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Comment by raghuveerdotnet | Hacker News Reader

Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.

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During a very difficult time in my life recently, I found it impossible to sleep. I would have stress nightmares and even when i did fall asleep, I would soon wake myself up with specific scenarios my mind was trying to work out.

I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation.

I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep.

Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again.

This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists.

My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills.

I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds.

Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience.

I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping.

Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.

I am sorry you are going through this. Thank you for sharing.

I imagine you are still dreaming, but likely you are sleeping deeply enough that you don't have the time to "recover" your dream upon waking.

Putting on my armchair psychologist/anthropologist/whatever hat, I find the fact that you can sleep better with people speaking around you very interesting. I wonder if we are built to feel comfortable when we can hear people whom we trust (your background conversations in this case) speaking as we sleep? Means someone else we trust is awake and can be observant of dangers while we nod off.

Sounds about right.

Also, teenagers, adults and elderly people have different sleep schedules that would allow for a tribe to have constant fire watch.

Isn't that what cats who trust their human do all the time? Come to sleep on their lap for protection?

I have struggled with sleep at night for at least 15 years now. I get very sleepy in food courts (general hubbub in a safe feeling surrounding) and as a child who hated cricket I dozed off on the couch more than once when it was on. There's something calming about a low level of crowd noise.

This very difficult time in your life you appear to have in common with your collegues if I’m reading you right. Can you elaborate a little bit on your work and maybe other novel coping strategies you and your collegues evaluated?

I went through a similar phase, but I solved it with audio books. You might want to give it a try.

Sounds similar to why many watch these types of videos: [0]

I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1]

As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA

For anyone who is suffering from this, or on some days finds it hard to sleep I recommend Science and Futurism With Isaac Arthur podcast.

It has "Narration Only" versions of all episodes and it is very interesting, so if you can't sleep you can listen to it but it will not have harsh noises.

Also Philosophize This has the same properties (very old episodes have some loud music).

Let me know if you know similar podcasts.

+1 to Isaac Arthur videos as lullabies. The only thing I regret is that then I also need to rewind each episode multiple times because I'm genuinely interested in what's said.

Recently I've also started to listen to luetin09's Warhammer 40k lore videos. They are in similar vein that they could also be podcasts. Skeptoid is another one I've used.

I have used a similar coping strategy in stressful times. Put a YouTube video on that’s “the right amount of boring” in my headphones and just let the auto play play me out.

A possible explanation is that when you are “watching tv” you’re not obligated to do anything else, hence you loosen up and stop thinking about those other things. A safe space of sorts.

I am a little surprised that so many responses suggested optimization to your technique but not how to solve the problem at root.

I am neither a shrink nor your shrink but I think it's probably safe to say that whatever is affecting your sleep is probably affecting other parts of your life too, and while you mentioned a very difficult time - our bodies and brains don't by default react in most helpful says (eg - keeping you up with nightmares isn't helping anything)

In my experience what helps is a real way to "look within" to understand what's really going on. Ideally, this is done with the help of a real psychiatrist - someone willing to do real deep work of therapy and analysis, not just boredly write a prescription.

The other thing is developing self insight techniques yourself. For me, a diligent yoga practice and yoga study into the meditative aspects has been immensely helpful. But even on the purely physical practice level, learning to "look within" to understand why a pose is hard or painful teaches you the same process that I am talking about.

This all may sound wishy washy but if you are a software person you can relate to this - it's often easy to fix problems once you understand them. It's impossible to fix problems until you do, at best you can manage symptoms.

The very best way of dealing with stress isn't internal, it is making the source of stress go away.

Unless the internal changes fundamentally change how you view the world ( i.e. the source of stress no longer causes stress, which is the kind of change you'll very rarely see in adults ) it will only be a paliative measure.

Being better able to cope with crap is useful, but I don't think it can be considered solving the root of the problem ( due to lack of neuroplasticity in adults ).

I couldn't disagree with you more, fortunately. You can never remove all stressors but you have way more control over your reaction than you think.

One example - people's natural emotional reaction to work deadlines is something like "I'll die if I don't make it" which is almost never literally true, but your body and mind torment you as if it was. Everyone can learn to reframe it to something more healthy like "I am a hard-working processional and I am driving myself to achieve this deadline as a matter of achievement and pride". Then you can engage with it fully and then still go to sleep at night.

Here's the key thing: whether you are able to change how you react depends on whether you try, and whether you try depends on whether you believe that you can. So at the start, you must believe that introspection will empower you to make changes, or you are doomed to be stuck forever.

The pit that many people fall into is that they take themselves very seriously and believe that how they feel about something is an objective representation of the severity of that thing. My example with deadlines above is one example. Another simple one is social anxiety. Someone can really believe and feel that "if I go to drinks with coworkers, they will judge and laugh at me and I will make an ass out of myself somehow" - that feels super real to them but objectively it's not real at all. So they spend hours of torment and lots of sleepless nights fearing and dreading and avoiding something that objectively is nothing. If they can reframe it (over the course of years, with a lot of help and work) the whole thing reduces to "it's just drinks who cares.". Same situation, but the person turner a stressor into a neutral or maybe even positive.

Don't be stuck where you are, and don't think you can't change or feel differently unless the world does. And then expect the change to be hard work but worth it.

Having a large rainy day fund is something a lot of people are missing.

Paycheck to paycheck drastically increases stress level, yet so many won’t get away from it.

When I ran an Airbnb, it was shocking to see how cheap other cultures would eat. Every meal home made. Despite no kitchen access label on listing.

Uh, must be a cultural abyss here.

When someone says they are under a lot of stress, I take it as they work 70 hours weeks, or they found out they'll be a cripple or people they love are dying, or the chance that you'll be stabbed when going to work is quite high.

Never crossed my mind that enough people are under heavy stress by the examples you gave.

I specifically did not want to describe my specific crisis because I didn't want to distract from the conversation of my solution to the sleep-impacting aspect of the stress.

We are also dealing with the source of my/our stress, and it should be resolved one way or another in the next few months. It's a 24x7 crisis for us that's complex and we're all working on it. This isn't routine work stress.

I have also used some stoic phrases and slow breathing to help me during the day. https://iamthemaninthedarkroom.com/

My above comment is strictly about this one technique that I stumbled upon.

Is that darkroom site a reference to, or pulled from, something? A quick search for that string only turned up that site, and this ( https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848880528/BP000023.xm... ) which seems unrelated.

Anyways, thanks for the link, I bookmarked it. Might also make a local version of it and set it as my homepage.

Reminds of days when I could only sleep with the Air crash investigations show running in the background. It was something about the narrator’s voice that put me to sleep.

I had similar issues, and tried to solve them with a similar method. I fell asleep to an audiobook about the roman empire many nights. I finally realized that the reason I was having trouble falling to sleep, and trouble getting back to sleep after a noise, etc.

I turns out that the only time when I was not doing something that occupied my mind was when I was trying to sleep. Eg, I'm either working, consuming media such as Netflix or podcasts, talking with people, etc. I'd even listen to podcasts while taking walks. So when trying to sleep, I'd be stressing out over my problems, and trying to work through them.

For me the solution was to find a better time to remove distractions and think about my problems. Eg, taking walks without podcasts, driving without the radio on.

This resonates with me. I’ve noticed an absolute dependence on mental stimulation. I think your solutions is the same conclusion I came to. Cheers!

To be clear, you found your insomnia disappeared after having more no-input time?

Take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but I feel intentions(not to be confused with intentionality) help a lot here. They play a distinctive role in the etiology of attention(and the subsequent process of resilience building), one of the fundamental aspect of dealing with psychological issues. For eg, Whenever you become aware of these nightmares, try to observe the casual chain, eventually your mind will be inured to these episodes and will become much better at threat detection. Something like a mindfulness(Vipassana) retreat can help with this a lot.

My experience has been that most of the psychological issues can be resolved to a great extent by employing the "redundancy of potential command a.k.a Self-Organization"(See McCulloch). Meditation does this by asking you to bring back the wandering mind again and again. But you can also do this voluntarily by repeatedly observing the stress inducing conditions such as nightmare(in your case), which can help your brain better adjust and detect patterns.

This makes more sense for someone who might suffer general anxiety or "work stress" or relationships stress.

In my case, we're facing a crisis - so we know the source, and that it's temporary (one way or another).

What do you mean by we know the source? At best, you can track the functional(mri) and structural(pet) aspects your brain if you take the neuroscience route, and the behavioural(cbt) aspect when you take the route of psychology. It seems to me that the unique experience i.e., the unwelt is out of reach without some form of mindful confrontation/adaptation.

My wife has tried very similar things for years: having an Alexa Echo (or similar) play rainstorm sounds all night seems to work fantastically for all here.

This is very interesting, this is the easiest way to fall asleep for me - reading a book or watching/listening to a comedy series. For some reason my brain prefers it to a dark & quiet room.

Two things that work great with me: smoking weed & wearing a sleeping mask (a bit of light can really fuck w/ my sleep and for some reasons no US apartments seems to have real blinds).

Weed is a fairly heavy-handed solution IMO. It’s likely to help with insomnia, but also to have significant side effects. Many people enjoy some of the side effects, which is great. But many do not, which makes it hard to recommend generally for insomnia.

I usually just smoke one puff and it doesn’t have strong effects. I’m sure this would be more effective in general compared to pills, so I don’t agree that we should dismiss this advice based on “oh it’s drugs”.

Oh for sure, compared to pills (even OTC stuff with significant hangover effects like Benadryl or Nyquil), it absolutely deserves serious consideration. I would recommend trying melatonin, chamomile tea, and simple mental exercises (eg. counting from 1 to infinity) first though.

I wonder if taking melatonin supplements for a week or two could resolve your issue. A very small dose (0.3 mg) of melatonin is usually sufficient to restore nighttime plasma melatonin levels to those characteristic of young people.

Having suffered recently from randomly waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get to sleep again I found 2mg time release melatonin the way to go. If you do wake up it's much much easier to fall back to sleep again.

I've found a similar solution to my sleep problems.

I used to fall asleep listening to audio books. I eventually found audio books that are barely interesting, with certain narration styles to put me to sleep faster.

I now have a series of audio books, mostly gumshoe detective novels, that I use to sleep on nights when I'm dealing with stress. I set the sleep timer for 6 hours, and invariably get a good night of sleep.

Can you suggest some books like that?

Lately I've been using books from the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.

My thoughts on the book series aside, it's long, and I find the narrator rather soothing.

I'd absolutely check out samples first though. One person's soothing narrator is another person's grating narrator.

I had a critical acute stressor a few years ago, I wont describe the situation, but the symptoms were:

- panic attacks

- waking up into a panic attack; imagine sleeping, then waking hyperventilating, shivering, and for lack of a better word "freaking out"

- sleep disturbances

- periodic severe emotional disturbance

- inability to remove the stressors, and critically, I had to increase the stressors involved as it was time critical

I was able to take two weeks off from work, and I took escitalopram.

I didn't find escitalopram to be ... a game changer, but it did allow me to "decide" how I was going to feel, and if I felt I was going to have a panic attack, I could head that off through feedback and self aware thinking.

When I get to sleep with sound in the background it usually gets incorporated in my dreams. Recently fell asleep while listening to a podcast about file systems and in my dreams all my family members were talking about files systems and B-trees. Didn't feel well rested in the morning. But something like white-noise or different nature sounds could be much better. There are apps that play different droning sounds like train or plain noises, forest sounds, seaside waves etc.

In my case, non-speech background sounds allow me to dream - which wakes me up because the crisis I'm currently going through changes these dreams into nightmares.

The key for me is that the background sound must contain speech. Podcasts don't work either because their is no visual component. I need to be able to imagine the visual, even if I'm not watching it. Somehow, that's important. Maybe it stimulates that part of my brain to prevent it from creating visual dreams. I suppose there's a general rule in the brain that when you're listening and watching something, that part of your brain goes into input-mode rather than compute-mode.

There are two important takeaways here.

1. I've (for myself) obviated the need for sleeping pills (the solution my colleagues have taken).

2. There are seemingly no ill effects to preventing my brain from dreaming naturally for over six months.

If you really think about that 2nd point, this means that it would be possible to create sleep specific programming. One could use it to incorporate messages to ones self.

Many in this sub-thread are thinking they can use it to learn new things - typical HN! ...but since novel content wakes your mind, I think it would be more valuable to program motivational content. Content that reinforces your core principles and might help you focus yourself in the subsequent day. It might even be possible to have a small portfolio of programming if you're expecting/planning a different type of day.

Obviously, I'm going through a temporary crisis, so I cannot pursue this, but someone should.

Interesting. On a tangent, when I was a teenager I would sometimes fall asleep on the couch with the TV on. Mostly because I don't like falling asleep in the dark, esp. when alone. I would set a timer on the TV so it doesn't run all night but inevitably the TV shutting off would wake me up. More recently I would put on a documentary on YouTube, and I would queue a few different ones so I get into deep sleep before they end, otherwise it would wake me up.

That's interesting, I do 4-7-8 box breathing when I can't sleep due to anxiety. And its pretty much impossible for me to fall asleep when there is any kind of audio/visual stimulus in my environment. I need darkness and silence. Heck I can't even fall asleep if my S.O. or even my pet is touching me.

In "The Body Keeps the Score", Bessel van der Kolk discusses the effects of psychological trauma and how important it is for people to process traumas via dreams which essentially remove the emotional component but leave the learning. When, say, veterans wake up from nightmarish dreams of a trauma, they don't complete processing it. Then they keep waking up from the same extreme nightmares stuck with that trauma unprocessed. He found a medication that helped veterans stay asleep through the entire nightmare, and within weeks the veterans moved past their traumatic dreams. There may also be non-medical interventions to help get past that trauma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score

Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep

So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...

"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).

For me, it’s a podcast—-but one I’ve already listened to.

It can’t be a new one or else I’ll get too interested in it.

I use a similar approach, but instead of TV, I use the build-in text to speech tool of Mac OS X (you can set up a keyboard shortcut[1] and then select any text and computer will read to you). I choose usually a longish-article, or sometimes a HN comments thread, and then a few minutes in I've dozed off.

It's a little tricky to choose the right length (i.e. not being awake enough to notice when it ends, but also not too long so it reads to me for hours).

I'm not sure if this is healthy... It works for me as a source of entertainment, but I can fall asleep without this too. I've heard that bringing a computer into the bedroom is definitely something not recommended for anyone seeking work-life balance.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

Thanks for sharing your approach. You might also be interested in Herald, which does a similar thing using Amazon Polly: https://www.heraldpod.com

I know several people who can’t sleep well without a tv playing, usually a playlist of old movies they have seen 10 times. It works for them. I’m up to 430am every night since about 8 months ago and it makes me wonder if I should try it.

Listening to the right human speech creates an INCREDIBLE relaxation response for me. I have never felt so deeply relaxed as when listening to the right speech.

I have tried several sleep aids in heavy dosages, meditation, breathing exercises, visualization/journey exercises and pre-recorded journeys ... but none create such a powerful relaxation response.

Weird, I know! It took me a while to notice how deep and regular my breathing was without effort, and how a deep calm always settled over me when I fell asleep listening to audio such as from The West Wing. Eventually I bought a sleep mask with built-in wireless earbuds, and began experimenting with different kinds of human speech as background for sleep.

Just as @koheripbal discovered, I found the selection of just the right audio is important.

> revenge bedtime procrastination: a phenomenon in which people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.

For me, it started as more of a reverse-Christmas situation - if I go to sleep, the next thing I know I'll be having to got to work and I really don't want that!

Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.

I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived.

This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.

In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch.

Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work.

And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.

> In the real world

Do we just live in the different real worlds? Because in my real world, deadlines are almost always arbitrary and fungible so long as the right kind of communication is made -- the only times I've seen that not be the case for me/folks in my network is 1) when they're working on something that's actually time critical (rare but does happen) and 2) when they're working in a dysfunctional, top-down environment (far more common).

I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea that you might lose a client by missing a deadline by 2-3 weeks (rather than not selling them well enough). Is this a hypothetical situation you're talking about? Sometimes, 2-3 weeks is as fast as they'll get back to you with a single hop of communication. The other example of engineers get down-evaluated for ending up jumping on the grenade of a task that gets significantly longer (sometimes by months) -- I do see that happen from time to time but whether the manager down-evaluates is often inversely correlated with that manager/management chain's capability. The good managers understand that scope creep and an unforeseen gotchas happen; they don't want to take those instances as failures but rather .

> When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.

Why? That sounds like unproductive, unhealthy self-martyrship. It's the complete opposite of how a competent professional works through things. Do you simply like to suffer? There's a reason people don't work like that in the "real world" and it's because there are actual real dollars on the line and competent organizations understand that such behavior purely results in expensive unforced errors.

Would you see my sibling comment? What about your experience do you think caused to conclude that losing sleep is justified to meet a deadline, when others have reached the opposite conclusion?

I worked very closely with somebody when we were both about 10 years out of college. Unlike you and I, she still believed that “cramming” by staying up late to meet a deadline was a worthwhile strategy. I shared my reasoning with her, and nudged her over time, calling attention to the concrete detrimental impact of pursuing short term goals at the expense of intermediate term capacity and personal well-being, but she wouldn’t budge. This is a very smart person who ostensibly shared similar educational and professional experience to myself, that simply reached a very different conclusion. She ended up modifying her behavior only after going through a painful and damaging burnout.

How does a person go through university and not learn this lesson? Should we teach them the better way? How?

Edit: I remembered a potential clue- my coworker was able to transition from work to sleep rather easily, where I require a substantial wind-down period. Perhaps this shifted the equation.

The thing is, that when you have a high level of stress, you will find it hard to sleep well.

"Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep"

So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.

I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.

The other thing is that if you’re not an individual contributor, trust your people and let go of things.

I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory.

Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.

Wow, "revenge bedtime procrastination" is such an apt term (not being cynical).

In Chinese, it's a single, uhm, guess you could call it a word: 報復性熬夜