When I go many days in a row without enough sleep, I find that my cognitive abilities (i.e. what I am capable of doing) does not seem to significantly decline--as judged by things I build and people I interact with.
But, my endurance of focus (the amount of time for which I can perform at a high level) does suffer.
The weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I can't keep going... it's just that I sort of somehow don't keep going. I find my mind wandering more easily, checking in on social media more, and then time passing more quickly when I do. I'm more likely to look up from Twitter or HN and be surprised at the time.
In short I don't seem to be any dumber while doing something, but number of things I get done in a typical time periods declines.
As I have come to understand this impact, it has given me greater empathy for addicts. My brain doesn't feel like a tired muscle, or like I'm doing anything wrong in the moment. It's only later, when I look back, that I realize I was making bad decisions and losing time. It has just reinforced how hard it is to use decision-making to recover from a situation where the brain has already been compromised by bad decisions.
> I find that my cognitive abilities (i.e. what I am capable of doing) does not seem to significantly decline
It's very common. Studies on sleep deprivation report that subjects do not feel their cognitive abilities decline. However, measuring cognition using objective tests does show a significant decrease in these abilities.
I think that's what other recent psychological/neurological research has found too (citation needed--but do remember reading about it recently from multiple sources).
It figures that everyone each has their individual baseline "propensity to stay focused"--and sleep deprivation degrades someone's focus below that. You take a normal person and sleep deprive them, and their "propensity to stay focused" is lowered, but still might fall within an acceptable/functional range.
One theory that's gaining traction is that people with ADHD have a somewhat lower baseline than average, and when you throw in sleep deprivation, their "propensity to focus" falls into dysfunctional territory. Ergo, ADHD might have a large sleep component.
In all cases (which corroborates with your experiences), they found that people are really poor at actively self-detecting those fluctuations.
May be more of the same but I find my filter also declines substantially, so I basically turn into a colossal pain in the rear to deal with. Longer-fused patience or optimistic thinking becomes short fuse rage and negativity. There is no bandwidth to deal with multiple things at once or compartment, and no bandwidth to ingest any signal except the thing in front of you in your mindset.
> The weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I can't keep going... it's just that I sort of somehow don't keep going. I find my mind wandering more easily
That's exactly what I experience if I have a few too many days where my sleep is interrupted or I sleep badly. I already give myself very little leeway there, where I usually have about 5.5 to 6.5 hours before I need to wake up (I fall asleep very quickly), so it's a fairly good gauge of time). If something wakes me earlier than expected, it affects me the next day.
I find that coffee makes this harder to determine, as I'll still feel alert that next day, just as if I had better sleep, but I'll be less productive overall in all the ways you mentioned. I can still think coherently, but I appear to be able to do so about the same thing for a much shorter period before being distracted with something else.
> As I have come to understand this impact, it has given me greater empathy for addicts. My brain doesn't feel like a tired muscle, or like I'm doing anything wrong in the moment.
That's a very astute observation. I've noticed before that more sleep makes me more productive, yet there's always that allure to staying up a bit later and reading a little bit more in the book I'm reading (which is almost always the problem), or watching a little bit more, etc.
Like an addiction (I assume), the path from non-problematic behavior to problematic behavior is somewhat gradual, and noticing the problem is somewhat impaired by the negative effects of the problem itself. I don't set out to sleep very little, it just gradually gets worse where I'm skimping on sleep more and more often, until it's fairly consistent, and then I eventually notice and break out of it. Then the cycle repeats, but I generally spend far more time with little sleep than adequate sleep overall.
Your last point really resonated with me. I've seen a very good friend crash his entire life by a string of bad decisions that led to him being constantly under pressure and burned out.
Ironically the use of some strong nootropics helped him cut the corner and work himself in a saner situation from which he could use to start coming back on his feet.
I have experienced something similar after I've been ill. For example, day 1 and 2 I'm just doing my work and don't feel ill yet, then day 3 I get ill and have to stay home from work.
Afterwards I notice that my work from day 1 and 2 is way below average and can more or less be discarded, while I did not notice this at the time.
That's early phase sleep deprivation for me. Distinct from late phase, where I'll forget a sentence the second I hear the next one. Just completely shot short term memory until I find time to sleep for 10 hours, sometimes a few days later. Comes around the day after a deadline.
> The weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I can't keep going... it's just that I sort of somehow don't keep going
Sounds a lot like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Which means it can simply be a question of your perception of a phenomenon, not an objective truth of it.
I’ve been under sleeping and I play a lot of games. Poker, go, call of duty war zone. My performance in all of them suffers. I actually don’t allow myself to play poker anymore unless I have two nights of full rest.
Since a few years ago (when I read Why We Sleep [0]) I’ve made it my priority above all else to allow myself 8 hours of sleep, even if I don’t ‘use’ all of it. With more sleep, an innumerable amount of things are better (as read in the book), but subjectively I noticed the following after about a month straight of good sleep:
* Pain was far more manageable (IBS, MMA injuries)
* Sleep was more restorative when I woke up
* Emotions far more regulated (less irritable)
* Quicker to come up with on the spot jokes, or come up with a refutation to an argument
* Gym performance +30% at least
* Gym recovery faster
* Short and long term memory improvement
* Less health flair ups
* Reduction in brain fog
It’s hard to notice these differences subjectively unless you know what it’s like when you’re “optimized”
Following a keto (or carnivore with a focus on ketosis) diet leads to a further boost across the dimensions mentioned above.
I think many people outside of self-optimization don’t realize what they’re sacrificing when they choose to forego sleep. Even total productivity is enhanced, despite working less hours due to sleeping.
Just recently since I've been working from home all the time, I realized I don't actually need an alarm to get up, since I don't need to leave the house at a predetermined time to beat traffic and get to the office at a reasonable time. Getting up at the same time in the morning was just habit.
Instead now I have an alarm to go bed, and I get up when I feel rested.
I would imagine the group of people who immediately accepted everything this book claimed as fact and went on to immediately adjust their lifestyles to match may have a strong correlation with the group of people who are more susceptible to the placebo effect.
I didn't make it through the first chapter before I started looking into the accuracy of the claims he was making. Some of them were clearly bananas.
> It seems that there’s very high variation in how people respond to sleep deprivation.
There you go. It's the tyranny of averages: when variation between humans is greater than the effect of the intervention.
This reminds me of reading The How of Happiness and learning that happiness is basically 50% genetics, 10% circumstances and 40% behavior. The author frames that 40% as a really big number, but I thought about it the other way around: if you're unlucky enough to be born into the bottom decile of genetic happiness, then you could do everything right and still be less happy than someone with really good happiness genes who does everything wrong.
Some people get smashed by any lack of sleep, and some people (most notably short sleepers) are totally fine with as little as 4 hours a night. There is no advice that works for both kinds, and formulating advice based on averages is committing a grave fallacy.
I suppose the world of health research is plagued by this erroneous assumption that humans are more or less the same. In some ways sure, but in many ways we are profoundly different.
> I suppose the world of health research is plagued by this erroneous assumption that humans are more or less the same. In some ways sure, but in many ways we are profoundly different.
Sidenote: I came to the conclusion, that this is the crux of all generalizations when it comes to humans. Not all policies will be good for all people. The ideal country might be very different for you and me. Also our diets, the way we build relationships, how we should train our bodies or what constitutes moral lives.
Research in general pretty much has to work this way. You're trying to identify "laws" or rules that govern reality. Outliers are interesting, but in general we expect to find many instances of some phenomenon—which means that by default we're looking for cause-and-effect relationships that apply in "most cases."
It's also worth mentioning that it's very easy for people to convince themselves that they're special or different when they actually aren't. Our own psychology is very unreliable. So while your point is well taken, people should also not assume they're the exception to the rule, even if they might be.
I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time.
Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule and were disciplined about napping on time. I never had the scheduling freedom available to actually give it a go, and accounts of others trying it seemed to indicate that it was actually pretty awful to keep up.
This article seems promising, but it's a relatively short experiment. Would be interesting to see what happened after a year of 4 hour sleep. Based on the author's description, sounds like their body was trying to force them asleep at every turn and they had to fight through it. That would be hard to maintain long-term.
I truly wish one day we can isolate and synthesize whatever magical thing happens during sleep and recover some useful time. This seems much more practical than life-expectancy extension to me. As long as, of course, employers don't take it upon themselves to increase the workday as well. I'd rather sleep than work.
I’d say that the idea that we can recover wasted time sleeping is predicated on the idea that sleep is not a useful thing to do with our time. I think the current consensus is that there is actually many different things that our bodies and minds do while sleeping, so you couldn’t isolate one benefit of sleep and replicate it, you’d have to replicate five or ten different benefits of sleep, or more.
If you want to recover some time, try Soylent, moving closer to the office, hiring a maid to do the cleaning, etc. Assuming that these are within your means, you can recover quite a bit of time that way.
I did uberman in grad school, kept it up for a few months. It technically did give me more hours in the day, however most of that free time was spent on either making sure my schedule was arranged well enough for my sleep times, or sitting around reading a book quietly at 3am because everyone else including my roommate is asleep and all businesses are closed.
The benefits weren't really as pronounced as I was hoping for. Then if you end up missing one of your scheduled sleep times it really effects you and throws you off for a day or two.
I am a big fan of sleeping. It makes sense to try to optimize how you use your time awake than to try to do everything in a sleep-deprived state. I've definitely spent days after 4 hours of sleep pounding away at code, seeming to be productive, and then waking up the next morning, thinking "wtf is this garbage", and then deleting it. That's 16 hours wasted, to save 4 hours in bed. Doesn't seem like a good deal to me.
I think if you really want to micro-optimize, you need to be able to set up quantitative metrics and then start playing with variables, and then make very small changes. Maybe you only need 7.5 hours of sleep, not 8. If you are set up to measure the differences in mood, wakefulness, etc., then you can probably detect when you've not gotten enough sleep. But, you might not like the results. Rather than fight them, you probably have to embrace them (or seek medical intervention).
Have you tried lucid dreaming? I’ve been a lucid dreamer since I was a kid but I didn’t know what it was called and I thought that’s how everyone’s dreams work. Somewhere along the way in law school I started using my dreams to study. I’d slow-walk through hypothetical fact patterns or anticipate getting cold-called to recite a case we’d read. It’s been incredibly helpful and once I realized my classmates had no idea wtf I meant by “I literally study in my dreams” I found all sorts of groups online who have different techniques you can try.
I still use lucid dreaming for all sorts of things like practicing for presentations or running through meetings that I know will be difficult. I’ve found its most useful (for me at least) when prepping for interactive or adversarial situations because it forces some part of the brain to “be” both sides: the question asker and answerer.
The problem I see with this kind of studies is that they don't measure long-term effects, and oh boy - do they exist. Its the topic I can be used as a bad example. When I was around 16, I found that my ideal sleep schedule was doing 20h awake and 6h sleeping. In those 20h, I'd spend around 13h in front of a monitor (monochrome, so less eye strain), and the rest doing the usual stuff (reading, eating, etc). I kept it for as long as I could (around 3 months), until it stared interfering with "life schedules" such as school. So instead of returning to the usual 8h sleep, I started sleeping when I could. It lasted a couple of years, until the brain couldn't take it anymore. After that, I spent the biggest part of 6 months sleeping (would be awake around 4-6h a day) and medicated (as far as I recall, no explicit sedatives). Fast forward a couple of years, and I'd do "marathons" like 20-40h awake, but then with 10-12h sleep time. Periodically, I'd need to sleep "a day" (usually around 14-16h) to feel recovered.
In the past 6 or so years, my sleep schedules have been pretty normal, but I sill need to sometimes sleep "a day" (at weekends), and its very difficult for me to sleep only 8h a night. When I'm on vacations, I usually sleep around 12h as often as I can.
Messing with sleep schedules (granted, in an extreme way) has had a profound negative impact in my life, and past 20 years, I still suffer consequences from my youth mistakes. The benefits I reaped from having "extra time" are dim compared to the long-term consequences not only on my health, but also on my personal life.
There are other schedules on that site that are far tamer, such as Everyman 1: sleep 6 hours at night, one 20-min nap during the day, which you could do on a lunch break. The fact that many think polyphasic sleep is only Uberman or other nap-based schedules is disappointing to see. There are whole gradations from 9 hours (two 4.5 hour sleeps, not necessarily reduction of total sleep time, but it gives better sleep for some) to Uberman or Tesla (~2 hour total sleep time), which by the way is not known to be stable over a longer time period, a fact that the polyphasic community willingly accepts.
It is particularly disappointing to see because, just as you say, I'd also like to see more research on sleep and perhaps synthesizing its effects into a compound, but if people dismiss these alternate sleep schedules, we may not fully understand what the brain is doing during sleep, as fewer researchers are incentivized to study it, thinking it's just BS, which hurts the field overall.
> I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time
8 hours - I wish!
Since starting freelancing full time I've been lucky enough to not need to get up at any particular time and ditched the alarm clock - but unlucky enough to find out that it takes me around 9-10 hours of sleep to wake up naturally.
Unfortunately, after getting used to it, waking to alarm now feels like torture (well, it did before too, now that I think about it).
> I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time.
Given the option, would you want to be slower and less energetic if you could stay up 24/7? We seem to make a trade-off. We sleep for 8 hours so that we can be at optimal performance the rest of the time.
> Uberman
I have never seen anyone that could sustain this. This is probably by design, the body has several mechanisms to make you go to bed. If not doing so was actually beneficial, it is likely that adaptations to this end would be more common.
> I truly wish one day we can isolate and synthesize whatever magical thing happens during sleep and recover some useful time.
Even our real world machines require maintenance stops. Don't hold your breath. Maybe we could make this more efficient in the future and speed up the processes.
That has never been wasted time for me so I disagree on your sentiment. Sleeping is a very fulfilling and engaging activity. I would rather not have the pace set by an expectation of increased "productivity".
I have come to the (non-scientific) conclusion that this is probably genetic. I know some people who sleep a lot less than me and seem to be fine with that. I am not fine with less sleep, but I wish I was because I would love to have the extra hours each day.
I thought of this for the first time when listening to a Freakonomics podcast series interviewing major company CEOs. Several of them mentioned schedules where they average 3-5 hours sleep per night, forever. They all seemed to think that was fine.
I think I would be severely ill, maybe even literally die, if I averaged 3-5 hours sleep for a duration of many months.
When listening to that series it hit me, maybe this is a genetic thing. In the same way that you kind of need to be tall to make it into the NBA, maybe you need the "minimal sleep is okay" gene to make it as a CEO or rocketship founder. People with those genes get anywhere from 10-20 hours more time per work week than I do, and that's a big advantage over one week, let alone compounded over a career.
I don't know what the research says about this, but my lived experience makes me think it's pretty likely, and unfortunately that also means I may have to be more realistic about what my body is and is not capable of.
Was his assessment basically just playing video games? I've noticed that's an activity I can do proficiently for an extended duration on very little sleep (along with things like "bulk" coding) but there are others I'm awful at unless I'm well rested (eg. complex planning, creative efforts like songwriting) and I've found my communication skills start to become impaired when I'm really sleep deprived.
I'd be curious to see how he performs on a broader spectrum of cognitive and even physical assessments.
This is one of those posts I wish I could downvote 1000 times. It's the brogrammer equivalent of fake news: 22-yo kid "makes science" with a sample of 1, some videogames, and a few charts.
You are 22 year old. Your body is at peak condition, built to go out and hunt for days on little food and little sleep. Of course it will work more or less fine for a few weeks.
I find it concerning how many people in this thread immediately jump from believing Why We Sleep is truthful to the book is complete bullshit because guzey says so. Indeed, some good points are raised by him but at the end of the day he's just another fucking guy with a blog. The entire field deserves more study but the responses on here feel like Grandma on Facebook passing on something she read because it feels right.
> I slept 4 hours a night for 14 days and didn’t find any effects on cognition (assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT).
Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
I read about the Uberman sleep schedule stuff myself when I was younger and trying to recover time I "wasted" sleeping. I ended up trying Uberman myself (15 minute naps, 6x per day).
I did a decent amount of prep work. I talked to my doctor (who basically said as long as I'm not falling asleep while driving, go for it). I set up ways to track my cognitive abilities around work (remote software engineer at the time). I started tracking kill-to-death ratio in favorite first person shooter (I thought it was a good measure of my innovation, as you can't use the same tricks for very long against human opponents). I also started tracking my weight, strength, endurance, and food intake.
It was hard to get into the schedule, and it never really clicked and held. Eventually I found the schedule to be frustrating and difficult from a social perspective. So I ended up dropping it a little over a year after I started.
So yeah, a little over a year.
When I analyzed my numbers I didn't see any particular hits in any of the areas. Work stayed stable (I actually got promoted about 9 months in, so I'm fairly confident about that). My kill-to-death ratio in the FPS climbed steadily along a similar trajectory as it had before I started. I found I was eating more (from ~2300 calories per day to almost 3000 calories to day), but my weight stayed level. Strength and endurance went up slightly, but that's probably more because I was checking them regularly versus not doing any exercise leading up to it.
Would I suggest it to others? No. There were other issues I had with the plan, more societal. And it was frustrating to not be able to focus on something for more than 3.5 hours at a time. But it certainly was an interesting time.
Having recently had a baby, 4 hours of presumably uninterrupted sleep per night is an absolutely amazing prospect! Luxury!
What I noticed was it was not so much a lack of sleep, but how the sleep is interrupted that was the killer. After a few days of barely sleeping longer than 30 mins at a time I found that memory was hugely impacted, and even trivial mental arithmetic required concentration. I suspect this is to do with not being able to get into the appropriate "deep sleep" cycles or something-something-REM sleep?
If you are up for it, please try the experiment again with 4 hours of sleep randomly broken up into 10-60 minute chunks (random variability is important - i.e you go to sleep not knowing how long you've got) distributed throughout the day, with a minimum of 60 minutes between each chunk. Enjoy :)
Guzey had another blog post on Matthew Walker's sleep book posted on HN a while back. I thought it was a bad faith critique, from my own biophysics perspective. We had some back and forth, guzey seemed nice & respectful enough, but I still had my misgivings about the critique. Sleep is very much an open question.
HN seems to really love maximizing cognition and the overall efficiency of their life. That said, if you want to try this experiment yourself, know this: sleep also affects mood, memory, and longevity (e.g. dementia). Chronic sleep deprivation is not good for you.
"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut down sleep.
I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.
This study can lead one to conclude that at least some people can function well for short-term periods of sleep deficit, at least when performing stimulating activities.
However, we also have studies showing that people are very poor at recognizing when they are being affected by sleep deficit, so you would need to run this experiment on yourself first before concluding it applies to you!
I discovered that about 1/3 of people can be sleep deprived without any ill effects, which is the bucket I fall in. Another 1/3 will be disgruntled but can function at a lower level, but for the last 1/3, it's catastrophic and can't function at all. That's my wife, and what exemplified this the most was after having kids. She was almost immediately a wreck but I was able to hold together with the lack of sleep and spent most of the time being the caregiver for our kids during the toughest parts of the night.
Previous, I had another incident of sleep where I got 4-5 hours of sleep a day for about a year, and then it all came crashing down on me eventually.
About 10 years ago, I was doing algorithmic trading globally and would sometimes watch my trades until 1-2am, and then wake up at 6am to be ready for US trading. I was doing fine with no problems from lack of sleep, and then one day after about a year I stopped being able to think clearly. I was having real trouble thinking or learning new things and had a bad headache. I went to my doctor and she immediately scheduled an MRI because she thought I might have a brain tumor. I was scared shitless, but I was able to get the MRI the next day. After the results came back negative for brain tumor, I thought maybe it's sleep, so I left work in the middle of the day and fell asleep and slept for about 16 hours. I realized right there and then I was sleep deprived, so I stopped trading immediately and focused on trying to sleep properly.
These days I need close to 7.5 hrs of sleep a day and if I get less, I'll feel it pretty quickly as opposed to 10 years ago when I felt nothing.
I am fascinated by this, when I was younger I was obsessed with cutting out sleep, experimenting with polyphasic sleep, energy drinks etc.
I'll add one other anecdote that I don't know what it means, but I had a project I was working on that was tight deadline, as a result I was only able to get two hours a sleep a night for about a week. For some reason once I got past the third day my tiredness and desire to sleep seemed to dip considerably, and I found that staying awake when engaged in any activity or discussion was easier. If I was just sitting in a meeting or presentation that I wasn't very interested in I would doze off, but as long as I was engaged I felt like I didn't need to sleep at all.
Back in the 1980s this was expected of MIT undergrads. Took me over a decade and some difficult effort to extract myself from chronic lack of sleep. I feel likeI was a lot smarter and more productive when I get 6 hrs minimum. I am a lot healthier on other metrics as well.
Perhaps this shows that a coupled weeks is OK. Certainly it helped me in my 20s — I could hold down a job and still spend evenings at clubs with my gf and then wife. So in that way I was a good spouse(!)
A broader study would be interesting too — according to my pediatrician mother I didn’t sleep much even as a baby / toddler.
> However, for the entire duration of the experiment I had to resist regular urges to sleep and on several occasions when I did not want to play video games was very close to failing the experiment, having at one point fallen asleep in my chair and being awakened a few minutes later by my wife.
I don't really believe this, and I find this interesting and impressive,but this sounds like a George Costanza scheme after getting caught playing video games or sleeping too much
This may be anecdotal [and sleep deprivation may impact different people differently] but it has a huge impact on me.
I used to use memrise [flash card style memorisation] to learn new words/concepts for years [25minutes, the first thing after waking up, every single day] and I know from experience how sleep, food, hangover, etc. impact my performance.
Sleep has a gigantic impact on my memory, focus and creativity — I believe it is responsible for really high variation in IQ points [10 - 20, but that's my rough guesstimate]. This is a more qualitative assessment but whey I sleep 4 hours it resembles a high level of depression — I lose motivation and all of my natural curiosity is gone [eg. usually, reading/learning brings me happiness, but it's all gone when I'm sleep deprived].
That's why I haven't used an alarm clock for years now.
I definitely couldn't do it. After about a week, my body would just crash/go to sleep by itself, world be damned.
Same, or rather, worse, when working 12 hours a day for more than ~2 weeks. I just start thinking "what the fuck am I doing? Why is this worth it?", and if it's not worth it it would just drive me into a serious depressive mood.
Maybe because I know I could do better than this, that there are other options. Maybe it's because I made peace with death already. But I think it's just that I'm physically not made for this kind of overload.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|5 years ago|reply
But, my endurance of focus (the amount of time for which I can perform at a high level) does suffer.
The weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I can't keep going... it's just that I sort of somehow don't keep going. I find my mind wandering more easily, checking in on social media more, and then time passing more quickly when I do. I'm more likely to look up from Twitter or HN and be surprised at the time.
In short I don't seem to be any dumber while doing something, but number of things I get done in a typical time periods declines.
As I have come to understand this impact, it has given me greater empathy for addicts. My brain doesn't feel like a tired muscle, or like I'm doing anything wrong in the moment. It's only later, when I look back, that I realize I was making bad decisions and losing time. It has just reinforced how hard it is to use decision-making to recover from a situation where the brain has already been compromised by bad decisions.
[+] [-] hashmal|5 years ago|reply
It's very common. Studies on sleep deprivation report that subjects do not feel their cognitive abilities decline. However, measuring cognition using objective tests does show a significant decrease in these abilities.
[+] [-] oh-4-fucks-sake|5 years ago|reply
It figures that everyone each has their individual baseline "propensity to stay focused"--and sleep deprivation degrades someone's focus below that. You take a normal person and sleep deprive them, and their "propensity to stay focused" is lowered, but still might fall within an acceptable/functional range.
One theory that's gaining traction is that people with ADHD have a somewhat lower baseline than average, and when you throw in sleep deprivation, their "propensity to focus" falls into dysfunctional territory. Ergo, ADHD might have a large sleep component.
In all cases (which corroborates with your experiences), they found that people are really poor at actively self-detecting those fluctuations.
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|5 years ago|reply
Not a place I’d recommend if you can avoid it.
[+] [-] kbenson|5 years ago|reply
That's exactly what I experience if I have a few too many days where my sleep is interrupted or I sleep badly. I already give myself very little leeway there, where I usually have about 5.5 to 6.5 hours before I need to wake up (I fall asleep very quickly), so it's a fairly good gauge of time). If something wakes me earlier than expected, it affects me the next day.
I find that coffee makes this harder to determine, as I'll still feel alert that next day, just as if I had better sleep, but I'll be less productive overall in all the ways you mentioned. I can still think coherently, but I appear to be able to do so about the same thing for a much shorter period before being distracted with something else.
> As I have come to understand this impact, it has given me greater empathy for addicts. My brain doesn't feel like a tired muscle, or like I'm doing anything wrong in the moment.
That's a very astute observation. I've noticed before that more sleep makes me more productive, yet there's always that allure to staying up a bit later and reading a little bit more in the book I'm reading (which is almost always the problem), or watching a little bit more, etc.
Like an addiction (I assume), the path from non-problematic behavior to problematic behavior is somewhat gradual, and noticing the problem is somewhat impaired by the negative effects of the problem itself. I don't set out to sleep very little, it just gradually gets worse where I'm skimping on sleep more and more often, until it's fairly consistent, and then I eventually notice and break out of it. Then the cycle repeats, but I generally spend far more time with little sleep than adequate sleep overall.
[+] [-] fegu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roritharr|5 years ago|reply
Ironically the use of some strong nootropics helped him cut the corner and work himself in a saner situation from which he could use to start coming back on his feet.
[+] [-] aerique|5 years ago|reply
Afterwards I notice that my work from day 1 and 2 is way below average and can more or less be discarded, while I did not notice this at the time.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|5 years ago|reply
Sounds a lot like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Which means it can simply be a question of your perception of a phenomenon, not an objective truth of it.
[+] [-] testnew2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacephysics|5 years ago|reply
* Pain was far more manageable (IBS, MMA injuries)
* Sleep was more restorative when I woke up
* Emotions far more regulated (less irritable)
* Quicker to come up with on the spot jokes, or come up with a refutation to an argument
* Gym performance +30% at least
* Gym recovery faster
* Short and long term memory improvement
* Less health flair ups
* Reduction in brain fog
It’s hard to notice these differences subjectively unless you know what it’s like when you’re “optimized”
Following a keto (or carnivore with a focus on ketosis) diet leads to a further boost across the dimensions mentioned above.
I think many people outside of self-optimization don’t realize what they’re sacrificing when they choose to forego sleep. Even total productivity is enhanced, despite working less hours due to sleeping.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
[+] [-] DominikPeters|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
[+] [-] bentcorner|5 years ago|reply
Instead now I have an alarm to go bed, and I get up when I feel rested.
[+] [-] rdgthree|5 years ago|reply
I didn't make it through the first chapter before I started looking into the accuracy of the claims he was making. Some of them were clearly bananas.
[+] [-] kthxbye123|5 years ago|reply
Following a "carnivore" diet is a really terrible idea. Unless you're an Inuit living in the frozen north, you should eat some greens.
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
There you go. It's the tyranny of averages: when variation between humans is greater than the effect of the intervention.
This reminds me of reading The How of Happiness and learning that happiness is basically 50% genetics, 10% circumstances and 40% behavior. The author frames that 40% as a really big number, but I thought about it the other way around: if you're unlucky enough to be born into the bottom decile of genetic happiness, then you could do everything right and still be less happy than someone with really good happiness genes who does everything wrong.
Some people get smashed by any lack of sleep, and some people (most notably short sleepers) are totally fine with as little as 4 hours a night. There is no advice that works for both kinds, and formulating advice based on averages is committing a grave fallacy.
I suppose the world of health research is plagued by this erroneous assumption that humans are more or less the same. In some ways sure, but in many ways we are profoundly different.
[+] [-] kharak|5 years ago|reply
Sidenote: I came to the conclusion, that this is the crux of all generalizations when it comes to humans. Not all policies will be good for all people. The ideal country might be very different for you and me. Also our diets, the way we build relationships, how we should train our bodies or what constitutes moral lives.
[+] [-] Zenbit_UX|5 years ago|reply
You can be poor and happy or rich and happy, but the smarter you are the less likely either of those are true. Though being rich certainly helps.
[+] [-] trebidor|5 years ago|reply
It's also worth mentioning that it's very easy for people to convince themselves that they're special or different when they actually aren't. Our own psychology is very unreliable. So while your point is well taken, people should also not assume they're the exception to the rule, even if they might be.
[+] [-] akersten|5 years ago|reply
Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule and were disciplined about napping on time. I never had the scheduling freedom available to actually give it a go, and accounts of others trying it seemed to indicate that it was actually pretty awful to keep up.
This article seems promising, but it's a relatively short experiment. Would be interesting to see what happened after a year of 4 hour sleep. Based on the author's description, sounds like their body was trying to force them asleep at every turn and they had to fight through it. That would be hard to maintain long-term.
I truly wish one day we can isolate and synthesize whatever magical thing happens during sleep and recover some useful time. This seems much more practical than life-expectancy extension to me. As long as, of course, employers don't take it upon themselves to increase the workday as well. I'd rather sleep than work.
[0]: https://polyphasic.net/schedules/uberman/
[+] [-] klodolph|5 years ago|reply
If you want to recover some time, try Soylent, moving closer to the office, hiring a maid to do the cleaning, etc. Assuming that these are within your means, you can recover quite a bit of time that way.
[+] [-] AlexanderNull|5 years ago|reply
The benefits weren't really as pronounced as I was hoping for. Then if you end up missing one of your scheduled sleep times it really effects you and throws you off for a day or two.
[+] [-] jrockway|5 years ago|reply
I think if you really want to micro-optimize, you need to be able to set up quantitative metrics and then start playing with variables, and then make very small changes. Maybe you only need 7.5 hours of sleep, not 8. If you are set up to measure the differences in mood, wakefulness, etc., then you can probably detect when you've not gotten enough sleep. But, you might not like the results. Rather than fight them, you probably have to embrace them (or seek medical intervention).
[+] [-] elliekelly|5 years ago|reply
I still use lucid dreaming for all sorts of things like practicing for presentations or running through meetings that I know will be difficult. I’ve found its most useful (for me at least) when prepping for interactive or adversarial situations because it forces some part of the brain to “be” both sides: the question asker and answerer.
[+] [-] aforwardslash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cercatrova|5 years ago|reply
It is particularly disappointing to see because, just as you say, I'd also like to see more research on sleep and perhaps synthesizing its effects into a compound, but if people dismiss these alternate sleep schedules, we may not fully understand what the brain is doing during sleep, as fewer researchers are incentivized to study it, thinking it's just BS, which hurts the field overall.
[+] [-] balfirevic|5 years ago|reply
8 hours - I wish!
Since starting freelancing full time I've been lucky enough to not need to get up at any particular time and ditched the alarm clock - but unlucky enough to find out that it takes me around 9-10 hours of sleep to wake up naturally.
Unfortunately, after getting used to it, waking to alarm now feels like torture (well, it did before too, now that I think about it).
So much time. Every day.
[+] [-] outworlder|5 years ago|reply
Given the option, would you want to be slower and less energetic if you could stay up 24/7? We seem to make a trade-off. We sleep for 8 hours so that we can be at optimal performance the rest of the time.
> Uberman
I have never seen anyone that could sustain this. This is probably by design, the body has several mechanisms to make you go to bed. If not doing so was actually beneficial, it is likely that adaptations to this end would be more common.
> I truly wish one day we can isolate and synthesize whatever magical thing happens during sleep and recover some useful time.
Even our real world machines require maintenance stops. Don't hold your breath. Maybe we could make this more efficient in the future and speed up the processes.
[+] [-] scollet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|5 years ago|reply
I thought of this for the first time when listening to a Freakonomics podcast series interviewing major company CEOs. Several of them mentioned schedules where they average 3-5 hours sleep per night, forever. They all seemed to think that was fine.
I think I would be severely ill, maybe even literally die, if I averaged 3-5 hours sleep for a duration of many months.
When listening to that series it hit me, maybe this is a genetic thing. In the same way that you kind of need to be tall to make it into the NBA, maybe you need the "minimal sleep is okay" gene to make it as a CEO or rocketship founder. People with those genes get anywhere from 10-20 hours more time per work week than I do, and that's a big advantage over one week, let alone compounded over a career.
I don't know what the research says about this, but my lived experience makes me think it's pretty likely, and unfortunately that also means I may have to be more realistic about what my body is and is not capable of.
[+] [-] rkagerer|5 years ago|reply
I'd be curious to see how he performs on a broader spectrum of cognitive and even physical assessments.
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
You are 22 year old. Your body is at peak condition, built to go out and hunt for days on little food and little sleep. Of course it will work more or less fine for a few weeks.
[+] [-] brewdad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abtom|5 years ago|reply
Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
[+] [-] shaftway|5 years ago|reply
I did a decent amount of prep work. I talked to my doctor (who basically said as long as I'm not falling asleep while driving, go for it). I set up ways to track my cognitive abilities around work (remote software engineer at the time). I started tracking kill-to-death ratio in favorite first person shooter (I thought it was a good measure of my innovation, as you can't use the same tricks for very long against human opponents). I also started tracking my weight, strength, endurance, and food intake.
It was hard to get into the schedule, and it never really clicked and held. Eventually I found the schedule to be frustrating and difficult from a social perspective. So I ended up dropping it a little over a year after I started.
So yeah, a little over a year.
When I analyzed my numbers I didn't see any particular hits in any of the areas. Work stayed stable (I actually got promoted about 9 months in, so I'm fairly confident about that). My kill-to-death ratio in the FPS climbed steadily along a similar trajectory as it had before I started. I found I was eating more (from ~2300 calories per day to almost 3000 calories to day), but my weight stayed level. Strength and endurance went up slightly, but that's probably more because I was checking them regularly versus not doing any exercise leading up to it.
Would I suggest it to others? No. There were other issues I had with the plan, more societal. And it was frustrating to not be able to focus on something for more than 3.5 hours at a time. But it certainly was an interesting time.
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
What I noticed was it was not so much a lack of sleep, but how the sleep is interrupted that was the killer. After a few days of barely sleeping longer than 30 mins at a time I found that memory was hugely impacted, and even trivial mental arithmetic required concentration. I suspect this is to do with not being able to get into the appropriate "deep sleep" cycles or something-something-REM sleep?
If you are up for it, please try the experiment again with 4 hours of sleep randomly broken up into 10-60 minute chunks (random variability is important - i.e you go to sleep not knowing how long you've got) distributed throughout the day, with a minimum of 60 minutes between each chunk. Enjoy :)
[+] [-] biophysboy|5 years ago|reply
HN seems to really love maximizing cognition and the overall efficiency of their life. That said, if you want to try this experiment yourself, know this: sleep also affects mood, memory, and longevity (e.g. dementia). Chronic sleep deprivation is not good for you.
[+] [-] praptak|5 years ago|reply
I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.
[+] [-] gregwebs|5 years ago|reply
However, we also have studies showing that people are very poor at recognizing when they are being affected by sleep deficit, so you would need to run this experiment on yourself first before concluding it applies to you!
[+] [-] ping_pong|5 years ago|reply
Previous, I had another incident of sleep where I got 4-5 hours of sleep a day for about a year, and then it all came crashing down on me eventually.
About 10 years ago, I was doing algorithmic trading globally and would sometimes watch my trades until 1-2am, and then wake up at 6am to be ready for US trading. I was doing fine with no problems from lack of sleep, and then one day after about a year I stopped being able to think clearly. I was having real trouble thinking or learning new things and had a bad headache. I went to my doctor and she immediately scheduled an MRI because she thought I might have a brain tumor. I was scared shitless, but I was able to get the MRI the next day. After the results came back negative for brain tumor, I thought maybe it's sleep, so I left work in the middle of the day and fell asleep and slept for about 16 hours. I realized right there and then I was sleep deprived, so I stopped trading immediately and focused on trying to sleep properly.
These days I need close to 7.5 hrs of sleep a day and if I get less, I'll feel it pretty quickly as opposed to 10 years ago when I felt nothing.
[+] [-] hpoe|5 years ago|reply
I'll add one other anecdote that I don't know what it means, but I had a project I was working on that was tight deadline, as a result I was only able to get two hours a sleep a night for about a week. For some reason once I got past the third day my tiredness and desire to sleep seemed to dip considerably, and I found that staying awake when engaged in any activity or discussion was easier. If I was just sitting in a meeting or presentation that I wasn't very interested in I would doze off, but as long as I was engaged I felt like I didn't need to sleep at all.
I really wish we knew more about sleep.
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps this shows that a coupled weeks is OK. Certainly it helped me in my 20s — I could hold down a job and still spend evenings at clubs with my gf and then wife. So in that way I was a good spouse(!)
A broader study would be interesting too — according to my pediatrician mother I didn’t sleep much even as a baby / toddler.
[+] [-] jrootabega|5 years ago|reply
I don't really believe this, and I find this interesting and impressive,but this sounds like a George Costanza scheme after getting caught playing video games or sleeping too much
[+] [-] qu4ku|5 years ago|reply
I used to use memrise [flash card style memorisation] to learn new words/concepts for years [25minutes, the first thing after waking up, every single day] and I know from experience how sleep, food, hangover, etc. impact my performance.
Sleep has a gigantic impact on my memory, focus and creativity — I believe it is responsible for really high variation in IQ points [10 - 20, but that's my rough guesstimate]. This is a more qualitative assessment but whey I sleep 4 hours it resembles a high level of depression — I lose motivation and all of my natural curiosity is gone [eg. usually, reading/learning brings me happiness, but it's all gone when I'm sleep deprived].
That's why I haven't used an alarm clock for years now.
[+] [-] jotm|5 years ago|reply
Same, or rather, worse, when working 12 hours a day for more than ~2 weeks. I just start thinking "what the fuck am I doing? Why is this worth it?", and if it's not worth it it would just drive me into a serious depressive mood.
Maybe because I know I could do better than this, that there are other options. Maybe it's because I made peace with death already. But I think it's just that I'm physically not made for this kind of overload.
[+] [-] yovagoyu|5 years ago|reply
A lot of the people who say this doesn't affect them seem to be bored video gamers with no career focus and no stress.
I feel like they'd feel it too if they had to work 12 hours a day and had some moderate stress.