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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

How many hours of sleep, nightly?

Lately I've been meeting many "hustlers" who are swearing up and down I only need 6 hours, or even less, which I thought would be obviously absurd, but this stupid meme keeps cropping up. The 80s sales gurus were teaching us this in highschool with their pep talks, and now the new-rich millenials are devouring it and sending it straight down the line on their instagrams.

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In the 80s they had cocaine. One is forced to wonder if modern "hustlers" are omitting something in their advice.

Adderal, its everywhere, and not much in the way of side effects. Taking it while you are in the thick of a task is the way to do it; once it sets in you are working at 150% pace with undivided focus. This is the drug of the future. Much more sustained focus from caffeine, and no stomach discomfort or nausea that you might encounter with high caffeine doses. This drug, along with ritalin, are designed such that you can't get a high enough concentration of the drug in your blood to trigger any physical dependence or tolerance. Plenty of my friends have prescriptions, and doctors generally prescribe enough to be on the drug every waking hour for a month, whereas they might only need to take it a couple times a week for focusing on a specific task, so people whose ADD symptoms are milder tend to build up a surplus.

I don't agree that it's the miracle drug you're indicating.

First off, the effectiveness in diagnosed add / ADHD people vs people just using it doesn't seem to be 1:1. For example, it gets me focused on relevant tasks, whereas my non ADHD friends could easily get sucked into the infamous "clean the entire house" funnel. Or, it just makes them anxious.

I also suspect it dramatically reduces my emotional reaction to things, including art. I feel like it robotocizes me. Sure, I'm more effective, but time seems to just slide by without having any real impact on me. The weeks I don't take it seem to automatically be more "colorful" in my long term memory.

It's certainly made my life a hell of a lot easier as someone with ADHD, but I wouldn't sing its praises as a side-effect-less drug. If anything, the side effects are insidious in a dangerous (emotionally) and undetectable way.

Yes, modafinil. The majority of the people I know use it. (So do I, but that's because I work an overnight shift... maybe once I finish this side project I'll be able to land a nice 9-5 software job.)

That still making the rounds? I remember in the coding bootcamp kids were going on about it, so I asked my psych about it as an alternative to adderall (always willing to explore treatments to my adhd), and she was surprised to hear people were taking it thinking it was like adderall. She said "people with narcolepsy take that, it doesn't help focus at all." This was early in days of it, looks like it's a known thing to try to use modafinil as a cognitive enhancer, though there's little data to support it actually works like that:

Modafinil, sold under the brand name Provigil among others, is a medication to treat sleepiness due to narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, or obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).[3][7] In OSA continuous positive airway pressure is the preferred treatment.[3] While it has seen off-label use as a purported cognitive enhancer, the research on its effectiveness for this use is not conclusive.[8][9] It is taken by mouth.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil

It does help in my experience. Less so than Dexamphetamine, but also feels like it's doing you less damage. I tried Ritalin, but got headaches. We can't get adderall in .au so I don't know about it first hand. The problem is you can't get Modafinil subsidised if you have ADHD, only if you have Narcolepsy, so while Dexamphetamine is probably doing long term damage, it costs me $20 a month where Modafinil is > $200.

"Adrafinil is a precursor to modafinil, meaning the body converts adrafinil to modafinil, and are often discussed together for this reason. Adrafinil is a mild stimulant designed to fight off sleepiness and fatigue."

You can buy it online, legally in the US anyways, probably in Aussieland too.

Sounds like your psych wasn't familiar with off label uses. I know a lot of people who have tried or regularly used Modafinil. It eliminates brain fog and improves focus, like many stimulants do.

It helps if you're tired. I'm not sure if it helps with focus or if most people just have dismal sleep quality.

I've found caffeine to be sufficient, too scared to try anything "harder" - but I suspect many hustlers do not have wives and children, or if they do they are crappy fathers/husbands - I personally know some people like this.

Could it be the aggressively over prescribed amphetamines?

I often do 6 hours, but not by intention, just because I get in the zone, but then my next day is totalled (have to go to bed early). I shoot for 8 or even 9 hours when I can get it. I also drink coffee in the evening sometimes but try not to exceed 300mg of caffeine per day, but I am weird in that I can sleep even while caffeine is running through my system. Mostly, I try to compact time as much as possible to free up a contiguous chunk to work on my own stuff, which is usually about 1 productive hour per day if I am lucky.

I've been getting about 4 hours a night for the last 5 years and feel fine. I used to swear by 8 hours, but as I've gotten older I just don't need as much.

Well, you must be an outlier, because that "as you get older you need less sleep" meme is not supported by scientific study: https://www.sleep.org/articles/aging-need-less-sleep/

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