Sleepy America: 60% of adults say they’re more tired than ever before | Hacker News Reader

Sleepy America: 60% of adults say they’re more tired than ever before

studyfinds.org

59 pointsharambae22 comments

I wonder how much of this is anxiety behavior. You have a scary sounding situation outside that you can't do much of anything about actively, so instead you invest your energy in distraction like television and gaming - which is really a "delay" strategy, not a solving strategy.

Personally, I've been trying to intentionally invest my time in productive things (writing little games, learning, working out) to try and actually reduce my anxiety instead of just burying it.

As the joke goes: "Anxiety must be a liquid because it flows right into your brain as soon as you lay down to sleep."

This is definitely my guess. People don't sleep as well when they're anxious even if they're in bed the usual amount of time.

I've been working on similar productive things (i.e. reading, jogging, projects), to keep out the 'what-ifs'. One of those projects I intend to start soon is building a small game. I've come across a lot of discussion about engines, frameworks, and hand-built options. A large majority push for larger engines like Unity or Godot that 'do it all' to focus more on the game and less on what's needed to build it. That seems alright, but being a backend dev, I generally enjoy understanding the full operation and building it out as close to my needs as possible.

What have you used for your smaller games? And what would you recommend for someone with programming experience, but lacking experience in pretty much every other facet of game development?

I am a big fan of the Lua LOVE framework. It's all Lua and very minimal boilerplate code.

Recently there was a post about a game called BYTEPATH and the developer put up an entire tutorial on how they made the game including hacking into what little required code there was (the main event loop).

https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://love2d.org/

Thank you. This looks great.

I have a few text based games which I write in JS so they can be played on the web. I use an off-the-shelf story format (Ink, though Twine is a popular competitor) and otherwise write the engine myself.

I've started using Unity for some 2d games (and faux isometric ones) and it's a bit of a blackbox but not as much of one as I thought it would be. Still not a fan of their licensing on the asset store though you can publish packages to git and itch.io without EULA nonsense.

As someone who’s daily logistics have not changed that much (been working from home for 18 months, and not really going out besides grocery shopping), I feel like you have something here.

I’ve definitely been more tired in the past 2 months, and checking in with myself I have noticed that I’ve been pushing away anxiety

> so instead you invest your energy in distraction like television and gaming - which is really a "delay" strategy, not a solving strategy.

Well, technically it's an effective means of social distancing, so in a sense it is doing something meaningful to improve the overall situation, even if psychologically it doesn't feel like that at all. Though one could spend the time better and achieve the same result with less anxiety, as you've suggested.

> About half of participants get out of bed 10 minutes before remote workday starts.

Guilty

IMO it comes down to good habits and (more importantly) kids. I have never been more relaxed in my life. I get 8+ hours of sleep every night, and sometimes nap during the day. Cutting down on long commutes has made such a positive difference to my life that I'm never doing it again, pandemic or not.

Everyone I know with young children is on the opposite end of the spectrum though, now that childcare/daycare/babysitting/family assistance options aren't available anymore.

I've been getting worse at this. The thing is, it leaves me feeling more anxious if I roll out of bed and go straight to work. I like having a slower morning where I can sip coffee, read, or work on a side project before starting work.

Between working from home full time, having the pandemic fatigue, and the days being longer, I go to bed later, sleep in later, and wake up closer to when my workday should start. It's a solvable problem, I just need to find the discipline to reset my schedule, again.

I’ve felt exhausted for the past month. I also started full-time remote work in December. My previous routine of working out at the gym before work vanished.

I don’t know how much of this is anxiety and how much is new bad habits (or lack of good habits). Some of it is stress (my new job is stressful). Some of it is the constant fireworks, instability, and the rise in violence in my area since the protests started.

But I definitely relate to feeling tired now.

If you're working from home AND trying to watch / educate your kids you might be like me and trying to fit work in wherever you can, and that can impact sleep.

our 2 small kids have decided to spend the pandemic waking up at 5am or earlier. Neat, right?

Could be excess CO2, it's summer, AC is on, lockdown had more people at home breathing more air. I've found opening a few windows for an hour to recirculate the air solves this issue. Hour long walks daily helps too

We all need to take more naps.

I’m going to see a sleep doctor on Friday. I’ve been napping two hours every day from 12-2 like clockwork and I wake up feeling confused and more tired than when I went to sleep. I did a sleep study years ago and was diagnosed with OSA but always felt like I was suffocating wearing the CPAP. Tried in the last few weeks to just force myself to wear the thing and I feel like I’m stopping breathing as I fall asleep. It’s awful and a damned if I do damned if I don’t kind of thing. Hopefully it’s “just” apnea because I feel like I’m literally going crazy from such poor sleep.

Try a 20minute nap, or at the very least try out increasing or decreasing the length by 5 minutes at a time.

You may be accidentally waking up each day at the lowest valley of a sleep cycle

You might consider experimenting with different masks and pressure settings to see if it helps a bit. CPAPs are awful but the common alternative is surgery.

Another less invasive option would be to see a chiropractor. I've watched videos claiming they help open nasal passages, but not sure if that's pseudoscience. I think surgery should always be the absolute last option.

Two hour naps will likely put you into a deep slow-wave REM sleep cycle. Waking up mid sleep cycle often leads to grogginess. If you cut your naps to 25 minutes or slightly less, you avoid deep REM sleep and should wake up feeling refreshed.

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is a good summary on the science behind sleep. The book also recommends to not use the "snooze" function on your alarm clock. It allows you to slip back into a sleep cycle that gets disrupted multiple times everyday.

Trying different masks, different pressure settings, or different ramp up time might help you adjust to the CPAP better. Mandibular advancement splint might be an option? It's definitely worth talking to your sleep specialist about finding something that works for you. There's a reason why sleep deprivation is used as torture, not to mention the long-term effects of unmanaged OSA

The older you get, the more tired you are. Last I checked, everyone is getting older.

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