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Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

Sleep is the key. Repeated lack of sleep has an extreme impact on cognition and memory retrieval.

A few things that have helped me:

#1 sleep in a completely dark room. A specialist MD shared this insight with me and it changed my life. I also use an eye mask and white noise machine.

#2 use a call recording tool on your internal meetings that can summarize notes. Being able to go back “in time” to a call often has enabled me to reload the entire interaction just watching a few min of the call.

#3 rely on your team. As a leader you get the benefit of the doubt that you are covering a lot, so I’ve made a ritual of just asking people to restate our last interaction and where they are at now with any updates. Again, simple thing but helps trigger my memory

Good luck!

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Also, if this is affecting you, get a sleep study! The money will be well spent if physicians can find possible reasons for poor sleep that can be improved - a lot of people suffer from various kinds of sleep disorders, and treatment is becoming cheaper and more accessible to the point that a diagnosis well worth it for increasing numbers of people, given the increased quality of life it can offer.

This is so important. I got diagnosed with mild sleep apnea, and I was "only" waking up 5-10 times per hour. After getting situated with a CPAP, my mood and mental clarity has improved 3-5 fold. I had similar symptoms to OP - feeling like I was losing my memory and mental capabilities.

I agree. Sleep dictates everything else. It's so difficult to get a good night of sleep, though. There are too many impacting factors. And wearing masks/earphones are usually uncomfortable.

Under pillow bone conduction speakers are a great way to get an audio fix whilst falling asleep.

Can you elaborate? How does it work improve sleep?

Just some ideas that I found...

.. temperature is critical, and if you experiment with setting your thermostat exaggeratedly high or low for a while you will eventually notice it has an impact on sleep.

... getting cold was a frequent struggle as I would lose the covers and they would be twisted up and I would have to drowsily untwist. Now I wear a long sleeve fleece button shirt backward like a smock. Backward because the tails of the shirt always fall down and keep your side warm. The covers I just pull up to armpit and have never had to wake up since.

I hate light masks too, so I cover my face with lightweight athletic shorts that have a cooling effect. Then I use a small half-size pillow (walmart chopped memory foam) and turn my head sideways to muffle the ear not facing the pillow.

On the topic of white-noise machines:

There are headphones out there that are purpose-built to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.

My favorites right now are SoundOFFs, which emit pink noise, no apps required.

I'm also going to experiment with the Ozlu Sleepbuds, which many are calling the unofficial Bose Sleepbuds III since Bose discontinued the second iteration of these buds and sold off much of the IP to this team.

Having an headphone on ears for 6-9 hours continuous- isn't that harmful for health?

It's fine as long as the earbud fits well. Comply foam or custom tips makes that easy. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sleeping-with-headphones

I've been sleeping with custom ear molds for five years prior to moving to noise machine earbuds. Hearing's fine as of earlier this year!

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