"you should first identify why you’re going to sleep later than intended, and then create a plan of action which allows you to deal with your specific set of reasons for procrastinating instead of going to sleep."
If only it was this simple.
If only it was this simple.
Staying up later always wins.
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.
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.