This must be why new parents always seem so bubbly and happy!
But seriously, that’s very interesting and explains what I’ve experienced. I’ve been in a depression since quitting my phd a couple months ago and not having a direction in life, but whenever I have trouble sleeping I end up feeling better the next day. Maybe I’ll trying utilizing it to get my portfolio looking better.
There's something about getting 2-3 hours of sleep that makes me feel like I'm on top of the world throughout the day. I've always assumed it was a kind of wild delirium.
Why don't you try it and see? Some of my best sleeps were after a sleepless night and for only like 1-3 hours, caffeine or other stimulants in the blood be damned
Edit: also make sure you have bright blue light during wakeup/morning/day and mellow non-overhead orangey/amber/yellow light (nothing east of yellow) at evening/night. Red 2 hours before bedtime for bonus "points"
Not to be flippant, but that’s called sleep deprivation. I did this daily for 18-24mo straight, sleeping a 3h block early morning (~4:30-7:30) and a 27min nap aligned with my sleep/wake cycle during mid-afternoon. I did this without caffeine, stimulants, sugar, etc. After having more kids I couldn’t keep the daily consistency required and scaled back to 1-3x a week. I spent years convinced that it elevated my coding, insights, etc., and there was a degree of truth to it, as it did mitigate the worst of my ADHD. Then I got medicated and suddenly everything in the world that had always screamed for my attention 24/7 started quieting down a little. It took me another decade or two to break more of the coping mechanisms I’d developed in my late teens for ADHD and dyslexia. I could ramble down several tangents for paragraphs here, but I’ll just throw out my personal note that while there were clear cognitive benefits (note: I’m sidestepping the increasingly clear long term cognitive risks indicated in recent research), the muscular-skeletal costs we’re greater.
Its def not a lifestyle, I don't feel like I made that super obvious. I'm talking about a once in a blue moon type deal where you need a hard reset. Sorta like how most people rarely turn off their phones, things get fucky with it eventually, and it needs a hard reset or reboot. Don't get too hung up on the metaphors, but I've experienced it working and I'm not exactly an n=1
I don't think you build up a "Beer Debt" that grows as it depletes like sleep and hunger. Cute wrong example but there's really nothing all that malevolent or irresponsible about the suggestion. Maybe keep it to the weekend (like don't start till Friday/Sat night) and obviously you need the set it up so you don't have to be places or hold meaningful convos although Im not going to rule them totally out
I have extensive experience with it. I would disagree that there’s nothing irresponsible.
I don’t recommend anyone try skipping a night just to see. Blood pressure, heart rate, and glucose levels can easily go to shit and exacerbate underlying any conditions. FWIW it would take me 1-2 weeks after shifting to a polyphasic before seeing any benefits (which makes sense, respective to jet lag). I can easily skip a single night (without stimulants, etc) and run off adrenaline the next day, but the day after sleeping again I’m useless state of sleep-lag-wtf.
Mediocre analogy: something like polyphasic sleep with extremely disciplined sleep-hygiene is like using a stack of high-interest credit cards for the rewards/benefits, but if you make a mistake then there’s a high cost and it’s not really tenable forever. Skipping a night of sleep outright is basically a pay-day loan.
"It was concluded that sleep deprivation has a greater impact on driving performance than a BrAC of 22 μg/100mls of breath, as measured by driving simulation. Coffee is not an effective countermeasure for sleep deprived driving and drivers’ ability to judge this impairment is suggested to be limited."
Can I ask how heavily everyone desire I pre-caveat the main lede here in order to get the discussion centered more on the idea itself and competing views on the extent to which folk's have found some usecase or success with it? Like, obviously if you're a pilot who needs to be able to thread needles and sew while you're able to still control the plane should maybe wait till they're relieved of duty for the weekend or some amount of time allowing the latitude to try this thing out but I feel like there's an amount of obtuseness and ridgidity on display here.
Edit: also, Polyphasic is insane so anyone making a false equivalence here can simply stop. I'm referring to an occasional all-nighter for the joint purposes of resetting ones mental slate and also helping prime oneself for a better quality and faster easing-into the next sleep
> in order to get the discussion centered more on the idea itself and competing views on the extent to which folk's have found some usecase or success with it?
So you only want "competing" views if they line up with your views?
The study was about driving, something many/most of us do on a regular basis. It shows that:
1. Sleep deprivation while driving is comparable to being intoxicated while driving.
2. Those who are sleep deprived are not reliably able to recognize their impairment.
If you think it's "obtuse" to bring this up, then I don't know what you're trying to do here. Those are extremely important pieces of information to bring up.
Can you comment on sleep hygiene and the stuff i mentioned about light? Do you sleep in complete darkness in a slightly cooler ambient setting and really get a lot of bright line first thing at waketime?
There's also sometimes this very strange time dilation that occurs in this 2-3h sleep such that it "feels" much longer and almost impossibly drawn-out psychologically as opposed to the much smaller true anount of time it constitutes
Not so sure; the whole article is about people having a reason to pull an all nighter. Students mostly. That’s intense motivation breaking a stereotype, recipe for a high
Yeah I feel like this is probably a big part of it. Nothing does away with my depressive existential dread better than just having any kind of work to do, be it working on a personal skill or employment related work.
Yeah, meaning is great, or you know, having something exciting or enjoyable to look forward to... but also, I used to heavily experience this type of emotional lift from lack of sleep but when I started taking Beta Blockers a decade ago the benefit stopped overnight never to return.
Adrenaline and the bodies "stress" responses really are a wonder drug, you have to completely reconfigure your life and processes when it goes away.
I went several years more or less depressed and observed this phenomenon and utilized it. Night of Kerbal Space Program and next day the world is much better. For a while. Also, a lot fuzzier. And I couldn't code very well (just good enough to do my job so everyone was happy but I could feel slipping).
Therapy and SSRI:s worked much better in the end.
But, for sure in a pinch it does alleviate unbearable darkness. The problem is it gives some, and takes a god damn lot - especially when entering middle age, when you (or I at least) can't shrug off sleep debt as easily.
The interesting thing is that this apparently was not well known during my therapy. I discussed this effect with my therapist, and she was skeptical and non-plussed. No hard feelings there, I'm super pleased she was robustly evidence based. But very happy to read these results in any case to validate my personal discovery.
> Therapy and SSRI:s worked much better in the end.
How did you find that therapy helped you? I've started therapy a few months back and so far I can't find all that much value in it. They can't fix any of the stuff that is making me depressed, so it mostly feels like I'm mainly getting self help style advice.
That’s my experience as well- though my therapy was a while ago. I had worked a stretch of utterly miserable jobs back then and conversation would always drift back to the work mess I likely left just prior and only frustrate me more. I saw several, mostly because I’d be on different insurance plans, etc. But not once did anyone say “maybe you need a new career path?” If anyone of them had followed that up with “and since procrastination is a problem why don’t we work on helping you get there”, I’d be singing the praises of the field.
I’m not hating on the profession or anything and I have friends who swear by it. But each of them, after a bunch of these sessions I could almost see a hint in their eyes of “damnit… none of this crap is working.” Like I slightly felt bad for them in a way. Slightly.
And honestly, given the trajectory of the world, I’d be more concerned if many people weren’t depressed.
Out of the field, personally I did like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), but it mostly reinforced what I’d learned from a decade of meditation and my buddhist practice.
While I def got more from therapy, I concur regarding ACT being the methodology that worked best for me and that it’s wild how much it overlaps with mindfulness and Buddhist practices.
Therapy helped me when I did it in a group. Mostly in making me realize how good I had it.
People that weren’t able to drive, weren’t able to go outside at all etc. I was just permanently afraid.
What I gained from my other sessions was mostly a ‘get out of jail’ free card to unload all of my thoughts. You can only do that on your family and friends so many time before it starts to wear on them hearing the same things again. But my therapist is paid for that shit, so I have no compunctions.
SSRI worked much better on a daily basis, but the therapy was nice when things were bad.
This is one aspect of therapy for sure. Just discussing your bad stuff with someone who is a talented listener is a very important component IMO to get your stuff together.
And I concur. Don't use your friends or family as therapist as a default option. That stuff is hard. Unloading a bunch of negative emotions to a non-professional can be hurtfull and poisonous. There are of course situations were you can share bad stuff with someone but that's a case by case situation.
You might not have a good fit with your therapist. It took me a few tries but once I found someone with a similar mode of thinking I got a lot more out of the discussions because she said things (often the same things as the prior shrinks) in a way that resonated with my brain better.
In that regard, therapy never fixed my problems, but it did help me recognize unhealthy thinking patterns and provide mechanisms for handling them, both of which have helped me avoid spirals and getting trapped in negative thought processes.
I've been in therapy over six years, and also did it for a shorter spell in the early 1990s.
A few months is really the start of the relationship - it usually takes that long for most people to establish trust with their therapist. That doesn't mean you have the right therapist, but it is hard to know this early on.
In my experience, therapy mainly seems to be a validation and enablement service, on a very big scale. If this is something you're not necessarily seeking, you'll find therapy useless. But a lot of people want it, feel better because of it, and are therefore willing to fork over not insignificant sums to receive it.
This is not my experience at all. There are different types of therapy with wildly different approaches. What I worked with my therapist were recurring negative thought patterns, the associations and actionable concepts to get better, as well as going through my moderately traumatic family history. Part of that is self-validation, for sure. It helps to hear from a professional that the stuff you've gone through and feel has traumatized you, has been pretty bad and yes, probably has traumatized you. It does not cure the trauma, but naming a condition helps to recognize it's effects in ones thinking, which again helps in modifying ones thought patterns around it.
It's really hard to recognize and work on your own negative thought patterns. Like, you can't clean your face without a mirror. You can't comb your hair very well without a mirror. A good therapist in a way works as mirror to your thought, and helps you to clean that stuff up.
If one is moderately well functioning then there is nothing left to fix and yes, a therapy may seem somewhat useless.
My therapy probably saved my life, and I'm not exaggerating.
While it may take a while to sync with your therapist, it's plausible the chemistry between you two just isn't working, or, that the style of therapy is not helpfull to you. There are tons of different types of therapies. Some try to figure out what makes you tick, and work through that. Others just try to analyze your current state and then simply offer actionable tactics to modify your current mood and thinking. I used the latter. Would have absolutely hated the former. But suitability seems to be really personal.
My therapist was purely interested in objective actionable items, negative thought patterns, underlying trauma, etc, and what strategies we could use to try to help me. These things are deeply personal and subjective, but similar issues come again and again between different people, and an experienced therapist can try many different things.
One aspect of depression feels that there are bunch of negative thought patterns and their strong negative associations, which feed eachother. A part of my healing was not giving energy to these things - letting them pass over me so to speak, and find ways to alleviate occasional bad spots (deep breathing etc). We worked with therapist with many of these things. Lots and lots of small actionable nudges.
"They can't fix any of the stuff that is making me depressed, "
I don't know your situation so I would not imagine trying to offer suggestions. I can tell what my bad stuff was though. My parents died, my wife became sick and unable to work and my son turned out to have really bad adjustment problems at school. More or less at the same time. And, I was fairly displeased with my job. That came on top of childhood trauma of parental alchoholism, depression and suecide attempts.
My therapist really could not fix any of that, nor did they try. What we worked instead was trying to give slight adjustments to my thinking and perception, lifestyle and relationships. Small nudges, here and there, over a long period, in combination with SSRI:s.
None of the issues have been fixed. None of them can be fixed. But at least for myself I can again find joy and happiness in a broken world. I truly hope the same for you.
I was really lucky finding a suitable therapist early on, but I understand finding suitable therapist can take some time. To my understanding ”therapist shopping” is a normal part of the process, and if you feel your therapist relationship is not working out right now, it might be a good idea to raise this topic with them.
I noticed something similar (see also: my comment about using magnesium and getting better sleep on the thread about deep sleep yesterday).
When I get ~5ish hours of sleep one night a week I am surprisingly more alert the next day but I also crash much harder by night. I cannot sustain multiple days of little sleep but one short night doesn't seem to have such a detrimental effect.
One of my teachers told us to make sure we’re getting a good amount of sleep two nights before an important event (exam, job interview, competition, you name it). One can easily cope with a single sleepless night, but not with two in a row.
But seriously, that’s very interesting and explains what I’ve experienced. I’ve been in a depression since quitting my phd a couple months ago and not having a direction in life, but whenever I have trouble sleeping I end up feeling better the next day. Maybe I’ll trying utilizing it to get my portfolio looking better.