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Comment by rdegges | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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?

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.

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

Look into sleep apnea as well

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