Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer
hbr.org
hbr.org
Science is averages, you might be average or you might not. Test your own performance and find out what you need. If you only need a few hours sleep and your performance is not affected, do that. Many people with insomnia worry about it or try to fix what might not be broken. You might be an outlier and not the average.
Then one day, I ate a cookie that had been cooked with marijuana. Suffice to say, I slept a lovely 8 hour sleep that night - and the greatest thing? I've only ever had to use marijuana a _few_ times in the last 3 or so years. So, it seems to work long-term...
I've figured it's probably better for my health to stop switching weird medications every 3 months, and have a brownie every now and again.
I'm a much healther and happier person by far.
You mean using marijuana to treat insomnia (or sleep disorders in general)? Quite a lot, actually - marijuana is one of the most studied drugs in existence, and its effects on sleep disorders have been documented thoroughly. It depends on the state, but some of the states with medical marijuana laws accept sleep disorders as a valid use.
Alas, I'm not one of them. I really need 8.5 to 9.
I really wish I could get by on 5-7 hours like so many of my friends do, but after a while I just had to accept I couldn't physically do it.
I often sleep six or seven hours on work days, but I have to recover in the weekend.
Don't try this unless you've actually done some measuring and testing; overconfidence and biases are more common than tests:
> Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.ht...
I'm not sure if I have much to contribute other than "me too". I can confirm though that in my experience, drugs, routines, etc just don't work for me.
The funny thing is the impairment isn't linear throughout the day. There are times when it is really bad (1-3am) and times when it is pretty good (dawn, during the daylight hours etc). In general the only times I found myself impaired was at work. I have talked to people who worked in other industry overnight and their experience was the same.
As far as I can tell, without tremendous amounts of caffeine, the brain seems to go partway to sleep, able to recover from approx. half of the outstanding sleep debt per day. Part of the problem is the way in which we use caffeine to compensate.
Circadian technically means every 24 hours, so a better word may have been just "body clock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Criteria
I try to get 8 hours and still struggle. Apparently there is a small fraction of people who manage with tiny amounts of sleep because they are geneticically different[1], but there is no use in using that as a standard that 95% of people should live by.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mut...
[1] My own experience, may not apply to everyone, everywhere.
Your circadian rhythm changes in your teens, and too few schools are willing to work with this rather than against it. The results are sleep-deprived kids doing crap work in school and getting into car accidents like the one mentioned at the start of the HBR article.
(Too bad that there doesn't seem to be any large authoritative collection of relevant material.)
\ You obviously have no way of knowing this but my convention on gwern.net is anything in lower-caps is draft/incomplete, and so I don't link it unless it's extremely relevant (as it was in this case).
A great resource is a book called `Lights Out! Sleep, Sugar, and Survival` by T.S. Wiley. They book eventually gets into some controversial territory without much data to support the claims, but the first half or so is largely about sleep and invaluable. There's a ton of references for the sleep section.
Tl;dr - get the book I mention and sleep. Human sleep cycles change with the seasons and you shouldn't be up too much outside the realm of daylight if possible.
This sentence seems like having been taken straight out of Marx's "Das Kapital", volume 1. I know this is the Harvard Business Review, a bastion of capitalism if there ever was one, but I gathered that business owners had smarten up a little in the last 150 years.
If they don't want to do it for the benefit of their employees, they should do it for the benefit of their family and business friends, because at some point or another some guy like Lenin or Trotsky could come again and ride the wave of discontent and the consequences would not be pretty.
http://the99percent.com/videos/7110/Tony-Schwartz-The-Myths-...
Basically, he believes that mental exercises is just like physical exercise. During rest periods is when your capacity to do the exercise expands, not during the exercise itself.