Sleep deprivation disrupts memory | Hacker News Reader

Sleep deprivation disrupts memory

nature.com

The mention of deep sleep being necessary to memory formation is especially interesting to me.

I went 5-8 years or so with poor quality sleep. While it is difficult to estimate correctly at home, my Zeo was regularly giving me 15-20m of deep sleep a night and I had a very hard time fixing it. While I performed fine at work, I had a hard time recovering from any sort of physical symptoms (such as tension) and building muscle memory. I certainly felt pretty bad, and it was like things didn't 'stick'.

Nowadays I get 40m on average. Still not great but getting better.

May I ask what you did to improve your deep sleep?

Hard to pin it on any one thing unfortunately.

I notice it goes up when I’m doing as much as I can of the following: get 20-30m sunlight, talk with friends in person, avoid alcohol, work out, and be more active in building my life (vs having it built for me). Also, doing necessary emotional work with a counselor. All of those IME reduce my low grade anxiety.

It’s basically all eating your vegetables stuff. Way more impactful than any supplement or protocol.

N=1 and all that. HTH

Not the OP, but first of all you need enough time. If you constantly have only 5-6 hours of sleep per day then there is nothing what would help.

But if you have enough time than you need to try everything, beginning with air quality, noise and light reduction, bedding quality.

One of the first episodes in the huberman podcast, he references a study where insomnia was cured in 100% of study participants by taking them camping for a week. I think sleeping is like weight loss, it's really simple but people don't want to do what's necessary. Non-sedentary lifestyle, eat right, wake up and go to sleep with sun, don't use electronics, etc.

Only candles after dark (I could read comfortably by two beeswax candles, very dim light compared even to most night lights) and no electronics entirely cured my “insomnia” of decades within a couple days. Go figure, hundreds or thousands of candle-power lighting up whole rooms, and entertainment more compelling than a Roman emperor could command on tap, is extremely bad for sleep. What a surprise.

It’s goddamn hard to keep up, though.

Pro tip: use RGB light strips for room lighting and set them to pure red an hour or two before sleep.

I don't have any trouble sleeping, but that's what I do when someone requires me to suddenly disrupt my sleeping schedule so I can get up at some ungodly early hour and it's the only way I can go to sleep sooner than usual and actually fall asleep.

If you really wanted to do it every day it would make far more sense to automate it and make it gradual to simulate a sunset though.

I am not saying this as veiled criticism. I am asking this so I can understand what you said better because my sleep is terrible. When you say no electronics entirely, do you mean after dusk or something? Because obviously you wrote this post.

My solution was similar but less extreme: candles or warm low output LEDs that are not ceiling-mounted.

Electronics are allowed until the last hour before bed, but after 7pm or so only with a blue light filter and minimum brightness, and only with text content, no video or gaming.

The second I break these rules I immediately have trouble falling asleep, like clockwork. Which of course I periodically do for a media or video game dive, then I either accept the crappy sleep or I take a pill.

This sounds less disruptive to try :0

I’m not doing it anymore. Worked great. Kept it up for a few weeks. Early to bed, slept well. I basically hadn’t done that since I was like 8 years old.

Yes, after dusk. Probably would have allowed a couple hours past dusk in Winter (northern hemisphere). Turns out you (nearly everyone, excepting the few who’d have had insomnia even in a Nebraska farmhouse in 1920) get tired fast with low light and no hyper-stimulus. You can still play musical instruments or play cards or read by candle light or a few other things. But that won’t keep you up until 2AM night after night after night (maybe every now and then).

But god, it’s hard to make that work with any amount of a modern life.

Thanks tons for these details. Time for me to give it a shot, esp. if playing instruments doesn’t contribute to the problem.

I dislike how you frame it as a personal failure to do what is necessary. It is a societal failure. People may have strong self-control, and want to have completely more primitive lifestyle which would likely improve their mental state, but escaping the industrial society can be simply out of reach for many people. For example if you're poor and born in a city-state you may never even have the capacity to experience camping.

Individual problems have individual solutions.

I disagree that they are individual problems. This isn’t Sparta. Many of the negative mental health externalities were created either inadvertently or deliberately to maximize shareholder (read: wealthy, mostly older people) money. It’s irresponsible.

And notice I didn’t say value. Profiting off of making another person doesn’t add value. It extracts it from them, like the scream extractor in Monsters Inc.

This kind of thinking is associated with 70s New Leftism and is mostly wrong. You can spot it because it says every problem is caused by "corporations" or "billionaires". I think it's interesting to look at how it's actually different from Marxism, which basically says today's small business owners are the reactionary class, not the big ones.

The reason old people are powerful is 1. they vote in every election 2. they have lots of free time 3. they own land 4. there's a lot of them. They're not called baby boomers for no reason.

I think the main reason you see activists advocate against "corporations" is because the activists want the government to privatize everything in a different way by having nonprofits run it, which are not "corporations" but are usually even more corrupt.

Society is not under your control. Laying the blame at society's feet is a way for those who are suffering to abscond themselves of the burden to change their behaviour.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter who's fault it is, it just matters what you do about it.

Of course, the truth is somewhere in between, but leaning towards "take personal ownership of the problem" is probably a better default setting.

This is giving boomer

> a way for those who are suffering to abscond themselves of the burden to change their behaviour.

Much as you've absconded yourself of the burden of using words correctly.

"Abscond" means "to depart secretly and hide oneself" - it makes little sense in the above context.

Why can't it be both? On the one hand, well intentioned economically mobile people are not practising healthy sleep habits. On the other, our societal structures do not facilitate or encourage healthy sleeping patterns.

The reason to prefer the indivualistic framing is because one has far more control over one's own behaviour.

Being outside for an hour during sunset is the best sleep medicine. Don’t even have to go camping.

Episode 2 was about sleep. But the transcript had no matches for insomnia or camping.[1]

It sounds like a distorted memory of a small study where subjects without sleep disorders slept earlier but not longer or better when camping with natural light and fire only.[2] How long the effect lasted was not studied.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1TxQj9IsQ

[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(13)...

This makes far more sense. A lot of people with insomnia have Sleep Disordered Breathing - sometimes apnea, sometimes UARS which is roughly the same thing except you tend to wake up before oxygen desaturation, resulting in somewhat different symptoms and high false negative diagnostic rates.

> May I ask what you did to improve your deep sleep?

I think Steve Gibson (of the Security Now podcast, and absolutely not a doctor), had a "healthy sleep formula" of taking a time release melatonin and a time-release niacinamide supplement, and he claimed his Zeo would register more deep when he took it. I got the impression he thought his own sleep was poor and was trying to fix it, and just talked about his personal project on his podcast.

I tried it, and anecdotally I did feel like I slept deeper.

My experience with taking things before bed has been negative because you have to take them with liquids, or else they're one of those combo supplements with a bunch of metabolites left over, and either way you end up waking early because you have to pee now.

In my case - I've had sleep problems for a decade - it started to improve once my kids stopped waking me up 3-4 times a night.

It's still not as good as it was before as I've not been able to get sporting properly and, well, they kids do wake us just not every night anymore.

There was a post here on Hacker News many years ago about a software developer who became a bicycle messenger.

One point from that post related to this discussion:

"Once I became a bike messenger, I slept like a log for 8 hours every night."

In my own life, having worked both manual, physical labor and been a tech worker, I noticed the following:

- When I worked construction, my body would be exhausted but my mind would be very active when I tried to go to sleep.

- In tech work, it's my mind that is exhausted but my body still has energy

- I've also worked jobs that required a high amount of both physical and mental focus and that's when I usually sleep the deepest.

Good old saying - if you work hard manually, rest by doing something mentally challenging, and vice versa. For most of us vice versa applies hard.

I do something every day or evening, even if its just 1.5-2h evening walks. Days I don't do anything are definitely harder to fall asleep, to say the least, and some small achievement is missing.

I take a stimulant for my adhd. If i didn't have physical exhaustion (usually a 10km 2h walk before sleep) I don't think I could sleep at all. It still affects the quality of sleep (not much deep sleep) though.

Now, sleep quality really affects everything. I think in general, mental health/sanity is hardly taken seriously in the tech industry. If I had employees I'd rather they had enough physical activity and sleep over a long and sustainable period than them sleeping under their desk hacking through the night.

I’m the same way when it comes to motor skills. I play electric guitar, and it’s pointless to practice technique if I did not sleep enough the night before - nothing will stick anyway.

    sleep disruption could be used to prevent 
    memories from entering long-term storage, 
    which could be useful for people who have 
    recently experienced something traumatic, 
    such as those with post-traumatic stress 
    disorder

This makes sense, but it's hard to see how this would work in practice.

You'd have to induce this sleep deprivation right after the traumatic event. "Sorry you watched your house burn down today with your favorite hamster inside. Here's some modafinil so you won't sleep for two days. It will help you not remember this."

Bleh. At that point just dissociate. By the time you've got PTSD symptoms it's usually too late to simply prevent memories from being recorded.

I’ve always wondered why it’s hard to sleep after stress and anxiety. Seems counterproductive, but perhaps it is adaptive.

> people who have recently experienced something traumatic

As a parent of a 5 month old baby, I can say that nature has already provided a mechanism for this to work. If it were not for the lack of memories of the first 3 months, I would never agree to have another child. It appears evolution has found a use for this quirk of our brains already.

When you say "in practice", you're thinking of artificially operationalizing it and how one would force that through medication or whatever. Of course that would be hard to sensibly apply in practice! How would you distinguish a traumatizing experience from a manageably negative one in time to formulate a prescription, how would you prescribe wakefulness to someone who didn't seek it themselves, how do you know how much wakefulness is appropriate or what other trouble you might be causing by artificially amplifying it?

But if you step back, the real "in practice" is the thing that bodies already do. Sleep is often a mess after truly shocking experiences, and this mechanism suggests some reason why. For the folk that need scientific studies to justify things that their bodies naturally want to do, this is the study that says it's okay to toss and turn and have weird sleep hours when something bad happens.

Hmmm. I guess it is this way for a lot of people. Although, this is not usually my experience. I think it's because high stress physically exhausts me, so I sleep like a rock afterward.

But (some stressful relationships aside) I've never really experienced chronic traumatic stress, like living in a warzone, where as I'm going to sleep I have to worry about my physical safety. Now that would most definitely wreck my sleep.

I've attempted that in the past out of similar naive idea. I didn't use any stimulants, just slept on a chair without proper blankets. It did seem to get rid of a lot of unwanted data, though it also posed cognitive penalties, possibly some permanent. I guess it's a last resort option, not something generally recommendable.

I imagine this correlates somewhat with having children.

It's both a "traumatic" single event (especially for the mother) and also traumatic over time in that your sleep schedule is affected, big changes to your life etc.

People joke that evolution made it so we don't remember how hard it is to have small children but maybe there is some truth to that statement.

I severely doubt messing with sense-making and coherence of traumatic episodes is going to prove beneficial.

I have personally experienced this. I went to a concert in NY while living in the midwest. I was a pretty broke grad-student at the time and hence opted not to get a hotel for the night before the return flight. The concert ended late and we reached the airport by around 3:30 AM for a 7AM flight. I think I took some naps at the gate before the flight and got very little sleep on the flights.

I barely remember anything from that night. The concert itself is mostly blank except for one or two moments. I remember some moments of driving late at night afterwards (getting lost at one point) and having a very late night dinner at an IHOP. I barely remember getting on my connecting flight.

Overall a very surreal experience.

Now I make it a point to get proper sleep on such trips. What is the point of doing these things anyway if we don't get to keep the memories?

I've attempted to use the effect strategically. Not sure if it really worked or not. It's certainly not healthy, and it certainly didn't improve the quality of my work, but I've pushed thru some unpleasant times with an eye toward trying not to form long-term memories by way of sleep deprivation.

Smart move:

Sleep deprivation facilitates extinction of implicit fear generalization and physiological response to fear - PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20889142/

"Clinically, trauma-exposed victims often experience acute insomnia, indicating that such insomnia might provide prophylactic benefits in reducing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder via extinction of the fear-magnifying effects of memory."

I'm 29 years old, and I have definitely noticed my memory getting worse over the last ~5 years. I've always wondered if this is something to do with sleep deprivation, increased stress from work/school, or just the natural effects of getting older.

Try doing a 24 hour water fast. It will feel awful during the fast, but you may notice your mind is sharper the next day after a good sleep. Cleans out the cobwebs at a cellular level (autophagy). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106288/

EDIT: I'm getting rate limited so cannot reply to the comment below.

Water fast means only drinking water. Tea or coffee is acceptable if black (meaning without milk or sugar).

"Water fasting is a type of fast during which you're not allowed to consume anything except water."

I would never do a fast that cuts out water/liquids. That is stupid.

How to die with one simple trick!

Most people browsing HN would survive 1 - 2 months without food. 24 hours is nothing. Your pot belly has a spare 50,000 calories.

If you read the comment. He said to "water fast", not just skip food, which would be probably fine.

Also, not everyone is obese. For not obese active people, it might not be the best.

I didn't read the comment. I wrote the comment.

Water Fast means only drinking water. Standard terminology. You can verify that with a quick Google search.

1 - 2 month survival estimate is for an ordinary person. If you're obese then you can survive up to a year without food.

For an ordinary person in reasonably good health, a 24 hour water fast only provides health benefits. Up to 3 days of water fasting is beneficial. I wouldn't recommend any longer than that.

The more frequently you fast, the easier it gets. Your body adapts to burning stored fat as fuel and the hormonal hunger triggers become less severe. I've reached the stage where 24 hours is easy.

> Standard terminology

I'm sorry I'm not born within 200km from you and I don't speak the same dialect -_-'

Clearly entirely my fault…

What a strange reply. It's not a dialect. It's just plain English.

https://www.google.com/search?q=water+fast

Fasting is incredibly well tolerated and good for you. The longest a person has gone without food was about 380 days (Angus Barberi)

Read before comment? He said to "water fast", which I presume means not drink.

"I presume." There is a famous saying about assumptions that applies to you.

Given no knowledge beforehand, "water fast" can mean either of two things:

* You only consume water.

* You consume anything but water.

Both understandings can be inferred at face value, but only one is correct.

I too understood this as the latter before subsequent comments specified it is the former, and the name isn't even accurate since apparently consuming tea or black coffee is also acceptable.

Using as few words as possible is often the hallmark of a talented orator, but sometimes it pays off to be verbose and specific.

Water fasting means only drinking water. A dry fast is no water, no food. An absolute dry fast is no water, no food, no showers. A 24 hour dry fast won't kill a healthy person - but I wouldn't advise it.

This works, I corroborate.

The problem is not a lack of will or capability to sleep for 8 hours a day. It's usually the lack of ability to allocate 8 hours, because of various commitments and other circumstances.

(It's like telling a poor guy to start saving some money. While it's technically absolutely correct, the problem is usually not the lack of the desire to have savings.)

“Try doing a 24 hour water fast”

In the referenced study water was available ad libitum.

It’s food that was restricted, for 24-48 hours, that promoted beneficial cellular autophagy in mice.

[Longer (“chronic”) fasting was detrimental (in rats, further removed from humans; (and not examined in that paper, just referenced))]

[This is why I like HN, replies backed up with literature references to further meaningful interpretation and discussion #ThumbsUp!)

EDIT: TIL: a “water fast” is not fasting on water but on food… with ample water…. should be called a “water feast”

My experience from an increasingly long time ago was that starting at around age 24 (which was ~5 years ago for you), I got worse at staying up late or going with little sleep. I would try to pull all nighters for work, and it would absolutely kill me, whereas younger than that I could do it.

My dreams are so vivid, and movie like, that I frequently wake up very tired. My memory is shockingly poor, and I have often wondered if it could be connected to poor quality sleep. I also suffer from Aphantasia and suspect the vivid dreams are somehow compensating for that. Mostly it feels like 40years programming has rewired my brain!

It's cool to back it up with data, but any parent who has looked after a newborn knows this.

This may be a feature, particularly for mothers. The pain of the sleep deprivation and challenges of the early days of motherhood are not stored strongly, as to not interfere with the desire for more children.

Socially this means less empathy toward current early days/months/years parents though.

This is somewhat true. It isn't as though parents don't understand and remember the pain completely though. It's not amnesia. There is also a very tribal mentality (from what I've seen) in mothers. It's quite a beautiful thing where it is at the same time an exclusive community (you can only be a part of it if you have given birth), at the same time everyone who is a mother is automatically welcomed.

Can confirm, ever since having children my memory is pretty poor. Baby brains they call it.

Have a 3 month old and I recently embarrassed myself when a coworker asked "how'd you go with problem x yesterday afternoon" and the best I could do is "sorry, I can't remember".

It feels accurate to me. Whenever I experience a manic episode, my sleep patterns are severely disrupted. Often, I don't sleep at all, or I manage only brief 1-2 hour naps. During these periods, my memories become fragmented and disjointed, making it difficult to recall events clearly. The weeks or even months during these episodes blend together, creating a haze of scattered memories.

Funnily I saw this just yesterday: „Dihydromyricetin ameliorates memory impairment induced by acute sleep deprivation“ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30876981/

Nootropics Depot now retails this (not affiliated).

Hi Hacker News I’m Captain Obvious and I’m here to tell you (and myself) an uncomfortable truth that most of us kinda know but really can’t face up to.

Many of us have sleep problems.

We don’t have the healthiest lifestyles. Lots of screen use, being very sedentary, many of us eating bad food (it’s quick! I can get back to thjngs). Denis Nedry is not a mischaracterisation.

It’s not true for absolutely everyone but for the vast majority of people the answer is super simple. You need to exercise. Not even a ton. Three times a week will probably do it. Some cardio some weights, each visit to the gym a decent workout.

This will cost you £40-£90 a month. That’s about the cost of various Adobe Creative Cloud packages, which enable you to make mediocre graphics on your home personal computer.

for the same price as those photo tweaks you can get: improved longevity, improved all round health, protection against RSI and back problems, hugely reduced stress levels, improved levels of focus and happiness and better relationships. Hey, keep it up for a bit and you’ll even get a bit buff and your partner might like that.

We all know this and yet we all seek alternative explanations and remedies: eye masks, Vit D, meditation, dietary fads… because they’re so much easier than 2 hour trips to the gym a few times a week. Sure for some people those things are real but for the rest of us it’s just procrastination because:

The gym isn’t very fun.

Get over it. Put a podcast on, start small, accept that Tuesday night and Thursday night are going to be mostly lost to the gym and just enjoy the journey there and enjoy the music or podcast accompaniment. It’s a tax on living. Pay now or pay much more later, your choice.

I struggle with this so hard, but I’m trying ringo, I’m trying, and you should too.

I'm in my 30s and when I don't sleep enough, my memory is directly affected. I struggle to remember words at times (I speak two languages so I might remember the word in the other language). Then I sleep and everything goes back to normal. It is terrifying every time though: do I have Alzheimer? Comes immediately. But then I sleep and everything is fixed

The key to beating this is being self-aware and figuring out when your brain's maintenance cycles are bleeding into your waking thoughts. And use something to cover your eyes while sleeping, even if it's dark outside.

No 303 redirect:

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4924167541825165&w=mVT-1Kc...

I've struggled with getting good sleep for much of my adult life. I also feel that I have a terrible long term memory in comparison with some of my peers. It all makes sense now.

> To Diba’s surprise, rats that were woken up repeatedly had similar, or even higher, levels of sharp-wave-ripple activity than the rodents that got normal sleep did. But the firing of the ripples was weaker and less organized, showing a marked decrease in repetition of previous firing patterns.

I wonder what would happen if their sleep was disrupted in a "regular" way, thus creating new firing patterns..

The Web page is breaking text selection for me until I disable JS.

I’ve had the same problem. In my case it was uBlock hiding the full page cookie dialog but the dialog was still disabling text selection. I really wish websites would just respectfully set the minimum by default and let users opt in to the extra tracking. Then reward those users with internet points or something. People go nuts for internet points.

Regarding the article itself… I always wonder (while laying awake at night) what impact trains have on people’s mental health. I’m thankfully not close enough to get woken up by them, but they roll through at like 1am, horns blaring at every hint of an intersection. It’s gotta be measurably unhealthy for people living near the tracks

Please keep comments focussed on the content

In case someone wanted to quote text for discussion, now they know to turn off JS.

It is against the rules here to comment on the form of the website itself. Remain focussed on the content

One line, informing people how they can quote text from the article under discussion, vs. a cascade of policy meta-discussion? :)

Yes

now I feel very bad about going to sleep between 11PM and 1AM and getting up between 5AM and 6AM for many many years now.

Why? Do you experience memory issues? If you can do that for years and not go insane or break down you must be built different. I know people like that and envy them, but this is not typical.

Since I became a sleep maintenance insomniac (I fall asleep fine but wake up 5hrs later and generally can't fall back asleep), my memory has gone from phenomenal to abysmal. I struggle to keep things in mind. More than ever, I rely on notes and reminders

That seems like possibly the hardest kind of insomnia to treat.

Is there any treatment for this specific kind of insomnia?

When that happens to me it's often because I'm ruminating about something, can't get it out of my mind and relax. If that's what's keeping you up, CBT (cognitive behavorial therapy) techniques can help to stop that thought pattern, or just taking some daily action (any concrete action besides just turning it over in your mind) towards resolving the thing you're thinking about can help.

White noise sometimes helps me sleep too, especially after waking up in the middle of the night.

My theory is this is cause by stress hormones.

You can get to sleep because you’re so damn exhausted, but you wake up as soon as you’re physically able because of the hormones.

The answer is exercise. Aerobic and weights. Three times a week minimum. And for a good amount of time.

I do powerlifting 3x week. No real aerobics, I should add that but I just hate it. Sometimes I’ll drop the weight and do high rep sets which does get my heart pumping.

My completely unscientific analysis: aerobics gets the blood circulating more and enables the body to remove stress hormones from the blood at a faster rate.

I have issues with that as well, started taking magnesium (both normal, elemental magnesium and magnesium l-threonate) and it's made a world of difference for me.

> this is not typical

going to sleep between 11PM and 1AM and getting up between 5AM and 6AM is completely typical for a parent with kids in school.

OK 1AM might be pushing it but by the time you eat dinner, help with homework, do chores, get the kids to bed, and take a bit of time for yourself and spouse to decompress, yeah it's easily getting close to 11PM.

Then getting up in time to get dressed, get the kids up, make breakfast, get them to school and get yourself to work, you're probably getting out of bed at aroud 6AM or maybe 7AM at the latest.

Last I spoke to a sleep doctor, I was told that 6-8 hours is enough sleep for a lot of people.

That would mean 11-5 is is actually enough sleep, as is 12-6

So really the problem with these times is only the incidents when staying up to 1am, or when getting up at 5 after sleeping at midnight

You are grabbing the minimum, it depends on the person. I need 8.5 hours, but last weekend I slept 10 and 10. It was great for recovery, I just didn't have any free time

11PM to 6AM is very different from 1AM to 5AM. Parents of little children who need you to wake up multiple times per night have it worse, IMO. And they often report memory problems and overall mental decline.

I have to force myself to bed at 11 or 1130 because my free time starts between 930 and 10 pm. Lucky I can wake uo at 730, so if I go to bed at 1030pm I'm well rested

If you’ve been doing if for many years chances are you are one of those folks who don’t need as much sleep. Apparently there is genetics involved

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

It's more concerning if he intentionally deprived himself of sleep during adolescence (e.g. forcibly staying up to play video games), as brain development continues through age 25.

Now reading Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker. Recommend

That's a very bad book

"Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors"

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Also check out the detailed chapter level summary here: https://www.booksummary.pro/Why_We_Sleep_summary.html

Because anything on earth requires rest. There is a limit in universe for everything. Now science I know neuron and all. But that's my perception

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