for my wife.
In my case, I needed to eliminate a medical problem first. My sleep problems resolved when I was diagnosed with celiac disease and I stopped eating gluten.
Now any sleep problems I have are entirely because I stay up too damn late sometimes. That's effectively an "emotion management" problem, which for me is alleviated by getting regular exercise, eating well, meditation, etc.
When you get down to that many details - it’s no longer sleep management but life management. You’ve had to completely rework your entire life in order to somehow get this one aspect of your life to be better.
Which is good for you but doesn’t seem completely reasonable for everyone.
I wish people realized that level of change is just beyond reasonable for most folks out there. There are too many things that are outside of control for folks. A lot of them due to financial troubles and there’s nothing they can realistically do in the next few years about it. Maybe they get themselves a better paying job and so forth but that might take a decade until it’s sufficient. Even then - they suffer more for the whole decade of their life.
If you are only looking for a quick fix to sleep you are correct. I would argue that decent sleep was almost incidental to all the other positive changes taking care of yourself will make in a persons life. It's a holistic everything is connected philosophy.
The results are interesting. It seems like there is a lot of clustering going on in the regression data. It could be worth investigating if instead of a linear relationship between sleep quality and consistency with academic performance, there is a logarithmic (or some other superlinear) relationship instead. This would help confirm the intuitive notion that there are diminishing returns to optimising one's sleep.
You'll want to have a stronger link before you can worry about what kind of relation it is exactly. And if you ignore the people with scores <60% you lose most of the correlation entirely, which to me suggest there's something causing both bad sleep and bad academic performance rather than there being some continuous relation. In fact the distribution looks bimodal which suggests there's something splitting the population in 2.
I recently dropped caffeine. For about 3 weeks, I have been drinking decaffeinated tea and coffee only. Fortunately I wasn't dependent on caffeine. I like the taste of those two beverages, but my body does not crave caffeine.
The effect on sleep is very notable. I wake up spontaneously between 6 and 7 am, even though it is dark in January in CZ and we have massive exterior blinds in our bedroom which make it completely dark. And I feel very fine and productive throughout the day.
I tried melatonin before, it sort-of works, but the effect of dropping caffeine seems to be much stronger.
But seriously, as a society as a whole, we undervalue sleep. By using an app [1] I've noticed that i sleep less than i thought i did. The thing is, i might be in bed 8,5 hours, but i only fall asleep after an hour or so, and also, i seem to wake up during the night.
There's no reason to think that 7-730 hours is so little for you that it's hurting your performance if it's just based on those measures. Don't give yourself sleep anxiety over pointless chasing of 9 hours sleep.
I think I have anecdotal evidence of the corollary on this: poor sleep quality leads to not-good academic performance.
When I was 20, I had an almost Fight-Club level of insomnia, where I would go multiple days at a time without sleeping, not for lack of trying. I would quit caffeine, bike multiple miles a day, try eating healthy, eventually getting a prescription for ambien which had so-so results but for a period of about 4-5 months I got the worst sleep of my life. My already-mediocre college performance took a steep nosedive, leading me to eventually drop out. It was hard for me to justify to myself going to class when I was, at some level, in physical pain.
Fortunately, I haven't had anywhere near that level of insomnia in 11 years, so the only thing I can think of was that it was the final throws of puberty.
I highly recommend Andrew Huberman's podcast and especially its sleep episodes for anyone interested in understanding sleep and turning the knobs to improve it:
Speaking as someone who is actually diagnosed with chronic insomnia and delayed sleep phase disorder, college sucked because my lack of sleep would affect my focus and concentration and that would kill me on exams where a sloppy mistake (circling the wrong answer) or running out of town would drop my grade significantly even if I fully understood the material.
I performed much better on homework assignments where there was less time pressure because I could work on them around my irregular sleep schedule. I'm grateful now for working as a programmer because it affords me the same luxury - with my condition I simply can't exist in a 9-5 society.
(Before people comment, yes I have tried melatonin and no, recreational drugs don't help me sleep either)
The more sleep-deprived I am - the worse my working memory feels to work, nevertheless the more productive I am. A sleepless night gives highly elevated productivity during the next day. I feel boost of attention capacity, inspiration and creativity. It even gets easier to do mental math.
Obviously a sleepless night also causes some physical discomfort but 500 mg of L-tyrosine cures it (and itself also gives some extra boost).
I also used to practice taking a nap every time I come home from the office but such an evening nap always (since my early childhood) makes my mood horrible (grouchy, unenthusiastic and asexual) for hours to come.
You probably aren't more productive, you just feel more productive in that you can sit and grind for a long time. I did a lot of practice programming where I measured myself, some things that would take hours when I was tired but I felt I was doing a lot of things took like half an hour when I was rested. However when I was rested I didn't feel that I accomplished much, it was just an easy task and then I moved on, while when I was tired I was feeling like I was moving mountains. Also code quality issues and bugs were much more common when I was tired.
> You probably aren't more productive, you just feel more productive in that you can sit and grind for a long time.
And when I am well-slept I can't sit and grind for a minute, I'm 95% anxiety and procrastination then. Even reading an article which doesn't fit in a single screen feels almost unbearable. But when I'm severely underslept it feels easy and joy to read anything almost no matter how long.
I would rather sleep 2 hours a night every night, be happy and productive (but astonishingly dumb when talking to others in real time though) if I didn't believe this probably is harmful for overall health in the long run.
Nevertheless it always is hard to get up and it requires a lot of sleep to feel good physically so I always sleep ~13 hours/night on weekends&vacations.
Have you tried adhd meds? Probably a healthier solution than trying to constantly sleep deprive yourself, and most likely more effective as well as you then no longer handicap your mental abilities.
Sleep deprivation migth help to focus and do those tasks at all instead of procrastinating. That's my experience at least dealing with boring and unpleasant tasks.
I don't have any research to back this up, but it's possible that framing it as being more focused on less interesting work rather than "productive" helps clarify what might cause it. When we are well rested, our brains are functioning at a higher level, which includes spending energy making micro decisions about how important things are, what the priority is, what work is related to what you are currently looking at, and so on. When over tired, our bodies exert less energy on non critical processes, which might mean not overanalyzing or being distracted away from a task you'd rather not have to do.
So getting certain work done is easier when tired, but productivity would arguably include doing the "right" thing, mapping the right information together, and so on, which you'd want to be better rested for.
Curious to hear if you agree on the productivity vs focus clarification, or if you feel like you're truly more productive in the sense that you do some of your best work (greatest ideas, executed efficiently, with minimal errors) when tired?
May not apply to you, but sleep depriving yourself can be an unintentional self-treatment for ADHD, or even other things like depression. Good to know if anyone reads this comment and identifies with it.
I agree. Anxiety has a huge impact on sleep. A lot of sleep experts focus on sleep hygiene which is important but not very helpful when anxiety is the main cause for the sleep problems. Sometimes people are not even aware of the problem cause anxiety can trickle in very subtly.
It's not bed time for me, it's wind down time. I can reliably get into bed for 11:30 every night, but how quickly I fall asleep depends on what I was doing at 10:30
Very interesting. I believe there is also the concept of sleep hygiene (nope - not a shower!) which involves creating a bedroom environment and routine to ensure consistent, uninterrupted sleep. A good night's sleep isn't just good for your mental health and productivity, it's also a good healer for your body.
I recall a talk describing a study to evaluate how the sleep-deprived lifestyle of college students was affecting their grades. Unfortunately the researchers had trouble finding a non-sleep-deprived control group at the school. They ended up paying students to (try to) sleep 8 hours a night (self-reported, though presumably somewhat accurately.) Unsurprisingly the less sleep-deprived group had better outcomes.
Another study observed high school students found that in any class at any given time around 1/3 of them appeared to be asleep (not merely "not paying attention" but actually unconscious.) The effect did not appear to depend on the teacher or course material.
I've felt this. For me, the most important factor for good sleep is going to bed and waking the same time every day. If I have one late night that causes me to sleep in the next day, it'll take up to a week for me to recover my normal routine.
Sleep is important, but this article is kinda useless in itself. First, yes, sure, of course sleep matters.
But also it's measuring association, not causation. It's easy to think of reasons it works in reverse: of course people with good grades sleep better, they don't worry about having poor grades.
And it's even saying that " Sleep measures accounted for nearly 25% of the variance in academic performance". That's causation language, and I don't think they determined that.
Bad sleep quality associated with an increased risk of starting to drink coffee!
Rejections at bars associated with an increased risk of ugliness!
Overloaded servers associated with HN article voting!
Wrinkles associated with an increased risk of ageing!
Tendency to reject loaded titles implying causality is associated with an increased risk of studying statistics!
Facial bruises associated with an increased risk of punches!
A) This is probably casual, because sleep is good
B) The most interesting part is that sleep the night before exams wasn’t associated with any change to grades. This actually suggests to me that sleep in and of itself is less casual and more correlated to general lifestyle choices. I recall my college freshman year in particular to be full of temptations and distractions.
It could still be correlative; 'lifestyle choices' are basically the definition of correlation not causation. Or were you being sarcastic?
For another (probably unhelpful) anecdote, got great grades in my senior year of college when I had a scholarship. One semester in my junior year I took 18 credits and also worked 32 hours a week through a 45-minute-one-way commute...I got very little sleep and my grades suffered for it. The primary things I learned that year were (1) don't over-commit yourself, (2) make a schedule and stick to it if you need to get the bare minimum done and don't have time to do everything, (3) you don't actually have to attend every lecture or turn in/complete every assignment to pass a class, (4) long commutes suck, and (5) a little bit of VHDL syntax stuck around was about the only thing I learned in those classes. My bad grades were not caused by poor sleep, poor sleep was a side effect of a larger issue (namely, the perpetual problem of money).
My take is that sleep the night before doesn't help you a whole bunch, or not nearly as much as sleep while you are learning the material. (i.e., consistent, quality sleep leading up to exams).
For all the discussion on the forums here, I control-f 'ed and didn't see a single mention of sleep apnea. It's very common in men, even more so as time goes on. If you have a family history of it or snore loudly, it may be worth seeing a sleep specialist.
I like to mention Mouth Taping since so few people know about it. Keeping the mouth closed at night helps with a few issues. This idea is unpolular (unlike CPAP, for example), but it can help, do check it out
This article stimulated an interesting discussion. Sleep problems are very fixable/treatable. Improving sleep starts with objective good quality sleep data- a sleep test. FDA grade multi night sleep test give us great insight into sleep to rule out sleep disorders (over 80% of people are usually not aware). Using data from a sleep test allows clinicians to guide us on what would be the most effective intervention to improve sleep. I work at empowersleep.com; it’s a digital sleep health platform. Not selling here but, I see so many people suffering I felt obligated to share there are solutions and guidance to better sleep. Just for context, I’m a board certified Harvard trained sleep doctor. We’ve helped thousands of people improve their sleep.
My sleep cycle is that I go 4 days until I have to take a longer sleep (10 hours) and the rest of the time I operate on 6-7 hours of sleep. I usually wake up at 7-7:30 and I usually go to bed at 12-1 or 9-10 on my long sleep days. It's inconsistent and I worry about that fact.
The biggest blocker for me is my time alone and distraction free. I like and want distractions to be gone when I work on personal projects. Early morning doesn't get me that as my wife wakes up at 5:15 (maybe if I woke up at 4?). If she's up and I'm up there are interactions which is great. And then there's text messages from friends and family and work chat all day. I can mute both and do but it's there, beckoning me for my attention. To take my focus...
Look I know what the answer is for me. I need to replace work time with project time. My life would be in more balance if I had my 9-5 chunk of time where I do what I like doing (vs work stuff) so I don't feel like I'm living 3 lives in a single day.
That implies my personal projects make enough money to have a family on. Not true now so the grind continues.