How to Avoid Sleep Debt | Hacker News Reader

How to Avoid Sleep Debt

healthysleep.med.harvard.edu

95 pointsramchip53 comments

Speaking about sleep in terms of debt is somewhat misleading. A sleep deficit can't be "paid off" as you might pay off a financial obligation. If you overdraw from a checking account, you can settle up by making one larger-than-usual deposit. If you stay awake for three days, then sleep much longer than usual doesn't give you a full cognitive recovery. It might be more accurate to think of staying awake as taking out a loan with very high interest.

EDIT: This is a difficult concept to understand because it sounds like a semantic difference. Here's an interesting article that explains it in more detail:

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212276021/of-neurons-and-memor...

Your reply is what I was hoping to see when I saw the title of this post.

On the other hand, if you get 50 hours behind on sleep, you only need a handful of extra hours to get back to normal.

It's both better and worse than actual numerical debt. Paying it off is painful and slow, but you don't have to pay off the original amount.

Well, not really. During the time where you're building up those 50 'lost hours', your body is performing worse. What you owe in sleep you'll (immediately) pay for in reduced quality of wakefulness: lower mental acuity, worse immune system, poorer physical performance, slower recuperation, etc.

Nature only barters, not lends.

I work primarily in operations on an entertainment service not too dissimilar from Netflix. Every couple of months I have pager duty for a week. I'm lucky to get 6 hours of consecutive sleep in a day. It seems to take a week to recover from it. Everyone I know who works in operations on services with similar availability requirements seems to have the same problem. It can be extremely difficult at times especially when you're under pressure to get something resolved and your cognitive abilities are shot.

There isn't much point to this comment I guess other than to say that yes, good sleep is very important and more important than people realize.

Do the developers not share in pager duty for their apps at your company? I thought this was now standard practice anymore. I've never seen a company where the devs are on pager duty with the kind of reliability issues you describe. And yes, these were all companies with very tight uptime requirements.

If I am guessing his company correctly, then most development teams indeed do their own pager duty with typical oncalls lasting one week. Some teams have extremely heavy ops load and have support people or even support teams that focus on doing ops and reducing op load.

There are several possible causes of such an unusually high ops load. Maybe it's a failing in that team (teams typically track operation load carefully, as it can serve as an early indicator of something in the team dynamics going wrong), that team might be under pressure from management to push out new features on a tight schedule (leaving less time to get things right, or to fix known issues), they may have had the unfortunate luck of inheriting a service written quick and dirty by one of the VP's favored "get shit done fast" teams (a problematic phenomenon that fortunately seems to be becoming less common), or it may just be the nature of their particular work for whatever reason.

I have seen teams with extremely high operation load get support teams based out of other timezones, so that 24/7 ops coverage can be done mostly by people working during their regional business hours. Why that hasn't been set up in his case, I cannot say.

There are many, many companies that provide customer-facing services that don't develop their own software in house and rely on vendors for all their systems. The TV services provided by telcos and cablecos are one example. Of all the "major" telcos in the world that provide a TV service, I only know of one that does anything in house.

Have you countered some of the debt with exercise? I recommend a brisk, highly intense workout (e.g., the scientific 7-minute workout) as soon as you wake up. It will help you get over cortisol levels and give you a nice rush of endorphins, plus nice boost of blood flow to the brain. I've found that it helps me even get over grogginess and headaches when I'm very sleep deprived.

I have not, but in speaking with other people on my team, it has been mentioned as helping a lot. It's probably a lot more effective than a bunch of coffee.

You should push for split shifts, 12 hours each or maybe rotating 16-hour shifts or something. Nobody should be a pager monkey during their sleep hours.

Of course, you should also be pushing for higher quality systems and software :-)

> It seems to take a week to recover from it.

Out of curiosity, how much sleep are you getting on average per night in the following week?

For myself personally, I've found that there's pretty much nothing that 2 (perhaps 3 max) consecutive nights of unlimited sleep can't fix. Sometimes I'll sleep for 12 or 13 hours in a row each night, and then by the last day I usually feel normal again.

I get about 8 hours a night following my week of sleep deprivation. I would probably try and get more but my problem is compounded by having young children.

I thought I saw a study that showed sleep debt not to be as cumulative as in this guide, that the amount needed to catch up topped out at something like 10 or 12 hours. I don't have a link, though, so I guess my post is equally suspect :)

This is similar to what I've read. That the longer you stay up the more it impedes your mental abilities but you don't incur more "debt". That no matter how long you stay up you fully recover your facilities after one good nights sleep.

Do you have any links? It is contrary to everything I have read and my own experiences. When I pull an all nighter then sleep well the next day I am still wrecked.

From anecdotal experience, generally you'll need 2 consecutive nights of recovery sleep to recover from serious deprivation (whether chronic or acute). 1 usually isn't enough.

Most research shows there is a cap in that with a few weeks of good sleep, waking up naturally, your body returns to peak performance.

I haven't seen much research that suggests you can pay off sleep debt in large chunks so putting the debt in hours doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sleeping 4 hours tonight and then 12 tomorrow night is not equivalent to sleeping 8 tonight and 8 tomorrow

It is the difference between chronic and acute sleep deprivation. Go 100 hours without sleep, and sure you'll be hallucinating at the end, but you recover after about 16 hours of sleep. On the other hand, get slightly less sleep than you need, and it builds up over time, and requires an equal amount to get back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting...

Inconsistent sleep patterns can also cause circadian rhythm disorders. I struggle with delayed sleep phase syndrome as a result of years of poor sleep hygiene. I use what is called chronotherapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase)) every few months or so in order to put my sleep schedule back at a reasonable time.

That's not what it says. It says that the recovery is slower for chronic sleep deprivation, not that it takes 'as much'. Do you contend that it could take an entire decade to dig out of a large sleep debt two extra hours a night?

After chronic partial sleep restriction, the recovery process of cognitive functioning seems to take longer than after acute total SD. Performance in the PVT was not restored after one 10 h recovery night, but approached the baseline level after two 10 h nights in a study with seven consecutive sleep restriction nights with 5 h sleep/night (Dinges et al 1997). Using the same test, three 8 h recovery nights were not enough to restore performance after one week of sleep restriction

Ah, thank you. I was attempting to find a source for something that I vaguely remembered, while rather tired. The irony of delaying on sleep while reading an article about sleep loss was not lost on me.

I'm trying to get my business off the ground while raising two kids under 5. I'm constantly between 5-6 hours of sleep a night. It's a vicious cycle - the longer it goes the more I need to work late to catch up. Yet the later I work, the less efficient I become. I know that I need a good sleep reset, but there never seems to be a good time. Exercise become difficult to schedule, and I've definitely gained weight over the last several years. It's not good, but the decline is slow and hard to recognize in the moment. It's been so long (4 years now?) that I think I've forgotten what feeling rested feels like.

The "trick" is to set up a hard rule. If you get up at 6.30 in the morning, be in bed at 10p no matter what so that you will fall asleep by 10.30p-11p at the very latest (8h of sleep).

Also, no laptop/phone/tablet/etc. in the bedroom - just books/magazines. Reading before bed is the best way to slowly move towards sleep and not keep yourself up for hours the way that looking at a screen does.

Yes, sometimes you feel like you can work for an extra couple hours, etc. - but at the end of the day it's a choice you have to make. If you genuinely care about being healthy, put {sleep | healthy food | exercise } before everything else. The first few weeks might be a bit rough, but the rest will follow.

Making hard rules like these seems to me like the only sensible solution. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that expecting to run a successful early-stage business and being a good parent to two young childen is impossible unless you lower your requirements on one or both fronts. If you don't lower the requirements voluntarily, nature will do it for you. (There are rare examples of people who have extraordinary endurance, but they are by definition extraordinary).

Burnout is not fun and it can put your out of business for months, or even years if you have a bad case. (In my case, it was a year and a half of zero productive work). One of my relatives, after a particularly rough Ph.D, claimed that she will never be able to perform at the same level again. It's okay to be ambitious, but I think too many young and ambitious people let their ambition get the best of them. Learning your limits by crashing into them at full speed is not advisable.

I don't mean to sound negative or dismissive, but I've experienced this myself and seen too many cases first-hand not to care. The Silicon Valley startup culture is in many places outright destructive when it comes to this aspect of life.

More constructively: Setting strict deadlines and schedules that you will maintain unless the sky is falling (change the definition to "no matter what" if the sky is "constantly" falling), balancing your time so you have enough sleep and enough time to yourself is a safe way to ensure that you are working sustainably. This will lower your productivity, though. At least make your sacrifices with both eyes open.

Also, if you can't turn your brain off and are having trouble sleeping initially, 0.5mg of melatonin is wonderful and effective.

I've thought about using this. Do you use use it often?

My understanding is that taking it consistently isn't a good idea. Using it the odd night that I'm restless seems like a good idea.

Do you have a source? I haven't seen anything that suggests it isn't unhealthy. It take it almost daily, have done so for over six months, and have never slept better or had as much energy. It's also given me the energy to get in better physical shape.

I don't have sources that outline the issues on why taking it for a long time is bad. I have talked to a pharmacist and other articles stating that it's a temporary fix.

Here's another article mentioning that it should be taken for 3 months at most:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/melatonin-s...

The three months is because there have been studies showing it is safe for that long. But afaik there have been no studies suggesting that it would not be safe to take it for longer.

Gwern has a page (with a very pro-Melatonin message) with lots of links: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

> My understanding is that taking it consistently isn't a good idea.

All the research I've read says that it makes absolutely no difference. You never develop an immunity to it and it doesn't inhibit natural production. No research (that I'm aware of) has yet to find a downside, even at regularly taken large doses.

I use melatonin supplements on a fairly regular basis over the past year to regulate my sleep cycle, as recommended by my doctor to counteract Ritalin-induced insomnia. Studies have shown no reduction in efficacy after three months of use, according to Wikipedia[1]. If no change could be detected by that point, then there's a good chance that it's fine for extended use. From my own experience, this has held true.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Stimulants

Just to add my own personal anecdote, melatonin supplements did not work for me. This is not to say it won't for others, but it isn't magic for everyone.

I don't like the "read a book" advice. I end up staying up til 6am reading the goddamn book.

Read a dictionary.

The rest will follow! I see what you did there.

Stuck in the vicious loop with you. I can't imagine adding kids to the mix.

My ex often slept only a few hours a night and my oldest son was born with sleep issues. I also had to do a lot to recover from being very ill and on a lot of medication, which completely screwed up my brain chemistry and sleep cycle.

Some things that might help you a bit:

1) Take your vitamins.

2) Instead of melatonin at night, take co-q-10 in the morning (about 12 to 14 hours before you typically sleep or need to sleep). This is the co-enzyme for melatonin. It chemically wakes up your brain and will also cause a small spike of melatonin about 12 to 14 hours later (stuff I have read says 12 hours but for me 14 hours worked better). Taking melatonin will not cause a spike in co-q-10 production. When my brain chemistry was seriously screwed, it took me days to stop feeling half asleep if I took melatonin. Co-q-10 was a gentler, more comprehensive means to heal my chemical sleeping-waking cycle.

3) Clean up your sleep area. I have suggested this to multiple people and they are often shocked at how much good it does. Do "spring cleaning" type stuff for where you sleep -- wash all bedding, thoroughly dust, etc.

I frequently consider this path, but I see a lot of people in your situation. I'd be putting my family, business, and self at serious risk. Is that path the right economic choice? I'm not exactly hurting financially right now.

If I am increasing my risk of early death significantly by keeping at that pace, I find it hard to justify the trade off as a father and husband.

cf. http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/important-slee...

After four years, you certainly have enough to make a decision about the long term value of what you're doing. What keeps you motivated to carry on at this pace? Is the fiscal incentive outsized to employment?

Great job on the site! I've used it a couple of times to compare products.

Feeling rested makes you a better father and a better person. Life has a new meaning when you have had enough sleep, proper diet and regular exercise.

Your mind and body is used to the constant pace of doing things day in and day out. I am the same way and I'm trying to change. One thing finishes and I want to start something else. In your case, its your business. There is always something to do. It's a type of addiction.

I also have kids and I've settled on a home gym. Wake up, do the workout and get on with the day. My biggest challenge is shutting everything down at night and going to bed. There is always something to do, to learn, to read.

Anyway, its a tough problem but its worth working on.

I'm working on an app that may help you. I wrote a bit about my experience here: https://medium.com/better-humans/50c835e15244

Exercise is definitely going to help and to avoid the difficulty in scheduling it, schedule 5-10 minute high intensity workout as soon as you wake up. You'll be surprised how much that helps.

I'd love to help out. I've lost over 20 lbs just doing 5-10 minutes every day and have kept it off, but my primary focus was just feeling more energetic and overcoming all the stress that one spirals into with such schedules. Feel free to follow me on twitter (same username), and I'll DM you my email (don't like to publicly post my email) :/

I sympathise with you, being in a a similar situation (two kids under 5).

What I have found works best for myself is the exercise. It does simply come down to discipline. Do not allow it to be pushed aside. I ensure that I am up at 6:30 each morning to hit the gym and then I am good to go for the day on that natural high. It is harder to stay up in the evenings, and my sleep is interrupted, but when I sleep I sleep well.

Good luck!

I'll have three kids under 4, any day now. I can't remember feeling rested, either, but I've gotten used to it. I'm a professor and about to kick off a startup using free time over summer break. It's worse for my wife, I'm sure. For me, going to the office to work is my "rest".

I don't think the need for sleep is a constant. It can vary season by season, and week by week.

Sometimes I find I need 8 or more hours to feel rested, others I wake up on my own after four and feel as though I've slept a full night. Usually I run at about 7.5 hours, and thats when my body wakes me up. When I was working graveyard I found I needed more sleep overall than when I work days.

For me it definitely varies by season. I don't use an alarm clock and I go to bed roughly at the same time every day (+- an hour at the very most). In summer I wake up around six, in winter I sleep until nearly eight.

If you're not using an alarm clock, then it's probably sunlight (or warmth) that wakes you up. The sun rises earlier in the summer.

This kind of problem is really fascinating to me. On the one hand, we're all pretty ambitious and would love to do more and that can cause one to sleep less. On the other hand, the more jam packed your schedule the easier it is to become less productive. I'm actually working on an app for myself and hope to release it soon, but it amounts to guiding me on a 5-10 minute workout every morning.

I've found that doing so helps me overcome grogginess, gives me an energy boost and even helps me alleviate headaches--which is incredible.

So for anyone that feels tired no matter how much you sleep, just do something like the 7-minute workout or tabata workouts (I have my own routine I'll share with the app) and you'll hopefully get a nice energy boost which will last you a while and you'll gradually notice your metabolism will improve, etc. This is not scientifically proven, but exercise is pretty awesome either way. :)

This is interesting, but week on science or quantitative data. Some of the randoms stats sewn throughout don't even agree with each other.

Oh my god, my kids are going to harvard to learn that if they dont sleep enough, they will be sleepy during the day.... This is funny and sad :(

Not a very helpful article for the insomniac. Surely a bigger problem for many people is being able to fall asleep at all, let alone sleep for a required number of hours.

If you are truly an insomniac, no article will solve your problem. A doctor, however, is likely to help.

The article wasn't about dealing with insomnia, so I'm not surprised that it lacked useful advice for dealing with it.

As a rule of thumb anxiety stops people dropping off to sleep while depression causes them to wake early. Sleep apnoea cause very many micro-breaks in sleep.

There are different forms of insomnia.

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