Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination
solvingprocrastination.com
solvingprocrastination.com
"No matter what you need to fix in your life, start with sleep and food. You'll have difficulties improving anything else if these two basic needs aren't fulfilled"
That sounded very Captain Obvious at the time, but as I'm getting older, I realize more and more he was so right.
From a shallow skim, it looks like this study compared the same people across multiple days.
That's also why I end up here half the time.. back to work.
I think the point the article is making is that if you want to reduce your procrastination, you should first try to regulate your sleep. Procrastinators who get a good night's sleep, will have a better chance of not procrastinating.
If only it was this simple.
For example:
* If you can’t stop browsing social media before going to sleep, install an extension that cuts your access after a certain hour.
* If you feel too energetic to sleep, reduce caffeine intake/blue light exposure in the hours before bedtime.
* If you don’t feel motivated enough to go to sleep, use motivational techniques such as marking down streaks of days on which you successfully go to sleep on time.
Again, I'm not saying that it's easy, but if you’re willing to put in some effort, there are a lot of effective techniques you can use: https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-procrastinati...
I struggled with this for a long time. I'd decide that I wanted to go to bed earlier, and wake up earlier, but would always fail with the former. I'd get in bed in time, but would never be able to fall asleep. It turns out the solution is really simple...
The silver bullet was:
Don't focus on bed time. That will come naturally. Go to bed whenever you can. The key is to WAKE UP early, every morning. Regardless of what time you went to bed, WAKE UP at your target hour the next morning.
Also - exercise each day. For me, lifting heavy weights and sleeping too little, quickly fixed my "too much energy" at night problem.
Not long ago there was a stigma about this thing that wasn't just about hiding it, it was about "it won't happen to me, I'm not crazy". But you can be in your mid 40s or early 50s before you have a first episode[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder [1] http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516...
But diagnosed bipolar people know this. This is potentially harmful advice because many people may not know they have a latent bipolar disorder that hasn't manifested yet. In my parent comment I gave a histogram of the age of onset of one's first episode -- it's well possible to be a nondescript software engineer in one's early 40s and literally go crazy.
Of course, your proposal also has merits, so people should weigh risks and benefits. Also note family history, history of depression, etc. which are also risk factors.
Here's a recent survey of what w know about bipolars and sleep https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935164/
But basically this has been known empirically since old-timey asylums. Hippocrates probably has a hint of this as a factor of the "sacred disease". It's a fact.
But not fucking with your sleep is "antifragile". If you agree with Taleb generally, you won't risk it. The downsides are immense. You can easily spend all your savings in one weekend buying soviet filmmaking gear. And that's just the financial side. Bipolar is treatable but doesn't go away. It's just easier to handle. You go to the grave with your pillbox in hand, just in case they buried you alive.
The minor disruption of having to take a handful of pills every night, 3 minutes times 365 days times 35 years = 2100 hours. You could probably learn French, German and Italian in that time. I'm refraining from talking about the major downsides. Educate yourself.
--- You can also have a latent allergy to peanuts but you always ate small portions. Then someone says "eat only peanuts for a week" and someone says "beware, some allergies are cumulative-exposure, you could be especially sensitive". Then you weigh your risks and benefits. Maybe have someone around to help you if you choke.
With bipolar you won't know what's happening right away. It will seem you're having the best period of your life (and you are!). Weigh your risks and benefits. What's being proposed is a lifehack. You could also try to sleep right the way your mother taught you to.
Perhaps there need to be more pushback from us tech workers when we hear about, e.g., all night hackathons or polyphasic microsleep experiments or the need for nap rooms in offices to compensate for all those 2am coding sessions or something. That some people definitely experience adverse effects where the consequences can be hard to control and some people's lives can be literally wrecked by the thing.
In my case, lighting turned out to be a big issue. All of the following proved necessary:
* Blackout curtains that made my room darker at night * But, they were curtains. So, they were not so dark that no light came in in the morning. This helped me wake up * Better interior lighting for night. I bought some "bedtime bulbs" after I saw them on HN, and installed them in my lamps. They're very warm, and I feel sleepier * A red light in the lamp by my bed for reading * Morning light. First thing I do upon waking is walk outside in the light, and try to get in the sun. Even in Canadian winter * Morning light, part 2. I use a wakeup light, after reading about the one Sam Altman used here: http://blog.samaltman.com/productivity * I use "reduce white point" on my phone past seven or so. It's set fairly high * I make a point of getting ready for bed, and avoiding screens. So last hour is just getting stuff wrapped up for the day, hanging out, etc * Sleep tracking. I use an apple watch, and auto sleep. I more or less centre everything around getting as much as I can. It's massively improved everything else in my life. This tracking is also how I measured the effectiveness of the changes above.
All of the above basically reset the circadian rhythm. That was why I kept going to sleep later than intended. Again, I had years of what seemed like onset insomnia. Now, I more or less don't. I still take longer to fall asleep than my girlfriend does, but I regularly am asleep before 11, rather than 1-2 am. And I feel much happier for it.
I also use .3 msg of melatonin, around 5-6 pm, following a tip here about dosing. (Apparently it's either that, or a larger amount right before bed)
Just now, I noticed I felt awake and realized I had left the overhead lights on. While typing this comment I turned them off, turning on the lamps with warm lights, and feel sleepier.
I suspect that's not quite how the original article meant it, but looking at my process in hindsight, it was fairly simple. Just basically continual assessment focussed on "why". Why was I not sleeping? And what do experts recommend for circadian rhythm.
Staying up later always wins.
I guess that's related to what another commenter said, that essentially we stay up because it's more fun than the alternative. One thing that works for me as a result is focusing on dreams or stories I tell myself at bedtime to generate fun dreams. Another thing is give myself a goal where bedtime is somehow the reward (I will fold all the laundry and bake cookies, but then I have earned going to sleep) and it will make me feel like going to sleep is desirable even if in actuality laundry and cookies sounded much better.
It's solvable, though, and I'm taking steps to help myself.
I can't get anything done, so I lie away worrying about the things I didn't do. Repeat.
The only fix for me seems to be adrenaline. Working on something exciting, playing games, exercise - I don't feel tired. But brain work is hopeless and I struggle to get through the day.
Also, this seems to be observed only in those "who have low trait self-control".
Adjusting the title for those two points may be more helpful.
As for the probable 2 years period, it doesn't look like it is the case in the paper; "Seventy one full-time employees participated [...] Participants completed a one-shot general electronic questionnaire"
[0] http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA (2012, 60 mins.)
That is my friends pattern. Kind of rough.
I'm still using mine in comparison with pencil and paper sleep charts, they agree well. It's just a shame I can't show the data from fitbit to my specialist.
What would a good export look like?
I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low accountability environment.
So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access.
The two that I've found to work the best for me are http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.... for Android.
I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've blocked apps like Chrome and the Youtube app permanently, and it's impossible to get around without wiping my phone (which I'm probably too lazy to do). I had to go ahead and install the Reddit app and mobile Firefox when I discovered I could install apps remotely through the Play Store on my laptop (ha!). I also block the Play Store app on the phone.
This makes my phone a phone, text messager, podcast player, audiobook player, and maps device rather than a source of infinite novelty.
For my laptop it's a little harder since I can't block the browser and and still do web dev, but the Cold Turkey app is the best app I've found to be as undefeatable as possible while still filtering specific sites. You can set up schedules, so I block sites after a certain time at night. Since, a key part of the procrastination cycle is staying up too late and then getting up later or tired, getting a bad start to the day, etc etc as the article suggests.
Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever, but it makes a very strong effort to disallow itself from being uninstalled. It's a desktop application, not a browser plugin, so it can actually prevent the whole "I'll just use IE to browse Reddit" problem that Chrome plugin blockers have. And having admin privileges, it can actually enforce blocks.
This may be a bit extreme, but modern life isn't really "normal" in any possible way for our meat sack bodies and brains.
A great book about all of this that was also helpful for further motivating me to try to be proactive here was Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism [http://calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/].
It's not really a book about "quit Facebook", but rather "be intentional about the technology in your life instead of having technology happen to you. I've determined that Hacker News is a valuable use of my time within moderation, while Reddit doesn't really ever provide any sort of value, whether productive _or_ relaxing.
Err no, you just change the date/time and voila.
I say this from experience that good sleep makes all the difference between a productive and a sucky day. You feel more focussed after a good sleep. Make good sleep a habit.