Ask HN: Do other people have days in which they're dumber than usual? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do other people have days in which they're dumber than usual?

88 pointskidintech63 comments

I know the title sounds foolish but...I think I noticed this during undergrad, and it happens every once in a while now, years later:

most days I'm my usual self, but every now and then (maybe a day every few months?) I'm just...dumber. And I can pick up on it pretty quickly, for example when I try to think about something that's not ingrained in my routine (such as a work task), it just feels like my mind is...foggy?

And it's not food or exercise or sleep, because especially with the pandemic, my routine is the same.

Does this happen to anyone else? Google searching warranted no lead on the matter.

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Sadly I feel like it's the opposite for me, most days I'm running at half speed, and on a "good" day it's like I have a different brain - I process things more rapidly, I'm more optimistic, I get more done, etc.

I suspect it's sleep related because I can generally feel how the day is gonna go within 10 minutes of being awake, but the frustrating part is that hours of sleep seems to have little bearing on how refreshed I feel in the morning. There is some correlation there, but not enough to say it's all about the hours.

It's not sleep apnea or any known sleep disorder either, so please withhold the ensuing deluge of HN faux Dr's and their google-fu diagnoses ;)

I don't recall this being an issue much in my 20's, maybe this is what aging is like. I've had to resort to just taking advantage of good days and doing as much work as possible, and then on bad days I'll just do mundane work I normally would otherwise not want to do.

So at least for me - yes having good and bad days is entirely normal.

I noticed this too. For me, diet was the main culprit in my inconsistency. My armchair theory is that either fluctuating blood sugar levels during sleep or imbalance of gut microbiome are the cause.

A mild ketogenic diet worked wonders for my sleep quality and mental clarity. Intermittent fasting too (on meal a day).

Those can be tough to follow, though. I also found that eating no carbs 4 hours before bed and no big meals 2 hours before bed can help as well.

I second looking into your diet. I have over the months worked out that a low histamine diet works for me... but it could be anything for you.

Really easy to test — follow a strict elimination diet for a few days. Nothing but rice, potatoes, chicken and water. At least with me I felt like a different human within 3 days.

If you have small kids, I think this experience is pretty normal. If you cannot find any explanation for it maybe get a blood analysis and let them check for deficiencies (e.g. iron). Good luck.

I know you asked specifically not to be armchair doctored but here it comes.

How sure are you that you don't have sleep apnea? Did you actually do a study? Everyone I talked to didn't think I had it but I did a study anyway and lo and behold... no matter how much sleep I got, no difference whatsoever, always tired, just like you. But now several years later I did another one and I don't have it anymore. I think if you have it at a particular threshold they might not always diagnose you with it. So if you have a "mild case" like me you might meet the threshold one night and not the next.

Same. I have like 10 or so days a year when I’m so quick-thinking, motivated, optimistic, and energetic, I feel like if I kept it up for a year I’d take over the damn world.

But it’s just a day every now and then, so doesn’t amount to much. I do wonder whether most high-achievers wake up feeling that way more days than not. God damn life would be so easy and pleasant if that were the case.

I have those as well! Definitely more rare than my dumb days though. It's not so much the fact that I'm sharper, but life is just...rose-colored.

Exactly. I feel much sharper, much more energetic, and much more optimistic. Exactly “like I have a different brain”. Those days are awesome. If I could even get a couple of those a week, man, that’d be nice.

How to have good sleep is also a bit of a mystery for me. A fresh breeze, sunlight, de-congested nostrils, lack of alarm, and relaxing ambient sounds like chirping birds and people living their lives in the distance seem to help, but ideal conditions aren't always available.

Yeah. Brain fog. I've traced mine to the following:

+ Stress on uncertain situations

+ Lack of sleep

+ Lack of clarity of 'the next thing to do'

I can't solve the first, so I try to handle the latter two with the obvious solutions (sleep more, set next task) but also with other methods. I tried different Mg supplements, Caffeine + L-Theanine, -afinils, and Adderall under these circumstances. Adderall turbo'd my performance back up and past, the -afinils worked if sleep was the problem, and the others didn't help at all.

If you are a disciplined person, then maybe occasional Adderall use will help. I have no dependence issues (use is roughly once / 3 months) but if you have discipline problems, then don't do it, tolerance is easy to build and addiction is possible.

I am currently attempting CBT strategies. Going to give STOPP a shot.

> + Lack of clarity of 'the next thing to do'

This hits home with me.

Plus one here. I'm trying to find "next thing to do tomorrow" on evening the day before, but when I'm out of luck - productivity suffers until I find one.

This resonates with me a lot. Stress can be handled do something which is easy to do but opposite of your current activity for example. Running, Gym or any anything that takes your mind of that isssues.

Lack of Sleep - This is difficult one. Procrastination ruins sleep. Just try to let it go. Do something boring to make you fall asleep.

Lack of clarity - Talk. Talk to someone in your team even junior dev or your manager. What happens is that our mind ends up in loop which doesn't break. Lack clarity signifies that you either don't understand requirement clear enough to make task out of it or you trying to figure way smarter solution than what you need at hand.

I wouldn't rule out the pandemic being an issue here. These are not _normal_ times, and is an additional stressor. For me stress _definitely_ impacts my ability to think clearly, and the higher the stress (even if not immediately obvious to me), the worse my thinking skills are.

As another commenter mentioned, migraines can also do this. Not all migraines come with a lot of pain, so that's not always a dead giveaway. But during a migraine, my thoughts are muddy as hell.

Just seconding this by proxy. Thanks to some early steps, I'm about as unaffected by COVID-19 as a person can be. I live in a neighborhood with acres between houses, telework to an office across the country, and am not at all unused to not leaving the house for a week at a time. In addition, I was able to make a bigger-than-usual trip to Costco in addition to already having some disaster preparedness steps taken well before-hand (fresh batteries, fresh water containment, rice / flour / staple foods on hand, etc.) and yet I still find myself at numerous points throughout the day thinking about some things I need, or might need in the near future, trying to find ways to procure said thing without leaving the home, and it's draining me in very small doses.

OP says it's been a problem for several years.

Consider CO or CO2 being elevated indoors, which is a real thing. Consider working next to an open window if the climate allows it.

But it's also often totally random to me, if something is uncomfortable (say my back hurts randomly that day from sleeping funny) it's distracting and makes it harder to focus.

Ever since I got a CO2 sensor, I've noticed a direct correlation between "foggy brain" and above average CO2 concentrations

Which CO2 sensor did you buy?

https://www.co2meter.com/products/personal-co2-monitor?varia...

this one, it's 400$ and totally worth it. I've probably made up easily $400 in productivity in a month.

What CO2 sensor do you use? Any recommendations?

Grandparent responded to my question and said https://www.co2meter.com/products/personal-co2-monitor?varia... In case you didn’t see it

Yes.

Also I have times when I just need to step back. For instance I am mostly a hardcore coder but I had to deal with some color and design issues that I felt really foggy when I tried to think about.

After taking a break (and also reading CSS documentation to fill in gaps in my knowledge) it just hit me that the color pink was the answer to one problem and it was downhill from there except for the CSS property that it took forever to find.

Yes.

As others have mentioned, taking a step back and trying to have in mind the end goal help me get on track. I also try to break the task in smaller steps, either mentally or on a notepad, where I outline the steps I have in mind.

I noticed that it usually happens to me when I'm overwhelmed with the task.

Yep, I have a similar procrastination issue.

For me the most helpful mantra is "What's the smallest thing I can do right now?" I have no idea how I'm going to rebuild this whole front end in Vue, but I can send a quick email to someone asking them to clarify something, or I can update the text on a single button.

It sounds trivial but if you do that enough times your brain goes "Oh, I guess we're working now" and you get that crucial momentum going.

I agree, I also ask this question in the form of "What can I do to move the ball forward?" or "If I'm stumped, who can I ask and what information might they need to solve the problem?"

TODO list breakdowns are great for this.

Yes, we're not robots, we have inconsistent state, it's ok to not be productive (work-wise) every day of our lives.

Yes. I suspect it boils down to body chemistry. When I have caffeine, my recall is quicker and I'm more creative and focussed. Unfortunately, I can't stay caffeinated all day or my eye starts to pulsate and it feels like my heart is racing.

If I could maintain my caffeine 'high' all day, I'd be much more successful, but it's not worth the health risk. I do alright, financially, in spite of that, but I'd like to accomplish more meaningful work. The comparison of my work between my morning coffee high and afternoon crash is night and day.

I took Adderall once. I don't know it it was a placebo effect or not, but I knocked out a complicated physical simulation model (that I'd been puting off for months) in about 5 hrs, and to this day I've found very few errors in that model. ...I'm just saying.

> I don't know it it was a placebo effect or not, but I knocked out a complicated physical simulation model

It's not a placebo effect. That's what Adderall does. While I never recommend abusing drugs, the fact that you're using caffeine for self treatment and you respond so well to Adderall may mean you have undiagnosed ADHD.

It's worth going to a psych and getting a prescription for it. The great thing about drugs like that is you can take them on days when you really need to knock projects out of the park, and be normal on other days.

The mathematician Erdos apparently did amphetamines for productivity and a friend bet him to quit for a month. He said:

> "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month."

My guess is that he used them for self-medication much like they're used formally now for ADHD treatments. I am NOT recommending you take drugs illegally, but it is fairly easy to get diagnosed for ADHD and get a prescription. It might be a big help.

I stopped taking Adderall after someone here on Hacker News pointed me to some literature that indicates ADHD patients being treated with Adderall have an 8x higher risk of Parkinson’s than those with ADHD who did not receive treatment. I can’t look it up as I’m already feeling anxious with everything going on and don’t feel like reliving that particular trauma. The study was done in Utah.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2018/09/adhd-...

Consider an ADHD diagnosis.

I usually have dumb days at least once per day, but on my most productive days I can get that up to 2-3 dumb days per day!

But actually: Yes. This is totally normal?

So I have this too, try googling 'brain fog'.

I've been trying for years to figure out exactly what causes it. Searching online gives you hundreds of possible causes, for ages I thought it was gluten in my diet, sugar, anxiety causing it, and to some extent I think all of these do affect it.

Recently though I've noticed that sleep might be causing it, specifically breathing through my mouth when I sleep causes me to have a foggy feeling throughout the day, so I'm working on trying to breathe through my nose for the whole night now.

Hope this helps!

Surgical tape for sensitive skin works pretty well for this as long as you get a good seal over your mouth.

I don't have this, but I would suggest on brain fog days you might want to try eating a salad with a lot of leafy greens and getting some exercise in (a twenty minute walk should be sufficient). Also, take Omega-3 pills and vitamin D supplements.

I'm not claiming this will fix your problem, but it could rule out dietary problems or give you a tool to fight the fog.

I wonder also if maybe some nights you aren't sleeping as well and just aren't aware of it. It might be worth monitoring your sleep with some kind of wearable too.

Yeah. All the time. You can't expect top tier performance from yourself all days, everyone has an off day every now and then.

I never figured out why. But ultimately, it doesn't really matter... I imagine that humans are naturally cyclical on the scale of weeks to months.

Different people have different levels of cycles. Bipolar people are cyclical to the point where they cycle between depression / hyperactivity... but even "normal" people have ups and downs.

We aren't machines. We work differently at different times.

The condition is known as "brain fog". For example: https://www.healthline.com/health/brain-fog#causes

I've also seen common cold listed as a potential cause, which definitely jibes with my experience.

Yes, but mine seemed to be from my CPAP pressure set too high. Seems like overoxygenation is a real issue and it was terrible. Now that I'm back to properly titrated, I've found I gain an edge from 4mg of galantamine supplement from Doublewood Supplements. I've tried other companies, but Doublewood seems to be more potent.

This compound is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, so it increases acetylcholine in the brian. It is known to help Alzheimer's patients early in the disease to stay sharp. This fact worries me since I am an ApoE4 heterozygote and so the fact that it works for me may mean I have something wrong :/

I write down on paper how I feel, the work I do, exercise, food I take, everything.

That means if one day I am not ok I can rewind and find the culprit very fast, like getting exhausted from doing too hard work the day before.

In your case, you will be simply forgetting what you did once you sleep. Or you could be simply ill.

I usually think very clearly and fast. Usually my mind is never foggy unless when I am ill, like an occasional headache(once in a year) or when I get the flu.

I do not drink coffee nor significant alcohol. Those can make you bog down.

My mind was boggy when I started working from home in front of a computer years ago. I realized I just needed exercise every day.

Lack of sleep, anxiety, the weather, certainty, a number of things can affect mood.

I find I am the most productive from tue-thu, more productive in the evenings than mornings. I am also more productive in spring and autumn than I am in peak winter and summer.

Overtime you reflect and look inside yourself and learn how to tune your body.

I still feel quite more tired nowadays as a dad but ironically I also feel like I get a lot more done. Mileage varies day to day.

Some days I am just a dumdum and I go home early, play with dog and baby and sleep it off.

Don’t stress too much. Do what feels good. Take care of yourself first before you take care of your work.

The times I've felt like this have been in conjunction with slow-burn stressful events. I've also felt my body sometimes seem to handle nutrition differently under stress, like I'm keeping the lights on but actually joints and muscles feel terrible if the stress lasts too long.

This is typically a retrospection thing, and not a revelation that occurs in the midst of the feeling. One day I'll wake up, make a huge breakthrough, feel great, and wonder if I've been asleep for a month. My memory of the period is also fuzzy.

I think our brains are way more nuanced than we appreciate.

Happens to me all the time. Your conscious experience is the product of you processing a staggering amount of information from the world, and you're not aware of most of that processing. I would say give therapy a try.

What you'll have to do is basically just science on yourself -- make a hypothesis, test it, interpret your findings, and repeat until you know how you work. Therapy is more or less learning how to do that for all the soft emotional stuff in your head and learning how to manage your personal stress.

Yes.

For me it correlates to elevated stress either in the moment or the few days (or weeks) before. If I've also not slept well or enough, I notice it faster.

I no longer consider it a thing to be fixed, but a fact of life. Delivering at 100% of "potential" every day is not really normal, and some of my most productive moments are in days I've consciously accepted I won't accomplish "normal" amounts, and end up solving some unsolved problem because my brain had the space to process it.

It works out in the end. :-)

Yes. Usually I can attribute it to sleep or hydration or exercise etc, but since you've ruled them out, sometimes I've found it can be due to an unmet emotional need, often loneliness or anxiety (currently dealing with this). It's like the brain just refuses to stick on the thing I want it to. Took me a long time understand this, as emotional awareness isn't the easiest thing for me. Meditation has helped to get in touch with what's going on.

I had this same issue for years, had seen doctors and a psychologist. Was tested and learned I had ADHD. Meds, coping strategies and general self-awareness helped in a big way.

But I also had this specific issue on certain days lingering even with ADHD treatment. My doctor suggested I had sleep apnea. Possibly related to sleep habits and possibly a very soft lumpy mattress. My wife and I got a new firm mattress and it really did the trick.

Download a symptom tracker or patient care app and record food, sleep and supplements etc for a week. Have it auto correlate what it could be or use the logs to determine what it could be yourself. For me it was sleep, not exercising and Distressed mood that caused me to have such days.

Try One of these apps(all have free basic functionality afaik) symply, careclinic, or foody if you suspect it’s food related gl.

It's the inverse for me. I'm pretty stupid most days, but every once in a while I surprise myself with something insightful

Possible it's some form of migraine? I sometimes find my mind is cloudy either before or after I develop a migraine.

I often have these days when my mind is pre-occupied. I'm used to having around 40 minutes a day dedicated to my commute, where I relax and turn my conscious mind off (luckily I don't have traffic)

I've had to start doing other things to get that mediative time back- be it exercise, playing with dogs, gardening, whatever else.

Not particularly dumb-days but I do have days where I am much more effective. Sadly it's the days I take Adderall.

That said, I do realize that it's just as likely that I only _feel_ more effective. If I had a decent way to measure developer productivity, I'd be a rich man...

Totally. Especially when the sun is out and it's a beautiful day.

Yes. And some days I feel much sharper than usual.

For me I think it is routine related. I almost never have 'dumb' days during the work week but they're fairly common for me on the weekend.

For me, it's the worst on the next day.

Once in a while, I'll look at some work I did the day before and think "Man, is that stupid. What was I thinking yesterday?"

It's more like, I have days when I feel normal that are just breaks in the fog, because I've been depressed for 20 years.

holy cow yes. The other day I could hardly spit out normal sentences without grasping for easy words. As other have said I think it was related to stress/sleep.

PMS? That sure does a number on me.

Yeah, that happens to me too.

Possibly sleep apnea?

Yes, definitely.

all the time!

Same here. Every day.

Changes in Earth's magnetosphere have huge impacts on your minds, so yes.

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