I had a very nasty case of insomnia 7 years ago. Without going into details of my associated illness, I went 2-3 months with almost no sleep due to hypnic jerks/sleep starts. When I told people I couldn't sleep, they assumed I just had difficulty falling asleep, but I literally could not fall asleep. It is terrifying. For whatever reason, whenever I miss a significant amount of sleep (one or two nights) I get very bad sleep jerks to the point I would start to fall asleep 30+ times a night and then wake back up immediately. The only two ways past it I found was a benzo sleeping pill or alcohol and both were hit and miss (just to inhibit the jerks - I had no problem starting to actually fall asleep). Even then, my body seems to build up massive adrenaline after sleep deprivation, so I would wake up 1-2 hours later in a cold sweat and have to start all over. The more sleep I miss, the worse it gets, and after you miss several nights in a row you get VERY "sleep anxious", and so the cycle continues. Once I'm caught up, I'm fine and the jerks disappear completely, but it takes a while. I just had another case of the jerks this year for the first time since then but I was able to get over it in about 3 weeks this time. Still, it freaked me out as I had considered myself past that and had gotten a little bit careless.
The point of this long winded intro: Don't take sleep for granted. If you sleep well, cherish it. Ever since this time I keep immaculate sleep hygiene. I go to bed on time, at the same time, get daily sunlight, don't eat before bed, and 9/10 times I'm asleep in minutes and sleep great. I still have occasional early wake insomnia, but for the most part sleep well.
Occasionally I think about things like mentioned in this article and what the long term effects will be, but mostly I just don't worry about it. There isn't anything I can do about it at this point except try to sleep as best I can from this point forward.
Went through 2 weeks of insomnia after living on a ship for a while, then back on land for 2 weeks, then back on ship for 6 months -- was normal after finally returning. Maximum 1 hour sleep for 2 weeks straight, most nights none.
The thing about those two weeks, was with no sleep there is no "refresh" between days. If I asked myself the question of what I had for breakfast this morning, it would have multiple answers. The past several days were "today" in memory. It was very disconcerting. It did have a cool upside of reading several books in 2 weeks time, but the downside was feeling like everything in the world was wrong.
Thankfully when I went back on ship, I was able to sleep again -- best sleep I ever had with the rocking and white noise.
My experience of being sleep deprived is that my memory starts going downhill -- I feel like I have difficulty recalling what happened on days where I was running on little sleep, even after I have had good rest. It's as though those memories weren't properly stored and just disappeared.
I did several days straight without sleep and got mildly delusional. I remember sitting up, thinking about something (can't remember what) and then a minute later realized I was just thinking complete nonsense and got up to work.
Well, it wasn't just breakfast, it was everything that I might consider "today" stacked on top of each other. So if I had a mental list of "things to do today", that just got longer. It was my mind was cluttered.
I wasn't as tired and craving of sleep as I would have expected. Probably physically tired a bit just because I was sitting up reading books all night instead of getting good rest. Individual tasks in the "now" didn't seem too bad, but everything else (and it turns out to be a lot) that depended on short term was messed up -- conversations with people, where I parked, what day it was, routine tasks which felt like they were already done but still needed to be done that day, etc...
I might need to do the laundry but felt like I had already done the laundry -- but that was 4 days ago. It took mental effort to observe what day it was, rather than waking up on Wednesday and knowing all day that it is Wednesday. Instead it I "knew" it was "Monday" and I also knew it was "Tuesday", and it certainly didn't feel like Wednesday. So I was spending mental effort for things that just flow naturally. Thankfully I didn't have much to do during those two weeks.
maybe they didn't realize but if you subjected them to any sort of cognitive, physical... actually you can almost say whatever kind of test, their performance in just about all of them would vastly downgrade compared to them in a rested sleep status.
these results have been known for a long time for various problem solving tasks (your error rate and task completion time will skyrocket), physically focused things like weight lifting or cardio (you will lift less and not be able to run as long before hitting a wall etc.), reaction tests (you will become a slowpoke), memory tests, mood and other psychometrics. there are also fairly obvious outward physiological effects, like increased collagen production will give you baggy eyes, etc.
I havnt stayed up for quite that long but even 96 hours without any sleep is a strange experience. Watching the sun go up and down multiple times without a break does mess with ones head a bit.
I am incredibly envious of people who have good or even average sleep. For some reason the last year or so I haven't been able to sleep well if I drink too much water. You know, that thing that we all need to survive daily? It's super messed up and every specialist I see waives it off.
I also get really bad sleep anxiety/water anxiety. And you're right, articles like these are only good for scaring normal people who fight their own bodies from sleeping. They're pointless for people whose bodies are fighting them and can only generate more stress.
Most sleep specialists are "sleep apnea specialists" in my experience. Can be useful if you have that, but was of limited use during my issues. I had to find my own way.
Best of luck. Not sleeping sucks. And I totally agree, all these articles do for those with sleep issues is add more stress. Very few people choose not to sleep.
Ugh, I've been getting that sense over the last few months but I was holding out hope maybe I could find one that wasn't. The whole specialty medicine thing in the US is another awesome thing to navigate :)
I had a primary care doctor insist that I needed to see a sleep specialist about possible apnea, even though I told him that I wasn’t tired or having trouble sleeping. I went through with it because I was curious if the specialist would have any additional insight, but nope, it was just checking for apnea and sending me on my way.
That could be linked to electrolyte balance. Depending on your water source, if it's too low in minerals it can flush out your system causing something like hyponatremia (low sodium), which can cause sleep issues.
I had similar problems when I used a Brita filter with a ketogenic diet, switching back to regular tap water fixed it. :)
I agree, and magnesium is a key one. I certainly find I become sleepier easier if I use magnesium bisglycinate (or any magnesium really, but the bisglycinate is absorbed better and hence has no effect on my bowels!:) Coffee not only provides a stimulant but also prevents magnesium being absorbed well[1], so if you like coffee it's worth taking some.
I also take magnesium bisglycinate, usually at night [1].
I recommend everyone does their research on magnesium deficiency. Supposedly the vast majority of the nation is low in magnesium due to soil quality depletion. Vegetables these days just aren't packing the same punch that they once did.
As a parallel connector noted, electrolytes- Gatorade powder, either regular or sugar free. If you use the grape with soda water it makes a pretty nice grape soda.
I'd also ask about a benzo or other chemical help.
I am not a doctor and this is something to ask a doctor about, but Amitriptiline has been great for improving my sleep (as a side effect of the main reason) but it is also mild in terms of side effects (mood, next day drowsiness are minimal)
and generically available too. YMMV of course.
With no sources, and only a second-hand anecdote, I’ve heard that fasting from anywhere between 3-7 days can have some crazy effects on sleep (apparently you have tons of energy at odd times, ketones, etc etc). Anyway, might be worth a shot in the dark if nothing else seems to work for you during those spats, maybe try a bit of a fast and see if it provides a helpful shock to the sleep system?
Interesting suggestion. I thought I had tried everything, but never tried anything like that. Thx will keep in mind if it ever happens again (god I hope not).
Research seems to support it: "Compared to baseline, a significant decrease in arousals, a decrease in periodic leg movements (PLM) and a non-significant increase in REM sleep were observed at the end of fasting." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12748412/
Though, personal anecdata: I sleep less during week-long water fasting (<7h instead of usual ~8h). I feel excellent but the total duration is less. Resistance training (barbell) increases the duration for me.
I find when I can't sleep the best treatment is fig newtons and milk, which is about the opposite of this. I also find that food to close to or far away from bedtime is injurious to my sleep.
It's "nice" to meet somebody else who has experienced hypnic jerks before. It's like torture how they set in right on the edge of sleep. I went through a period of months of sleep jerks that seemed to be induced by a back injury, it's like my nervous system was going haywire in the presence of a pain signal as it was switching into sleep mode. Not only was it terribly disruptive to my sleep, it interfered with the healing process of my injury and turned into a vicious repetitive cycle.
While it was happening, I'd describe the sensation as like skipping a stone - I'd have to go in steep by taking a valium and going to sleep at my most tired or else I'd need to resign myself to "bounce" off the sleep surface a bunch of times before I finally fell through.
I used to have really bad anxiety, not as bad anymore, but I have no doubt that once I start missing sleep the anxiety plays a big role. I doubt anyone can go more than a few missed nights w/o getting really anxious - I think it is an inevitable result of sleep deprivation.
I can totally relate to your surge of adrenaline - my body gets really funky when I miss sleep. Most people get sleepy and more prone to doze off, but I have the exact opposite (I get wired but tired) and can often feel my heart beating in my ears and chest.
I also remember discussing with my wife if the hospital would sedate me beyond something like a bezo which was of limited use for me (I would sleep 1-2 hours per pill). Sounds like you had success - I'll keep that in mind if there is ever a next time :-)
Wow, that's a real nightmare scenario (no pun intended). I suffer from the same kind of hypnagogic jerks, albeit to a much lesser extent. The one trick that sometimes helps for me is to try sleeping on my stomach. It know it sounds like bunk... but putting a bed in the way seems to help dampen the sudden motion to the point that I can start falling back asleep almost immediately.
Yeah, I can second sleeping on the stomach. I guess I'm lucky, it's never been that bad. I often twitch myself awake immediately after the first time I fall asleep - but it's only ever the first time, and not every night. I've never found a pattern / reason, but it doesn't happen if I'm on my stomach.
Sometimes I mostly "sleep" through it - only wake up enough to notice and then fall right back to sleep, since I'm familiar with it now. But it wakes up my spouse, and startles the cat. :/
Interesting suggestion. I've always been a back sleeper and occasionally in the mornings when dozing, side sleeper. I think it would be challenging for me to sleep on my stomach, but it would be definitely worth a try if it comes back.. thx
Generally speaking, I'm a back and side sleeper, but sometimes if I really need to sleep, I always find stomach sleeping works the best (and lowers stress -- if something was keeping me up, stomach sleeping usually helps). That being said, it hurts my back to sleep on my stomach. I've found the putting a pillow under my stomach helps, but not completely.
I get worried too. I had untreated sleep apnea for upwards of 10 years (age 13 - 23). Each night my oxygen dropped to 85% or lower (this is what they recorded in the sleep study), and I woke up literally every minute for 10 seconds or more.
Scary to think about what my future holds, I know my attention span / memory sucks much more compared to when I was younger... anyways, I hope studies like these are wrong.
I've always wondered about this advice. I find it very difficult to fall asleep on an empty stomach. And even then I wake up much earlier than usually and very hungry. Usually I try to eat something heavy about 3 hours before going to bed.
IIRC multiple studies have found that eating a few hours before bed makes it easier to get to sleep. Avoiding eating 3 hours before bed is the advice I see about avoiding reflux (in addition to GERD reflux can go into the lungs and be less symptomatic).
Hence 'SUPPER' <-- supper was always common, and typically (in my neck of the woods) "Dinner at ~4:30PM" or so.
Dinner was if you had guests.
---
I have two strong personal takeaways at this post:
A)
* I have long had sleep issues, with the jerks and what not (I have them literally every other day, to this day)
* I recognize that many people ITT are high-IQ/thought-producing-workers
* The fact that REM does a basic "mental-wash" over your cortex and brain in gen, thus to solidify (calcify) memories into system. Such that if you experience poor sleep - you have a poor memory. This is TRUE for me.
B)
* Diet is a huge factor. And intuitively enough, just yesterday I was feeling that my internal sodium/potassium pump was off... I could feel it.
I eat a lot of bananas, but a close person to me is a Cellar Somm at TFL, who has 19,000 bottles of wine in the catalogue, and she constantly berates my poor memory ; but she literally eats a banana every single day on way to work, and has the ability to fall asleep in seconds, and when asleep - sleeps like a mummy.
ALSO partakes in smoking pot - which is commonly referred to when talking about memory loss, but jer memory is impeccable even over a decade, the details she can recount... (Dont make a fool of yourself at TFL).
The weird thing was I was literally thinking about the importance of the potassium sodium pump, and that I could feel an imbalance in my own body on such (my focus was on meditating on the health of my kidneys) but knowing that its also related to sleep and, more importantly for me, memory ; and the REM WASH - I am convinced this will be next step in restoring what was perviously a photographic memory when I was 15...
Alcohol ruins sleep for me. I wake up randomly during the night after a few beers, and I miss out on deep sleep and REM sleep. If I don’t get REM sleep I can barely function the following day.
Dosage is the key. I drink one quick glass of red wine before bed when I'm having jerks and that often does the trick. Sometimes I need a second. But yes, too much alcohol and you will awake later in the night typically...trade offs.
Or baclofen (5mg or 10mg before bed), similar but a bit different (and not scheduled if you are in the US). Either should also help keep you asleep, at least for the first night or two (like almost anything that affects sleep :(). Both affect GABA-B receptors, and I think alcohol affects both main types. Although, if your issue is similar to my similar issue (usually mild sometimes during the day but worst before bed, although not enough to keep me awake ever) the baclofen (or sodium oxybate) might even possibly make them worse (seems possible in my case, although I'm not sure it is all that likely that it does).
Another one you might not have considered is rosmarinic acid ("rosemary extract" or "lemon balm extract" or just a strong lemon balm tea). This reduces the metabolism of GABA and in my experience had a distinct but fairly mild effect on sleep that lasted a month or two of continuous use (unusually) but then took over a year to have any obvious effect again (possibly even longer, I haven't tried it much since and I can't remember if it ever really helped again). Unfortunately, I don't remember it having much effect on my movement issues but since alcohol and benzos affect your issue it might be worth a try rather than those if it happens again (hopefully not!). I was using 200mg rosemary extract standardized at 20% rosmarinic acid (from a no longer available source). I don't know if the chamomile does something similar, in which case it likely wouldn't help you due to the tolerance.
I fixed my sleep with modafinil, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone not just because I'm a nobody but because fixing sleep wasn't why I was taking it, that was just a happy side effect. My problem was and in part still is that it's quite hard for me to stay awake during the day, which meant that when I was in school I slept through most of it and when I was at work I would either fall asleep or "zone out" to the point of no functionality.
Once when I was operating a lathe someone told me to stop the machine after it passed ~300mm on the X axis, which takes maybe a minute, but before it reached that point I was already out of it, luckily the person was nearby and very quickly noticed what's happening and managed to stop the machine.
Modafinil helps me keep my eyes open and stay present in the real world. But I'm my country you can only get it via a prescription, so it's not really accessable.
You know, I feel like shit, I wanted to write something about my experiences in the past but all I could think about my doctors warning me not to share stories like these on the internet as future employers may read them and consider them a strong red flag.
Am I overly cautious?
Getting healthy sleep is a real issue many are battling with I believe.
I have one account tied directly and obviously to my true identity, and another (this one) that is not. Unless a future employer had access to HN's server logs (or my ISP, etc), they wouldn't be able to tie this comment to me.
A medical condition caused me insomnia that kept me up for four and a half days once. After the second day, my entire body began to hurt. By the end, I couldn't follow the plot to movies to keep myself distracted from how miserable I was and I stopped forming whole memories. I was so disoriented that I was afraid to walk down a steep hill to go to a pharmacy because I was afraid I'd trip and get badly injured.
Months later, I watched a couple of different movies that I thought I'd never seen. But I kept knowing the next couple of plot points. I didn't know how they'd end, but I'd clearly watched them in that dilapidated state because I always knew what was about to happen next in the next scene.
[deleted and reposted where I meant to reply after mis-click]
My best guess is it is a form of epilepsy commonly called "negative myoclonus". Essentially it causes involuntary limb movement whenever you relax. When sleep deprived, it can also happen for me at night before bed when I'm relaxed sitting in a chair. I also noticed my startle reflex is greatly exaggerated during these times. Strangely it ONLY exists when I'm sleep deprived. Right now, for example, I have zero symptoms of this.
Because parts of your body must work to digest that food (gut, liver, pancreas, etc). You don’t perceive it, but it’s happening. Then your blood sugar raises, which your body works to bring down. So your body is not resting even though parts of your brain may be.
I started noticing that whenever I was fasting, my sleep quality seemed to be much better.
I finally decided to try not eating in the late afternoon or evening, i.e. I'll try to have my last meal by 3 or 4 PM.
My sleep quality improved noticeably from doing that. I wake less often at night, and in the morning wake up feeling more refreshed. Definitely worth a try, though it may just be me.
There's been various studies on it (1), nothing super conclusive, but general medical belief seems to be eating shortly before bed (< 1hr) disrupts time to go to sleep.
Is a jerk accompanied by something happening in a dream?
I have this every now and then, for example I start dreaming that I'm walking and then I suddenly trip on something which wakes me up.
It also worsens if I'm already deprived of sleep. To me it feels like the longer I stay awake the more vivid my dreams are and they start earlier as I'm falling asleep.
For me it's not really an inconvenience as it doesn't happen that often, but it's annoying as I have to fall asleep again.
No, I don't get far enough into sleep for that - it happens right at the point of dozing off.
I know what your talking about and do occasionally get those kind as well. I will dream something like I'm walking down a sidewalk and suddenly the next step isn't there and I jerk awake. I usually get this if I fall asleep sitting vs laying, etc.
In case you haven't tested for it yet, maybe mention to your doctor to test your serotonin levels as hypnic jerks are a known symptom of low serotonin levels.
I had a bad case of this in 1997/1998 for about two weeks, it was terrible. I didn't know the name, "hypnic jerks." Like a fool I didn't go to the doctor. I occasionally get those jerks while just on the verge of sleep now but it doesn't last more than 10 or 20 minutes.
- exercise. I lift weights and do some cardio. Ease into it as overdoing it can make it harder to sleep. Do in morning or afternoon, not evening.
- comfort. If your bed isn't comfortable get a new matress. It can make a world of difference.
- chamomile tea before bed. I drink two cups nightly.
- I supplement magnesium, and find that taking a big dose before bed both helps my sleep and mild jerks
- Make sure the room is dark. I use a sleep mask as otherwise I wake up at 5-6AM when the sun cracks thru the blinds
- Make sure the room is cool. My upstairs bedroom doesn't cool well via central air so I got a portable unit to assist
- Relax. One night of missed sleep won't kill you and if you can convince yourself of that, you are more likely to relax and fall asleep
- Deep breathing. If you can't fall asleep. Practice relaxation via deep, slow breathing in your belly, not your chest. It takes practice, but works great.
- Pzizz app. Awesome, awesome stuff. I like the relaxed breathing and sleep hypnosis sessions
- If your brain just won't stop, try some inositol. I take 3g (most pills are 500mg, so 6x) and that seems to work
- Some melatonin can help if you just can't get "sleepy". For something stronger, 50mg of benedryl knocks me out good. I try not to take either of these very often though.
For about 2 years now, I've been doing most of my workouts in the late evening. It's mostly weight training. I rarely start before 9pm and often start around 11. Last night, I went from around 11:30 to 12:15. I take about an hour to stretch, shower, rehydrate, and wind down. Then I fall asleep like a rock for the entire night.
I feel like no one read the entire article, and it's partially the fault of traditional newspaper writing style for sticking the juiciest stuff up from, but the article concludes there's no consensus on what chronic sleep deprivation does to humans.
> Nevertheless, many scientists said that the new research should not be cause for panic. “It is possible that sleep deprivation damages rat and mouse brains, but that doesn’t mean that you should get stressed about not getting enough sleep,” said Jerome Siegel, a sleep scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did not contribute to the review.
> Dr. Siegel noted that neural injury comes in degrees, and that the extent of sleep deprivation’s effect on the human brain is still largely unknown. He also expressed concern that undue worry about the long-term effects of sleep deprivation could lead people to try to sleep more, unnecessarily and with medication.
The opinion of a single review paper on effects in mice is not conclusive science. So, in other words, there's no news here.
You are cherry-picking and being unnecessarily dismissive.
From the same article : “Sleep loss can injure the brain, and if it happens in mice, and it has been shown to happen in other species, then it probably does happen in humans,” Dr. Veasey said. “It always begs the question: How much sleep loss would cause injuries? But looking at all of this literature together, of around one week of chronic sleep loss, it really does suggest that you injured the brain to some extent.”
There is enough consensus in the scientific community about "some" connection between sleep deprivation, free radicals, oxidation stress and cell damage. Because of ethical issues since we are not allowed to directly force stress a Human (the article states: there is currently no ethical way to measure the degree and kind of cell damage caused by sleep deprivation in the locus coeruleus and hippocampus of a living human.) we do it on genetically well-matched species like Fruitfly, Mice etc. We then use statistical inference to extrapolate to Humans and see how well it matches with self-reported/observed data.
Folks, we are all going to die. Live life well, make sensible decisions, eat well, get outside, exercise, socialize. The rest is noise. Do you want to be min-maxing every facet of your life?
While the importance of getting enough good sleep has recently become mainstream, we are still living in a culture where just striking a balance between work and a personal life is an unattainable goal for many people. We should really be talking about work/life/sleep balance, since excelling at the former two easily come at the cost of the latter. As the article highlights, sleep seems like a facet that is important to optimize above most others.
The public health consequences of sleep loss and sleep-related disorders are far from benign. The most visible consequences are errors in judgment contributing to disastrous events such as the space shuttle Challenger (Walsh et al., 2005). Less visible consequences of sleep conditions are far more prevalent, and they take a toll on nearly every key indicator of public health: mortality, morbidity, performance, accidents and injuries, functioning and quality of life, family well-being, and health care utilization. Some of these consequences, such as automobile crashes, occur acutely within hours (or minutes) of the sleep disorder, and thus are relatively easy to link to sleep problems. Others—for example, obesity and hypertension—develop more insidiously over months and years of chronic sleep problems. After decades of research, the case can be confidently made that sleep loss and sleep disorders have profound and widespread effects on human health.
I've met people who pride themselves on only sleeping 4 hours a night because they're too busy "working hard" for 18hours at the office. This article could really help them.
> Do you want to be min-maxing every facet of your life?
I've been sleeping less than 6-7h consistently for the past few weeks, and if that'll cause permanent damage to my brain/memory, I absolutely want to prioritize a fix more urgently.
I generally proscribe to satisficing, and wouldn't want to freak out if I missed 30-60min here or there, especially if I still pretty fine, but I value my faculties.
Also, discomfort is usually your body giving you a hint: stop doing that. If the amount of sleep you get leaves you feeling good, there is very little chance you are hurting yourself.
Six hours is definitely not something that makes me uncomfortable over the mid term (multiple years) but eventually catches up. Four hours doesn't feel uncomfortable for me until about a month or two of sustained low sleep.
Seems like sleep, which is a third of your life and has a impact on the other two-thirds, is a very big factor to "live life well". Do you really consider it noise?
There is no news for some virtual construct of an ideally informed individual - meanwhile, I often meet simple people that believe that sleep is optional and secondary. And the consequences are very visible.
> consensus
For practical reasons and purposes, waiting for """consensus""" is a bad idea.
It is, sure, but to recalibrate the idea of "evidence" start asking the Man in the Street... You'll see that Terry Jones is now nowhere to be found, Carol Cleveland is not a man and - you'll be "at a loss".
> accepted by the scientific community
Sure, but my point was that we don't wait for it. (Were it, again, that simple.) "Ars longa, vita brevis" has another sense not restricted to the individual.
Sleep debt > Lack of Focus > Stress at work > Stress migrates home > Bad Sleep from Stress > Spirals
May i point out that nothing protects from stress migrating home. Nothing. Normal Homo Sapiens Fight or Flight response expects the stress to cease after the dangerous encounters. The role switching of modern society does not offer a mitigation for that. Meaning the lion hunts you home to the cave. Every day.
Stressor handling strategys are plenty available
(Rock climbing -> refocus the stress response to a fleeting danger)
(Meditation -> Learn to control the stress producing body response), but the best one is to remove oneself from a stressfull environment.
Nothing is worth that payment reduction, after all you pay with your life, getting your system flooded with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol which significantly reduces your lifes lenght and quality.
Just dont do it. If somebody wants to stress you, throw it on the floor and quit. Do it, until they stop stressing you.
-> refocus the stress response to a fleeting danger
video games are filling this role for me (and i exercise separately void of danger). although i used to get caught in feedback loops of too much gaming leading to decreased performance of responsibilities leading to more stress leading to more video games to destress.
that said, i still recommend them. just be aware of the potential cycle and stay disciplined about using them as a tool! Also, dont get so caught up in what youre "supposed" to do in the game such that it becomes another source of stress.
works with a variety of games for me. my preference historically has been competitive shooters with team communications (CSGO, Halo), strategy games (Civ5), survival games (minecraft, v rising), RPGs (elden ring, skyrim, Divinity Original Sin: 2)
games are the perfect environment to push a comfort zone, trust your gut, be wrong, suffer consequences, and bounce back from it. this seems to be critical for me. I think a lot of games would work. I love trying new games for this reason, and tend not to "complete" games unless it's convenient to.
i find the catharsis is heavily dependent on how i play the game. I try to challenge myself on my own terms, like shadow boxing, while maintaining a respect for the game and playing along. I try not to be stressed about performing my best, nor completely careless. I honestly rarely try to perform at my best, but do try to keep it rare rather than never.
It can be an exercise in and of itself to maintain an appropriate amount of care and effort throughout the entire experience. I slip up one way or the other at some point and it feels good to catch myself and reset mentally.
edit: it also helps that it is usually the last thing i do for the day and i go into it feeling satisfied about what ive done the rest of the day (closed work for the day, exercised, chores, hygiene)
It's unfortunate to see stuff like this when I feel like everytime I'm delaying sleep it's for my education. Sometimes I'm just playing video games but usually I'm really learning or building something. I'm a major victim/perpetrator of "revenge bedtime procrastination" because I really don't want to have to just get up in the morning and have another unfulfilling day at work.
I go to sleep very early and when I wake up I'm full of energy to start to learn things or work on side projects.
I was doing it the other way around. I will stay awake until late and try to go to sleep with enough time to have rest. There reality is that I will always wanted up with the clock alarm and lacking rest.
But I failed to sleep because I just wanted to do that last thing. Now I know that I have 4 hours until I have to start working, that are very productive hours. And I always wake up before the alarm goes off, fully rested.
This rings so true for me. Doing an 8-hour a day internship for the first time this summer (college freshman), and even with it being remote and at home, I struggle to find the time to balance 2h at the gym, meals, walks w/ family/dog, and most importantly, Leetcode and working on independent skills. There’s never enough time in the day and I don’t know how I can fix it.
I'm a developer with 5 YOE, and it doesn't really end. But honestly, unless you're definitely trying to get into the MANGA (formerly FAANG) world, I would focus much more on just building something to show to potential employers. I think that's more likely to make an impression on any arbitrary company, because almost every company I've ever interviewed with has not really cared about algorithmic problem solving skills. Most companies want to see your ability to produce software. Plus actually building something, imo, is much more emotionally satisfactory.
Thanks for the advice. Pretty much exactly what I’m trying to do. To be quite honest, I don’t do more than 1h of leetcode per week - been trying to spend much more time working on a startup with a friend. But even that is so hard. After a 10-5 workday, and being 9-10 by the time I’m done with everything else, I’m dead tired and it’s hard to work up motivation even when it’s something I love to do (write code where I determine what I’m writing).
> been trying to spend much more time working on a startup with a friend.
Jesus, an evenings-and-weekends startup plus a full time job and leetcode and 2hrs(!!!) at the gym per day?
One thing you're going to need to accept is that there isn't enough time for everything you want to do. In a day. In a life. Consider dropping some of this stuff. My god, you don't even have kids eating 20+ hours a week like lots of people do!
Days are never going to get longer, and your life is only getting shorter. Maybe you operate like this for a little while at the start, but you're going to have to prune at some point. You can't fit a gallon of water in a thimble.
My advice would be to congratulate yourself on fitting much more productive stuff into a day than almost anyone else I’ve ever seen (sustainably). Don’t stress, and if you want to try to fit something else in, use a vacation day.
This. "I'm highly productive all but 3 hours every weekday and get a good night's sleep 9-6, help". WTF. This whole thread is crazy to me. "I barely have any downtime during the week" yes! That's adulthood (well, it was high school, too, but there was that sweet, sweet break of college that I didn't appreciate enough when I had it...) and it's the reason sane countries mandate 4+ weeks of paid vacation per year. Work weeks are a grind (throw kids in the mix and tell me how much time you have left then!) and weekends are barely enough to almost recover and take care of all the important things you were neglecting during the week. Multiple entire weeks off per year are required to have actual leisure and something like full recovery from the grind.
vanviegen actually has a great point. You're already spending full-time learning. In my case, I'm not learning anything at my daily job anymore. Realitically, I'm more often teaching.
The problem with me is that technically I can find time for everything I want to do. But as soon as I start to get into a strict routine, things start to feel monotonous and I eventually go back to my old ways.
It's a bit distressing reading this and thinking of all the sleep debt I've had, especially in my late teens and early 20's when I had school and started a career. Especially my teenage years when I was still developing. I never thought it could be serious or permanent. Alas, all I can do is try to prioritize my sleep now. At least I have made significant improvements recently :)
I had the first same thought. But then also, media has always been alarmist/click-baity, and that's the way story is told. That's true whether its Fox News or New York Times. Doesn't make this story necessarily wrong, but maybe not as dire as the way story/headline is framed.
Oxygen is also a poisonous gas that is slowly oxidizing your body, but as far as we know, humans have been exposed to it constantly since prehistory. I'm sure the same could be said for sleep loss, whether because they are stressed about work, or stressed about falling out of the tree and being eaten by the lions below.
Try your best to get a good night's sleep, but don't let these kind of "recent studies show" articles distress you too much. There are all kinds of harms in our environment holding us back from hypothetical perfect health, and there always have been.
> There are all kinds of harms in our environment holding us back from hypothetical perfect health, and there always have been.
If "us" is mankind and its history, the "always have been" seems off. There are traditional harms, like the risk of being bitten by a tiger, but most of those harms are recent, something we are not yet genetically rewired for.
Of course, so get the best night’s sleep that you can, but don’t be distressed about the irreversible brain damage you suffered staying up late as a college student.
I'm amazed how many people just don't care about their sleep getting interrupted. I had a thing with my neighbors where I was complaining about them waking me up. They basically told me they don't care about getting woken up and I should just relax. Like yeah, maybe I could relax if you let me sleep. I was blown away theyre alright with constant sleep interruptions. I can't believe the qol stuff people just put up with.
People are different, and we still don't have a good understanding of how we're supposed to sleep. For instance the 8h of continuous sleep at night guideline is just that, a guideline, that won't fit many people's life of biological cycle.
Guidelines are needed to make policies and sweeping decisions at population level, but shouldn't be taken too seriously at individual levels.
Your neighbor was insensitive and should be more compassionate, but it doesn't mean their QOL is worse than yours (arguably they were in better shape than the sleep deprived you)
I have seven years of sleep tracking data and the biggest thing I've learned is that how little I can help in changing my sleep schedule or length. Sure I might sometimes manage to get to bed early, wake up early or sleep hours longer than usual, but if I actually listen to how I feel, it's really consistent and also not what school or nine-to-five work would require.
I mean it kinda makes sense as well, biologically, that there's a bell curve of both duration and falling asleep hour. It's dangerous and limiting for a group of people to be asleep all at the same time.
It's immensely frustrating when people push for their opinion of what a good sleep schedule looks like. We can unfortunately still see it in our school system and I can only hope that at some point our policies start following the research.
I realized at some point that a good portion of harm from sleep interruptions comes from being anxious about them, not the interruptions themselves.
I be have always been very sensitive about my sleep, but after getting a child (and suddenly getting lots of interruptions every night) I stopped caring and found out that a few interruptions a night isn't really that big of a deal if I don't let myself get agitated about it.
I had a incredibly stressful college experience where I suffered severe sleep deprivation on the regular due to undiagnosed ADHD. I worry that I have permanent brain damage from the experience.
I'd say unless you're experience seriously crippling problems I'd take some distance from the anxiety. Brains are much more resilient than thought. If you have tangible symptoms, consider asking your GP, better safe than sorry.
The human body and brain are resilient and what was, was. You can now focus (pun not intended) on not repeating such an experience and take good care now.
Go find and read some articles about neurogenisis to feel better? Seriously though, as a young adult I bought mephedrone analogs from RC vendors at one time and then later saw all the wild claims of brain damage and inability to sleep afterwards.. Relax, you are still you, and you're okay. It's not the end of the world.
And know that the brain has a massive potential for change and repair. It takes some pretty serious damage to see permanent issues. Most things will go away over time
It is very likely a safe assumption that all throughout history humans have had to endure some lack of sleep. The safest goal would be to avoid prolonged and large sleep debt, but losing sleep over losing sleep won't help.
One of the best books on this topic is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. While I know people on HN dislike the author, I think it’s a great book to read once in your life and get the benefits of knowing how important sleep is without being too alarmist. It helped me each day to get better at sleeping. I think we pride ourselves on our hustle and lack of sleep where these badges hurt us both in the short term and long term. Perhaps that is just a season of life everyone goes through though.
There's a pretty long (4-part) discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog[0] about Guzey's article and the book. In the end I was pretty convinced that many of the book's claims cannot be trusted.
Look at section 19 of the review. Matthew cut off a part of a graph from his sources that doesn't support his theses. How unscientific is that? Why shouldn't I be disappointed?
That in a "debate", you could value the proponents and rank the proposals accordingly, but it is a most difficult game for a number of reasons (that the proposals are complex; that the proponents are complex and encompassing strengths and weaknesses; that your judgement over them may be mislead; that circularly it is not clear how to (who will reliably) evaluate them etc.),
or that at some point you may want to shift the investment from the pieces of the debate to your ability to assess them critically and build the grounds for a more reliable judgement.
Just a general principle of distance from contents - heavyweights are hard to find so our ability to delegate judgement is restricted.
> ...it was read by hundreds of psychologists and neuroscientists who – I believe – also failed to find any serious issues [...] Some of the scientists wrote to me directly [including] a sleep scientist with >50 h-index who studied sleep for more than 40 years
This isn't some crackpot questioning the scientific consensus of an entire field of study. It's a critique of specific contents of a single piece of work.
Given that pop sci publications have a history of being slippery with the truth, and given the financial incentive to make millions off a pop sci book, and given that the claims made in the blog post are easily confirmed and checked, this appeal to authority that you've made is misplaced.
I think the great thing about our industry is that most of us can set our hours and work any block in a 24 hour period. Personally, I've had the best success going to sleep when I'm about to get tired, and getting up without an alarm when I'm done sleeping. That tends to be several sets of 2-3 hours a night. Generally, I don't get sick every year, but when I do, the first sign is I sleep a full 9-10 hour span.
I also notice that napping is not good for me. Unless I can sleep the full 2 hour span, I'm better off waiting until bedtime. I suspect shorter naps disrupt a rem cycle and cause a fogginess upon waking, where the full rem cycle being 2-3 hours I wake up feeling like I've had a good coffee. You can train yourself to notice this as you pass through various stages of 'awareness' while you're sleeping. Each time you remember seeing your clock, that is usually one complete rem cycle.
If the day were 28 hours long, it would match my needs perfectly. Why is this?
I also think I have this, though my lifestyle seems to play a big role.. if I'm very active I can stay on a 24-hour cycle; but the majority of the time my cycle is more like 24.5-26 hours, which slowly causes drift until I need to do a 2-3 day 'reset' (go to sleep at 6 AM one night, 12 PM the next, and 6 PM the next), which leads to me being really tired for the majority of those days.
Once I get to sleep at 6 PM I'm set for at least a couple of weeks though, I can slowly drift to sleeping at midnight - 2 AM which is pretty good for me.
> I think the great thing about our industry is that most of us can set our hours and work any block in a 24 hour period.
And the problem with this is, meetings.
Unfortunately, almost no one knows what non-24 is, including sleep therapists I've talked to.
People always look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about non-24. If left to my own devices I'll just go to bed an hour later each night, I can get into a bit of a midnight to 2am schedule also, but then pop a later night in order to be tired enough the next night to rest back a few hours.
Also recently diagnosed ADHD (in my 40s), and apparently sleep issues like non-24 are at least correlated to it.
Have you also observed that you're better able to adapt to the 24-hr day when you're not working and getting regular outdoor activity and exercise? I really think working with computers indoors is a large contributing factor to my non-24.
It's hard to say. I was doing a lot of hiking and outdoor activity last summer, and it didn't really make that much difference (if anything, being in better shape gave me more energy at the end of the day).
I do find I have an energy slump in the early evening and wonder if there is some way to take advantage of that, but haven't been able to push myself to try a sleep schedule change that drastic (and my hunch is that it'd just push that slump earlier and I'd start drifting again, just starting from an earlier point in the evening).
For me the problem is that I can't sync to the light day without really forcing myself — and I can only force myself so much. A day according to my biological clock is slightly longer that 24 hours, so with nothing to keep me in sync since I graduated from the university, my sleeping schedule is always slowly drifting. At some point it gets inverted and then goes back to normal. Without me disciplining myself at all (not forcing to go to bed at X time and not using an alarm), one cycle of this takes approximately 2 weeks.
Most people I know don't wake up without an alarm after 2-3 of sleep, assuming they were awake for 16-17 hour prior of going to sleep. How did you end up with this approach?
They're likely 'awake' and don't know it between cycles.
I just noticed specific intervals where I'd have a period of wakefulness categorized by the ability to remember the time on the clock when I'd see it. When you sleep your brain is cycling through phases between wakefulness and deep sleep. Between cycles of deep sleep where you're darting your eyes and twitching around, you have periods of semi wakeful sleep.
There are tools that allow you to try an experiment: Use a tool like sleepyti.me and input the time to wake up. Try to time out a single rem cycle for yourself by staying up late without a device in your hand or TV on, and wake up at the desired time. This isn't how I started, but when I saw the app I recognized the cycle immediately. When you wake up, you'll feel more rested than if you woke up at the midway point in one of the cycles, even if it is longer. In my case there's less fog, less agitated state, and quicker boot up time (my term for the time it takes to go from awake to writing code)
If you want to get weird, I'm happy to talk about another sleep cycle I had for a while, but I'm already rambling. The gist of it was many naps, many rems, less cumulative sleep.
Yah, I timed out my sleep cycles and it's about 90 minutes for me. Sometimes Fitbit and similar devices can show people this as well, but it's not always accurate (it was another confirmation for me rather than the primary way I determined the cycle length). And you are correct (and I encourage others to figure their cycle out), if I wake up on the cycle break (for me, 3/4.5/6/7.5/9) I am much less foggy and sleep inertia is reduced than when I wake in the middle of the cycle.
Another way to try to wake at the proper point is an alarm that gradually increases in intensity - you can set it about 30-45 minutes before you have to get up, and if you are already in a wakeful state, you'll hear it when it's low, but at the end it will get loud enough to ensure you get up.
Lastly (and not a shill for Fitbit, it's just the one I use), Fitbit has an alarm feature that will try to detect when you've moved into a light sleep stage and go off then (again, you tell it the latest time you want to wake, and it'll start monitoring 30-45 minutes ahead of that time, and go off when it thinks is optimal).
Long story short, I feel like, while they aren't perfect, we are starting to get some awareness of the importance of sleep cycles and some tools built around that awareness, which is pretty cool.
I'll do my best to explain, it does look a little confusing in retrospect. Let's say for the sake of argument that these cycles are 2 hour blocks: 0-2, 2-4, 4-6, and so on. If you sleep 0-2, and wake up at the end of that cycle during the wakeful period between 0-2 and 2-4, you'll feel more rested and have a faster bootup time than if you do 0-3 and wake up midway through 2-4 interrupting a period of deep sleep. You may notice more feelings of fogginess, agitation, and sleepiness, and a longer bootup time as your brain is shifting gears metaphorically speaking.
When you first fall asleep, you move through a few stages of sleep until you reach the end at the REM stage. Interrupting this stage is what causes the issue for me. I wake up still dreaming or speaking as I wake up.
Do you think it is possible that the longer sleep period that is usually associated with illness is a sign of a sleep crash for you? Like, maybe sleeping 2-3 hours per night eventually finally catches up to you physically and you need a longer sleeping period to recoup? Then again maybe that's unlikely if it only happens once a year or so.
I was curious because what you wrote reminds me of what happened to me, but on a different time frame. I would "naturally" have the energy to stay up really late and often get 3-5 hours of sleep per night. I felt alright. Then once a month or so on a weekend I'd sleep ~12 hours. Over time that once-a-month longer sleep period turned into every other weekend, then every weekend, and then 12 hours turned into 15. It took me way too long to realize that I'd be basically walking around like a sleepless zombie all week even though I thought I felt "fine" and then completely crashing due to lack of sleep on the weekend. It's like my judgement of my own resting state was impaired, thinking I was OK and rested when I wasn't. Starting to get more sleep during the week felt like coming up from underwater.
Weekdays I don't sleep much, if I had to guess I average 4-5 hours. Weekend comes and since I don't have many obligations, my day is almost entirely free, and I'm willing to sleep in, usually 10-12 hours, occasionally made more miserable by a night a alcohol.
The sad thing is I can get 3 hours of sleep or 12 and I'll wake up and not feel rested. Usually this translates to a thick brain fog (any effective OTC "sleep aid" just makes this worse) and I can hardly think straight for some hours.
> The sad thing is I can get 3 hours of sleep or 12 and I'll wake up and not feel rested. Usually this translates to a thick brain fog (any effective OTC "sleep aid" just makes this worse) and I can hardly think straight for some hours.
I felt the same way after doing my 15-hour-weekend-sleeps. I'd often feel _more_ tired than on weekdays, super groggy the whole weekend. The involuntary 15-hour "catchup" never actually caught me up, in retrospect it was just my body crashing but not properly recuperating. It was not until I put in a conscious effort to get 8 hours each night that things started improving in terms of actually beginning to feel properly rested.
Personally, I put very little stock in NYT health reporting articles. I am a public health researcher, and I have seen numerous NYT articles that just get fundamentals wrong. Though my field is not sleep studies, I can tell the conclusion of this article is essentially animal models[0] and longitudinal surveys[1] provide enough evidence to support hypothesis-driven studies in the future. But that's about it.
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
I know you mean well but we must be careful that we do not "throw out the baby with the bathwater".
The "great unwashed public" is incapable of understanding Scientific Nuances. Hence it is better in the interests of Public Health and Safety to project a simplistic and alarmist message when needed to get them to fall in line. It has always been this way in any matter of importance. This is actually much more important with those complex multifaceted subjects like Sleep, Fasting, General Health etc. It is made worse by the fact that the negative effects of these are imperceptibly slow, gradual but accumulate toward a unknown point when the "sudden collapse" happens.
This is why the jobs of Scientists/Researchers like yourself is so critical and crucial to the "Policy Makers". Your Scientific Knowledge drives your Belief which you distill and simplify to convince the "unwashed policy maker" who can then put out a decree for the betterment of the "unwashed masses".
I get your point, but how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?
I'd imagine newborn parents would fall into that category for instance, and I never met anyone who just thought not sleeping isn't a big deal and it will all be fine.
Pretty much everyone in professional services for major corporations fits this bill. Working for the big 4 and getting 5 hours of sleep is pretty much impossible. Adderall is essentially a requirement for everyone. Cocaine and Xanax for the more adventurous. That's not even getting into the actual finance companies and investment banks etc.
Same for emergency services in any major city or manufacturing facility. 24 on 48 off pretty much guarantees an all-nighter every 3 days. Then you can't really go to sleep when you get off at 7AM the next morning, because you need to get a good nights sleep on the second night because your next shift starts at 7AM.
I don't know how that works for your brain, but after the first couple months you just seem to adapt and your not tired all the time like you were in the beginning.
>how many people are currently getting less than 5 hours a day of sleep, and more importantly, don't think it's an issue that is impacting their health ?
That is precisely the point. The insidiousness of Sleep Deprivation is well known. Sleep has multiple stages and some of them (eg. REM) are more important then others; thus it is the Quality of Sleep rather than the Quantity which actually matters (this is the main reason people sleep over a spectrum of hours rather than any fixed point; the body decides the amount of "restorative sleep" needed and 8 hours is just a heuristic average). Ever since all sorts of "Visual Display Terminals(VDTs)" like TVs, Computer terminals, Electronic/Neon billboards, Smartphones, Tablets etc. became commonplace Sleep Quality has suffered drastically (there is a direct correlation between VDT exposure and Sleep Quality). Almost all IT workers (in particular; Programmers) are sleep deprived. With the explosion of Smartphone/Tablet ownership Sleep Deprivation has become commonplace. I am beginning to see young children as young as 10 years have dark circles under their eyes!
Our Society and Economic Systems needs to be changed to accommodate our current Scientific knowledge about our Mind/Body w.r.t. Sleep/Exercise. The Human organism is highly adaptable and resilient but only upto a point.
I experienced chronic insomnia for over a year and definitely felt the impact it had on my physical and mental health. Two interesting things that I learn about insomnia from my experience:
1. I thought I could "will" myself to overcome my insomnia, but realized quickly that for chronic insomnia (defined loosely as at least 3 nights a week for 3 months or more), symptoms typically worsens over time and becomes harder to resolve if left untreated.
2. People who suffer from insomnia are often painfully unaware of how disruptive it is to their everyday lives. I thought I was doing OK, but turned out that I've gotten so used to getting poor sleep that I have forgotten what life was like before. People who are sleep-deprived consistently underestimate how sleep-deprived they are.
Cognitive dissonance is also conveniently ignoring the deaths of many animals that took place so that your vegetables could be grown and harvested. The deaths of the animals that once lived in the spot where your pretty home sits, etc.
Animals are meant to be eaten. Seriously, in their natural environments herbivores like cows or pigs never just die of old age, once they get to slow to run away from predators they become their next meal. By eating meat you are basically helping some animal fulfill their destiny ;-)
I would regularly fight bouts of insomnia and I can tell you that nothing, and I mean nothing legal will put you to sleep better than being truly exhausted from exercise. Real exercise where you have to dig deep to be able to finish what you started will result in a decent night of sleep — everytime.
We're all different, I remember waking up early to run a marathon (something like 5am), being exhausted for the rest of the day, but still struggling to sleep at night around 11pm or so
Eh, for me edibles are way more effective and are legal where I currently live. This is more effective (though arguably less healthy) than even 100mi on a bike. The problem for me is more in staying asleep than going to sleep.
It depends when in the day. I sleep far better on days when I do intense exercise. But only if it’s not within 4 hours before I go to sleep. If I exercise close to bed time then I might not get to sleep until early morning.
In 2020 I started getting this weird perpetual minor unsteadiness. Like I could not stand still, I sort of swayed, or at least it felt like I was swaying. My doctor said it was too minor to really be anything, I was fine. I couldn't shake it. When this started I was going hard, 5ish hours of sleep, 3 miles on a treadmill, work, then 5ish hours working on a new deck on my house, then sleep, rinse repeat.
A few months ago I started doing one meal a day fasting. I noticed my weight slowly creeping up and wanted a change. A side effect has been my sleep has gotten much better. (I eat lunch typically) I sleep 7 hours easy and even when I wake up I feel like just laying there some like I am a teenager again.
A few weeks ago it occurred to me after nearly two years, the unsteadiness sensation was finally gone. Not sure if its the calorie restriction or more sleep, but I am not complaining.
In my experience the improvement on the unsteadiness would be more in line with getting more sleep. I've had times of poor sleep and unsteadiness is one of the side effects.
I experienced something very similar to this when I had a kid. As you say, minor, but still noticeable. Like I was having to make constant small corrections to my balance. It worried me a bit at the time, although in retrospect I'm convinced it was caused by sleep deprivation. I wasn't getting more than a few (broken) hours a night for many months. It went away as things started to settle down a bit.
The data supporting the negative effects of sleep deprivation are I think all observational, and most use self-reported sleep quality.
I remain very sceptical of such analyses due to confounding variables (eg people who sleep less are also less healthy in other ways) and reverse causation (eg dementia causes poor sleep not the other way around). Not to mention the almost useless nature of self reported data. Mendelian randomisation studies are a much better way to look at these questions. I could only find one study and it is far from compelling for a link between sleep and dementia: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/3/817/5956327
If it turns out that a large amount of sleep deprivation causes brain damage in humans a lot of people are going to freak out (and probably do even more damage from worrying.) Hopefully our brains are more resilient than mouse and puppy brains (yikes...)
If this were as dangerous as intoned, I would expect there would already be observable trends in the acuity of aged parents and those who did not raise children.
I'm sitting here reading this at 3am after having fed my 2 month old son and this was the same thought which crossed my mind. Given how affected my sleep has been (and my experience isn't anything out of the ordinary really), I would absolutely expect to see some pretty clear trends showing up.
That's going to be confounded because people who have kids are probably self selected to be doing well financially, which is correlated with mental accuity.
I recommend the book "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker if anyone is interested in the research aspect of what happens when we don't sleep, or don't sleep enough, and the science behind it.
I try and not eat after 9pm, stop watching electrical devices 1 hour before bed, and no caffeine after 3pm, and aim for 8+ hours in bed. Im very happy that I can do this, and not have to worry about getting to work on time (I live close to office)
So few of the comments mention apnea. Lots of people have it and have no idea.
Since I got diagnosed I'm very open about my CPAP use. I feel so much better, I talk about it often. You'd be surprised how often I explain what apnea is, only to have someone in the conversation laugh and say the symptoms match their partner or themselves. Even discounting the effects of sleep debt, I know plenty of couples who have difficulty co-sleeping due to snoring or frequent wakeups.
Considering an at-home sleep study is so simple and cheap to administer, I wonder how health outcomes would change on a large scale if we just checked people for apnea on a semi-regular basis, like once every 3 years, the same as we do for other common health issues.
The obnoxious thing is that if it turns out you have a sleep problem but it's not apnea, there's not much they can do for you. Or at least that was the impression that I got :(
If under my own will, I could go to an expert and say "hey let me pay for a sleep study". Unfortunately I don't have the energy to fight with a GP to get a referral.
It's pretty easy, just saw you're tired and your partner has noticed you choking in your sleep.
They will probably give you a watchpat to start off with (take home test) which aren't great but if that doesn't turn up anything you'll get an in lab.
I know it's annoying to fight with doctors when you're tired but for this I promise it is so worth it.
Feel free to PM me if you need more specific advice.
What about the compound effects of a sleep surplus?
I sleep 9 hours a night, sometimes slightly more, and I often worry that I might have conditioned my body into accepting more sleep than it needs - with potentially negative long-term consequences. But when I sleep less I feel off. I think of the quantitative length of my sleep as offsetting the qualitative hit it suffers from my daily caffeine.
I think there are negative correlations with excessive sleep and mortality/health. But I doubt there is causality. As in it is much more likely that people who are of poor mental/physical health will sleep more, rather than your health deteriorating because you are sleeping +1 hour than the accepted norm.
I wouldn't worry too much, it is an absolute blessing that you have the conditions and the body to sustain 9h sleep cycles. As a father of two, with copious amounts of caffeine intake, I wouldn't mind having some nights with that quality of sleep myself! :)
See also the glymphatic nervous system [1], great example where better scientific theories explain more data. The glymphatic nervous system explains why you can go longer without food or water than you can without sleep, the lack of sufficient sleep impacting mental health, learning, memory, and even age-related cognitive deficits. Sure, there’s individual variability, but sleep is most important activity you must do every day.
On the context, "sleep debt" seems to be from experiments at 4-5h per night restriction cumulated for many days [0]
How much sleep is actually needed above that will heavily depend on the person and what they do
[0] "Dinges, D.F. et al. (1997) Cumulative sleepiness, mood distur-
bance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements
during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night." mentionned in the research article references
It's unfortunate that the article doesn't mention the great villain of sleep debt, caffeine. The substance we use to wake up is the one taking away our deep sleep.
Avoid alcohol before bed. In any quantity. It is incredibly disruptive to sleep cycles. You will fall asleep, but quality is not good. There is a reason many studies use it to disrupt REM.
Extremely apparent too. It'll put me out real fast, but I'll be awake in a few hours and then repeat a few more times till the sun is up and you gave a splitting headache.
I think you need a couple hours per unit (a 5% ABV beer, etc). You have ti have fully processed the alcohol and given your brain chemicals a little time to settle down. So you could conceivably drink a few beers or glasses of wine during the day and stop in the early evening and be mostly fine. But right before bed if it hits your first sleep cycle it is kind of a disaster because the whole first cycle alpha, to beta or however it sequences gets messed up and a lot of people float between REM and deep sleep without getting either in the first half of their sleep (assuming its 8 hours).
Caffeine's half life is around 5 hours[1], I'd say it's fine if you drink it in the morning.
I'm quite sensitive to caffeine and I struggle to sleep if I drink coffee any time after noon. It's a pity because I love the taste of coffee and Oolong tea :(
There's variability in caffeine's half life from person to person, so everyone should experiment. I only drink it in the first 3 hours of my day, but even then, if I drink too much it negatively impacts sleep onset.
Been monitoring my sleep the past few days and I find it weird that I always wake up after about 6 hours. On some days, I tried to go back to sleep to get that full 8 hours but I still don't feel fully energized throughout the day. Something that helps me maintain that energy though is a half hour nap in the middle of the day (or night since I work night shifts).
Several years ago I spent some time in a lab studying sleep in fruit flies.
They've put out a number of interesting publications since my time there.
[1] Evidence of very large variability in sleep duration between flies, with limited consequences for very long duration sleep deprivation (wrt lethality)
[2] Evidence of context-dependent modulation of the effects of sleep deprivation. It appears the effects of sleep deprivation on males can be affected by sexual arousal/activity.
It makes me wonder if there are similar effects on humans. A night spent socialising too late does effect one differently to one spent working too late.
The source of information about this that I have found most useful is an hour long talk given by Dr. William Dement at Google Tech Talks called Healthy Sleep and Optimal Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8
> looking at all of this literature together, of around one week of chronic sleep loss, it really does suggest that you injured the brain to some extent
I guess that is at least a fairly decent time to have persistent inadequate sleep. At least if this is happening to you regularly then you really do have a specific issue to address and routine type insomnia (2-3 nights of less than adequate sleep) are probably not figuring into it strongly. For effects of that type, I would have thought there were cohorts of people with chronically disrupted sleep (airline workers, shift workers etc) that could make good validation sets to look for such effects. If that hasn't been done yet I'd be surprised so I feel like the more likely answer is that whatever these effects are, they at least require a substantial protracted period of poor sleep.
I am having difficulty to fall asleep and sometime remain asleep. It is very handicaping indeed. Of course benzo are working great. I had great result with bromazepam. But I stopped taking it a month ago (because I am afraid that it is not really good for the brain in the long term.)
Instead i tried Armodafinil. I personally found it really helps regulating my sleep cycle.. I take a pill and sometime half a pill in the morning.
When time for bed comes i can now fall asleep relatively quickly without alcohol / benzo.
Interesting topic. I probably don't sleep enough. Frequently go to bed past 2 am, get woken up by my kids around 7, so that's 5 hours at most. I seem to be functioning fine, though. Well, sometimes I'm tired or have trouble concentrating, but at other seems I seem to be able to learn new things or solve puzzles easier than ever before, despite being well over 40, when I thought these things were supposed to get harder.
Completely anecdotal of course. I should probably go to bed earlier anyway.
Feeling, and performing, okay under these kinds of stresses isn’t the best sign that you are in fact healthy (Especially if the part of your body that’s doing the feeling is the one being damaged!)
There are also many alcoholics who do just fine day to day as well; right up until their livers fail, or they get early onset dementia etc.
Now here's an interesting question - can the effects of BDNF from ketamine infusions (or LSD/psylocibin therapy) assist in repairing the damage caused by sleep deprivation?
I have a good friend who, by these standards, has accumulated a massive sleep debt. He's in his 40's now and is still as sharp as ever. This is just one example, of course, but it appears it's sustainable for some people (or, they have a much greater capacity for debt).
Had a colleague who was sleep deprived. He started behaving very wierdly and we came to know that he had cut himself, send lewd texts to women and later had to go seek serious help.
The spiral for me is that as I get sleep deprived, I get more vivid dreams which wake me up. A good night sleep is one in which I wake up having not remembered any dreams.
I trust in plasticity of brain, if it was damaged it can be repaired. So I would like another study about impact of good sleep, food, exercise and meditation on brain.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but after reading Why We Sleep and a dozen articles like this one, I've become increasingly skeptical of sleep research, especially in context of the reproducibility/replication crisis.
There's no dispute there are deleterious effects of sleep deprivation and accruing sleep debt, and that people would be better off with a full 8 hours of sleep. Lack of sleep is harmful for cognition, the cardiovascular, digestive, and endocrine systems, mood regulation, etc. Memory and attention suffering as a consequence after sleep deprivation is undeniable, as we all know. Most of the claims of negative health impact are quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrated to a degree, no debates there.
However, it's the _magnitude_ and severity of the effect, and especially the claims around the mechanics of sleep debt, that warrant skepticism when considering large-sample observations in the real world. Sleep debt supposedly accumulates semi-indefinitely (the research on the "max" limit of sleep debt is lacking), allegedly takes 4+ days to recover per hour of deprivation, and cannot at all be repaid in "lump sums" by for example sleeping in on weekends regularly.
While this may be true to some degree consider someone who averaged 7 hours of sleep on average through high school and college, 6.5 hours in the first 4 years of their career, and 5 hours for the following two years, after getting married and having children before finally reading an article such as this and deciding to eliminate their sleep debt. If it truly accumulated semi-indefinitely, took multiple days per hour of debt, and had a ceiling on "repayment rate", this person (who honestly sounds quite typical and near the median) would either celebrate their 100th birthday, or declare bankruptcy so to speak before becoming debt-free. It's not great science to make these partial claims on the attributes of sleep debt which are incomplete.
Further, if you read Why We Sleep, the logical conclusion (from the case effectively being made) if sleep debt were really as bad as claimed would entail that the 40% of the population in modern society would have hardened arteries, moderate to severe hormonal and mood dysregulation and other significant mental and physical issues by middle-age. Yet we don't observe this in anywhere near 40% of the population; not even in the majority of those individuals averaging 5 hours of sleep or less nightly.
Conditions like severe obstructive sleep apnea, defined as 30+ hypoxic events per hour, are certainly correlated with hypertension and heart issues. But sufferers should be hardly functioning, cognitively or physiologically, were sleep deprivation to be as harmful as advertised* and you'd wonder how anyone with the condition could get a diploma or maintain a job according to the sleep researchers. Many OSA sufferers can literally go without a single sustained hour of sleep, ever, over the majority if not the entirety of their lives. It's true there's a higher incidence of cardiovascular issues in this population, but the condition is also comorbid with obesity, which has a greater impact on cardiovascular health.
And finally, the majority of studies and meta-analyses finding increases in general mortality rate amongst people who sleep under 7 hours a night, also produce the same finding amongst people averaging over 9 hours a night.
*The one claim which is well-supported and cannot be disputed is that sleep debt does result in significant sleepiness and delayed reaction time, as we sadly see on a yearly basis in many countries that practice daylight savings, with a spike in fatalities and severe bodily harm from car crashes like clockwork the Monday the clocks are shifted forward.
**Also, there is another claim that is true - prolonged, absolute sleep deprivation results in fairly rapid total system failure and inevitable death, much more quickly than the majority of chronic diseases, including heart, kidney, or lung disease (which people can live with for years or decades). It's on par with the most aggressive forms of cancer. Please don't mistake this post as stating sleep deprivation/debt is "not a big deal", it certainly is. However the science does not, in my opinion, appear to be nearly as robust, and has many more exaggerated claims than other areas of physiological/health research.
> There's no dispute there are deleterious effects of sleep deprivation and accruing sleep debt, and that people would be better off with a full 8 hours of sleep.
I question this, given that modern hunter gatherers only get about 6.5-7.0 (quality) hours of sleep.
Probably, most of us in the modern world have poor quality sleep, and this confounds epidemiological studies by creating the illusion that we need long duration of sleep.
There's also genetic variability in sleep duration needs. A small number of people are legitimately fine on 4-5 hours.
> also produce the same finding amongst people averaging over 9 hours a night.
Again, confounds. Depressed people, unemployed people, etc. The problems with empirical sleep research are largely methodological problems that all of epidemiology faces.
While sleep duration is more of an open question, the health impacts of a shifting sleep pattern is not. Lots of evidence that shift work is really bad for you, from cancer to heart disease to dementia etc.
Paywall, so apologies if the articles covers this but I couldn’t see it in the sector could read.
I recently finished reading “Why We Sleep” which is an interesting exploration of this topic for those that are curious. Written by a researcher in the area, with call-outs to the actual research and IMO a reasonably measured approach to clarifying the difference between “what we know”, “what we have correlation to believe, but…”, and “what intuition / studies in mice / others has suggested might be true, but…”.
It’s definitely given me a lot to think about with my own life choices.
Thanks for sharing this, I've got more reading to do!
Though it's not off to a great start because the very first claim "U-shaped relationship between length of sleep and longevity, i.e. both short- and long-duration sleep are associated with higher mortality" is actually stated in the book :/
Let them read if they want to stay up a bit later. If they complain that they want to stay up later, tell them that’s fine, but they just have to be awake in the morning if they like being up for more of the day. Teach them that they can use their internal clock to get up earlier if they really want, but don’t let them use an alarm clock.
They almost always choose to sleep in and it has hugely positive effects on their behavior and memory.
Some people just don't need that much of it and the whole idea that everyone needs the same is actually torture for them. I don't need much at all and sleep later and during school the idea that you have to all start at the same time it becomes hell of you laying there for hours and just not being able to fall asleep but then getting more and more stressed knowing you're risking oversleeping or just being exhausted when really just accepting that you can't really sleep before 2am so there isn't point trying will serve you better.
