In case you feel sleep is a waste of time, it could actually be surprisingly productive to sleep. Once thing I noticed in grad school is that your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them. And often I would "dream" up a clever solution to a homework problem during my sleep.
J.P. Serre, one of the most brilliant mathematician still living today, purportedly "does all his best work in his sleep": https://tinyurl.com/y25q45ut
From what I learned in the wonderful Coursera course: "Learning How to Learn", these are manifestations of the unfocused or diffused mode of the mind, and play a critical role in learning and problem solving.
While I understand why you'd write something like this, I think that this sort of thinking is the reason people get poor sleep nowadays anyway. This obsession with "efficiency" and "productivity". Even if it is more productive to get sleep, I believe that thinking about it in terms of hygiene or in terms of quality of life is much healthier.
Maybe you disagree but not every minute of life should be devoted to doing the most productive thing you can. Sleeping for sleep's sake or because it makes you feel good should be enough reason. I'd rather turn my attention away from all these life-hack, min-maxing ways of thinking and just listen to my body telling me what it wants.
It's a truly mind-boggling feeling when you escape the busy city life and somehow manage to be truly in sync with yourself.
I was hiking in Scotland and Iceland over the last two years and either times there was a breaking point when we were in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland some weather forced us to camp near a volcano off-site from the camping zones. In the morning, I got out of our tent and looked across a vast space of grass, rocks and ashes. A creek flowing nearby made the only perceivable noise aside from wind.
You take a look left and right. Breathe. A breeze goes over your face and you hear the deafening silence emanating from nature itself.
It was then when the usual life all felt like a massive distraction from life itself. It was a nice, calming and deep feeling that it's completely enough to just be... hard to convey.
Farming is not a good life. Hunter/gatherers famously had it much better.
Doesn't matter. The sustainable population of farmers is orders is magnitudes higher, to the point that they can push out any hunter-gatherers almost without noticing. I hope that modern life is at least closing on that quality of life, but I don't think it is yet, for most people.
What most people know as farming is not the only nor most effective way to grow food in trade of time and resources.
Permaculture practices, "food forests", etc. are a better alternative and take most of their effort in the several year setup process. Once in balance, they are generally self sufficient and can produce significant amounts of edible food.
That's not to say everyone should become a "farmer", but for people in the HN community, it should warrant some study (it's all about systems design and design patterns).
Probably most of the labor of hunter gatherer societies was done by women. The men hunted some, but a bigger responsibility was raiding their neighboring tribes (often for women) and protecting themselves from being raided by their neighbors.
If you look at hunter gatherer societies, many times women are treated as property and there is horrific violence against women.
Also a lot of these societies are polygynous with men having multiple wives. So yeah, men work less - but that is because the women do the work for them under threat of violence.
The highest cause of death among young men in the HG tribes of Papua New Guinea is other young men. It's an incredibly violent culture there. The !Kung tell a much different story:
Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:
In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and violence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppression of aggression. From this point of view, values about interpersonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and separated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:
During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of discord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]
I've thought about this and come to the conclusion that the ambitious man/town/society down the road is the problem. You can hunt and gather all you want, but societies build technology and excess manpower and one day they will come along and ruin your day.
You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!
And you don’t need to go far for this effect. I still to this day remember a beautiful calming moment I had when on a walk in the backyard near a house outside of Portland Maine.
Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.
Completely agree. I think GP put it this way because it’s easier to convince a “productivity ninja” that sleep is good for productivity than to convince them that productivity shouldn’t be their sole focus. If the goal is for them to get more sleep, this is how to reason with them.
I understand your point of view, but honestly I have a hard time consolidating the notion of being stress-free with the notion of making as much of an impact as I can.
I want to be as productive as possible (when I'm not allotting necessary time for recreational activity, but my social activity is generally at a minimum) because of a driving fear over the future of earth and humanity. I have a deep urge to do as much good as I can in my life for society, because anything else just seems so selfish.
I was gifted with intelligence and determination, and to waste these skills overwhelmingly in personal pursuits when the world is in flames just seems so irresponsible. Anyone could do that. I want to make a difference, and that requires being as efficient and productive as I can.
A lot of my energy still goes into the projects that feed me, but as I build after I build a nest egg there are many things I would like to increase my focus on.
For one I would like to break into the educational gaming sector. [0]
I've drafted and prototyped a few programs but haven't released anything substantial yet. Productivity and privacy tools mostly. Persona management utilities, a log utility I hope to eventually have distributed with most Linux distros, a (in my opinion) revolutionary social media platform which I'm still keeping quiet about for now.
I've recently finished drafting initial plans for a software suite which would allow you to maintain a private distributed data store and generate hashes which contain unique revocable keys in order to access and/or modify portions of this store. Websites/entities can be given these unique hashes in order to share information like reputation and private information under their own unique namespace, and other entities can be given access to (optionally fuzzed) fields from other namespaces. A Reputation API would provide entities a common way to provide cumulative updates to a person's reputation.
This could power services such as anonymized chat platforms based on reputation, distributed trustless online transactions, and hopefully a viable alternative to Cloudflare and Google reCAPTCHA. I want to work with websites like Reddit to reduce bot spam by implementing it. To move forward I'm just looking for a partner to aid me in technical writing (RFCs and such) and community management so I can start an open source collective around this idea because it's a lot of work.
I spend a lot of time leisure coding as well just for practice, picking up new technologies and stuff.
You have a valid point. But on the other hand, this is ycombinator news, and so entrepreneurs trying to get that last bit of productivity by doing an all nighter might think more long-term about this.
Hacker News is the complete opposite nowadays. People who tries to maximize productivity are frowned upon. The norm is to put your family, friends, travelling and stuff like that before anything else.
The most profound effect I noticed myself is learning passages of music on an instrument (note I'm an amateur, and not especially good!) After not too long trying to learn/practise one evening, I will be noticeably better the next day.
I found exactly the same thing and it weirded me out. How did I get better without practicing? Often I would hit a wall after practicing for hours and was not able to play a certain passage, but then the next day I magically could.
I've recently found that reading before going to sleep (while not staying up late reading) opens my mind the next day and I wake up knowing whether I have accepted or rejected a premise of a nonfiction book. It's like I read, don't think about it then, but then as I sleep I make up my mind or have more questions about the things that I read.
It's strange, and I wish I could learn more about this phenomenon.
I won't dismiss that a lot of things can happen during sleep that will help you do better in the morning, but a lot of the time I think this kind of thing boils down to performance falling off as you get tired, to the point of eventually negating improvements you make. It doesn't help if you've figured out how to do something if you're tired to execute on it.
The Dark Souls series of video games are known to be hard, especially the bosses. Many people, myself included, have experienced being stuck on a boss and after 20 attempts they give up for the night. Next time you start the game up you beat the boss on the first attempt!
It's hard to know if this is because your subconscious mind kept working on the problem, or if new neural pathways were formed to handle the eye-hand coordination, or, as you suggest, you just came back to the problem refreshed.
Being refreshed, and not frustrated and tired, seems like the simplest explanation for this.
The music thing is definitely a real phenomenon. It’s well researched and covered in some detail in “Why We Sleep” by Matt Walker (which is mentioned in tfa, and is a fantastic book.)
One day I could not compile something. After fighting it several hours I decided to go sleep. A few minutes before waking up I dreamed that the solution was to set an environment variable. I even saw the specific variable and which value I had to set. I woke up and immediately tried it. It worked.
That's the exact reason why we should have beds at work and not have regular working hours. People should just work and sleep whenever they want as long as they make meetings and project deadlines.
I for my part would never want to sleep at a bed in my office. I'd rather go home. I also live in Japan and a lot of places here have beds in the office but all it does is squeeze more time out of people and make them stay longer
I work from home coding, sometimes went onsite. If I'm stuck on a problem with some code which a walk or short break didn't solve, a sleep would usually solve it, hence the saying "sleep on it". I'd even sleep during the day for half an hour or a few hours just to get the answer. I've also been awake for 80hrs doing a windows server upgrade which failed horribly but I put that down to the system being hacked. Felt like a zombie, but strong tea and hard water calcium rich near London so possibly also contains unmetabolized cocaine in, played its part in being able to stay awake for that long.
That works for me. In the last months of collecting data for my PhD thesis, I pretty much lived in the lab. This was basically biochemistry, so there was lots of "do this, wait some hours, do that, wait some hours, ...".
So I just napped when I could. At night, on the couch in the break room. During the day, on the cot off the women's restroom. And conveniently, there was a shower for staff who cared for research animals.
Now, living in a small apartment, my ~12 m^2 room includes desk, bed and storage.
I noticed extra inspiration on bathroom breaks as well, but as a control I tried just getting up and walking outside and back, and that seemed to have the same effect for me.
There's something going on during that context switch.
It feels like because all of the data about a problem is being unloaded into long term memory, when you return to the problem, you parse the entire data as once instead of adding to it in pieces.
It almost feels like a puzzle except the second time looking at it, you're looking at the whole thing you've solved versus just the piece you last added.
I feel Luke ta a mixture of context switch and some idle time/downtime. I find walks great for letting my thoughts drift and work through things, same goes for train journeys. I think perhaps as you say, the switch unloads the information into your subconscious and then the downtime let’s it get to work.
I really liked Rich Hickeys talk on Hammock Driven Development which is basically this exact subject: load everything into your brain and then go snooze on a hammock while your mind gets to work.
It would be an interesting experiment to think on a problem, then swap to a different office and see if that gives you a different perspective and insight.
I totally agree. When faced with a problem outside the comfort zone, sometimes the brain focuses too much on a part that may turn out to be irrelevant. Having a break and returning later usually works wonderfully to again see the big picture.
Likely it's simply because that's one of the few occasions in modern life when we're not being bombarded with external stimuli. A few minutes of silence and your brain goes: "Right, now's a good time to present this thing I've been working on." Same thing with showers.
Haha, interesting theory. For some it’s a cigarette break, for others (all of us?) it’s bathroom break, shower (showerthoughts, anyone?), nap, meditation. A break of any kind, if we may generalize.
When I used to bike commute to work, I had a similar effect. My commute to work is about 1 hour each way. On the way to work, ideas about work would pop into my brain. On the way home, ideas for home would pop up. Need to say that I don't really think about either work or home, they just pop up.
Sadly that does not occur so much now that I am driving to work. I wonder if cycling vs sitting is the differentiater here.
Imagine a future where we have engineered this effect to perfection, and even in your dreams you are expected to work. The effect would be an increase in the supply of labor, without an increase in the population. Wages would be depressed. There would be at least some people who have no reprieve, no moment to themselves, just so they can make it to the next paycheck and survive. 24 hour wage slaves. A human shaped cog in a capitalists machine.
I was banging my head on a brick wall for an hour or so yesterday trying to figure out how a simple obvious thing wasn't working. The (also simple but slightly less obvious) setting that I'd forgotten to update came to me just as I was drifting off to sleep. This happens all the time.
In Spanish we call it "consultar con la almohada" (to consult with the pillow). I think it's not sleeping per se that gives you answers, but breaking the cycle of frustration. You wake up rested and think more clearly.
> I noticed in grad school that your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them
As other comments already mentioned, this works amazing for problem solving related jobs as well. As an engineer I use this actively on almost a weekly basis.
To make this work you just gotta really think about that problem and understand the actual parameters very well. Like almost every detail. And you really need to want it solved. Like make it really bother you. This usually comes
by itself if you are engaged enough with the problem anyway. You can't solve something subconsciously when you just glanced at it and think "meh" about it. Then go to sleep and hope for the best if you didn't already solve it by using the above steps. Worst case is you wake up with the urge to understand the problem better and either get the solution or the next hints within the day ... or next session of sleep. The brain is really an amazing tool if utilized right.
Lucky you. In my case, I end up thinking about the problem in my sleep, come up with solutions that are a mix between reality and fantasy within the dream and usually end in a horrible loop of the above while I desperately try to break out of it. In short, spoils my whole night sleep ( at least how I feel about it next day ). Rarely have it actually produced a successful solution!
My problem too. I actually can't fall asleep because my brain keeps throwing out random ideas at me, like a toddler tugging at my sleeve: "is this solution good enough? no? How about this? No? What about this? No? This?" and so on and so on throughout the night.
Describes perfectly some problems I've had when sleeping. They are not really any problems I think before sleeping and even in my sleep I'm not sure what the problem is but oh boy is my brain thinking hard about it. Usually I need to reset by walking around my apartment for a minute. Thankfully I've had less and less of these nights recently.
Wow, I thought that only happened to me. There was only one specific project I was on where I would have the not so practical fantasy solution like you described. Others were like the parent, a good sleep discovers solutions, I wonder what my subconscious was saying about all of this.
I secretly suspect this is everybody, and the people who claim to be coming up with real solutions in their sleep are back justifying what happened when they had enough time to sleep well and felt nice.
As I also experienced this, the trick is that you keep your mind focused around the problem, even when you go to sleep. I already mentioned you need to make trying to solve the problem your big thing of the day. Of course if you try to solve a problem and at the same day got almost robbed or were close to having an accident (or something really nice happened) your brain is most likely to process that instead at sleep or mix things up.
Claiming that all the engineers, scientists and researchers who claim to use a specific technique to solve problems are really just "back justifyting" seems a bit weird. For the record, I use this technique all the time AND, for the past 8 years, have been getting a solid 8 hours sleep most nights. Why would we do that?
I completely agree. I fully discounted the value of sleep when I was in school but now professionally I use it in a very similar way.
When I need to learn how to use a new tool, I’ll read through the docs, some tutorial examples and try to find an actual complicated example (which is usually what I actually need to work with) of how it’s used. The first day, I kind of get it in theory but struggle to connect how the tool interacts with everything else. If I get a good night’s sleep I’m usually ready to get my hands dirty the next day with the complicated stuff because my understanding greatly increased overnight
This is also covered in Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep where he cites several controlled studies demonstrating the role of sleep in learning and outlines the neurobiology behind it:
I used to see sleep as a waste of time. A few years ago I started to recognize its importance in overall well-being and adjusted my schedule and commute accordingly.
Reading Walker's book led me both to take sleep more seriously still and to take more pleasure in it.
For those that don't wanna read the book, I enjoyed Peter Attia's interview with Walker. I haven't read the book though, so no idea if you'd be missing something.
One of the most interesting takeaways / proofs about the importance of sleep mentioned in the podcast, was that there's a huge increase in car accidents and heart attacks after the clocks shift in the spring (I haven't verified the claim).
On the other hand, while Walker may be right about everything he says (anecdotally I'm extremely aware of how important sleep is day-to-day), I found his book to be very poor evidence of what he's trying to persuade us of. His writing is that of one who has bought unquestioningly into a cult. The evo-psych digressions about "wise Mother Nature" are nothing short of ridiculous; the one that sticks in my memory is that he seriously considers the possibility that Nature gave teenagers an offset sleep cycle from adults so that they could start exploring the world on their own for a few hours each night. (One much simpler possible explanation is that it gave the tribe someone who was naturally on guard duty for more of the night, but of course this is testable by looking at non-tribal animals and I haven't tested it.)
As alecco says in this thread, it is indeed a hardcore scientist who studied sleep for twenty years trying to communicate to a wider audience. I'll cut him a lot of slack.
Also, not sure if you've seen Walker speak (do check out on YouTube), he's one of the most brilliant public speakers. Very few scientists can manage to hold your concentration like Prof. Walker does.
This happens to me too for as long as I can remember. It's an endless thought-loop of abstract reasoning with a dream-like quality and coherence, never actually quite focusing in on the problem but disruptive to the goal of restful sleep.
I've had these exact type of dreams 4-5x/year for the past 15 years, since being in grad school. They're an interesting phenomenon. They're also fairly disturbing.
Joshua Waitzkin has an interesting perspective on this. He will take an idea, keep it in his hold, and then make sure he lets go of the focus a few hours before bedtime. IE. Do something with family instead.
Subconscious brain still works on it, but still able to sleep well. Not sure if this would be applicable.
In high school, I would often "retell" the day in my mind, usually right before bed. More often than not, I would wake up with the solutions to problems I struggled with.
I have been trying to recreate this as an adult, except now I'm retelling the story of my day to my wife and vice versa.
Maybe the key is to do it earlier in the evening, and then disconnect for a few hours? I'll give it a shot.
Between lucid dreaming and solving problems overnight, sleeping was never better than in my high school years. I really do wish I could go back to that.
I'm still conflicted on the merit of lucid dreaming and problem-solving.
I find ZMA and Huperzine A can you get you lucid dreaming, but I don't know if it helps with problem-solving. IE. You'll still wake with the solution w/out dreaming.
Same experience here. Sleeping with a notebook on my bedside table has helped somewhat--I can write down thoughts as I'm trying to fall asleep and not "worry" about forgetting them in the middle of the night.
But I do resort to sleeping pills after a few of those nights in a row.
I once had a problem we had thought / talked about for maybe a year, that gradually increased in urgency. We were almost down to the wire on coming up with a solution, we had 3 detailed plans written up, and they all had huge trade-offs, none of which were really acceptable to the majority of use-cases. I once spent an entire day thinking it through non-stop and just couldn't see past what we had already planned. Eventually decided to call it a night.
I woke up at 5am and knew exactly how to solve all of it. Took me 3 weeks to code what I knew the moment I woke up and it worked flawlessly from day 1 of testing. Now if I'm stuck I take off early and rest.
do you have an established routine for embarking on major efforts like that? how much value is there in writing out the plan, and at what resolution? I'm figuring out how to "sketch" large problems as I move towards being a more senior developer.
I have a pretty low bar for just starting a Google Doc, and it's part of my early thought process. It's important to very early on (even if you're not sure you're going to spend time on the problem - even if I just spend 30 minutes doing research on it), put the problem statement, exit criteria / success metrics, non-goals and stake holders on paper to clarify your own thinking about what you're even trying to do.
As different approaches present themselves I just write a quick summary with the pros / cons and gotchas that come to mind. At first I don't put in a ton of time - it's just notes organized like it might be a report one day. I'll probably throw a lot of what I've written away as my thinking on it improves, but I never throw away ideas. If it was plausible enough that I spent some time researching, it's worth recording for everyone else's benefit why you decided to abandon it.
Eventually when the problem comes to the surface more I can say, "I have a report started on this!", quickly revise it and share it with my team and stake holders, and we iterate from there. The design doc mentioned in my original post had actually been around for years, and I had shared it 6 months earlier and had a lot of detail and critical thinking applied to my early doc. It was just a progression from something I opened quickly when I had 1 idea.
You should take notes or records for early research somehow anyway, I just try and do it in a way that's quickly shareable as a design / plan. It might take months (or forever) until it's worth sharing, but it's just a place to record my ideas and new things I learn as the problem's on my mind.
I’ve experimented with nootropics and I came to the conclusion that the best way to improve your mental ability is:
Sleep
Exercise
Diet
And then everything else like nootropics
In that order. That is, they certainly work and help but they’re a micro-optimisation so there’s not much benefit if you’re not doing the macro ones first and sleep, in my opinion and anecdotal experience is at the very top of that list.
This is also my experience that sleep has the most impact. Not only does it impact my mental ability, it also impacts my mood, and therefore my productivity of wanting to work.
I don't know about the order or exercise and diet, but they are definitely on there.
Those are my exact conclusions too after doing a lot of research and experimenting. I may add that high intensity exercise seems to work best for the brain. I'd also add stress to this list - people underestimate how big it's impact can be nowadays.
Thomas Edison used sleep too. It is written that he would would would sit holding two metal objects in a chair over metal pans. He would sit and contemplate a hard problem until he dozed off and dropped the items in to the pans, waking him up, after which he would rapidly write down what conclusions or ideas he came to in that few moments of sleep.
He is not alone in this regard among the elite thinkers, “healers”, and inventors throughout history
>In case you feel sleep is a waste of time, it could actually be surprisingly productive to sleep.
Probably the most productive thing one can do.
Idea: Full sleep is useless. I'll sleep 5 hours or less and gain more productive time / life lived.
Reality: Without full sleep (7-8.30 hours/day) you'll be less performant, less intelligent, less healthy, less productive, and on top of the less performance through your life, your life itself will be shorter.
One of my undergrad (and favorite) required classes was Graph Theory at UCSC taught by Gerhard Ringel. Asked how he solved problems - he pointed out that he slept on them.
It was a comment I heard from many Profs. but his was the first and it stuck.
I think the different stages of sleep play a part here ... Salvadore Dali apparently liked to keep an object/pen in his hand that would drop and wake him up.
Still can't find enough real examples of polyphasic sleeping working, but love to know how well people of that retained content.
Yep! It's been hard to ignore the other things people questioned about his attempt though ... I'm leaning toward trying biphasic, but still not sure yet.
A litle bit insane, the article says: "Your number of immune cells begins to decline as well, as your body is deprived of its opportunity to make more".
More daily work, less health!
So many times I'd be at home in my office, crunching 12 hours straight on a problem, only to finally give up and go to sleep. Without fail I'd jump out of bed an hour later, test my solution, and go back to sleep a happy man.
This doesn't happen for everyone. I've never had this happen. I've had a few dreams that seemed like amazing insights when I first woke up but then realized how they were dumb dream ideas.
That said solving problems while not focusing them has been repeatedly shown in research, including in dreams. I've had it happen many times while awake. The technique is to work intensely on a problem, then completely stop and move to something unrelated and simple. Often times a solution or missing information will pop into your head much later.
I find this works best if the last thing you do before falling asleep is studying or thinking about the problem as you are falling asleep. i remember reading thomas edison and salvador dali used a more intricate technique to problem solve during sleep https://www.inc.com/the-muse/albert-einstein-thomas-edison-y...
I refer to it as my hamster, it sits in the background spinning the wheel of whatever problem I'm stuck on. I find it works best if I actively think about the problem before sleep and then consciously put it out of my mind by doing something else. It might take a few days but there is usually an A-Ha! moment out of nowhere.
> your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them.
This is the same for creativity, this is why you come up with ideas in the shower or the train, assuming you're just idling and not scrolling through your smartphone.
Similarly pauses allow for other skills to grow (stop playing music for a week, a month, and you'll often feel more apt when you return). We're probably full of phasors and delays. And letting time for everything to mature/settle seems to matter.
When I have long bouts of binge coding (the last month) my dreams are just me constantly refactoring the same bits of code, usually related to the task at hand when I fell asleep.
Few years ago I spent quite some time learning Haskell, failing to understand the concept of Monad. One day I just woke up, with the concept understood. It was like magic.
I've just learned to recognize the kind of problems that sleeping me is good at.
Let's see if I can verbalize that...
I think it's often when I've discovered a lot of new things during the day, and I struggle to combine them.
Or when I get stuck on something, maybe having a hard time to decide between options. I go to sleep confident that I'll have fresh perspective and decisiveness the next day!
My first real experience with sleep deprivation was when I was 12 1/2. My friends and I stayed up all night and sometime the next afternoon decided to go for a short hike. I made it down the street and then realized I was tired and said I was going back to the house. Next I knew I was sitting at the kitchen table with a Dr. Pepper in front of me, surrounded by my friend's parents and the rest of my buddies. Apparently I had been walking around the house talking to myself, and I still have vague recollections of being pursued by my 7th grade journalism teacher demanding that I name the world's oceans.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in this article -- microsleeps, immune weakness, irrational thoughts and behavior -- sure rings a bell from my university days when I would, either for work or school "reasons," routinely pull all-nighters. Ended up with some very bad results.
Also: Schools in general in my area, including elementary, are starting waaaay earlier than they used to, and the kids aren't getting enough sleep, which leads to lethargy and bad behavior, etc etc. I oppose starting kids on the habit of academically-induced sleep deprivation early in life, but every time I complain about it to school officials, they have some clever comeback centered either on "studies" or the convenience of the parents who pay the taxes
Oh boy, the university I'm attending right now has lectures starting at 8am, which is earlier than usual for my country, and ca. 36 hours of lectures per week.
This means that you usually go 8am/6pm in uni multiple days a week, then you obviously have your assignments and catching up on the lectures to do, and all the random stuff that comes with living alone (laundry, grocery, cooking, cleaning, etc.) - this means that you quite literally get to the point where you either study or start skipping sleep.
I complained to my faculty and the administration because it is quite full of studies that show that sleep deprivation leads to depression, lower performance, etc. And got various responses out of them:
- a couple of professors told me that they don't care and if you want to succeed in university you have to sleep less than normal
- some admin staff told me that the university doesn't have enough space for everyone, hence they have to start earlier in the morning to gain an additional lecture slot during the day (nevermind the fact that this slot is from 12 to 2pm and is always used for lunch break).
This shit really makes me furious, if not even universities which should be run by people that rely on hard data to make their decisions can come to the conclusion that starting the day early either means fucking up the long term health of their students or having people skip lectures altogether, I don't know if anyone ever will.
Sorry for any mistakes in my post, for context it's 6:30am and I'm getting ready for a lecture (riding on 5 hours of sleep for a few days in a row now)
What I hated even more about 8 am lectures is I lived an hour and a half away from the university, so from the time I left the house to the time I got home again took like 13 hours every day. And the real knife in my guts is I was paying for the privilege of this.
Now I work from home, and saunter in to work at 8 in my pajamas with a bowl of fruit loops. I put in my 8 hours of work, and then I walk 3 feet to my left and flop down on my couch and start playing video games. And they pay me for this!
36 hours a week from 8am to 6pm means that you have approximately 2 hours between lectures each day to do your assignments. Sure, it isn't suited to having part time job or much free time, but from my experience it sounds like pretty normal uni routine and no one I know complained. And I warn you, when you are older it isn't going to be any better, just instead of assignments you have to take care of kids.
The difference being that those meetings were a one-off or at the very least a rare occurrence. University,on the other hand, is a daily commitment for several years (meaning that it can also lead to chronic sleep deprivation)
This is makes it feel like parents are a lazy self-centric bunch.
Most parents are bound by their work hours, as a society we haven’t accept yet that normal people should have flexible hours or we can’t all be at home parents.
School time is just an effect of that outer context.
This is especially bad for teenagers as they are wired to sleep at later times in puberty (called "phase delay"). How the are you supposed to learn while being sleep deprived for basically most of your classes?
This had a huge impact on me in grade school. From 7-12th grade (middle and high school in the US) I routinely got around 6h of sleep during school nights. I was constantly tired. Combined with ADHD-I I had a really hard time focusing. Looking back at it I would have done much better if I had 8h of sleep.
Public school scheduling is a hard nut to crack. But I don't recall that it has gotten any worse recently, it's always been somebody suffering a very early schedule. There are only so many buses, so many parents to drive their kids, and almost everyone has to be at work first thing in the morning, etc.
Sleep is very very important, and I've learned this the hard way. Sleeping well has been a challenge, and I am glad I'm not alone.
Articles like this one and books like Why We Sleep however make me very anxious, since all they seem to do is point out how bad it is if one doesn't get enough sleep. I know that. How can I fix it? I had CBT based sleep therapy last year, and things have since improved, but not much. Then I have the occasional random doctors who tell me how sleep is actually not that important and how they used to sleep only 3h/day when they were my age. Even the cult book Why We Sleep has chapter after chapter of telling me how screwed I am because I don't sleep 8-9 h/day, with little actionable items that can help me. I get that it is super important to raise awareness about sleep, but every time I open such articles, I am invariably made anxious about my sleep, and people who know what I'm talking about know how hard it is to sleep with anxiety about your sleep.
Something that helped me with my insomnia was to fix my waking schedule.
I rigged up a low power beside light on a timer, a radio alarm clock and an alarm clock. I set each to come on about 5 minutes after the one before, with the radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 which is a speech station. That made my waking up routine much more gentle, I felt better when I woke up, and subsequently seemed to sleep better.
Now I have one of those Philips Lumi wake up lights/radios which does the same kind of thing.
People make the mistake of just focusing on going to sleep, and not enough on the fact that sleep is just one part of a whole daily cycle, and looking at the whole day, at things like what and when you eat/drink, can really help. Recently I've been eating too late in the evening and it's been screwing up my routines.
You sound exactly like how I felt before seeing a doctor about my insomnia.
If you haven't already, I'd suggest just seeing a doctor, and asking for something that will help you sleep. I was given 50mg Trazodone, and I feel like it's saved my life. It's not a controlled substance, so doctors and nurse practitioners hand it out like candy.
Now I get 8 hours of sleep a night, and most of the research I've dug up indicates it doesn't mess with your sleep architecture. There were some nasty side effects my first few weeks, but they seem to have faded over time.
I spent months and months obsessively reading everything I could about how to improve my sleep. Tried it all. Tried every OTC supplement even rumored to improve sleep. Nothing helped. And the more time I spent stressing about it, the worse it got. By the time I saw a doctor I'd probably gone two weeks straight averaging 2-3 hours of sleep a night. I felt like a shell of a human being.
Just asking for a pill might seem like an unhealthy cop out to some, but the improvement in my quality of life since doing so has been immeasurable since doing do.
Trazodone seems like a might big hammer for this problem. Do you plan to take it forever? I’d assume that removing it will cause withdrawal and a reversion to your previous insomnia. Or did your doctor suggest a plan of taking it for X months and then taper off? While the idea of a pill to fix this problem sounds really appealing to me, taking an SARI is not without risk.
The two years running a startup destroyed my sleep. I’ve spent the last 1.5 years trying to fix it.
I’ve had an Oura ring for almost a year and I rarely get more than 6 hours of total sleep per night. 5 hours is frequent. 7 hours is the most rare treat.
I don’t have anxiety. I don’t feel overly stressed. I love the work I’m doing. Life is pretty good. Yet most nights, I’m up at 2am and it takes an hour to go back to sleep. Then I’m up around 6am and that’s that. I never set an alarm; I could sleep until 7 or 8 if I wanted to.
Blue light glasses. No food after 4:30pm. Workouts every day in the morning.
Phenibut is the only guarantee that I’ll get decent sleep (6.5 hours). This doesn’t knock you out and my Oura data shows I’m getting all sleep stages. I wake up feeling good to great. But I limit that 2-3 times per week.
Meditation does help a bit.
I’m going to go in for a sleep study. I am determined to fix this because it really decreases quality of life. Plus, as you said, the research shows what a huge long term impact this has. I am very dedicated and focused on my health and longevity, it’s annoying how much I am failing at one of the most important parts.
I know how you feel. I try so hard to sanitize my sleep environment, set myself up for a good night's sleep, everything as recommended, etc. Then I go to bed at 10:00PM ... and wake up at 2:00AM like clockwork. Lay there for 1.5-2 hours, fall back asleep just in time to get woken up after really hard sleep by the alarm at 5:00AM, feeling like crap. Like I overslept. Knowing that I certainly didn't get the 7-8 hours of sleep that I should need.
> telling me how screwed I am because I don't sleep 8-9 h/day
I think, more accurately, 7-8. For many of us, 9 hours is just too much time and will erode sleep efficiency, such that we develop maintenance or onset problems.
I've had long struggles and generally sleep consistently well now. Largest contributors to my improvement, through experimentation, have been: consistent waking time, strongly alleviating anxiety through CBT and activities such as yoga and exercise, vitamin d3+k2 & sunshine during the day, restricting coffee consumption to 1 cup (don't underestimate this it as caffeine boosts cortisol), and not least of which, eliminating porn consumption. I'm not sure why the latter has been so impactful but it has had a strong, predictable impact on onset latency. The rest is just the usual good practices, keep your room dark and comfortable and have a wind-down routine away from electronics.
It sounds like you have a problem with high anxiety. Have you spoken with a mental health professional about it? Anxiety can impact your ability to sleep.
Truth is the solution to your problems is a 2 page bullet pointed list of actionable items that work. For which you wouldn’t even pay $1 because there’s no way to verify the information before buying and once it’s out it’s out so there’s no profit in creating it.
Solve it yourself or throw real money at the problem if you actually care.
5 minutes of box breathing (4 seconds inhale, 4 hold, 4 exhale, 4 hold) has been very helpful at calming my mind and feeling more ready to fall asleep.
I'm sure that it must be true based on how other people act on little sleep, but for me the effects this article claims are blown way out of proportion (or just seem wrong).
> longer than 48 hours and you’re looking at behavior that mimics psychosis—incoherent rambling, disconnection from reality, prone to outbursts
Does anyone else here have experience staying awake this long? In college I frequently stayed awake for 48 hours without much effect besides my reaction times falling off a cliff and a mild high toward the end. Hallucinations never kicked in until 60+ (which is a more substantial increase than it seems). My main gripe is all the effects listed in the article seem to take it as fact that less sleep = more grumpy, while in my experience the complete opposite is true (less sleep = more goofy/euphoria).
This is very much a personal thing and the article is only showing one end of the spectrum. While I have issues staying up past 48 hours and my longest ever stint was 56 or so, I can go for 36 hours easily without any real dramatic adverse effects. I certainly don't feel drunk and am quite capable of performing complicated work even after 24 hours of being awake.
As long as the sun is up my body generally wants to be awake and when going for long periods of uptime I only have an issue with tiredness between 2am and 4am. After 4am I can convince myself that the sun will be up soon and once I can actually see the sky brighten I become energized rapidly.
The one time I did go past 48 hours I never hallucinated but simply felt like a zombie. My mind basically shut off and I felt very detached and remote to my own consciousness. The odd thing is that when I finally got into bed it still took me something like 2 hours to finally fall asleep because I felt too tired to actually fall asleep.
Anyway, that's my experience. When I read through the article I kept thinking it was missing the mark for me completely.
> when I finally got into bed it still took me something like 2 hours to finally fall asleep because I felt too tired to actually fall asleep
Oh I can absolutely relate to that. On low sleep I found it incredibly natural to fall asleep sitting on a bench with no back rest (without falling over), but purposefully trying to sleep in a bed was always difficult. Up until about 35-40 hours awake I can easily fall asleep in a bed, but it becomes challenging past that point. I'm guessing my brain is pulling some c4 trickery there since that's roughly when my coordination starts to deteriorate.
I developed a trick of sitting on the edge of my bed when I'm in this state. Sooner or later I nod off, and then I can just _literally_ fall back into bed.
It's not uncommon for me, if I'm highly engaged in something, to work straight for 15-20 hours. So as a result, my wake/sleep cycle is consistently longer than 24 hours. And that has the additional benefit of frustrating geolocation.
Even so, I rarely go more than 30 hours awake. But with occasional naps, some as long as a couple hours, runs as long as a few days are not uncommon.
I take modafinil for bipolar disorder, and zolpidem for insomnia. So I can avoid many of the downsides of sleep deprivation. One cool thing about modafinil is that it increases alertness and engagement, but doesn't interfere with sleep as much as coffee and amphetamines do.
This describes me as well. Bipolar and ADHD. If I'm engaged in something I obsess over it and work 10+ hours until it's done.
It takes every other feeling away and not until I stop do other things come back (sleep fatigue, hunger, etc)
Yes, just that. I struggle a lot with getting engaged. Especially if I'm uncertain how to proceed. Or if whatever seems too difficult. Too big to imagine.
But once I do get engaged, especially if I understand (or at least, think I do) how to proceed, I won't stop until it's done.
I did that often when I was 20-25, and then the habit of not having day/night affinity made it to the core. Then at around 33yo I couldn’t sleep for 3 or 4 nights in a row (not sure how to count). You want to sleep, you have to, you close your eyes and go to bed, but it doesn’t work. You don’t know if it ever will. That was pretty terrifying experience. I was also scared to use alcohol or street drugs to fix that, since the perspective of additionally being stuck in a sleepless hangover was unbearable.
Since then I rarely abused my sleep cycles, but my week schedule drifts often. At monday I get up at 10, at friday it’s 16-19 (4-7pm). I un-drift it by not sleeping the sunday day. Can’t do anything with it.
Sleep drugs help to fall asleep early, but can’t make me unbroken on wake up. Even a couple of hours now make a big difference, and if I get up early it “doesn’t count anyway” for my body at the nature’s evening.
I've hit 24 hours twice on accident shortly after coming home with a newborn child, and was seeing pulsating walls and other weird visual stuff and generally feeling pretty shitty. The first time, it took me until much later to realize I had been awake so long. So definitely some YMMV.
“Fireflies” in my vision and then peripheral movement are the two effects that hit me first, usually around 24 hours.
I will often hear what sounds like voices from another room. The first time this happened I freaked out a bit, searched the entire house, peeled outside through windows. When it was clear, I put my ear close to my radio thinking it was on at a really low volume. But of course no matter what I did the sound stayed the same. Then the irrational state of my mind lead me to believe the house was haunted.
Audible hallucinations and peripheral movement are exactly what happens to me - I rarely am awake for more than 20h, but it's been 18-22 hours every day for 6+ months, and eventually they just sort of end up there regularly.
I stayed awake two nights in a row during college and, while I felt miserable and perhaps somewhat dilirious, I don't believe I had such disassociative effects. I could believe incoherent rambling after maybe 4 or 5 days, but that seems extreme for 2.
4 or 5 days? I'm not convinced a healthy person could make it that long. I've asked hundreds of classmates and grad students over the years for their records and have yet to meet anyone that claimed over 72 hours. Personally my body was almost completely non functional around 65 ish hours -- stumbling and slurring words, no concept of time, incapable of focusing. The only reason I was awake long enough to reach that point is because it took hours to finally fall asleep. Honestly I'd love to hear what happens if someone could get to 72+ hours.
50-60h is my limit, and luckily haven't been near that in a long time. Shit gets weird.
Not having met anyone that claimed 72h+ probably mostly just means you've never known any speed freaks - what happens after that mostly depends on whether or not you're on meth.
I made it to 82 hours. It was forced upon us (military training, trench digging sleep deprivation exercise). I made it all the way to enforced rest period. Others didn't.
Up to 48 hours things were mostly normal in all areas, I was just tired. After that second night things started to get weird. Hand eye coordination worsened dramatically (not good when swinging pick axes and shovels in close quarters with others). Speaking and forming thoughts was definitely affected negatively.
One funny thing was we'd frequently have to 'stand to' and prepare for an attack by downing tools and standing in the trench with our rifles ready to fire on any attackers. Standing still for long periods staring at nothing was enough to bring on repeated and severe micro-sleeps. I distinctly remember standing there and hearing clattering noises and soft cries of pain from the field around me. I wondered what it was, until I watched my trench buddy slip into a micro-sleep, his body go limp and fall into the bottom of the trench. His rifle made the characteristic clattering sound against the corrogated iron and his cry came from smashing his knees into the side of the trench as he crumpled.
I was 20 at the time, the youngest from my company and dealt best with the deprivation of anyone. Youth plays it's part I think, though I am also predisposed to need less sleep even now, so some genetic factor is probably at play too.
From 48 hours onwards I began to realise the less I did the more difficult things would be. I volunteered for soime arduous patrols during the day and we were all forced to do some recce's during the night. That night I fell twice, once down a bank. I cut my hand pretty badly. In a year of training it was the only time I injured myself. My performance was definitely affected.
Crouched under a tree in the pouring rain about 70 hours in I remember feeling physically sick from the brain fog. Night time caused the world to close in around me in a very disorientating way.
At about 80 hours I remember seeing an old Sergeant from early in my training as I was coming back from a patrol. My directing staff had gone back to their harbour area ahead of us as the assessment phase of the patrol was over and it was our responsibility to get back to our trenches.
So, free from interference I went over to shake his hand and found it to be extremely sharp and prickly. I recoiled and couldn't understand what was happening. Trying again I gripped tighter, feeling the sharp needle like pains in my hand again. For some reason I pulled him closer and then I felt the shooting pains right in my face, especially my lips.
As I stumbled backwards I forgot to let go of his hand. It came away and I fell back with it.
As I hit the ground hard my 'vision' cleared and I could clearly see I had been shaking hands with a Holy tree. The sharp pains were caused by the needle like spines digging into my skin.
I chucked the branch from my hand and got back in line.
No one noticed my excursion, they were too busy picking two of my patrol buddies up from the track. They were laying face down asleep having simply shut down right as they were walking along, falling face first into the dirt and staying there, snoring.
I stayed awake for approximately 85 hours once -- in order to sit 18 hours of exams over three days at the end of the first year of my engineering & computer science degree.
I wasn't a very diligent student in my first year. (I spent most of it programming instead, and the internet was brand new to us as well. Both were addictive. So I ended up doing that instead of studying the degree materials.)
When the end of year exams came, I hadn't really done much revision.
The night before the first day of exams (6 hours of exams - two subjects, one in the morning, one in the afternoon), I decided to stay up and study for a change, which is what I did.
Lunchtime that first day was spent preparing for the second exam.
Phew, those went ok, then I realised I didn't know enough about the next day's subjects either, and did the same again.
And again the third day.
Amazingly, after the third day of exams (about 78 hours awake), when it was time to relax, I felt so relieved that I felt light and great. Went out to the pub with friends, and wasn't tired at all, which surprised me.
Slept quite normally that evening.
I can confirm, the hallucinations after multiple all-nighters are quite real. Dreams seem to keep trying to start up, speech is slurred, and things get strange. Yet somehow, in the midst of that, I was able to write adequate answers in difficult, long technical exams.
The hallucinations, and the slurring and reduced physical coordination, seem to go away in the "relaxed" phase after something is finished. It's like the relief makes a new wave of physical resources available to work with.
I've done a few highly-stressed all-nighters (and sometimes 2 or 3 nights in a row) since then (due to hard life events than bad planning on my part). I've also been up 4/5 nights (I can't remember which, it was a very stressful event), but got short (<1 hour) naps in the day. It's a similar pattern at the end: When the thing that needs to be finished is done, the tiredness disappears, and my body feels light, great and not tired for a while. Relieved, even happy. Although, the cost afterwards has become greater over the years, and there may be days of exhaustion afterwards.
Although the exams 3 nights 4 days awake for exams was a kind of success, and it might seem like I must be one of those people who doesn't need much sleep, the opposite is true.
The longest time I've slept straight through, without waking (except for the usual wake-and-roll-over-back-to-sleep moments), was 25 hours. I'm sure, because I decided to find out when I was a student (a bit older than the above story). I knew that I slept a long time generally, and needed to if I was to feel rested, and that the timing was unpredictable. One day I decided to just sleep and sleep until I felt completely rested, and see how long that would be. So I did that, and it was 25 hours before I felt like I'd had all the sleep I could take. It felt pretty good, though waking at midnight, having gone to bed the evening of the day before, made me feel isolated.
I spend most of my life feeling rather tired, and I need about 9-11 hours sleep to feel good the next day (it varies but 10 feels like the average), but it's rarely achievable, for social and work pressure reasons, as well as difficult to predict insomnia. I've had fairly chaotic sleep "cycle" since the age of 15, which started due to staying up at night to do homework from school, and has never really recovered. By chaotic, for about 20 years (until ~35) most days it was unpredictable to me when I'd sleep and when I'd wake. Which as you can imagine, made work difficult.
Since 35 it's been more regular in that I sleep almost every night, although not always the same times. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of it, and sometimes I won't get to sleep at all, despite everything being dark and quiet and comfy, and me being tired. If I get sleepy and think I'll sleep, I need to go to sleep or I risk missing the "window" of opportunity to fall asleep.
I would love to feel rested some day. I can't remember the last time I felt like I had a really good sleep and was fresh and rested the next day.
(ps. None of the above involved any drugs, not even legal ones, unless you count Coca Cola. I didn't even drink coffee in those days. Saying this upon seeing the other comments about speed/meth etc.)
I had a bad reaction to an antidepressant that caused me to go for about 6 months with very little sleep 3 years ago. On median, 44 awake, 4 asleep. My record was ~65 hours before sleep. I personally only experienced hallucinations as well at around the high mark. My case was unique in that it was induced by medication causing a chemical change in the brain, not a personal choice, but my mood during that time was quite terrible, and the physical discomfort caused by headaches was extreme.
Not only is the article overblown IMO, but it's also irresponsibly written.
A lot of people suffer from insomnia and sleep anxiety. They don't need to be told that missing sleep is dangerous. They need to be told that missing sleep is normal sometimes, and that your body will sleep when it's ready to.
I believe that your experiences may differ from the norm, and I'm not denying your claim at all.
But I also have seen that many truly grumpy, negative people have also lost their self-awareness, and do not realize the state they are in. We see this in the working world quite often, when someone has just gotten into a negative funk, and are bringing down a team, and they don't even realize it. Sometimes those people just need to be told where they are really at, and told to take a break, and yes, to get a good night's sleep.
I find that as I age, the effects of lack of sleep get more and more severe. When I was 20, I could do 48 hours without sleep without any noticeable negative effects, but now, 15 years later, I suffer even if I get sleep in a night but just not enough (where enough seems to be around the 9 hour mark if I really want to be at my best the next day; and I’m a firm believer of waking on a multiple of 90 minutes to wake during a light sleep cycle. 7.5 hours isn’t bad but 9 is better)
Yep, I was a chronic insomniac. During the worst period (about 15-18yo) I had a few times where I'd start seeing things, getting paranoid or just generally really disordered thought pattern.
If you generally sleep well, then the occasional period of 48 hours of wakefulness is probably fine, but chronic lack of sleep (whatever that constitutes for you) can really mess with your brain.
All articles on topics like this blow way everything way out of proportion.
I also used to do 48 and 72 hours regularly during my college days and it really wasn't too big of a deal for just getting through a lot of work but creativity/reaction times definitely suffer.
There is a period during sleep where the body engages in rapidly flushing the brain of cerebrospinal fluids. This action is intensely physical and disturbing, however with the exception of the most serene true-insomniacs only a tiny fraction of people will directly experience it.
They say this prevents the build up of harmful toxins in the brain, and that the failure to do this over time can be a contributor to the onset of conditions like Alzheimers.
While many may claim to have overcome the need for sleep, and some actually feel productive. And claim to be just as effective. No one should be in doubt that long term effects of sleep deprivation is devastating. Not only to the Brain, and the body as many studies have shown.
If you are very relaxed, but persistently unable sleep. But are not alarmed about not being able to sleep anymore, and in a state of almost like not thinking. You may suddenly experience a throbbing sensation in the head/neck, a pulsing in this state.
Normally this enough to trigger alarm in the conscious and fully wake you up. But after this happens many times you can become expectant of it and just let it happen a little longer because you are not immediately alarmed.
Is this the sinking, tremor feeling you get after your awake state, but before the sleep state? That weird limbo where, if your brain jolts back on from this state, it's as if you awoke from a dream - even though you only dozed off for a couple of seconds?
There seems to be quite a lot of information about why <7 hours sleep is bad for you, but I'm more interested in why sleep >=8 hours is associated with increased mortality.
I read "Why We Sleep" but unfortunately it didn't answer this question. The association could be correlational but it's been replicated too many times for me to believe that there's not something more fundamental. Perhaps there's a hormetic effect that's blunted by too much sleep similar to how HGH is bad for longevity?
As others said, the data is contaminated. Likely people who are sick sleep a lot more.
That said, I'm one of those people (healthy, I think) who sleeps 9-14 hours every day. My goal every night is to sleep as long as I possibly can. Nights when I only hit 9 hours is usually because I had to get up to go the bathroom.
I have Sleep Apnea but treat it with a CPAP and went from 20 awakenings per HOUR to just 0 to 2 per NIGHT. But the amount I need to sleep hasn't changed for some reason. I definitely feel dramatically more rested after sleep than I used to though.
I started using AutoSleep app with Apple Watch Series 4 and it's been incredibly interesting. It uses your heart rate to automatically track sleep without you touching the app. So far, I vary from 15 minutes to 1 hour of stage 4 deep sleep per night. The average person needs 1.5-2 hours per night so I am not hitting that. My recent 6 day average is 30 minutes. There is barely a relationship between length of sleep and amount of deep sleep. Just this week I had one night with 6 hours and one night with 11 hours, both totaled 15 minutes of deep sleep.
I'd love to compare notes with someone else who uses the AutoSleep app.
Just went ahead and bought a series 5 Apple Watch because of this comment. I have a long tumultuous history with sleep apnea and have been desperately trying everything to figure out how to improve it. I typically sleep 10 hours per day (the sleep apnea is that bad), so I'm going to start recording with the app you've mentioned and see what happens. Thanks so much! Feel free to each out to my email in bio and we can start comparing once i have some data.
Awesome! Will definitely reach out and let me know what yours says. My biggest concern is understanding the accuracy of the app. Part of me thinks it's really accurate and the other part doesn't think so.
I think one of the issues with my current bedroom might be noise/air flow (oxygen) which is stopping me from getting the amount of deep sleep I need.
I also have been hacking my CPAP and tested increasing the pressure by 2 per night. Doing this dropped my API's from 2 to nearly 0.
Well, I'm not sure if my sleep is normal. That's for sure.
Other than Sleep Apnea, which has been treated to a large extent; I feel dramatically more rested after I began using a CPAP (best evidence) and my CPAP reads 0-2 awakenings per night (assuming it's accurate but not verified); although I'm not sure if it's been treated fully because I still need a lot more sleep than other people.
Other than Sleep Apnea, I have no health issues or problems and am very high functioning physically and mentally. I eat a healthy diet and regularly exercise.
So by those measures I think I'm healthy. But I am still in my early thirties.
You’d be surprised. A friend’s 11-year-old daughter who is athletic and slim just got diagnosed the other day, and she is getting a CPAP. Frankly, I think there’s a lot of confirmation bias because fat people who snore are much more likely to go in for a sleep study.
Yeah obesity is definitely associated with obstructive sleep apnea, no doubt. But what if they just have a thick neck and are otherwise healthy? I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt
Correlation vs causation leaves a lot open, chronically sick with a number of illnesses people may sleep more. Their mortality risk is also higher. I'd wish we could see controlled studies that randomly assign people to different sleep durations. You also have to control for gene mutations that affect sleep requirements https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-mutation-...
It's certainly possible that the relationship is not causal and can be explained by correlations with depression, unemployment, sleep apnea, etc. However I'm not aware of any study that definitively proves this. It would be great to see a study similar to what you propose.
In general I'm fascinated how too much of a good thing leads to increased mortality and small amounts of a bad thing leading to increased longevity via hormesis and would love to see if the same extends to sleep.
Some examples of hormetic longevity influencers: caloric restriction, alcohol consumption, exercise. Even DNP a straight up poison has been shown to be increase lifespan in animals provided the dose is small.
On a related note, I wear a fitbit and if I sleep from say 12-8, you'd think this would be 8 hours of sleep (as recommended) but I usually have about 1 hour awake or restless (according to the fitbit). So fitbit says I got 7 hours of sleep.
The question is do these studies account for this supposed awakeness that seems to be part of everyone's night of sleep? Surely nobody that reads them thinks they need 8+1 hours when the study says 8 hours is good...
I think most recommendations are to get 4-5 sleep cycles a night, so the actual elapsed time will vary for individuals.
The problem with chronic sleep deprivation is that you miss one or more cycles, It's like if you washed your clothes but skipped the rinse and/or spin cycles. Skipping a whole night of sleep and you're still wearing yesterday's clothes.
He didn't answer the question directly, but he did have a possible explanation that's at least worth a mention.
In the book, he suggested that many of the studies detailed people with preexisting disease, which was the hidden variable for both an increase in sleep length and an earlier mortality.
I read the original article and the abstract of your linked study.
First, I'd like to see a breakdown of 8 hour vs 9+ hours instead of grouping them. Someone sleeping a healthy 8 hours and someone sleeping 12 hours are very different.
There might be issues like, people who sleep 12 hours are sick, and that's WHY they sleep 12 hours and they die due to their illness.
Overall I'm guessing people who sleep a lot per day aren't very active, both career wise and going out/excising (just my guess) - and people who don't have jobs and are poor, they live less than people who do have jobs and have money. Also people who are depressed sleep more. So not all sleep is equal.
It's hard to approach health from a cybernetic point of view, but I think that's what's missing to make these studies less unidimensional. The key is how to make science more cybernetic. That I don't know.
I often find myself mote productive after a mildly bad night. The brain stops anxiously looking for nuts to crack, and instead can easily focus on a single problem for a long time. Isn't best for all scenarios, but definitely superior in some, e.g. implementing a large chunk of logic that was designed earlier.
Haha, that I recognize. Especially if I am a bit hung-over because I could not resist taking an advance on the weekend by hitting the pub on a Thursday night. May today be a productive day!
If sleep is so important. Why didn’t we evolve to have our newborns and toddlers not destroy our sleep? Are parents sacrificed for the well being of the kiddos?
A lot of people might not like my answer, but here it goes. I have a 2,5 month old daughter, and my wife breastfeeds her. During the night, I don't wake up because she immediately gives her milk when she wakes up. There are a few things evolution gave us for support (correct me if these 'facts' are wrong):
- When women breastfeed, they get some hormone that can put them into REM sleep way faster.
- Men are not as sensitive for sounds during their sleep as women.
So evolution wise, this was probably mainly a mothers sacrifice. This lets the other, more physically strong parent (when that was still important) function at 100%.
In these modern times, work is divided and so both parents divide all family and money work, and so also share the sacrifice of sleep deprivation.
I'm in a very similar situation right now: my daughter is 2.5 months old and my wife breastfeeds. And while the first month was rough for both of us; ironically, I feel like I've been sleeping better than I have in years during the last month. Probably because I know that I need to sleep to perform my best when I work so I can provide for my family.
We do this as well. Well, we try. But I sleep more light than my wife. So it is always me waking up first anyway.
With our first child, I slept in another room altogether to get the sleep needed for work. With two small ones it’s much harder.
I either get woken up by a karate heel-kick to my nose or just the horrible feeling of a wet bed.
Note that humans are helpless for an incredibly long period of time (compare with horses, who can run almost as soon as they hit the ground). It looks like nature has offloaded a lot of the normal work from the child to the parents, in the case of humans; we're very much an evolutionary oddity in this regard.
Interesting factoid from the fascinating Legal Systems Very Different From Ours: the Kaale (a Gypsy tribe in Finland) don't recognise the parent-child relationship at all, because reproduction is ritually unclean; the facts of reproduction cannot be admitted. Instead, a mother leaves the tribe to bear her baby, and returns with it, whereupon the baby becomes the entire kin-group's responsibility. Sounds to me like a good way to let parents have some sleep, by batching up the group's children!
The whole family living with you and helping you out,just rest when the baby is with someone else. Oh you live in the 21th century? Sorry :(
At least the kid won't die from starvation and diseases. So that's good. But you have to go to work 40-60 hour every week away from your beloveds to a place where sleep is forbidden. So that's bad.
I actually thought about that exact same thing last year when my daughter was born. As frustrating as not getting enough sleep is, what irritated me more is that apparent lack of ANY evolutionary advantage to sleep depriving your parents.
From natural selection perspective, at that point you've already passed on your genes and now your most important mission is to ensure those genes get passed along. Your own wellbeing is not important.
Of course it is important, a newborn is not able to survive for years to come without parental support. If terrible sleep reduces the parent's survival or its ability to protect the child by a big enough percentage, I'd imagine there would be an evolutional pressure there.
Yeah, and now take: reduced immune system from sleep deprivation + a lot more exposure to viruses from kindergarten = why parents of young children get sick so often.
This might be a longshot given the age of the post, but does anyone have anything to say about OVERsleeping? This is anecdodal but over the years I've internalized how important sleep is and have been able to regularly get 8+ hours of sleep. What I've noticed is that I get more "emotionally" lethargic - level-headed when something should be stressful, which is a good thing, but also very calm and collected when something should produce euphoria.
If anyone has any relatable experiences or links to articles about oversleeping I'd love to read them.
Oversleep leads to lazyness and sadness, or introversion and contemplatency. Or, it was just those teenage years, but when I was 16 and 18, I used to sleep 14h per day.
This contemplating mood lasted throughout the day, only to disappear and be replaced by ambition and will, many creative ideas late in the evening, just before it was time to sleep again.
8-10 hours is perfect, just enough to retain the creativity and motivation for the next morning which was gathered during the evening. Sleep longer than 12h, and feel so comfortable to just contemplate things without willing to do anything else but think and feel.
When I sleep less than 8h, all effects as described in article happen.
> on the Monday after spring daylight saving time, when we lose an hour of sleep, there’s a 25 percent increase in heart attacks
> Conversely, in the fall, when we gain an extra hour, there is a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks.
So daylight saving kills an extra 4% people by heart attacks. Light Yagami approves.
I wonder whether it's because of the sleep itself, or because when people don't sleep enough they tend to take stimulants that increase heart attack risks.
I didn't mean it to be comforting, the other poster talked about Daylight Saving Time killing people, which is not a great way to talk about what is going on, it creates moderate pressure for cardiac events to happen earlier in the week it occurs.
I mean, I guess I do find it mildly reassuring, as I know a few people directly that have survived heart attacks, had cardiac bypass and then felt much better than they had for quite some time prior to the heart attack.
It is your duty as human being to get enough sleep because if you are well rested you treat yourself better, you treat people around you better and you generally spread positive energy around. - this is how my spiritual teacher explained why getting enough sleep is first step to growth.
Sleep is required for proper function of the glymphatic system.[0] Insufficient sleep results in inadequate clearance of metabolic waste products from your brain via this pathway. Accumulation of said byproducts results neurological damage.
In other words, get good sleep or you're literally inflicting brain damage upon yourself. Impaired glymphatic function is linked to all manner of horrible neurodegenerative conditions.[1][2]
My experience with no sleep happened as a part of 21 day Vipasana meditation retreat. So on the 15th day after constant practice we had to face what they called Determination — 3 days with no sleep, not leaving the room, doing 1hr walking meditation / 1 hr sitting meditation / 1 hr rest, all over again.
As far as i remember the point was to keep all the gained mindfulness and awareness in the counciouness and do not let subcounciouness which acitivates as we fall asleep to kind of ruin the whole practice.
It was an intense process guided by the teacher, with new exercises each day, basically some variations of breath counting.
It was difficult mentally but not so much phisically and after just a night of sleep i felt amazingly fresh.
I like to think that those 3 days of a guided practice with no sleep was the key ingridient to let the meditation become the part of my existense.
> Push yourself longer than a few days without sleep, and the effects can be lethal.
The above statement in the article links to a story on Reuters about one case of an intern who stayed up for 72 hours and died for unknown reasons. Hardly proof.
This is so overblow. Many people have stayed awake for more than 72 hours and not died. In fact, there is no evidence that sleep deprivation causes death in humans. If you don't agree with that statement please falsify it with proof.
I recently stayed awake for 72 hours as an experiment. It was hard. I had all of the temporary effects described in the article except for hallucination but it was all temporary. After 14 hours of sleep I was perfectly fine. That's one data point.
Don't drive, operate machinery or perform surgery when sleep deprived but it's not some terrifying dangerous thing to go with out sleep for a few days.
Actually sleep deprivation results in death and is one of the reasons it is used as a torture method. Some neurological conditions which degrade sleep significantly result in death. Among the failures observed are things like loss of thermoregulation. Guinness book of records stopped recognizing sleep deprivation records because of the dangers of going too long without sleep. Sleep deprivation has been more extensively studied in animals like mice and rats etc and invariably results in death.
Sure there's lots of fear around sleep deprivation but where's the evidence that it causes death? By evidence I mean studies that don't involve pumping mice full of stimulants for days.
I was born with chronic insomnia and I'm now in my early 30s. I never feel sleepy and just this past Monday I went to work having not slept the night before. I'm healthy now and I guess my body is so used to the effects of sleep deprivation that I feel no side effects (such as headaches), but I wouldn't be surprised if I die very young.
If you have any questions feel free to ask them, just please don't suggest I try melatonin or marijuana.
You alluded to taking benzos + z-drugs for 10+ years (you weren't very specific, so I could be off base) on 6-9 month cycles with 3 month tolerance break, and that you've been clean off benzo/x-drugs for a year now.
I've seen cases of benzo/z-drug withdrawal (after a short 1-2 years of daily use) requiring 3 months to even notice relief from the side effects of the withdrawal (most notably, horrible insomnia). And then another 6-12 months of abstinence to reach a place where the withdrawal effects are no longer top of mind, or subtly present but not overwhelming.
If you were on benzo/z-drug for very many consecutive years (even with short tolerance breaks), especially if those years were before age 25, it's very possible that your brain has never had a chance to function in the way a "normal" (non-altered) brain functions that hasn't been exposed to long term benzo/z-drug therapy.
The scary part about benzo/z-drugs is that they can, over time, change the structure and chemistry of your brain through upregulation and downregulation of receptors in response to the presence of drugs. With benzos in particular, the amount of time it takes to reverse the drug-induced changes seems to be incredibly long (not weeks, barely months, maybe years -- obviously depending on the length of time of initial exposure).
This is all to say that, if indeed you were on ultra long-term benzo/z-drugs for an extended amount of time (2-5+ years), 1 year of abstinence may not be enough to fully recover back to a normal state.
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And I assume you do all the basic sleep hygiene stuff for insomnia: no caffeine (at all, not even in the morning), no stimulants even if prescribed, intense exercise in the morning but not at night, not eating within 3 hours of sleep, no electronics within 2 hours of sleep.
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If you think the first part of my comment is BS, and if you've already done everything in the 2nd part of the comment, I'd highly recommend trying a dramatic diet change: something like going strict vegan and cutting out all processed sugars (and processed foods in general),
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And if that too fails, think deeply about what triggers anxiety / emotional discord in your life, and try to eliminate the source of that completely. This is the hardest advice to follow through with, since for many people it means quitting jobs, ending marriages, disowning family, moving to another country... you get the point.
I haven't had issues with anxiety/depression since I was a teenager, thankfully. I'm very peaceful even when I can't sleep. When I was younger that was a big source of frustration and stress (especially during school), but I've accepted it many years ago. This is who I am and nothing can really change about that. :)
I've also never gotten into the habit of drinking caffeine. The only time I'll drink coffee is if my friends who are into that kind of stuff bring back some rare coffee from a trip and invite me to try some. I also don't drink soda or energy drinks.
It's possible that being on the sleep medications for extended periods of time changed my brain chemistry, but I think my condition is different from most people. This was something I was legitimately born with and can remember struggling with even as a very young child (3-4 years old). My parents have similar recollections. No one else in my family has this issue - I just see it as an unlucky mutation.
I'm glad you mentioned diet. I think that is probably something that helps me. I've been on keto for most of my adult life and since graduating college and starting working I've been on one meal a day (lunch) aside from the few month stretches where I tried to gain weight for weightlifting. Thankfully my parents were amazing cooks growing up and were also too poor to avoid keeping snacks in the house so I never got into the habit of eating candy or junk food. I definitely notice that I struggle to sleep even more on occasions where I go out and eat with friends late at night and eat carb heavy meals that I wouldn't eat otherwise.
Benzos are extremely helpful for providing relief from anxiety and stopping panic attacks, and everyone should have some and know how to use them responsibly. The level of utility of being able to turn off anxiety and fear is incredible. I take xanax before I go to the dentist, because it's just not happening any other way, and it absolutely squashes the flight response and lets me act like a normal human. It shouldn't be understated what a miracle this is, and that it can be done safely with almost no risk.
But they're also the most addictive substances we've got. After a week or so, you now have an addiction that needs tapering to not be dangerous. If you lose access to the drugs, you might die from withdrawal.
The withdrawal can make you feel literally insane. I don't know how to explain it other than it's extremely unpleasant and everything feels moody and irrational, and sometimes you don't even realize the extent to which you're being irrational until you take more drugs and feel "normal" again.
The potential for addiction is also high because these drugs feel the best out of all drugs. You're going to want to use it again. Imagine if alcohol never made you sick or dizzy, and you could have as much of it as you wanted, and you'd just keep feeling more relaxed until you pass out. Then you wake up feeling relaxed and don't have a hangover. That's what benzos feel like.
Also many doctors don't realize just how possible it is to have a seizure during withdrawal, and some doctors will refuse patients asking for benzos because they see them as drug-seekers.
Any time I see one of these threads about benzos, I try to share my experience, because they're just so misunderstood by the general public. And it's probably not great that there's so much talk about xanax in hiphop right now.
Everything you said is spot on except for benzos feeling the “best of all drugs”. You mustn’t have been around the block if you can say that with a straight face. There’s far more euphoric drugs out there.
I think it depends who you are and what you like. There's more euphoric stimulant stuff out there, and mind blowing psychedelics, but nothing else feels as overall good as xanax. I'd take benzos over opiates any day.
But I haven't been able to find quaaludes anywhere, so maybe I am missing something ;)
I've done two, but I didn't find them very helpful. They take several months to schedule, which is quite inconvenient, and they require dedicating a lot of time staying overnight in clinics with wires strapped to you.
The end result is the same, too. Current medical advice is a mix of sleep hygiene and meditation strategies (some insomniacs feel extremely anxious when they can't sleep, which makes things worse) and medication.
I'm currently not taking medication, but for many years it was a pretty constant cycle 6-9 months on medication, and then a few months tapering off because my body would quickly build tolerance to them. Medication was pretty critical when I was in college, but in the decade since I've graduated I think I've just come to see the cycle as unsustainable and ultimately kind of pointless which is why I haven't taken them for about a year now.
Just curious if the medication was a benzo or z-drug (e.g. Ambien). If so, did you take it nightly during your 6-9 month cycles? Did the tolerance reset after a few months' break?
I've tried pretty much everything. Of course Melatonin and Benadryl don't work much. Klonopin and Ambien both work well, but I try not to use it more than 1x a week to avoid a tolerance.
I tried a whole slew of them. Zaleplon was actually the one that worked the best for me and the one I took for the longest. The tolerance would reset after a few months break, but it would always get back to the point where it was ineffective. I've also never noticed melatonin to have any effect, even when taken correctly.
Same deal here, same age as well - I often wonder if I did it to myself by staying up all night every night in my teens IRCing with folks in the US, never the less I don't get jetlag (currently in Seoul and adjusted that day) and I don't feel uncomfortable (prefer?) 4 hours sleep.
That's interesting. I've heard several people say they developed insomnia as teenagers, but for me it was ever since I was a kid. My parents would always get annoyed with me when I was young because I would talk with my siblings all night instead of sleeping.
I should ask my mum about this, maybe the IRC was a byproduct of insomnia, I'm not sure. FWIW I'm also dyslexic and when I do sleep, I almost never dream.
Exercise doesn't have an effect for me. In high school I played two varsity sports and in college I played in some club/recreational leagues. Now I swim and weightlift, but I wouldn't say any of these activities improve my quality of sleep or ability to induce it.
This is because, for me, "sleepiness" is not the same as "tiredness." I can be extremely exhausted, both mentally and physically, but I'll still never feel sleepy.
I would say one of the most frustrating aspects of being an insomniac is that is makes activities like weightlifting much more difficult. I'll never be able to achieve my weightlifting goals because I simply don't sleep enough hours to let my body fully recover. I've found I still have a strong stamina for aerobic sports, but building raw strength and muscle has been really hard.
That's not from a lack of sleep. If you want to build strength and muscle, do less aerobic exercise and eat more - a lot more. You need to be in a caloric surplus for a while.
Nope, GP post is correct. Your body dramatically increases muscle synthesis and nervous system improvements while you’re asleep. A caloric surplus is one piece of three-part puzzle: progressive overload, caloric surplus, and sleep.
Almost certainly as part of the sleep studies and checkups I've done, but I don't recall any doctors calling any particular attention to it. They always seem more concerned with the state of my heart and my mental state (any anxiety/depression/etc.) when I go to checkups.
I went a period of several weeks with little sleep (2-3 hours per day). At first I was really tired. Then that started to go away and my head was numb. After that the numbness went away and I had a persistent headache.
The reason why I got so little sleep initially stopped after about 10 days (sleep regression in twin babies). The rest of the time was because it became very difficult to sleep. Any noise would wake me up - wide awake. It would take me hours to fall asleep. I continued to only be able to get 2-3 hours per day. Even with over the counter sleep aids.
Eventually I got some Ambien, which let me actually fall asleep for more time. That helped me get to the point where I could actually feel tired again when I needed to sleep.
Zolpidem was a lifesaver for me. Although I always have really strange dreams and never feel like I get “real” sleep while taking it, it helped me get back on track when my sleeping schedule would go off the rails.
There are some comments here pointing out that some effects in the article (post 30 hours of sleep deprivation for example) seem out of proportion.
If you are comparing to times when you did not sleep and "felt" you performed well, please keep in mind that your "feelings" are also affected by the same lack of sleep.
You might be thinking you are driving great, but compared to how your drive when fully rested, you are probably not. But you brain does not process or acknowledge this fully since it is deprived of sleep.
Your mileage with lack of sleep will surely vary, but to think you are not affected (without formal tests) will be the exact result of lack or sleep - thinking/reasoning is impaired.
Every time I travel 30 hours to India (three flights from where I live, with layovers) I get reminded in a big way that sleep is important. I can't sleep on planes, for whatever reason, and man does it ever screw with my body. Part of that is simple jet lag, but for a few days after traveling things are clearly malfunctioning, hormones out of whack, body temperature regulation bass-ackwards, brain fog, memory loss, etc.
Yet another anecdotal data point:
I pulled my first all-nighter at age nine. That was July 1969, Armstrong on the Moon, which in Europe was a nighttime event. Stayed up for the rerun next morning and day. Tired, of course, and everything slightly unreal, mostly from all the agitation and the ghostly tv images, I think.
Since then, have not infrequently skipped nights - because of night shifts of physical labor, because of coding and inability to call it a day, because of travelling, because of childbirth, because of sudden insomnia, because of new, exciting girlfriend or - rarely - because of partying.
Generally, once I get a normal night of sleep, I'm fine, no residual effects that I'm aware of. 'A normal night of sleep' means 7 - 8 hours in the dark part of the year, 5 - 6 during summer.
Just entered my sixties, and healthwise doing just fine. Working in a job with a higly varying time schedule and actually enjoying it, whereas regular hours Monday through Friday eventually always push me into torpor and quasi-depression.
I rarely take naps, but will go to bed and fall asleep no problem at five or six in the afternoon if that's what my schedule dictates.
Pretty neat to see these symptoms understood and researched. I experienced all of them during high school when I worked at a movie theater that kept me there past 2AM and got up each morning for Seminary at 6AM. No caffeine was allowed in my parents household either. The freeway microsleep is the scariest. You suddenly become very alert and realize you don't remember the last few minutes at all.
I don't sleep, I guess this is called "short sleeping". I have been this way my entire life. Frustrated my family growing up and still today, age 42, is hard for my family sometimes.
I sleep 3-4 hours most days, but lately just 2 hours each day. It's like clockwork. I've actually been up for 30 hours already.
What makes me different? Anyone have research or thoughts on this?
How are your general energy levels, memory, mood? I can’t provide any research or thoughts on your case I’m afraid but I expect others who may be able to would need this information.
My sleep has been reducing, strangely. I used to get 4.5 hours or so, then 4, then 3.5, etc. Recently I'm on 2.
I feel fantastic every day. I get up without an alarm. I don't need caffeine, I work hard, I take care of the kids, cook, etc. Should mention that I eat a lot of blueberries, avocados, fish, tea, turmeric, etc.
Memory is fine, I don't forget or have trouble recalling details. Usually. Sometimes I forget an API call, but don't we all?
My mood is always positive/euphoric. Some days I'm a bit grumpy but its usually because I'm bogged down in tasks and trying to do a lot at one time and I really just want to put these chores aside and do something more enjoyable.
J.P. Serre, one of the most brilliant mathematician still living today, purportedly "does all his best work in his sleep": https://tinyurl.com/y25q45ut
From what I learned in the wonderful Coursera course: "Learning How to Learn", these are manifestations of the unfocused or diffused mode of the mind, and play a critical role in learning and problem solving.
https://medium.com/learn-love-code/learnings-from-learning-h...