I’ve recently been finding that I struggle much more with intellectual work (math, hard programming, writing, etc.) when I sleep less 6.5-7 hours. While I’m at peace with the fact that I seem to generally require >7 hours a sleep, it’s frustrating that even though I set aside enough time for adequate sleep, I’ll often wake up after only ~6 hours of sleep and not be able to fall back asleep.
My cognitive ability seems to be impacted by a single night of bad sleep even when I’ve been sleeping well in the recent past. Concretely, if I’ve slept 8 hours every night for two weeks, a single night of poor sleep can still result in a ~50% less productive day.
In addition to impacting productivity, acute sleep deprivation also leaves me much less capable of entertaining myself by thinking, so I become much more inclined to seek out distracting forms of entertainment like scrolling through the internet. It also seems to increase my cravings for generally “unhealthy” foods (I’ve seen references to this in literature, but won’t bother linking them since it’s not the focus of my question).
Other useful notes about my general sleep habits/history include:
I’m not sure if I’ve always been this sensitive to sleep deprivation and just notice it more due to a combination of more introspective and spending more time on certain activities or if something’s changed and I’ve become more sensitive.
I generally have 1 cup of coffee in the morning around when I wake up. More cups of coffee do not seem to offset sleep deprivation’s impact on my cognitive ability, and in fact have at times exacerbated it.
I’ve tried napping when it’s fit with my schedule and each time ended up lying awake for the 20-40 minutes during which I intended to nap.
I’d love to hear others’ strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognitive ability. I’ve done some preliminary searching for papers, articles, etc., but those that I’ve found focus on reducing tiredness rather than on returning cognitive ability to baseline. I’m open to trying strategies including but not limited to diet changes, supplements, medication, and habit changes.
Get more sleep at night.
Take melatonin at the appropriate time and dose. It’s cheap and legal in the U.S., but most products have way too much. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ most insomnia drugs are not much more effective than this.
Avoid light at night, especially blue light. Light inhibits natural melatonin production, which interferes with your circadian rhythms.
If you can’t darken your room completely, you can use a sleep mask instead. Get the kind with cups (like opaque swim goggles) instead of the kind that puts pressure on your eyes.
Use f.lux on your personal devices to reduce blue light after sunset or use one of the similar built-in features of your OS. Windows 10 has the new “Night Light” setting, macOS and iOS have “night shift” mode. Newer Samsung phones have a “blue light filter” setting. These options vary in quality and may have configurable intensity. More intense is more effective and it’s surprising how much you get used to it.
Falling asleep is a common failure mode of certain types of meditation practice. You can use this to your advantage when suffering from insomnia in bed. Even beginners fail to meditate this way accidentally, so it’s not particularly difficult to do on purpose. Focus your attention on the sensation of breathing or on the ringing in your ears. When you notice you are lost in thought, refocus your attention. But when you notice the dreaming arise without directed effort, dive in and let them take you. It works for me anyway. If not, at least you got your meditation in today.
Take naps. Even 20 minutes dramatically improves performance when sleep deprived.
Try the sleep mask when napping.
Try the meditation techniques for naps too.
Track your sleep quality.
You can get smartphone apps that purport to do this using the phone’s sensors. Some fitness trackers or smartwatches also have this function built in or available as an app. Accuracy varies.
You may have sleep apnea. Talk to your doctor about doing a sleep study to diagnose possible issues and treatments. Some people do much better on a CPAP, but there are many other treatment options.
Avoid eating late at night. This can cause indigestion, which can keep you awake.
if you suffer from heartburn, sleep on your left side to contain it better, because your esophagus attaches to your stomach on the right side (unless you’re one of those rare people with backwards internal organs).
Exercise regularly. I’m not sure why this helps, but it seems to. Perhaps mental fatigue doesn’t always line up with physical fatigue unless you actually make some effort physically during the day.
The answer above is not a direct response to the question as asked, but it is still a very good list of interventions for improved sleep.
I’d add a few points. That the sleep literature is very big on maintaining a good circadian rhythm (entrainment) and a few interventions follow from that.
Go to sleep and wake up a the same time each day.
Don’t sleep too late in the day.
I try to avoid napping after 5pm no matter how tired I am.
Expose yourself to good amount of blue light in the morning for at least fifteen minutes, but ideally 30-60 min good. This is the opposite of the no blue light in the evenings.
A bright outdoors is best.
A luminator is good too.
I have Seqinetic light therapy glasses which shine bright blue light into your peripheral vision. I often put them as soon as I wake up while still lying in bed, and they noticeable push away lingering tiredness and sleep inertia. Unfortunately, I think they’re out of business. I wonder if anyone else is making an alternative version.
Routine helps too. The brain is very contextual and a consistent routine is part of that..
A set routine, e.g. brushing teeth and washing face, can induce your brain to think it’s sleep time.
Not using your bed/bedroom for anything other sleep or sex also stems from the “brain is contextual” principle, hence wanting to make bed/bedroom distinctly a context for sleep.
Also extremely key is temperature. Sleep is triggered by dark and cool.
You can note that sleep is generally worse in summer months because of the heat.
I believe I experienced a large improvement in my sleep quality when I began running an air conditioner to keep my room at ~17C (~63F) together and purchased a ChilliPad. The later makes a big difference since my current foam mattress is far more insulating than the coil mattresses I’ve used most of my life.
I echo the endorsements here of sleep tracking. I use a Fitbit Ionic whose data I use to generated an automated email report. The custom report is worth it since a) it lets me focus specifically on the inputs I control, i.e. when I go to sleep, and b) it lets me visualize trends and comparison over time better than the default Fitbit report. I describe my tracking strategy in greater detail in another comment.
https://humancharger.com/ would be another light therapy device for the mornings.
It might be helpful to have sleep tracking to have a better idea of what you need.
There’s hardware like https://dreem.com/en/product that promises to help people sleep better.
General tips for better sleep are about avoiding blue light right before bed. I sat my f.lux so red that green and black became the same color. In addition I have Philips Hue lights that dim red.
Cool down the room when you are sleeping.
Make the room in which you are sleeping pitch black.
Don’t eat anything 2 hours before going to bed.
Thanks, I’ll try this out! Zeo had already been shut down when I went to buy one, so I’m excited to see there’s a similar product on the market.
I’m not perfect about avoiding blue light but I do usually sleep in a cold room, stop eating well before bed, and wear an eye mask (although my room isn’t as dark as it should be).
Hopefully the Dreem will still help me get a better understanding of the factors that impact my sleep though.
I’ve been thinking about the “Muehlhauser as a Cool McGuffin” hypothesis for a couple of years.
In The Case of Boiling Boiling, Eliezer suggests using an “intelligence” (I hope it’s clear you meant the term) to predict how long it should slow down an earth ship (as long as your skin is nice) while the ship is still flying.
For example, let’s say the task of finding a safe low-ranking place to build the ship is extremely difficult and we all have to be sure that we won’t be embarrassed (let’s say we’d be in a room full of empty suits and we’d be able to feel comforted and safe)
I’ve found that we are able to focus about 200 hours on research work and we all feel it’d be too much time (or some other activity) to do the research in an engineering level but if we work out the solution and find it useful I think we’d have significantly improved our research.
In the case of my own PhD thesis, there’s no need to be a team of humans (including myself) and you can choose very quickly to run a team of humans all the time.
I have a sleep schedule with napping. I don’t drink enough water when I wake up (because the bed is full and I am too tired to go to bed). I take up around 2 hours to wake up when I wake up and eat something cool that I wake up. It is somewhat expensive, because I can’t stand anything to do except just to put up a little earlier.
I don’t want to be in the room, but it’s not cheap to go to bed.
An off-label use of fluoxetine (Prozac) is that it can caused prolonged sleep, possibly by reducing anxiety in ways that make it easier to stay asleep longer but specific mechanism of action is unknown. Worked well for me in treating narcolepsy-related sleep depravation, i.e allowed me to stay asleep 10 hours a night so I got enough sleep to avoid sleep attacks during the day. I’m no longer on it and still able to get enough sleep; my theory there is that regular meditation replaced the need for a drug to produce the same effect, allowing me to stay asleep longer.
I remember reading somewhere that meditation has been shown to reduce the need for sleep but was skeptical. If there’s any literature on this that you consider trustworthy, please share!
I don’t have any literature on it, but it has had that effect on me. That is, as long as I’m meditating regularly (I average about 45 minutes a day of “serious” meditation, and another 60 minutes or so of “casual” meditation) I find if I don’t get a full 10 hours I still often won’t have sleep attacks (in fact I now normally only sleep about 8 hours most nights) and I can sleep as little as 6 hours and still function mostly normally (but not doing that repeatedly, and I will almost certain have a sleep attack on those days).
Thanks for the feedback. I would like to confirm that if meditation is something that is not directly applicable, and also that meditation is far more effective, I do not have a reason to feel particularly guilty about it. I feel that I would like meditation if I had more than 60% of my meditation experience when it were described and accepted, so it would be a good exercise to spend my life practicing with that knowledge.
Another reason for not seeking it is that I expect it to make me happy when I do not experience it. But I also want to have it. I have a lot of emotions. If I have a good feeling that I am happy, I feel happy. If I have a good feeling that I am unhappy, I feel unhappy as well. If I have a good feeling that I am unhappy, I feel unhappy as well. If I have a better feeling that I am unhappy, then I feel happy.
It could also help me change my state of mind in ways that I don’t expect to work out. I feel that it would help me change my state of mind in ways you don’t expect to work out. It might just be that I do not actually feel happy, but it also helps that it is not the case that both of those feelings are causing me to experience negative emotion.
I also feel that there’s too much stuff on this website trying to justify that sort of thing as “bad feelings.” I am not sure what you mean with that phrase. For example, you might mean “That thing is a bad experience in itself, and I have nothing to negative it.”
I don’t have a problem with the suggestion that you could be having negative emotions if you were to experience negative emotions, but I would also like to learn a little about how you can make them happen and what it is and that you generally encourage as your emotional states are a result. And I think that there are a few different criteria you could use to try and overcome negative emotions:
How emotionally powerful is the emotion/sadness factor? If you really want to make yourself feel that it’s bad, you might have to be willing to “trick” your emotions to keep turning into negative emotion. The thing is, you cannot get through without negative emotions, especially if you start feeling guilty about it.
How emotionally powerful is the emotion/sadness factor? If the emotion/sadness factor is way below zero, then it might be
I think the whole point is that it’s a better thought experiment, but if you can’t have it yourself I’d find it very difficult.
Methods I’ve personally found useful for improving productivity when temporarily my cognitive ability or conscientiousness is lowered, not necessarily due to sleep deprivation:
Selecting from my TODO list tasks that are either non-demanding, or very exciting
Sitting next to a big window and spending a lot of time people-watching. I don’t understand why it worked, but I noticed it would put me in a rhythm where I would make slow but consistent progress with my work.
When a lot of mental energy needs to be mustered (and so the above two methods are not an option), cut out all the stimulation: put away my phone; close all the non-relevant web browser tabs; put on noise-cancelling headphones with pink noise playing; go to a separate room and/or use big objects to restrict my field of vision to nothing but my workstation. Also, make sure that I won’t be disturbed for the next couple hours at least: prepare a glass of water, go to the toilet, make sure my co-workers understand this “do not disturb” mode.
You seem to assume that your lowered ability is caused by sleep deprivation. Is that an assumption? If so, I would encourage you to track your sleep quality and your cognitive performance and see if they really correlate, if you can think of a way to do it.
My fully subjective impression is that my insomnia never impacted my cognitive performance. I used to stress about it impacting my bodybuilding. Then I started believing that the impact of my sleep deprivation is minimal, if any, and that new belief probably helped me improve quality of my sleep.
Going for a long walk similarly seemed to help temporarily.
This is an assumption in the sense that I haven’t compared any formal cognitive test results between days when I do/don’t sleep well. However, there are two factors that make me skeptical that it’s placebo-like, as you seem to be indicating:
I’ll often get up and be surprised to find I’m struggling more than usual with hard cognitive tasks, so it can’t just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I do feel fairly confident that on days when I sleep under a certain amount, I struggle more to make progress on math & programming, which at the very least measure my ability to concentrate for long periods of time and think without external aids. Specifically, I’ve noticed that on days when I sleep less, I can’t manage complicated trains of thought as well without writing stuff down.
That said, hopefully getting a Dreem as ChristianKI suggested will help me better measure my sleep quality and get a better sense of whether low sleep quality actually aligns with days on which I struggle.
Just to clarify my point: I was suggesting it was more like a confirmation bias than placebo. In my case at least, I used to think that sleep deprivation lowered my performance, and then started believing there was no correlation at all (although lack of sleep still affected my mood, so it was undesirable). However, I have little confidence in that belief, and even if I was more certain about it, it’s just an anecdote.
I don’t think that lack of sleep is any more a problem than it is a problem with sleep.
I don’t see the problem. Your mental experience is that it’s hard to get to sleep, especially if you have to memorize your concept and use it in different situations.
I think your ability to sleep is much more a problem than it is a problem with sleep.
You have not even taken a CFAR unit and started using it for yourself.
I am going to stick around to write a lot of stuff and try to analyze people’s ideas without having to read this stuff (eg if I think I have to, I should check the answer once I know it well).
I am going to write stuff which covers interesting areas in math and computer science (for at least a decade is more than an hour).
(For my own part, though, I’d say that I would have to read it before I had any experience with what you point out as important and interesting information.)