
Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination - EndXA
https://solvingprocrastination.com/study-procrastination-sleep-quality-self-control/
======
bigbaguette
My father once told me, before he passed:

"No matter what you need to fix in your life, start with sleep and food.
You'll have difficulties improving anything else if these two basic needs
aren't fulfilled"

That sounded very Captain Obvious at the time, but as I'm getting older, I
realize more and more he was so right.

~~~
audiometry
"Sleep is the most powerful Performance Enhancing Supplement" is another
remark that feels true.

------
saagarjha
Is it possible that people who lack self-control also have a poor sleep
schedule? I know that I personally can be rather poor at telling myself to go
to bed…

~~~
paulgb
I’m just one data point, but I have definitely noticed that I procrastinate
more when I haven’t slept as well.

From a shallow skim, it looks like this study compared the same people across
multiple days.

~~~
remyM
Definitely the same here.

That's also why I end up here half the time.. back to work.

~~~
paulgb
I've become a heavy user of the phone app and browser extension called Forest
that lets you blacklist a set of sites for a variable amount of time.

------
peshooo
"you should first identify why you’re going to sleep later than intended, and
then create a plan of action which allows you to deal with your specific set
of reasons for procrastinating instead of going to sleep."

If only it was this simple.

~~~
EndXA
I agree that this usually isn’t easy to accomplish, especially if bedtime
procrastination is a serious issue for you. However, if you do decide to try
and tackle this problem, this approach (identifying why you procrastinate and
then tailoring a personal solution) is the way to go.

For example:

* If you can’t stop browsing social media before going to sleep, install an extension that cuts your access after a certain hour.

* If you feel too energetic to sleep, reduce caffeine intake/blue light exposure in the hours before bedtime.

* If you don’t feel motivated enough to go to sleep, use motivational techniques such as marking down streaks of days on which you successfully go to sleep on time.

Again, I'm not saying that it's easy, but if you’re willing to put in some
effort, there are a lot of effective techniques you can use:
[https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-
procrastinati...](https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-
procrastinating/)

~~~
rubicon33
> If you feel too energetic to sleep, reduce caffeine intake/blue light
> exposure in the hours before bedtime.

I struggled with this for a long time. I'd decide that I wanted to go to bed
earlier, and wake up earlier, but would always fail with the former. I'd get
in bed in time, but would never be able to fall asleep. It turns out the
solution is really simple...

The silver bullet was:

Don't focus on bed time. That will come naturally. Go to bed whenever you can.
The key is to WAKE UP early, every morning. Regardless of what time you went
to bed, WAKE UP at your target hour the next morning.

Also - exercise each day. For me, lifting heavy weights and sleeping too
little, quickly fixed my "too much energy" at night problem.

~~~
thanatropism
I feel like one out of my every three posts on HN are about the same thing,
but this is dangerous advice for people with bipolar disorder, who could be up
to 2% of the population.[0]

Not long ago there was a stigma about this thing that wasn't just about hiding
it, it was about "it won't happen to me, I'm not crazy". But you can be in
your mid 40s or early 50s before you have a first episode[1]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder)
[1]
[http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516...](http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-44462004000700007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en#fig1)

~~~
travisjungroth
Go to sleep when you can, wake up early and lift weights is dangerous advice
for people with bipolar? It almost seems like you responded to a different
comment (pull an all-nighter to reset your cycle).

~~~
thanatropism
It is. Lost sleep is a snowball. It's very easier for bipolars in a manic or
even hypomanic state to sleep 5, 4, 2 hours a night and feel well-rested and
ready to pull weights.

But diagnosed bipolar people know this. This is potentially harmful advice
because many people may not know they have a latent bipolar disorder that
hasn't manifested yet. In my parent comment I gave a histogram of the age of
onset of one's first episode -- it's well possible to be a nondescript
software engineer in one's early 40s and literally go crazy.

Of course, your proposal also has merits, so people should weigh risks and
benefits. Also note family history, history of depression, etc. which are also
risk factors.

Here's a recent survey of what w know about bipolars and sleep
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935164/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935164/)

But basically this has been known empirically since old-timey asylums.
Hippocrates probably has a hint of this as a factor of the "sacred disease".
It's a fact.

~~~
arandr0x
But the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the population is like, 1% right? So
if you have disturbed sleep in that sense (sleep 4-5h for weeks on end, but
feel alert and well-rested) it is still quite unlikely to be due to
undiagnosed bipolar? (vs needing less sleep naturally, using too much coffee,
blue light, whatever)

~~~
thanatropism
Edit: maybe this communicates it better to some people - bipolar is a tail
risk of sleep deprivation / experimentation with sleep schedules / etc. It is
low-probability.

But not fucking with your sleep is "antifragile". If you agree with Taleb
generally, you won't risk it. The downsides are immense. You can easily spend
all your savings in one weekend buying soviet filmmaking gear. And that's just
the financial side. Bipolar is treatable but doesn't go away. It's just easier
to handle. You go to the grave with your pillbox in hand, just in case they
buried you alive.

The minor disruption of having to take a handful of pills every night, 3
minutes times 365 days times 35 years = 2100 hours. You could probably learn
French, German and Italian in that time. I'm refraining from talking about the
major downsides. Educate yourself.

\--- You can also have a latent allergy to peanuts but you always ate small
portions. Then someone says "eat only peanuts for a week" and someone says
"beware, some allergies are cumulative-exposure, you could be especially
sensitive". Then you weigh your risks and benefits. Maybe have someone around
to help you if you choke.

With bipolar you won't know what's happening right away. It will seem you're
having the best period of your life (and you are!). Weigh your risks and
benefits. What's being proposed is a lifehack. You could also try to sleep
right the way your mother taught you to.

~~~
arandr0x
That makes sense. I've never spent my life savings but I did behave in a way
that was both way out of character and quite shameful once as a result of an
inconvenient flight schedule. It's weird how people speak of sleep deprivation
as, well, not exactly healthy, but not downright dangerous. I guess that's how
they talked about cigarettes back in the day too.

Perhaps there need to be more pushback from us tech workers when we hear
about, e.g., all night hackathons or polyphasic microsleep experiments or the
need for nap rooms in offices to compensate for all those 2am coding sessions
or something. That some people definitely experience adverse effects where the
consequences can be hard to control and some people's lives can be literally
wrecked by the thing.

------
maxxxxx
From my experience lack of sleep or low quality sleep will cause all kinds of
problems. When I am sleep deprived I can't think straight, get irritable,
anxious and depressed. And I think I observe this in other people too.

~~~
hnick
Lack of sleep causes lack of sleep for me.

I can't get anything done, so I lie away worrying about the things I didn't
do. Repeat.

The only fix for me seems to be adrenaline. Working on something exciting,
playing games, exercise - I don't feel tired. But brain work is hopeless and I
struggle to get through the day.

------
PierredeFermat
The original study
([https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0202...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02029/full))
is not recent as the article kicks off with; it was Received: 14 January 2018;
Accepted: 02 October 2018; Published: 02 November 2018.

Also, this seems to be observed only in those "who have low trait self-
control".

Adjusting the title for those two points may be more helpful.

~~~
ejstronge
In the scope of research, that's super recent - it probably took the authors 2
years or more to conduct the research they described.

~~~
PierredeFermat
Of course, anything could be adjusted for recency if you adjust the scope.
However, if you read new research everyday, that's far from recent.

As for the probable 2 years period, it doesn't look like it is the case in the
paper; "Seventy one full-time employees participated [...] Participants
completed a one-shot general electronic questionnaire"

------
accrual
Another commenter recently posted a link to a lecture by Tim Pychyl [0] on
another post about procrastination. I decided to watch it and came away
feeling deeply informed about procrastination, why we do it, and how to solve
it. It's a nuanced topic. Highly recommended if you have an hour to listen to
this articulated lecture.

[0]
[http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA](http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA)
(2012, 60 mins.)

------
SubiculumCode
Pocrastination->loss of sleep-> procrastination->depression over
procrastination->desperation->breakthrough->manic high productivity

That is my friends pattern. Kind of rough.

------
HiroshiSan
Why not give participants a fitbit or a smart watch to monitor their sleep
quality? Are they just not accurate enough at the moment?

~~~
quantum_magpie
Fitbit are quite accurate (and it seems they're the most accurate right now),
but they're real scum and don't allow chronologic data export. I got one since
they have that as a feature, but it's such a shitty dataset that it's
impossible to do anything with it. It's even a stretch to call it a dataset.

I'm still using mine in comparison with pencil and paper sleep charts, they
agree well. It's just a shame I can't show the data from fitbit to my
specialist.

~~~
brlewis
Chronological sleep stages data appears available via the API:
[https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-
api/sleep/](https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/)

What would a good export look like?

------
davidscolgan
I recently found that nearly all of my procrastination problems in life could
be relatively straightforwardly traced back to internet surfing on sites with
infinite sources of novelty. As the meme goes, one nacho cheese Dorito has
more extreme nacho cheese flavor than a medieval peasant would get in their
entire lifetime.
[[https://twitter.com/matthewpcrowley/status/62107825382700236...](https://twitter.com/matthewpcrowley/status/621078253827002368?lang=en)]
Our brains just aren't equipped to deal with novelty of this magnitude.

I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a
solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an
extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all
evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have
recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for
myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low
accountability environment.

So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to
make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while
working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but
most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access.

The two that I've found to work the best for me are
[http://getcoldturkey.com](http://getcoldturkey.com) for Windows 10 and
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.appblock)
for Android.

I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've blocked apps
like Chrome and the Youtube app permanently, and it's impossible to get around
without wiping my phone (which I'm probably too lazy to do). I had to go ahead
and install the Reddit app and mobile Firefox when I discovered I could
install apps remotely through the Play Store on my laptop (ha!). I also block
the Play Store app on the phone.

This makes my phone a phone, text messager, podcast player, audiobook player,
and maps device rather than a source of infinite novelty.

For my laptop it's a little harder since I can't block the browser and and
still do web dev, but the Cold Turkey app is the best app I've found to be as
undefeatable as possible while still filtering specific sites. You can set up
schedules, so I block sites after a certain time at night. Since, a key part
of the procrastination cycle is staying up too late and then getting up later
or tired, getting a bad start to the day, etc etc as the article suggests.

Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever, but it
makes a very strong effort to disallow itself from being uninstalled. It's a
desktop application, not a browser plugin, so it can actually prevent the
whole "I'll just use IE to browse Reddit" problem that Chrome plugin blockers
have. And having admin privileges, it can actually enforce blocks.

This may be a bit extreme, but modern life isn't really "normal" in any
possible way for our meat sack bodies and brains.

See also [https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-
stimuli/](https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/)

~~~
davidscolgan
I wouldn't say I've exactly "solved" this problem, as I do still think
relaxation and getting new information are valuable. But making Reddit more
than just a ctrl+t -> r -> enter away is helpful.

A great book about all of this that was also helpful for further motivating me
to try to be proactive here was Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism
[[http://calnewport.com/books/digital-
minimalism/](http://calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/)].

It's not really a book about "quit Facebook", but rather "be intentional about
the technology in your life instead of having technology happen to you. I've
determined that Hacker News is a valuable use of my time within moderation,
while Reddit doesn't really ever provide any sort of value, whether productive
_or_ relaxing.

------
sidcool
I am trying guided sleep to fall asleep faster and relaxed. It's helping me a
lot.

I say this from experience that good sleep makes all the difference between a
productive and a sucky day. You feel more focussed after a good sleep. Make
good sleep a habit.

------
okonomiyaki3000
That explains a lot. I guess I need to start getting better sleep. Maybe I'll
start next week. Or maybe the week after that.

