I’d like to share one day’s worth of experience with modafinil.
I noticed a huge difference in alertness. I was filled with an urge to be doing something every second. I don’t believe I was more intelligent (some of the work I did that day turned out to be low quality) but I was much more productive. And happy. I felt like I was just “riding the day”—that going through life, minute by minute, running errands, checking items off my to-do list, and seeing what happened next, was boundlessly fascinating.
I suspect that, at least for me, and maybe for others, most unhappiness is really fatigue, coupled with the guilt of not having accomplished much in a state of fatigue. Simply not being tired makes me deliriously happy. I am not surprised by the study that coffee reduces depression in women, though I know to be suspicious of medical study methodology. The symptoms of clinical depression look a lot like the symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation (fatigue, inability to concentrate, clumsiness, weight gain or weight loss, dramatic and irrational emotions). It’s possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived (or that a typical amount of sleep for a modern-day working or student life is too little for their biological needs.) I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
Five hours of sleep a night for a whole year? I’m amazed you functioned! One five-hour night and I’m moderately functional, maybe a slightly shorter attention span and more mood swings than usual. Two nights in a row and I’m a zombie unless I drink a lot of coffee. Three nights and I’m a zombie anyway no matter how much coffee I drink. Unless I get 9+ hours of sleep every night, I will feel sleepy at various points during the day.
9+ hours of sleep per night for a month will probably make me feel bad. Average of 6 hours per night may be slowly wearing myself out, but this rate seems to be sustainable indefinitely.
But then, if I do not do anything stressful, I can do with 4 hours per night for a month..
Not “hard”. Four hour body inspired exercise routine. I’m fit and healthy with as little exercise as I can get away with (pushups, situps, etc. 3 days per week; 2km walk with sprints 3 days per week).
I’m a programmer and manager of programmers. I don’t use spaced repetition (I mean to… I’ve cron’d it to open every morning… but I close it every morning that I figure I don’t have time… and that’s every morning). I’ve not noticed any memory deficit. I think that amounts to: no information.
Neat. However, how regimented does your sleep schedule have to be in order for it to work? (My main problem with sleeping enough isn’t that I have trouble going to bed early enough, like seems to be true for a lot of people… It’s that some days I have shifts at work that start at 6 am and then I’m busy until 10 pm, and some days I get home after 11 pm and have to work 6 an the next day, and somehow even though I sleep 8-10 hours a night on the other days, I never really seem to catch up. (Also, can’t nap during the day, at least not on demand. I taught myself to do it a bit during first-year university, but my schedule no longer allows napping anyway.)
I can usually move naps ±90 minutes with very little negative consequence (±30mins with no consequences). I can skip a nap with coffee at the cost of adding an extra hour of sleep the following night (I had to give up coffee to make normal naps work—trace caffeine doesn’t stop me from napping, but does stop the naps from being effective).
Re: “can’t nap during the day… on demand”—the adaption period will fix that.
An emotion is irrational if it is not appropriate to the situation—for example, social anxiety is irrational if it causes one to avoid pursuing some social opportunities which have a positive expected value (for any utility function, which may or may not carry a heavier penalty for failure than a bonus for success).
See above. If your emotional state (and I assume the ability to distinguish a state of heightened emotion from a resting state) causes you to act in ways which do not reflect your evidence-based assessments, it is causing you to act against your rational decisions and is therefore irrational.
I would say that the ability to make this judgement belongs to the best-informed rationally-acting observer: someone who has knowledge of the your mental state in both emotional states, and from the available evidence, estimate whether or not the difference in behavior can be attributed to emotional causes. This observer may very well be you yourself, in a resting state; once you have regained your perspective, as you have a lot more information on your own mental state.
To expand on the example I gave above, someone experiencing social anxiety may suddenly focus on the various ways in which a social interaction can go horribly wrong, even if these futures are not very probable. Basically, anxiety hijacks the availability heuristic, causing an overestimation of the probability of catastrophe. Because this adjustment in probability is not based in evidence (though this point could be argued), it is irrational.
This definition of “irrational emotions” does not depend on the utility function used. If someone weights failure more heavily than success, and will go home unhappy at the end of the night if they have 9 successful conversations and 1 boring dud, they are not necessarily irrational. However, if, on previous nights with substantial frequency they have gone 10 for 10, and before entering a conversation they freeze in fear—then, their expected value has changed without sufficient reason. That is irrational emotion.
If your emotional state … causes you to act in ways which do not reflect your evidence-based assessments, it is causing you to act against your rational decisions and is therefore irrational.
So, anything which decreases rationality is irrational? Sounds like circle reasoning to me.
Besides, you original point was that
An emotion is irrational if it is not appropriate to the situation
If I wake up in a burning house, fear is certainly appropriate to the situation and yet it’s very likely to decrease the rationality of my decision-making. If I’m making out with someone I like a lot, love/tenderness is appropriate to the situation and will decrease my rationality. Etc. etc.
Do you take modafinil on a regular basis? If not, what made you choose not to, given your positive experience? If so, have you noticed any other effects that would be good to note?
If you don’t mind sharing, how do you plan to do this? Is it as simple as “this controlled substance makes my life better, will you prescribe it for me?” Or are you “fortunate” enough to have a condition that warrants its prescription?
I ask because I’ve had similar experiences with Modafinil (my nickname for it is “executive lubricant”), and it is terribly frustrating to be stuck without a banned goods store.
It’s possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived
I’m skeptical of this. Yes, five hours of sleep is bad for your mental health, but usually in a different direction. Did you have depressive symptoms that year? A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep. Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal. This would solve simple sleep deprivation. It’s possible that they lack something more specific that normal people are able to get by sleeping, but even that does not sound terribly likely to me.
ETA: As various people comment, this is largely backwards. I particularly regret suggesting that people who spend a lot of time in bed get useful sleep. So maybe sleep deprivation contributes to some of the symptoms of depression. But there are other symptoms and I am skeptical that the two are confused.
A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep.
For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I’m overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won’t happen until it’s far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my “days” would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.
Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I’ll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
I suffer from this as well. It is my totally unsubstantiated theory that this is a stress response. Throughout the whole day your body is tired and telling you to go to sleep, but the Conscious High Command keeps pressing the KEEP-GOING-NO-MATTER-WHAT button until your body decides it must be in a war zone and kicks in with cortisol or adrenaline or whatever.
Depressed people can have either insomnia or hypersomnia; insomnia is significantly more common. Depression-related insomnia is usually “terminal”—people wake up very early and can’t get back to sleep.
Strangely enough, there have been some studies showing that depriving depressed people of sleep has a strong positive effect on their mood, but of course then they’re too sleep-deprived to enjoy it.
Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal.
Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).
Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you’re waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.
And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule.
It seems likely that this is a combination of youthful endurance plus a lack of night cues (computer screens make fake-sunlight at any time of the night), rather than young people actually having a circadian rhythm that’s longer by hours.
That it is not a mere preference but a biological reality is one of the reasons I regard melatonin as so useful—fight fire with fire.
EDIT: Of course, it’s also true that artificial light and computer screens are not helpful in the least: see the second paragraph in http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#health-performance So you might say for young people, it’s a many-edged problem: they naturally want to go to bed late, their electronic devices exacerbate the original biological problem, and then all the social dynamics can begin to contribute their share of the problem...
I think Vaniver is objecting to the narrow claim of a cycle longer than 24 hours. Without clicking through on your sources, they seem to say that teens have a shifted cycle, not a longer cycle.
In particular, that shifting school later improves sleep suggests that teens have a shifted cycle. If they had an unmoored cycle of longer than 24 hours, the greater light exposure of an earlier start would probably be better.
Douglas_Knight is correct; I’m not challenging “young people want to go to bed late and get up late” but “young people want to sleep six times a week rather than seven” (or, more reasonably, 13 times every two weeks).
I do remember reading in a variety of places that young people, especially teenagers, tend to have more trouble sticking to an earlier sleep schedule. But you’re right that this isn’t necessarily biological in origin. It could just be that young people have a) greater benefits to gain from staying up late, since that’s when a lot of socializing takes place, and b) less practice using willpower to force themselves to go to bed, and maybe less incentive, since with their “youthful endurance” they can push through on 2-3 hour of sleep.
And being able to do this, or for example get really drunk and still make it to work early the next morning, is definitely a status thing that people are almost competitive about. Maybe some kind of signalling at work, too: “I’m so healthy and strong, I can afford to get really, really drunk and hardly get any sleep and still function...I must have awesome genes.” That could explain how being a compete idiot and passing out on my friend’s floor in front of my supervisor when I had an exam the next day somehow made me cooler to all the staff.
I don’t think it’s everybody—certainly there are cases of severe depression where the person sleeps 20 hours a day.
Maybe it’s more that sleep deprivation can masquerade as depression. That is, if you’re tired, slow, unmotivated, hopeless, lethargic, plunged in gloom, and you’re sleeping four or five hours a night, your problems might be related to your sleep patterns.
Sure, fatigue can cause unhappiness, but I don’t think it looks like clinical depression. You seem to be holding yourself up as an example. Did anyone think you clinically depressed when sleep deprived?
I’d like to share one day’s worth of experience with modafinil.
I noticed a huge difference in alertness. I was filled with an urge to be doing something every second. I don’t believe I was more intelligent (some of the work I did that day turned out to be low quality) but I was much more productive. And happy. I felt like I was just “riding the day”—that going through life, minute by minute, running errands, checking items off my to-do list, and seeing what happened next, was boundlessly fascinating.
I suspect that, at least for me, and maybe for others, most unhappiness is really fatigue, coupled with the guilt of not having accomplished much in a state of fatigue. Simply not being tired makes me deliriously happy. I am not surprised by the study that coffee reduces depression in women, though I know to be suspicious of medical study methodology. The symptoms of clinical depression look a lot like the symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation (fatigue, inability to concentrate, clumsiness, weight gain or weight loss, dramatic and irrational emotions). It’s possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived (or that a typical amount of sleep for a modern-day working or student life is too little for their biological needs.) I had a year when I thought I was losing my mind; in retrospect, it may have had something to do with getting no more than five hours of sleep a night.
This, with some qualifiers, beautifully describes my experience.
Five hours of sleep a night for a whole year? I’m amazed you functioned! One five-hour night and I’m moderately functional, maybe a slightly shorter attention span and more mood swings than usual. Two nights in a row and I’m a zombie unless I drink a lot of coffee. Three nights and I’m a zombie anyway no matter how much coffee I drink. Unless I get 9+ hours of sleep every night, I will feel sleepy at various points during the day.
It is highly personal.
9+ hours of sleep per night for a month will probably make me feel bad. Average of 6 hours per night may be slowly wearing myself out, but this rate seems to be sustainable indefinitely.
But then, if I do not do anything stressful, I can do with 4 hours per night for a month..
4.5hrs of sleep every 24 on everyman 3 since January and I’ve never felt better!
[full disclosure: the first couple of months were tough and involved much experimentation with schedules close to everyman 3.]
Never felt better? Do you do any hard exercise?
Not “hard”. Four hour body inspired exercise routine. I’m fit and healthy with as little exercise as I can get away with (pushups, situps, etc. 3 days per week; 2km walk with sprints 3 days per week).
Do you do anything hard involving your long-term memory? Do you use spaced repetition, and if so, has it suffered?
I’m a programmer and manager of programmers. I don’t use spaced repetition (I mean to… I’ve cron’d it to open every morning… but I close it every morning that I figure I don’t have time… and that’s every morning). I’ve not noticed any memory deficit.
I think that amounts to: no information.
Neat. However, how regimented does your sleep schedule have to be in order for it to work? (My main problem with sleeping enough isn’t that I have trouble going to bed early enough, like seems to be true for a lot of people… It’s that some days I have shifts at work that start at 6 am and then I’m busy until 10 pm, and some days I get home after 11 pm and have to work 6 an the next day, and somehow even though I sleep 8-10 hours a night on the other days, I never really seem to catch up. (Also, can’t nap during the day, at least not on demand. I taught myself to do it a bit during first-year university, but my schedule no longer allows napping anyway.)
I can usually move naps ±90 minutes with very little negative consequence (±30mins with no consequences). I can skip a nap with coffee at the cost of adding an extra hour of sleep the following night (I had to give up coffee to make normal naps work—trace caffeine doesn’t stop me from napping, but does stop the naps from being effective).
Re: “can’t nap during the day… on demand”—the adaption period will fix that.
What are “irrational emotions”?
An emotion is irrational if it is not appropriate to the situation—for example, social anxiety is irrational if it causes one to avoid pursuing some social opportunities which have a positive expected value (for any utility function, which may or may not carry a heavier penalty for failure than a bonus for success).
Who decides (and how) which emotion is appropriate to which situation?
See above. If your emotional state (and I assume the ability to distinguish a state of heightened emotion from a resting state) causes you to act in ways which do not reflect your evidence-based assessments, it is causing you to act against your rational decisions and is therefore irrational.
I would say that the ability to make this judgement belongs to the best-informed rationally-acting observer: someone who has knowledge of the your mental state in both emotional states, and from the available evidence, estimate whether or not the difference in behavior can be attributed to emotional causes. This observer may very well be you yourself, in a resting state; once you have regained your perspective, as you have a lot more information on your own mental state.
To expand on the example I gave above, someone experiencing social anxiety may suddenly focus on the various ways in which a social interaction can go horribly wrong, even if these futures are not very probable. Basically, anxiety hijacks the availability heuristic, causing an overestimation of the probability of catastrophe. Because this adjustment in probability is not based in evidence (though this point could be argued), it is irrational.
This definition of “irrational emotions” does not depend on the utility function used. If someone weights failure more heavily than success, and will go home unhappy at the end of the night if they have 9 successful conversations and 1 boring dud, they are not necessarily irrational. However, if, on previous nights with substantial frequency they have gone 10 for 10, and before entering a conversation they freeze in fear—then, their expected value has changed without sufficient reason. That is irrational emotion.
So, anything which decreases rationality is irrational? Sounds like circle reasoning to me.
Besides, you original point was that
If I wake up in a burning house, fear is certainly appropriate to the situation and yet it’s very likely to decrease the rationality of my decision-making. If I’m making out with someone I like a lot, love/tenderness is appropriate to the situation and will decrease my rationality. Etc. etc.
This starts to remind me of a steel Vulcan :-)
Do you take modafinil on a regular basis? If not, what made you choose not to, given your positive experience? If so, have you noticed any other effects that would be good to note?
I had a one-time trial and I’m planning to see my doctor for more as soon as I can.
If you don’t mind sharing, how do you plan to do this? Is it as simple as “this controlled substance makes my life better, will you prescribe it for me?” Or are you “fortunate” enough to have a condition that warrants its prescription?
I ask because I’ve had similar experiences with Modafinil (my nickname for it is “executive lubricant”), and it is terribly frustrating to be stuck without a banned goods store.
I’m skeptical of this. Yes, five hours of sleep is bad for your mental health, but usually in a different direction. Did you have depressive symptoms that year? A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep. Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal. This would solve simple sleep deprivation. It’s possible that they lack something more specific that normal people are able to get by sleeping, but even that does not sound terribly likely to me.
ETA: As various people comment, this is largely backwards. I particularly regret suggesting that people who spend a lot of time in bed get useful sleep. So maybe sleep deprivation contributes to some of the symptoms of depression. But there are other symptoms and I am skeptical that the two are confused.
For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I’m overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won’t happen until it’s far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my “days” would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.
Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I’ll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
I suffer from this as well. It is my totally unsubstantiated theory that this is a stress response. Throughout the whole day your body is tired and telling you to go to sleep, but the Conscious High Command keeps pressing the KEEP-GOING-NO-MATTER-WHAT button until your body decides it must be in a war zone and kicks in with cortisol or adrenaline or whatever.
This has been my experience as well.
Me too!
Depressed people can have either insomnia or hypersomnia; insomnia is significantly more common. Depression-related insomnia is usually “terminal”—people wake up very early and can’t get back to sleep.
Strangely enough, there have been some studies showing that depriving depressed people of sleep has a strong positive effect on their mood, but of course then they’re too sleep-deprived to enjoy it.
Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).
Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you’re waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.
It seems likely that this is a combination of youthful endurance plus a lack of night cues (computer screens make fake-sunlight at any time of the night), rather than young people actually having a circadian rhythm that’s longer by hours.
I disagree. The circadian rhythms in middle school and up is very well established; please see all the links & citations in http://www.gwern.net/education-is-not-about-learning#school-hours
That it is not a mere preference but a biological reality is one of the reasons I regard melatonin as so useful—fight fire with fire.
EDIT: Of course, it’s also true that artificial light and computer screens are not helpful in the least: see the second paragraph in http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#health-performance So you might say for young people, it’s a many-edged problem: they naturally want to go to bed late, their electronic devices exacerbate the original biological problem, and then all the social dynamics can begin to contribute their share of the problem...
I think Vaniver is objecting to the narrow claim of a cycle longer than 24 hours. Without clicking through on your sources, they seem to say that teens have a shifted cycle, not a longer cycle.
In particular, that shifting school later improves sleep suggests that teens have a shifted cycle. If they had an unmoored cycle of longer than 24 hours, the greater light exposure of an earlier start would probably be better.
Douglas_Knight is correct; I’m not challenging “young people want to go to bed late and get up late” but “young people want to sleep six times a week rather than seven” (or, more reasonably, 13 times every two weeks).
I do remember reading in a variety of places that young people, especially teenagers, tend to have more trouble sticking to an earlier sleep schedule. But you’re right that this isn’t necessarily biological in origin. It could just be that young people have a) greater benefits to gain from staying up late, since that’s when a lot of socializing takes place, and b) less practice using willpower to force themselves to go to bed, and maybe less incentive, since with their “youthful endurance” they can push through on 2-3 hour of sleep.
And being able to do this, or for example get really drunk and still make it to work early the next morning, is definitely a status thing that people are almost competitive about. Maybe some kind of signalling at work, too: “I’m so healthy and strong, I can afford to get really, really drunk and hardly get any sleep and still function...I must have awesome genes.” That could explain how being a compete idiot and passing out on my friend’s floor in front of my supervisor when I had an exam the next day somehow made me cooler to all the staff.
I don’t think it’s everybody—certainly there are cases of severe depression where the person sleeps 20 hours a day.
Maybe it’s more that sleep deprivation can masquerade as depression. That is, if you’re tired, slow, unmotivated, hopeless, lethargic, plunged in gloom, and you’re sleeping four or five hours a night, your problems might be related to your sleep patterns.
Sure, fatigue can cause unhappiness, but I don’t think it looks like clinical depression. You seem to be holding yourself up as an example. Did anyone think you clinically depressed when sleep deprived?