Sleep quality and consistency associated with better academic performance (2019)
nature.com
nature.com
My sleep cycle is that I go 4 days until I have to take a longer sleep (10 hours) and the rest of the time I operate on 6-7 hours of sleep. I usually wake up at 7-7:30 and I usually go to bed at 12-1 or 9-10 on my long sleep days. It's inconsistent and I worry about that fact.
The biggest blocker for me is my time alone and distraction free. I like and want distractions to be gone when I work on personal projects. Early morning doesn't get me that as my wife wakes up at 5:15 (maybe if I woke up at 4?). If she's up and I'm up there are interactions which is great. And then there's text messages from friends and family and work chat all day. I can mute both and do but it's there, beckoning me for my attention. To take my focus...
Look I know what the answer is for me. I need to replace work time with project time. My life would be in more balance if I had my 9-5 chunk of time where I do what I like doing (vs work stuff) so I don't feel like I'm living 3 lives in a single day.
That implies my personal projects make enough money to have a family on. Not true now so the grind continues.
This sums up the issue. Most people could get decent sleep if they wanted to or even made a basic effort, but their current poor-sleep compromise isn’t bad enough to make them want to give anything up. Or they don’t understand what they’re losing because it has been so long since they tried a reasonable sleep schedule.
> That implies my personal projects make enough money to have a family on. Not true now so the grind continues.
Consider giving up the side projects for a month or two. Side projects are one of the topics where people think they’re going to miss it more than they actually do. A month or two of total disconnectedness won’t sink your side projects, but it’s long enough to test the waters of a healthier sleep schedule.
You may find that after getting your sleep under control, your daily efficiency and energy levels improve such that you’re getting your work done faster, spending more quality time with your spouse, and ultimately freeing up a nice slot of usable free time in the day that could spend on side projects without wrecking your sleep schedule.
For a great many people their sleep schedule is not something they control. You have to work when your boss needs you to work. The specific hours you sleep on a given day will change randomly (ie I had to be in at 0500 rather than my normal 0630 today).
>> such that you’re getting your work done faster
So? Lots of people (most people?) work in jobs where speed is largely irrelevant. Working faster just means doing or being assigned more work, not going home sooner or getting any more free time for sleep.
Running on 4-7 hours of sleep (with intermittent 10 hour catch up days) has let me build and launch a lot of stuff.
- A vtubing engine for virtual production (film, improv, streaming)
- https://storyteller.io , tools for streamers (in-stream TTS, deepfaked gifs, a voxel camera), which should be done this weekend
I don't think I could prepare for YC or any other sort of funding any other way, short of quitting my other responsibilities. There's not enough time in the day, so you have to give up something.
I'll sleep more when I'm funded or when I'm dead, basically.
> This sums up the issue. Most people could get decent sleep if they wanted to or even made a basic effort
Agreed.
> but their current poor-sleep compromise isn’t bad enough to make them want to give anything up. Or they don’t understand what they’re losing because it has been so long since they tried a reasonable sleep schedule.
I think that just like with Diet or Exercise with sleep the feedback loops are longer/delayed and that stops people from engaging in overwhelmingly healthy behavior - because the habit is harder to form.
I tend to do this when I want to work on my hobbies, but then the relationship with my wife suffers. We enjoy going to bed together, it's part of the ritual of being a couple. I tried going to bed, then after she falls asleep getting up, but by then I'm too sleepy myself.
If your wife is sleeping that whole time, what are you really gaining? The laptop screen light is probably affecting her sleep, and you’re possibly creating issues for yourself. It sounds like multitasking where you end up with two things in a mediocre state instead of giving full focus to each.
I don't think there's an easy solution. Either your side projects suffer, or your relationship. I choose to keep my relationship healthy, but at some point, if you keep postponing every project and hobby, frustration starts to mount and that's not good for relationships either.
As an aside, I’d think our sex life would be better if we went to bed together. As it stands right now it’s something we need to specifically decide to do, and I’m guessing with couples that go to bed together there’s more of an assumption there.
Starting from right now, it's no longer an option for you, if your share of parenting responsibilities is a fair one and you don't just dump the caregiving of the baby unto your wife.
So kiss your spare time goodbye starting from right now. Until your daughter is old enough that she can play on her own for extended periods of time without constantly needing attention, and that's a long road ahead in the future.
Whenever this reality gets me down, a smile from my daughter and some playtime with her is enough to bring joy to my life. I love her. But my hobbies suffer and this frustrates me.
The past few weeks she’s largely been sleeping through the night though, so that system is no longer needed. I’m a photographer and this is my off season so I’ve been watching the baby during the day until her daycare starts in a few weeks. It’s on the way to my wife’s work so in the short term I don’t think our schedules need to change quite yet.
I know I need to get balance into my life because a child will be very destabilizing to my current lifestyle. * sigh * It feels like I don't have enough time to buy my own freedom.
The other day I had what I consider an extremely disciplined day. I woke up at 7am, was at the bouldering gym at 8am, went straight to work from that at 10:00am and worked until maybe 6:00pm. Then I went home, immediately started to make food and took care of some tax stuff, planning for upcoming vacations, and so on.
At the end this leaves me with more or less no time for anything on that day. So essentially bouldering in the morning was my theme on that day and that's it. But of course I don't want to accept this and then I'm disappointed that I didn't dedicate any time to my 5 other hobbies.
The problem is that the human mind doesn't work like this. You're interested in the stuff you're interested in, and your brain is probably wired to find interesting things.
If you simply say "I'll work during business hours, then spend time with my family, then sleep" you're probably going to be healthy... and disappointed. You cannot switch off your brain, some friend or acquaintance will show you something they did and suddenly it's on again -- you have a new hobby!
Note I don't give side-projects in the sense of "I could make a living out of this" a real consideration. That's what my regular work hours are for. I want to spend the rest of my time doing things I enjoy, not simply look for an angle to make more money.
And
Eating a large protein/fat based breakfast with as few carbs as possible as soon as you get up regardless of being a "breakfast person" or not
Have, together, completely transformed my capabilities as a human being.
As much as this might have helped you, this advice isn't going to work for everyone. Breakfast being the most important meal of the day was an advertising slogan, after all, and it isn't like dieticians are going to try to convince someone to eat breakfast if they are generally healthy.
For me, your advice means that I eat more during the day. I'm most hungry in the evening, so that's when I eat more.
For example, this article discusses fasting to reset jet lag https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/resetting-your-circadian...
It helps my body get attuned to falling asleep and waking up when I schedule it.
First few times it feels horrible but it's worth fighting through that knot in my stomach.
So far I haven't found a magic solution to this. Monitoring my diet certainly helps, and so does regular exercise, and so did greatly restricting my caffeine intake, but nothing seems to stop the slow, steady drift of the sleep clock into the future. It's like my body just ignores the daylight cycle and does whatever it wants.
What I did instead was talk to my manager, explain the situation, and gain an OK to essentially work for one big block of time in a day wherever it falls. That didn't solve the sleep drift, but it did relieve most of the associated social pressure and stigma. But I'd like to solve this properly, since it's a massive pain even when mitigated in this way, and I might not be so lucky to have a support network at my workplace in the future.
I've always struggled with this. When I was still in school (pre-university) was the most extreme. I would stay up late on Friday nights (01:00-02:00) then sleep until at least midday on Saturday. By Sunday night I couldn't sleep until 03:00-04:00 so got a very short sleep before Monday.
There was a reason for it back then: night time was when I could use the internet. Because there was no pressure to get up early the next day, I would spend as long as I could online. I wonder if this caused my later problems or if they were innate.
Later in uni it was normal for me to be completely nocturnal. I overslept my alarm every single morning, which just became more and more of a joke as it would go off a mere hour or two into my "night". I remember well the first time I "lost" a day. Woke up and made a cup of tea and it was already dark. I hated it. I hated that other people had actually done stuff that day and all I'd done was slept.
Now I'm older I find it much easier to stay on top of. At some point something in me switched and now I can't stand it if I'm not ready to do something by 09:00. I remember my brother expressing a similar sentiment when he was 12 (me being 15 and in the aforementioned weekend routine). I wonder why it took me until my late 20s to feel the same way.
How about artificial light cycle? I found that cutting light to just a yellow reading lamp after 9 p.m has really helped me sleep regularly.
Basically our internal clocks are not exactly 24 hours (can differ by even a few hours) so your body relies on some signals like sunlight and a meal in the morning to resync.
I used to think my body had a 25 hour schedule lol.
I don't eat breakfast but I do have a coffee and that'll tide me over until I have a piece of fruit at 9 or 10 then an early-ish lunch at 11:30.
Despite that, any time I turn the alarm clock off on holidays, my sleep cycle tends to shift a few hours forward. My energy levels seem to correlate with the hours when I sleep as much as they do with their number.
I’ve concluded that I’m (a bit of) a night owl living in an early bird world. I’m fine with it, because a couple of hours is not an enormous difference, but it means I’m rarely at my fullest focus or energy levels, especially early in the day.
And the experience has convinced me (n=1) that the early bird/night owl dychotomy is primarily biological.
> but it means I’m rarely at my fullest focus or energy levels, especially early in the day.
At the moment I'm trying to lean into this. I have the brain power and focus to work late at night, so I use that to do the mental work of planning/organising the evening before (clothes laid out for the mornings task, breakfast/lunch made in advance, gym bag packed, etc etc) and decide what I'm doing the following morning. I've found that it's the perfect time to go to the gym, do the "long" dog walk, scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush etc; anything that can be somewhat autopiloted but requires physical effort.
I've been doing it for about 6 months now to great effect (so far)
After the first year of very difficult morning workouts, I moved gym time to after work, and it became significantly easier.
I do as much preparation as possible the evening before. After a while, all those minor things became deeply embedded into my routine. As long as you keep it up at the start (and other responsibilities don’t intrude), it gets easier and easier.
One of the good things about growing older is knowing yourself better, and learning how to use that knowledge to your advantage.
Mix in some light exercise. Nothing crazy here, with all the health tracking available these days just aim for the minimums shown there. Doesn't have to be every day, just shoot for the majority of the week.
You might be shocked at how improving these two makes a difference. Do not take these to extremes, just aim for a better baseline than what you are doing now.
Also I'm speaking as an american here, and I was especially bad in these two areas. YMMV.
Blackout curtains and a comfortable sleep mask.
A comfortable pillow.
Cleaning up my diet.
My phone goes on "wellbeing mode" at 9pm every night.
I get into bed consistently between 9 and 10pm and I read for 60-90 minutes every night before falling asleep.
I follow a consistent, no excuses, strength and conditioning training program.
Happy to expand on any of this.
I would add that I am in my early 40s and that we have 3 children in the house that are under 3 years old. There are complications here, but, despite that, all of the above remains in place, and I actually feel rested today and like I am recovering when I sleep.
I used to wear sleep trackers to bed and I also had (have?) very poor deep sleep. I've left the sleep trackers out of the equation for a couple of years now, so I can't really comment on where I am today, other than to say that I wake up feeling refreshed. A little groggy, for sure, but I don't feel extreme fatigue like I used to.
I don't like making drive-by, blanket recommendations about this stuff when it starts to wade into medical advice / specific nutrition or supplementation, but... My last sleep study (way back in early 2016) pointed me in the direction of blood work. There was a thought that I may have thyroid dysfunction (I don't, or at least I didn't). I understand that it's fairly common and is a source for sleep troubles for many.
I'd also encourage you to look into ZMA or zinc supplementation if you're an active person. I don't have any specific sources that I can point you to, unfortunately. There's a little controversy here, too, to be aware of, because there is a lot of marketing hype around ZMA, about it being a "testosterone booster" (a zinc deficiency will lower your testosterone, hence supplementing it "boosts" your testosterone) and also in terms of the recommended dosages (zinc has an antagonistic relationship with copper, iron, and magnesium -- you can easily overdo it and create other mineral deficiencies). Having said that, and again just speaking for myself, I think that ZMA or zinc alone, after everything else was in place, is the thing that pushed my sleep quality over the edge from "meets goals" to "exceeds expectations".
I really, really want to make it abundantly clear that I don't think taking ZMA or zinc before bedtime will work for people that don't have these other major factors in place and/or don't have a (training-induced) deficiency to begin with.
In terms of my experimentation process... I didn't keep a notebook but I can sort of walk you down the path that I took.
I started with exercise but for years I was only doing cardio. I was a competitive distance runner from 12 to 18 and then maintained the habit until I was 25. Then I abruptly stopped running. I picked it back up at 32. Distance running specifically because I really knew nothing else. In my late 30s, I picked up strength training. Today, I maintain a clear balance between strength and conditioning. Endurance work is only used to develop or maintain specific physiological adaptations.
Also around that 32 mark, I realized that frequent alcohol consumption wasn't doing me any favors. Of course I already knew this but I wasn't serious about it before this point. Today, I try to strictly limit alcohol intake to Friday / Saturday evenings with limits of no more than 3 drinks per night and no alcohol after ~8:30-9pm. I'd wager that I average 2-4 drinks per week today and I find that this doesn't appreciably impact my sleep.
I also noticed a big difference when I started to tap the brakes on my caffeine intake. Dr. Walker's book on sleep, which also comes with it's own controversy, highlighted something very important to me: The quarter-life on caffeine is ~12 hours. That realization was enough to get me to take rate limiting caffeine seriously.
By the time we had our twins, I was 38. I had dialed in my nutrition and exercise to a healthy place at this point. But my sleep quality was still lacking. I knew that I needed to really focus on it if I was going to survive the first few years of multiple young children. That's when I started to look into hygiene factors.
I run hot. Higher body temperatures can disrupt sleep. I stopped eating after 8pm. We bought "cooling" sheets. I started to sleep with a lightweight comforter. I started wearing cotton boxers and socks to bed. We invested in a fairly expensive mattress. I started to actually feel comfortable in our bed. I also invested in a pillow that didn't leave me waking up with a tight, sore neck. The sheets, comforter, and pillow went through a trial and error process.
One of our twins is highly susceptible to sleep disruptions from light. Once we figured that out, we outfitted our bedroom (they were still sleeping in their cribs in our room at that time) with blackout curtains. That made an immediately noticeable difference. Waking up that following morning, my wife and I both looked at each other and wondered why we'd waited so long. Now every bedroom in our home has blackout shades or curtains.
It's an agonizingly slow process. And I think it's also very subjective, especially the nutrition and exercise pieces. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr. Andrew Huberman but he has his own podcast, as well as multiple podcast appearances, where he gets into improving sleep / sleep quality. I'd recommend checking those out. Should be easy enough to find on YouTube.
This one is risky because if the book is very interesting, then it is highly possible that I will not go sleep at all :)
Two less obvious things that work for me:
- Massage the back of my neck rigorously before sleep. Probably this improves blood flow to the brain.
- Unlock the window handle slightly, to get a constant flow of air towards the head. Probably I need more oxygen (or lower CO2) than usual because this doesn’t work for my wife.
I have tinnitus so a fan is an absolute must for background noise but I also find the air movement pleasant.
Now any sleep problems I have are entirely because I stay up too damn late sometimes. That's effectively an "emotion management" problem, which for me is alleviated by getting regular exercise, eating well, meditation, etc.
Which is good for you but doesn’t seem completely reasonable for everyone.
I wish people realized that level of change is just beyond reasonable for most folks out there. There are too many things that are outside of control for folks. A lot of them due to financial troubles and there’s nothing they can realistically do in the next few years about it. Maybe they get themselves a better paying job and so forth but that might take a decade until it’s sufficient. Even then - they suffer more for the whole decade of their life.
The effect on sleep is very notable. I wake up spontaneously between 6 and 7 am, even though it is dark in January in CZ and we have massive exterior blinds in our bedroom which make it completely dark. And I feel very fine and productive throughout the day.
I tried melatonin before, it sort-of works, but the effect of dropping caffeine seems to be much stronger.
But seriously, as a society as a whole, we undervalue sleep. By using an app [1] I've noticed that i sleep less than i thought i did. The thing is, i might be in bed 8,5 hours, but i only fall asleep after an hour or so, and also, i seem to wake up during the night.
No wonder my academic performance is lacking...
[1] https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/sleep-cycle-sleep-tracker/id32...
When I was 20, I had an almost Fight-Club level of insomnia, where I would go multiple days at a time without sleeping, not for lack of trying. I would quit caffeine, bike multiple miles a day, try eating healthy, eventually getting a prescription for ambien which had so-so results but for a period of about 4-5 months I got the worst sleep of my life. My already-mediocre college performance took a steep nosedive, leading me to eventually drop out. It was hard for me to justify to myself going to class when I was, at some level, in physical pain.
Fortunately, I haven't had anywhere near that level of insomnia in 11 years, so the only thing I can think of was that it was the final throws of puberty.
https://www.google.com/search?q=andrew+huberman+sleep+podcas...
I performed much better on homework assignments where there was less time pressure because I could work on them around my irregular sleep schedule. I'm grateful now for working as a programmer because it affords me the same luxury - with my condition I simply can't exist in a 9-5 society.
(Before people comment, yes I have tried melatonin and no, recreational drugs don't help me sleep either)
I hope there's something out there to help you. Not for the sake of conformity to society, but just for the benefits of high quality sleep.
Obviously a sleepless night also causes some physical discomfort but 500 mg of L-tyrosine cures it (and itself also gives some extra boost).
I also used to practice taking a nap every time I come home from the office but such an evening nap always (since my early childhood) makes my mood horrible (grouchy, unenthusiastic and asexual) for hours to come.
And when I am well-slept I can't sit and grind for a minute, I'm 95% anxiety and procrastination then. Even reading an article which doesn't fit in a single screen feels almost unbearable. But when I'm severely underslept it feels easy and joy to read anything almost no matter how long.
I would rather sleep 2 hours a night every night, be happy and productive (but astonishingly dumb when talking to others in real time though) if I didn't believe this probably is harmful for overall health in the long run.
Nevertheless it always is hard to get up and it requires a lot of sleep to feel good physically so I always sleep ~13 hours/night on weekends&vacations.
So getting certain work done is easier when tired, but productivity would arguably include doing the "right" thing, mapping the right information together, and so on, which you'd want to be better rested for.
Curious to hear if you agree on the productivity vs focus clarification, or if you feel like you're truly more productive in the sense that you do some of your best work (greatest ideas, executed efficiently, with minimal errors) when tired?
poverty => higher anxiety => lower life performance
higher instagram use => lower baseline dopamine => higher anxiety => lower life performance
I recall a talk describing a study to evaluate how the sleep-deprived lifestyle of college students was affecting their grades. Unfortunately the researchers had trouble finding a non-sleep-deprived control group at the school. They ended up paying students to (try to) sleep 8 hours a night (self-reported, though presumably somewhat accurately.) Unsurprisingly the less sleep-deprived group had better outcomes.
Another study observed high school students found that in any class at any given time around 1/3 of them appeared to be asleep (not merely "not paying attention" but actually unconscious.) The effect did not appear to depend on the teacher or course material.
But also it's measuring association, not causation. It's easy to think of reasons it works in reverse: of course people with good grades sleep better, they don't worry about having poor grades.
And it's even saying that " Sleep measures accounted for nearly 25% of the variance in academic performance". That's causation language, and I don't think they determined that.
For another (probably unhelpful) anecdote, got great grades in my senior year of college when I had a scholarship. One semester in my junior year I took 18 credits and also worked 32 hours a week through a 45-minute-one-way commute...I got very little sleep and my grades suffered for it. The primary things I learned that year were (1) don't over-commit yourself, (2) make a schedule and stick to it if you need to get the bare minimum done and don't have time to do everything, (3) you don't actually have to attend every lecture or turn in/complete every assignment to pass a class, (4) long commutes suck, and (5) a little bit of VHDL syntax stuck around was about the only thing I learned in those classes. My bad grades were not caused by poor sleep, poor sleep was a side effect of a larger issue (namely, the perpetual problem of money).
I literally couldn't focus on anything in College. It was like I was perpetually hungover everyday.
Also I wasn't great at self care when I was younger, first thing I'm going to teach my kids.
Sleep early -> wake up early -> have higher grades when exams are done in the morming? If you're a night owl, probably you'd grade better at night...