Sleeping our way to being productive | Hacker News Reader

Sleeping our way to being productive

nakedcapitalism.com

109 pointshackandthink91 comments

If you have any doubts about sleep quantity and quality, worth reading about the glymphatic nervous system, which is so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/

In short it explains, mechanistically, why poor sleep affects daily cognition, mental health, and age-related declines. Robust scientific theories explain more of the evidence. The glymphatic nervous system explains why sleep is so key to surviving and thriving. Maiken Nedergaard will end up winning the Nobel for its discovery.

When I was younger I heavily abused caffeine and would spend many long nights programming while deferring sleep as long as possible.

Now that I’m older, I’ve noticed that I just can’t do it. If I don’t sleep 7+ hours a night I feel TERRIBLE: my mood is worse, my focus is worse, and my overall productivity drops off a cliff.

Last year I was put on a medication with the unfortunate side effect of causing insomnia which made sleeping a full night extremely difficult and it was a struggle. Thankfully, after changing medications a few months ago to an alternative I’m sleeping great and no longer struggling.

My advice is to look into sleep hygiene and follow all recommendations. If you’re still not sleeping well look into medications and do whatever you can to treat your body right — it’s worth it.

> would spend many long nights programming while deferring sleep as long as possible. Now that I’m older, I’ve noticed that I just can’t do it

I’ve noticed the same but I don’t know if 10 years of age explains the difference as much as simply not being at the same level of fitness. I think if I was in the same cardiovascular shape, I wouldn’t have much more problem pulling all-nighters than I did in grad school (not that I necessarily want to...)

I am a lot more active now than when I was young, and I absolutely need the sleep now. When I was young I could really push it and do overnighters, etc. No longer.

Similar experience here. I was in objectively terrible shape in my teens through mid-20s; didn’t eat enough, didn’t sleep enough, didn’t drink enough water, and spent most of my day at a desk.

Flash forward to today in my mid-30s and all of this has improved dramatically (though has room for improvement), and yet lack of sleep is much harder on me now than it was back then.

Youth is a hell of a drug.

I'm curious what you suspect (or know) is the mechanism that makes sleep less effective now, than prior?

What I’m curious about is if you do program all night but then take naps during the day to make up for it. Does that provide adequate rest? Or does the sleeping part have to be at night for it to be effective?

Not OP, but for me I end up being occurring a sleep deficit that takes days worth of quality night sleep to pay off.

Not sure that day/night matters but an essential element is the cycles you experience during extended sleep. Naps won’t make up for that.

Night is probably most realistic because of light/noise factors

I have found that the #1 cause for lost sleep is anxiety. Every piece of sleep hygiene, from blue light to meals to exercise to whatever else you want to consider can't hold a candle to going to bed with a quiet head. Your advice is good but I wanted to put this out there: First fix your worrying and running thoughts, then fix your sleep environment if you still need to, then look into medication.

Daily exercise knocks on both doors, so to speak. It will help you sleep and it will also help you manage anxiety. Same for maintaining gut health. We are non-orthogonal systems.

If I go a week or so without some real exercise my anxiety starts to creep up. It does this no matter how good or bad my sleep has been over that time.

Edit typo while on my trainer. Lol

Fair enough, I don't mean to say that I'm not a proponent of exercise, or having a cold bedroom, or any of the other standard pieces of advice. I follow them all by habit at this point.

What I mean to say is that first things first. There are lots of well-meaning advice we can give to people suffering from insomnia, delayed sleep onset etc etc. Most of it will only work if it helps fix anxiety. Awareness of this can be very helpful by itself.

The problem arises when the obligation to exercise impinges on sleep time, whether that be having to get up early for a run or having to stay up late after chores to get a session done.

Sleep gives immediate benefits, exercise gives longer term benefits. It's a conundrum.

If your anxiety comes from not being productive enough and the not being productive enough goes existential ... and you won't get productive without sleep, then it is hard breaking that cycle with just stop worrying. Exercising can help putting your body physical at rest and you will sleep, if you are physically exhausted enough. And then you can go on do everything else.

I never could go without sleep even when I was 20. I never did all nighters and if I didn’t get 9 hours I’d feel bad. It actually taught me not to procrastinate and to pace my work reasonably which has been a big benefit.

Seriously, I see people talk about how much worse things are in some respect or other now that they're out of their 20's and I think... must have been nice - I guess I never felt that young. One funny aspect is that I don't really feel any older now that I'm pushing 40. I've no doubt that biology applies to me as much as anyone and senescence is coming for me as inevitably as it is for all, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

I was like those people when younger but when I reflect and introspect I feel the real issue was that I simply didn’t recognise the negative effects or take them as seriously, not that I could actually handle the poor lifestyle better than I can now.

I was sleep deprived constantly from 18 to 25 and got an autoimmune disease that developed (I think) because of that unfortunately.

Look into sleep apnea as well

yup Same here (minus the medications), I abused caffeine and my ability to go looong hours without sleep.

I just cant do it anymore, I suspect having two kids might have been the straw that broke my abused back. the first few years of kids breaking your sleeping up are pretty hard.

A big factor for being productive is also not drinking, as drinking negatively affects sleep and, essentially, makes you dumber.

I think, like with everything in life, the answer is, it depends on the dose. For me, I noticed that small doses of quality alcohol (good Czech or Belgian beer) seem to actually have positive effects on my sleep.

I get much less anxious and I sleep better(longer and with less interruptions) with one to max two beers in the later afternoon but not right before sleep. Going over that amount or drinking right before bed and my sleep quality goes off the cliff, so careful dosing and timing seems key, along with drinking plenty of water during, to hydrate yourself so your liver and kidneys don't run "dry" as they process the alcohol out of your system. Binging on alcohol on a boozy night out is obviously terrible for my sleep and messes me up for two days straight.

This is obviously not medical advice or encouragement to self medicate with beer, just something that I noticed on my own 30's male body.

This will potentially change as you get older. I’m in my very early 40s and what you say for my 30s was also true but not any more. Most of my friends at the same age as me report the same.

Best to dodge alcohol altogether where you can.

Yeah obviously, for best health and sleep try to avoid all stimulants altogether, including caffeine, alcohol, shrooms, weed, tobacco, hard drugs etc, but what I'm saying is it appears that correctly micro-dosing some of those can sometimes, depending on the individual, be as efective or even better as the sleep medication, which for me has always caused drowsiness and brain fog during the day as side effects.

The trouble is self medication can always go horribly wrong which is why no sane health professionals ever recommend it but that doesn't stop people from experimenting.

As per alcohol tolerance, that varies so much from person to person on genetics. For example, my uncle is a hardcore alcoholic and drinks almost a liter of wine per day and he's already in his 60's, yet his blood tests for kidney and liver function still show up within normal limits. Insane.

Maybe a nightcap isn't a good idea, but a glass of wine with dinner isn't even going to be detectable in your body by the time you go to sleep.

> a glass of wine with dinner isn't even going to be detectable in your body by the time you go to sleep

Unless you have dinner really early and go to sleep really late, I don't think that's true. The half life of alcohol is 4-5 hours and it peaks in the blood around 60-90 minutes after ingestion. [1]

[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-long-does-alcohol-sta...

> For me, I noticed that small doses of quality alcohol (good Czech or Belgian beer) seem to actually have positive effects on my sleep.

Do you think Czech or Belgian beer have a different "form" of ethanol than other beers, or is it something else in them that causes the difference?

I can only say that cheap/poor quality booze makes me sick, so through experience I've singled out a few brews from those countries that I know go down well with me and make me feel good.

It doesn't have to necessarily be Czech and Belgian beer, but I noticed those countries in general have higher standards than others for the beers they produce/export.

FWIW Corona beer in Europe is also brewed in Belgium.

I'm also curious about this. What makes it "good" (other than things like "I like it", or it comes from a manufacturer with a good reputation, etc.)

Is it just that the ethanol is accompanied with other non-active ingredients that somehow change the body's response?

Beer is essentially the chemical element of ethanol plus water and "other stuff" from the ingredients and brewing process. If that water and "other stuff" is of low quality, that makes me sick and can't drink it.

Basically: Beer that makes me sick to drink = low quality. Beer that makes me feel good = good quality.

That subjective assessment might not necessarily line up with what a test might show. As I understand it, even moderate consumption is said to worsen sleep quality in general.

Like I said, I can't comment on test results on other people, I can only comment how I feel after sleep. And I feel better after sleeping with a good beer or two in the afternoon, than without.

Shouldn't my own assessment of my sleep quality matter more than test results on other people?

Subjective assessments can be wrong, no? And when I referred to a test, I meant a test that might be conducted on yourself. You can get one although it's not free.

What makes you think that Czech or Belgian beer is higher quality?

Even small amounts of alcohol can reduce sleep quality: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/nutrition/alcohol-and-sleep

There is no instance where alcohol is good for you: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-alcohol-research-shows...

I think it's mostly wishful thinking, and maybe some cognitive dissonance, that drinking is somehow good for you in any way.

I think we as a society need to accept that alcohol is straight up bad for you. There is no case to be made for drinking as some kind of health benefit. There is a case to be made for drinking as a "fun" thing to do or as a depressant to remove yourself from anxious thoughts - but knowing that alcohol damages your brain is useful in determining if it's worth it for you.

Personally, I like smoking weed once a week. But I don't ever think "this is good for me" - I know weed is not good for you. I do it because it's fun. Nicotine (in the form of gum/mints - NOT in the form of smoking) is a different story, it's not nearly as bad for you as people make it out to be: https://gwern.net/nicotine

And sometimes I take some magic mushrooms - which to me have been immensely helpful in figuring out life and progressing forward to a better path. Magic mushrooms don't even really feel like "drugs" in that sense. And maybe if more people ate some shrooms they'd feel less like drinking and more like enjoying life as-is. It's good for helping with anxiety and depression as well. Just a thought.

>Even small amounts of alcohol can reduce sleep quality: There is no instance where alcohol is good for you: I think it's mostly wishful thinking, and maybe some cognitive dissonance, that drinking is somehow good for you in any way.

I don't think I said "alcohol is good for you go drink it", I said alcohol takes the edge off of MY anxiety and helps ME with my sleep IF I manage it right.

Yes, some research says alcohol reduces sleep quality, but for me it does the opposite IF I do it right. Who should I trust, the papers, or how I feel when I wake up?

If anxiety is preventing you from falling asleep or staying asleep, I don't think alcohol is the right solution. Alcohol might make you fall asleep quicker, but it's invariably going to affect how you sleep, such as messing with your REM sleep, messing with your ability to stay asleep, and then affecting deep sleep (NREM).

https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/en/healthu/2023/06/...

I would suggest sleep specific medicine, like NyQuil, rather than alcohol, which will not only long term negatively affect your sleep but also affect other parts of your body such as your ability to handle stress: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3860387/

Thus, alcohol might actually be increasing your stress and anxiety levels over time, rather than reducing them.

I agree with all of what you said until you started suggesting NyQuil instead. We don't have good data for long term effect of using antihistamine. Alcohol, in small quantity is not good but it's also not that bad especially in otherwise healthy and active people. Ideally, non medicated ways to reduce anxiety is a lot better.

I very much want the thesis of this article to hold true, but I have to wonder if the causal relationship in the article is reversed in reality.

A quick skim didn't reveal anything, but is there any evidence against higher earners being afforded more time to sleep because of a high-paying job?

If you measure everything by productivity, you have already lost at the beginning.

I love this response. And really find it weird that the article connects sleep with dollars earned.

There's a strong mentality of "anything good for GDP is good for the country" in the U.S. The constant stream of economic reports in the news (from "markets rallied today, with the S&P..." to the latest jobs report to what the Fed is doing this year); reporting other news in terms of how it affects the economy, etc.

When a single number becomes the single most important number the country measures, everything else takes a back seat. And that doesn't mean other things don't get any attention... it's just that spending time and money on things that don't have a direct (perceived) effect on GDP doesn't much happen.

Maybe so, but it is undeniable that having better sleep, eating better, thinking better, etc are, well, better for us regardless of whether the reason is productivity or not. I'd even say that were it not the reason, I might have more incentive to simply be a slob.

Glad somebody pointed this out. If I'm going to get better sleep it's going to be for the sake of honoring my body's needs, not for the sake of productivity.

I see a lot of articles emphasizing why we need better sleep but few on how to get better sleep. As someone who use sleep hygiene and sleep aides/supplements, and still struggles getting better, deep sleep, I would honestly like to see more of the latter.

The problem is that no one really knows. There are a tonne of people who simply cannot sleep well no matter what they change

This is my problem. Matt Walkers book did not help for me. The book “Better Sleep Better You” did as it provides concrete strategies to employ. That said, still a vast area that’s understudied for the anxiety ridden insomniacs among us.

I recommend the book “why we sleep”. It helps (helped me) understand some of the fundamentals of sleep and why it matters

How do you measure good sleep to begin with?

Caffeine sensitivity varies a lot - just skipping late coffee is good for some, for others, consider quitting caffeine entirely, at least for a while, to see if it makes a difference.

On the other hand, if there was a big push for more sleep, some industries would take a nose dive. Live entertainment, bars, social media, gambling etc. Wonder if at the end GDP would be up or down. But I guess it’d be a win for the society as a whole.

You can still sleep even if you take part in the night entertainment, you'll just have to sleep during the day instead of the night.

Some people can manage to recuperate the night sleep loss during the day, some, like me, can't and it sucks.

But you have to find time for sleeping during the day. It may be not an issue for the performers and people making money in those industries. But audience will shrink a lot.

On the weekends, unless you have to go to work then, you can find time for sleep during the day, no?

If you sleep on weekends during the day, you won’t do stuff during the day. So overall it will be less participating in economy.

On top of that, sticking to your circadian rhythm is important too.

>you won’t do stuff during the day. So overall it will be less participating in economy.

Who says you're mandated to participate in the economy during your time off in the weekend daytime? You already spent money partying last night and possibly eating out takeaway and ordering an uber. Isn't that enough "for the economy"?

That’s what I was trying to say in my original post. More sleep means less time for the economy. Different people may allocate it differently and some may go for weird schedules. But either way it means less time consuming and less GDP generated.

I’m not sure if there’s „enough“ when people want eternal GDP growth. Including pension funds etc.

Young people can do much better when it comes to less sleep or sleep cycle disruption. When I was a teenager I worked all nighters on the weekend and never had a problem with sleep.

I worked all nighters as a teenager and then slept at school. I didn’t have trouble in sleeping either, I happily did that during the day at school. But going with very sleep for teenagers is not that good for development. And I guess school is important for all but edge cases. If I hadn’t ended up as self-thought programmer, I may have had issues with school performance.

And that's one of the reasons GDP is a pretty junky measure.

  Stuff that breaks often enough to be replaced
  Just healthy enough to still go to work
  Subscribed to everything, owning nothing
  More food, less nutrition (and flavor)
  Everything without a transaction valued at 0, 
    Family, Sunsets, compliments, mentoring the next generation

Yes. IMO modern western problems can’t be solved without ditching GDP. Pretty much any issue from pollution to health to mental health can be solved but it will hurt GDP.

GDP is flawed measure - unfortunately we lack a better one.

The aim is to maximise utility, but we cannot quantify utility, and cannot tell when it increases at the level higher than an individual. So we use GDP and then .... Goodhart's law.

Musing for a minute, I wonder if there's a way to create an anti-GDP and subtract them?

Something like GDP - (Sickness, Mental Health Therapy, Fixing broken windows and flat tires... et. al.)

Interesting thought!

Some people will claim that fixing broken windows and therapy session just generates GDP! Yay for booming stock market lead by therapists and window installers...

It is an interesting idea. It might be possible to improve measures by subtracting some things that can be adjusted for that are harmful. There are lots of problems though - for example, higher expenditure on health might be a result of worsening mental health (bad), or better provision of services (good).

That still does not solve the underlying problem. The aim of an economy is to maximise utility (vaguely defined as happiness, satisfaction with life) or more meaningfully defined as an individual's preferences, The problem is that we cannot meaningfully aggregate this across individuals to maximise for the whole economy.

I’m sure GDP is a useful metric for all kinds of economic analysis. But it’s also an “easy target” in such a way where I feel it can be a huge distraction. You could appeal to man’s worse nature in all sorts of ways that reflect well in GDP.

Those gdp measures are just transfers of money. They don’t add to net productivity.

More productive workers produce more and generate more wealth, the real thing you want to measure with gdp.

BF Skinner, “Intellectual self-management in old age”:

> You can be fully rested in a physical sense yet tired of what you are doing intellectually. To take appropriate steps one needs some measure of fatigue. Curiously enough, Adolf Hitler can be of help. In a report to the Nieman Foundation, William Lederer has called attention to relevant documents in the Harvard library. Toward the end of the Second World War, Hitler asked the few social scientists left in Germany to find out why people made bad decisions. When they reported that it was when they were mentally exhausted, he asked them for a list of the signs 'of mental fatigue. Then he issued an order: Any officer showing signs of mental fatigue should immediately be sent on vacation. Fortunately for the world, he did not apply the order to himself. Among the signs on Hitler's list are several I find helpful. One is an unusual use of profanity or blasphemy. According to that principle, at least two of our recent presidents must have been mentally exhausted. When I find myself saying "damn," I know it is time to relax. (That mild expletive is a sign of my age as well as of my fatigue; I have never felt right about the scatological language of young people.) Other signs on Hitler's list include an inclination to blame others for mistakes, procrastinating on making decisions, an inclination to work longer hours than normally, an inclination to feel sorry for oneself, a reluctance to take exercise and relax, and dietary extremes—-either gluttonous appetite or almost none at all. Clues not on Hitler's list that I have found useful are especially bad handwriting and mistakes in playing the piano.

This is neat -- but has any of it been corroborated? For all we know the scientists might have said "Well we know he uses lots of amphetamines and doesn't sleep well -- what are HIS symptoms?"

And made their list...

When I see symptoms of ADD/ADHD described, they always sound like the way I feel when I haven't had enough sleep. I've looked up whether there's any correlation before, and they generally say that ADD can also cause difficulty sleeping.

I'm sure the experts have thought about all this a thousand times more than I have, but could that conclusion be partly the wrong way around? Even if sleep trouble doesn't cause ADD, it can't be helping.

I have ADHD as well as irregular sleep. I've had both these issues my entire life. Of course, I do notice reduced focus when I don't sleep enough, and at the same time, ADHD meds can mask these somewhat.

But I assume the reason I have ADHD and not just a sleep disorder is that when I'm well-rested (if I've slept 7+ hours every night for the last week) I still have symptoms of ADHD.

Is it possible that sleep issues as a child, or extended periods of less-than-perfect sleep caused the issues that I now have with focus? Sure.

But ADHD also has a pretty strong genetic link, so I suspect it's more related to inherited neurobiological differences rather than just damage to the brain from a period of poor sleep. I don't doubt that what gets diagnosed as ADHD could also be caused by damage to the brain though, and I also suspect there are multiple kinds of (genetically controlled) neurological atypicalities that get lumped together as "ADHD"

Thanks for the great answer. Reading back my comment I think I worded it too strongly really - I really don't want to imply, like, "maybe people with ADD just need to get more sleep." I'm sure anyone with a lifelong condition has tried every simple solution already. But the similarity of symptoms is interesting.

I think the main trap of "productivity" is believing doing a lot of things is "productive". I see quite a few people who look "productive" at first look but it's mainly just a lot of volume that doesn't really achieve much. I see that a lot in the upper ranks of middle management with their never ending meetings and initiatives that don't go anywhere.

And I think lack of sleep contributes a lot to people not thinking clearly.

A popular theme in today’s productivity culture is “waking up early.” It’s considered a sign of discipline to wake up at 5am.

5am is reasonable... if you fall asleep at 8:30 or 9 PM.

I wish we’d stop emphasizing early wake-up times, and start emphasizing reasonable bed times. It takes just as much discipline, especially with my phone so easily accessible and the TV so easy to binge.

Fantastic insight. It’s far easier for me to get up at 5:00 AM than to go to bed by 9:00 PM. Or even 10:00 PM.

But it's all relative. What's reasonable is what allows you to get a full night's sleep. I get up at 7:20 am ish, so I wind down before bed accordingly (reserving an hour) expecting to hit the sack at 11:20-11:30 pm. The scheduling of wind-down is an effective deterrent against sleep procrastination, which I find manifests itself more when I'm already sleepy. If I watch tv or game earlier, I won't be in zombie mode, and I'll avoid blue light exposure immediately before bed.

It would also be great if we’d stop making the 8 hours the gold standard. The amount of sleep a person needs varies a lot and fluctuates over the year and lifetime of the person. It can be as much as 12 or as little as 5.

>It can be as much as 12

If you regularly need 12 hours of sleep every day as base, it sounds like a health issue.

I would be very interested to read any papers where this is mentioned

Now in my fifth year of residency after finishing medical school, the effects of sleep debt are astounding. It’s difficult to describe how much better I feel and energetic I am when I have at least 3-4 days off work and get several consecutive nights of adequate sleep .

My life improved once I started tracking my sleep using a whoop strap.

I can see the quality of my sleep last night and calibrate my day based on that. Do this everyday and every day feels good->great.

+1 data point here. I think the mechanism is simply getting me to think more about getting quality sleep whereas it before it was just whim or a crapshoot.

I’d love to use a dedicated sleep tracking device, but they all now seem to require accounts, subscriptions, and forfeiting privacy. Sigh.

So I track my sleep with a timer app instead, and lose the detailed monitoring stats.

Something like this [1] then? I have not used it though, so I do not know how well it works.

https://www.withings.com/no/en/sleep-analyzer

Maybe, but it looks your data is stored on their servers. I consider data that's not stored on my machine with my encryption key to be essentially public data since any company, even one I trust, can be bought and the terms changed without warning.

Nice device, but the data is stored with them, so the privacy issue remains.

So, there are loads of half baked "measure your sleep"be devices/tools out there, does anyone know which heads scientific backing? Citations please!

I'd also add, get tested for sleep apnea. Many adults have it without many symptoms or underlying factors such as being obese.

Related reading - 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

Blurb: Explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com