Same here, and I agree it’s puzzling. Especially not wanting to go to bed. With most of my behaviors that don’t have an obvious motivation, I can think it through and figure out what’s going on, but not with this one.
I wonder if it’s a latent anti-bedtime reaction from childhood?
Speaking of which, why do all “good” American parents enforce bedtimes? I would think that if they enforced the getting-up time, the kids would take care of the getting-to-sleep part on their own.
This does not work with teenagers, in whom bedtimes are practically unenforceable, but whose need to get to school in a timely fashion does a reasonable job of imposing a getting-up time. They are chronically sleep deprived. Smaller children, I imagine, have even less of a chance of managing the feat.
Don’t teenagers have brain-chemistry that makes them have trouble getting to sleep at a reasonable hour? I’m not finding a good reference, but I remember reading that, and that the effect doesn’t apply to children.
Roughly one-quarter of the kids fell into the borderline-acceptable category, meaning they reported eight hours of shuteye nightly. The overwhelming majority fell short — with 30.2 percent reporting seven hours, 22.8 percent slumbering closer to six hours, 10 percent catching a mere five hours of sleep, and 5.9 percent claiming to nod off for no more than four hours most weeknights. Just the thought makes me yawn.
Certainly, schools don’t help the situation by starting classes earlier for teens than they do for younger kids — even though puberty and other developmental changes lead to adolescents needing more sleep than grade schoolers, not less. But there could be other issues. Like what share of teens don’t get enough sleep because they’re naturally night owls (like me) and find almost anything before 2 or 3 a.m. more interesting than slumber?
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53220/title/Vast_majority_of_teens_are_sleep-deprived
In an attempt to reset the students’ daily biological clocks Biological clocks, or circadian rhythms, so that they would be more alert in daytime and go to bed earlier, the researchers exposed some students in their classrooms to especially bright light between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Other students were exposed to muted red lighting. But the bright light neither changed students’ sleep patterns nor improved their scores on tests of mood, vigor, and cognitive function cognitive function Neurology Any mental process that involves symbolic operations–eg, perception, memory, creation of imagery, and thinking; CFs encompasses awareness and capacity for judgment .
I remember. It was a very high-profile study that asserted a phase-delay in the teenage sleep cycle. The study was cited for a while in arguments to shift the school day later by a couple hours.
That makes sense—but let me add that the idea that it is a myth that bedtimes must be enforced fits another observation: parents also seem to believe that they have to persuade or force their children to eat; yet in big families where no one can make sure everyone eats, all the children learn quickly to eat on their own.
parents also seem to believe that they have to persuade or force their children to eat
They do? I would be very surprised at parents who believed this.
Eating satisfies a natural desire and feels good. Sleeping means stopping the fun thing you’re doing and lying down in a dark room; why would kids want to do that?
I have two kids. If left to their own devices, they would eat the tastiest things on their plate, then stop (then complain about being hungry an hour later). They would never eat anything remotely healthy, and subsist entirely on chocolate if given the choice.
Since we have evolved to value fat and sugar as being the tastiest substances, children do have to be taught/persuaded to eat healthy food.
They also do need to be told when to go to bed. The times at which we have tried to let them set their own bed times have resulted in them trying to stay awake as long as they possibly can, until they fall asleep in the middle of whatever they were doing. They almost never voluntarily go to bed, no matter how obviously tired they are.
Eat a meal with a family with a single child. In many cases, the parents will spend much of the meal ordering or pleading with the child to eat their food. Then eat a meal with a family with 6 or more children. That probably won’t happen.
I do know one kid who really won’t eat on his own; if you don’t coax him into eating, he won’t eat enough. But that’s unusual.
It seems like it’s a near/far problem, at least in part—it’d take a few weeks, perhaps even a month or two, for the kids to figure it out, and in the meantime the parents will be inconvenienced by having to deal with cranky kids, and also probably having to stay up later than they’d prefer to.
I suspect most parents don’t give it enough thought to realize that the situation would be temporary (well, not counting the possibility that the kids could settle into an inconveniently late bedtime) and the lesson would be valuable, though, or they don’t believe that their kids would figure it out at all.
Could you guys be more specific about what you hate about going to bed and about getting up? I don’t even know whether you’ve all got the same problem.
Let’s say it’s midnight, I’m tired, and I’m home alone with nothing better to do. I know I have to get up early and I’ll feel better / be more productive the next day in direct proportion to how much sleep I get. I still just don’t want to go to bed. It requires real force of will not to stay up and find something else to do, even if it just amounts to reading random stuff online or otherwise killing time.
I’ve gotten better at just making myself go to bed anyway in that situation, but I don’t know why it should take any effort in the first place. Going to sleep should – at least occasionally—be my most attractive alternative, even from a short-term perspective. But for some reason it never feels that way.
I don’t have insomnia, nightmares, apnea or any other condition (that I know of) that would make sleep/bed unpleasant – so at least in my case the act of sleep itself doesn’t seem to be a factor.
I have at times set cron to shut down the PC, with a 1 minute countdown. It worked wonders. It did cut down on productivity somewhat. Working 25 hours straight actually does get a lot of stuff done!
The only times I recall “going to bed” feeling like a good idea is when I’ve been so far into exhausted sleep deprivation that base instincts took over and I found myself doing so almost involuntarily.
Even in those cases, my conscious mind was usually confabulating wildly about how I wasn’t actually going to sleep, just lying down for a half a moment, not sleeping at all… right up until I pretty much passed out.
Would you guys mind terribly if I picked your brains?
The kind of experience you’re describing is described fairly often in autistic communities. There’s a few variations, generally falling into the categories of sensory processing or executive dysfunction issues. The former category would include not experiencing, or noticing that you’re experiencing, ‘tiredness’, even when your body is acting tired in a way that others would notice (e.g. yawning, stretching, body language). The second case involves not being able to stop whatever activity you’re engaged in and go to bed, even though you recognize (perhaps briefly, before being drawn back into what you’re doing) that you are tired and it would be a good idea. (This isn’t quite the same as ‘I’ll do one more part, and then go to bed’ in that it’s less conscious and therefore harder to break out of—in many cases it takes a significant effort of will to stop your body from automatically taking the next step in what you’re doing, even if you’ve actually decided not to take that next step.)
I’m curious to find out if those issues are also experienced by people who aren’t autistic—perhaps to a lesser degree, or with different explanations than the ones that I mentioned. Do the issues I described sound like what you’re experiencing? Are they close, or similar in some interesting way?
The former category would include not experiencing, or noticing that you’re experiencing, ‘tiredness’, even when your body is acting tired in a way that others would notice (e.g. yawning, stretching, body language).
I’m not sure if this is what you’re talking about, but I’ve long distinguished two aspects of “tiredness”. One is the sensation of fatigue, exhaustion, muddled thinking, &c.--physical indicators of “I need sleep now”.
The second is the sensation of actually being sleepy, in the sense of reduced energy, body relaxation, and a general feeling that going to bed sounds like a fine plan.
I almost always notice the former, but unless accompanied by the latter (often not the case), acting on it by going to bed requires a conscious decision. Usually, the sleepiness will appear after I’m lying down, but at times I’ve been unable to clear my mind of activity and will lie in bed for two or more hours, unable to sleep despite being extremely tired.
If I’m deeply involved in something and not feeling “sleepy” I can easily fail to notice the fatigue (along with hunger and various other non-urgent physical sensations).
The second case involves not being able to stop whatever activity you’re engaged in and go to bed, even though you recognize (perhaps briefly, before being drawn back into what you’re doing) that you are tired and it would be a good idea.
In my case it’s more garden-variety procrastination; going to sleep is just one more thing that I know I should do but don’t really want to, because it’s boring.
I’m curious to find out if those issues are also experienced by people who aren’t autistic—perhaps to a lesser degree, or with different explanations than the ones that I mentioned. Do the issues I described sound like what you’re experiencing? Are they close, or similar in some interesting way?
My experience mostly reduces to a disconnect between a non-critical physical need and the desire to fulfill it, generally to an extent proportional to how much mental activity is bouncing around my conscious mind (the default state being “too much”).
As a final note, besides the melatonin not making me sleepy, neither ethanol nor caffeine seems to have an appreciable effect on whether I can get to sleep (though both will reduce the quality of any sleep).
I’m not sure if this is what you’re talking about...
I almost always notice the former...
If I’m deeply involved in something and not feeling “sleepy” I can easily fail to notice the fatigue (along with hunger and various other non-urgent physical sensations).
That doesn’t sound like the experience I was trying to describe, which is of not noticing sleepiness or fatigue at all, even when not doing something engaging. The ‘not noticing’ caveat is there because some autistics won’t automatically notice those sensations, but can consciously check to see if they’re occurring, and get into the habit of doing so. (The issue can apply to hunger, too.)
If you’re actually collecting datapoints, not just using the term semi-metaphorically, it may help to add that I’ve been diagnosed with (fairly moderate) ADHD; if my experience is representative of anything, it’s probably that.
I’m curious to find out if those issues are also experienced by people who aren’t autistic—perhaps to a lesser degree, or with different explanations than the ones that I mentioned. Do the issues I described sound like what you’re experiencing? Are they close, or similar in some interesting way?
How will you distinguish between a non-autistic ‘experiencing an autistic associated experience to a lesser degree’ and, well, someone experiencing a lesser degree of autism? Considering the context I am not sure if a “I notice that too” from a LessWrong poster would inform me much at all about how much prevalence independent of the causal factors behind autistism.
My experience, for what it is worth:
The former category would include not experiencing, or noticing that you’re experiencing, ‘tiredness’, even when your body is acting tired in a way that others would notice (e.g. yawning, stretching, body language).
My main experience of ‘tiredness’ is metacognitive awareness of impaired cognitive function. For example, I’ll notice that my verbal expression and spelling becomes impaired and the names of things elude me and then conclude that I am tired. I don’t feel ‘sleepy’. Note that now that I have discovered melatonin I actually can feel tired (if I take ~6 mg). This was quite a novelty! I also seemed to have developed somewhat more awareness of other ‘tiredness’ indicators such as yawning over recent years (late 20s).
The above applies to hunger as well, for most part.
The second case involves not being able to stop whatever activity you’re engaged in and go to bed, even though you recognize (perhaps briefly, before being drawn back into what you’re doing) that you are tired and it would be a good idea.
How will you distinguish between a non-autistic ‘experiencing an autistic associated experience to a lesser degree’ and, well, someone experiencing a lesser degree of autism?
I’m not sure that those categories are naturally distinguishable, actually—there’s a fair bit of controversy over whether there’s a smooth spectrum between very autistic individuals and very NT individuals, and such datapoints could be taken as evidence for that theory. Whether the NT-leaning-toward-autistic portion of that spectrum (assuming it exists, which I believe it does) manifests in single examples of significant autistic-type experiences in otherwise NT people vs. multiple slightly autistic-leaning traits (or both) is also interesting.
I tend not to spell that kind of thing out unless asked, though—not everyone reacts well to overt suggestions that they might be autistic-leaning because of some trait. ‘NT with a quirk’ is much more palatable.
The second case involves not being able to stop whatever activity you’re engaged in and go to bed, even though you recognize (perhaps briefly, before being drawn back into what you’re doing) that you are tired and it would be a good idea. (This isn’t quite the same as ‘I’ll do one more part, and then go to bed’ in that it’s less conscious and therefore harder to break out of—in many cases it takes a significant effort of will to stop your body from automatically taking the next step in what you’re doing, even if you’ve actually decided not to take that next step.)
This sounds like me. Not just for going to bed, but for anything I need to do. Do you have links to descriptions or discussions of this experience? Have people found any way of dealing with it? I’m probably slightly on the autism spectrum.
ETA: I’ve also heard this described as ADD or OCD.
This is my go-to article on the subject. I can probably dig up some more things later, if you’re interested. (I’m about to go to bed.) Mostly it’s more worked-around than overcome, but there are resources out there on how to work around it, and I’ll make a point of trying to find some of them if you want.
Executive dysfunction is part of ADD, too, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of it being an element of that. My understanding of OCD is that the mechanism behind the issue isn’t the same, but I could easily be wrong; I haven’t done as much research on OCD.
Going to bed is a little like dying. Someone slightly other wakes up in the morning.
Good point. For example, last night just before going to bed, I was totally absorbed in Eliezer’s latest story. But when I woke up this morning, I forgot about wanting to finish the story, and started doing other things. (Eventually I came upon the open tab and finished it.)
BTW, if anyone hasn’t read that story yet, you should keep this page handy as a reference, otherwise it’s pretty hard to understand.
Me too, and I’d love to know what that’s about. It’s a small, but puzzling form of irrationality.
Same here, and I agree it’s puzzling. Especially not wanting to go to bed. With most of my behaviors that don’t have an obvious motivation, I can think it through and figure out what’s going on, but not with this one.
I wonder if it’s a latent anti-bedtime reaction from childhood?
Speaking of which, why do all “good” American parents enforce bedtimes? I would think that if they enforced the getting-up time, the kids would take care of the getting-to-sleep part on their own.
This does not work with teenagers, in whom bedtimes are practically unenforceable, but whose need to get to school in a timely fashion does a reasonable job of imposing a getting-up time. They are chronically sleep deprived. Smaller children, I imagine, have even less of a chance of managing the feat.
...Woah. Thanks to your comment, I just remembered vividly how much my school years sucked.
Don’t teenagers have brain-chemistry that makes them have trouble getting to sleep at a reasonable hour? I’m not finding a good reference, but I remember reading that, and that the effect doesn’t apply to children.
The circadian link is to a gatewayed article; you can find a public copy at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sleepy+teens+haven%27t+got+circadian+rhythm.-a0134623686
I remember. It was a very high-profile study that asserted a phase-delay in the teenage sleep cycle. The study was cited for a while in arguments to shift the school day later by a couple hours.
That’s it. Thanks!
That makes sense—but let me add that the idea that it is a myth that bedtimes must be enforced fits another observation: parents also seem to believe that they have to persuade or force their children to eat; yet in big families where no one can make sure everyone eats, all the children learn quickly to eat on their own.
They do? I would be very surprised at parents who believed this. Eating satisfies a natural desire and feels good. Sleeping means stopping the fun thing you’re doing and lying down in a dark room; why would kids want to do that?
I have two kids. If left to their own devices, they would eat the tastiest things on their plate, then stop (then complain about being hungry an hour later). They would never eat anything remotely healthy, and subsist entirely on chocolate if given the choice.
Since we have evolved to value fat and sugar as being the tastiest substances, children do have to be taught/persuaded to eat healthy food.
They also do need to be told when to go to bed. The times at which we have tried to let them set their own bed times have resulted in them trying to stay awake as long as they possibly can, until they fall asleep in the middle of whatever they were doing. They almost never voluntarily go to bed, no matter how obviously tired they are.
Eat a meal with a family with a single child. In many cases, the parents will spend much of the meal ordering or pleading with the child to eat their food. Then eat a meal with a family with 6 or more children. That probably won’t happen.
I do know one kid who really won’t eat on his own; if you don’t coax him into eating, he won’t eat enough. But that’s unusual.
They just want an hour or so to themselves before bed, if that.
It seems like it’s a near/far problem, at least in part—it’d take a few weeks, perhaps even a month or two, for the kids to figure it out, and in the meantime the parents will be inconvenienced by having to deal with cranky kids, and also probably having to stay up later than they’d prefer to.
I suspect most parents don’t give it enough thought to realize that the situation would be temporary (well, not counting the possibility that the kids could settle into an inconveniently late bedtime) and the lesson would be valuable, though, or they don’t believe that their kids would figure it out at all.
Could you guys be more specific about what you hate about going to bed and about getting up? I don’t even know whether you’ve all got the same problem.
Let’s say it’s midnight, I’m tired, and I’m home alone with nothing better to do. I know I have to get up early and I’ll feel better / be more productive the next day in direct proportion to how much sleep I get. I still just don’t want to go to bed. It requires real force of will not to stay up and find something else to do, even if it just amounts to reading random stuff online or otherwise killing time.
I’ve gotten better at just making myself go to bed anyway in that situation, but I don’t know why it should take any effort in the first place. Going to sleep should – at least occasionally—be my most attractive alternative, even from a short-term perspective. But for some reason it never feels that way.
I don’t have insomnia, nightmares, apnea or any other condition (that I know of) that would make sleep/bed unpleasant – so at least in my case the act of sleep itself doesn’t seem to be a factor.
Use cron to make your browser open a new tab once a minute starting at midnight that says “GET TO BED!”
I have at times set cron to shut down the PC, with a 1 minute countdown. It worked wonders. It did cut down on productivity somewhat. Working 25 hours straight actually does get a lot of stuff done!
This is my experience as well, for the most part.
The only times I recall “going to bed” feeling like a good idea is when I’ve been so far into exhausted sleep deprivation that base instincts took over and I found myself doing so almost involuntarily.
Even in those cases, my conscious mind was usually confabulating wildly about how I wasn’t actually going to sleep, just lying down for a half a moment, not sleeping at all… right up until I pretty much passed out.
It’s rather vexing.
Would you guys mind terribly if I picked your brains?
The kind of experience you’re describing is described fairly often in autistic communities. There’s a few variations, generally falling into the categories of sensory processing or executive dysfunction issues. The former category would include not experiencing, or noticing that you’re experiencing, ‘tiredness’, even when your body is acting tired in a way that others would notice (e.g. yawning, stretching, body language). The second case involves not being able to stop whatever activity you’re engaged in and go to bed, even though you recognize (perhaps briefly, before being drawn back into what you’re doing) that you are tired and it would be a good idea. (This isn’t quite the same as ‘I’ll do one more part, and then go to bed’ in that it’s less conscious and therefore harder to break out of—in many cases it takes a significant effort of will to stop your body from automatically taking the next step in what you’re doing, even if you’ve actually decided not to take that next step.)
I’m curious to find out if those issues are also experienced by people who aren’t autistic—perhaps to a lesser degree, or with different explanations than the ones that I mentioned. Do the issues I described sound like what you’re experiencing? Are they close, or similar in some interesting way?
I’m not sure if this is what you’re talking about, but I’ve long distinguished two aspects of “tiredness”. One is the sensation of fatigue, exhaustion, muddled thinking, &c.--physical indicators of “I need sleep now”.
The second is the sensation of actually being sleepy, in the sense of reduced energy, body relaxation, and a general feeling that going to bed sounds like a fine plan.
I almost always notice the former, but unless accompanied by the latter (often not the case), acting on it by going to bed requires a conscious decision. Usually, the sleepiness will appear after I’m lying down, but at times I’ve been unable to clear my mind of activity and will lie in bed for two or more hours, unable to sleep despite being extremely tired.
If I’m deeply involved in something and not feeling “sleepy” I can easily fail to notice the fatigue (along with hunger and various other non-urgent physical sensations).
In my case it’s more garden-variety procrastination; going to sleep is just one more thing that I know I should do but don’t really want to, because it’s boring.
My experience mostly reduces to a disconnect between a non-critical physical need and the desire to fulfill it, generally to an extent proportional to how much mental activity is bouncing around my conscious mind (the default state being “too much”).
As a final note, besides the melatonin not making me sleepy, neither ethanol nor caffeine seems to have an appreciable effect on whether I can get to sleep (though both will reduce the quality of any sleep).
Thanks for the datapoint.
That doesn’t sound like the experience I was trying to describe, which is of not noticing sleepiness or fatigue at all, even when not doing something engaging. The ‘not noticing’ caveat is there because some autistics won’t automatically notice those sensations, but can consciously check to see if they’re occurring, and get into the habit of doing so. (The issue can apply to hunger, too.)
If you’re actually collecting datapoints, not just using the term semi-metaphorically, it may help to add that I’ve been diagnosed with (fairly moderate) ADHD; if my experience is representative of anything, it’s probably that.
How will you distinguish between a non-autistic ‘experiencing an autistic associated experience to a lesser degree’ and, well, someone experiencing a lesser degree of autism? Considering the context I am not sure if a “I notice that too” from a LessWrong poster would inform me much at all about how much prevalence independent of the causal factors behind autistism.
My experience, for what it is worth:
My main experience of ‘tiredness’ is metacognitive awareness of impaired cognitive function. For example, I’ll notice that my verbal expression and spelling becomes impaired and the names of things elude me and then conclude that I am tired. I don’t feel ‘sleepy’. Note that now that I have discovered melatonin I actually can feel tired (if I take ~6 mg). This was quite a novelty! I also seemed to have developed somewhat more awareness of other ‘tiredness’ indicators such as yawning over recent years (late 20s).
The above applies to hunger as well, for most part.
Spot on.
I’m not sure that those categories are naturally distinguishable, actually—there’s a fair bit of controversy over whether there’s a smooth spectrum between very autistic individuals and very NT individuals, and such datapoints could be taken as evidence for that theory. Whether the NT-leaning-toward-autistic portion of that spectrum (assuming it exists, which I believe it does) manifests in single examples of significant autistic-type experiences in otherwise NT people vs. multiple slightly autistic-leaning traits (or both) is also interesting.
I tend not to spell that kind of thing out unless asked, though—not everyone reacts well to overt suggestions that they might be autistic-leaning because of some trait. ‘NT with a quirk’ is much more palatable.
This sounds like me. Not just for going to bed, but for anything I need to do. Do you have links to descriptions or discussions of this experience? Have people found any way of dealing with it? I’m probably slightly on the autism spectrum.
ETA: I’ve also heard this described as ADD or OCD.
This is my go-to article on the subject. I can probably dig up some more things later, if you’re interested. (I’m about to go to bed.) Mostly it’s more worked-around than overcome, but there are resources out there on how to work around it, and I’ll make a point of trying to find some of them if you want.
Executive dysfunction is part of ADD, too, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of it being an element of that. My understanding of OCD is that the mechanism behind the issue isn’t the same, but I could easily be wrong; I haven’t done as much research on OCD.
Thanks! Yes, please dig up more on that! (Guess you didn’t go to bed right away.) I’d love to see resources for how to work around it.
I definitely have those kinds of experiences. I don’t believe that I’m autistic.
Going to bed is a little like dying. Someone slightly other wakes up in the morning.
Because I can’t stop my compulsive quoting...
-- XIII, More Poems, A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936)
Good point. For example, last night just before going to bed, I was totally absorbed in Eliezer’s latest story. But when I woke up this morning, I forgot about wanting to finish the story, and started doing other things. (Eventually I came upon the open tab and finished it.)
BTW, if anyone hasn’t read that story yet, you should keep this page handy as a reference, otherwise it’s pretty hard to understand.
/.