Why Broken Sleep Is a Golden Time for Creativity | Hacker News Reader

Why Broken Sleep Is a Golden Time for Creativity

aeon.co

241 pointsbenbreen64 comments

Kind of a tenuous argument. Yes, some famous people do it now - but you could as well argue from, say, the Paris Review interviews that because so many great writers write first thing in the morning, you want block sleep so you don't get up late. It may also be natural, but lots of things are natural and don't cause greater creativity. And one may be able to cite personal anecdotes, but the causation could very easily be the other way: someone gets up because they have a burning idea, not because they got up and then also had a breakthrough. I think it would be much more compelling if they could point to even basic experimental verification; for example, showing greater solution rates to 'insight problems' in a segmented condition.

Ideally, when I wake up at 5am and my head is racing with ideas, I head to my whiteboard in my home office. I write and sketch it all down and three hours later I fall asleep again, waking up at 10 refreshed. Most of such work has really been my best, with proposals that were refined and made it straight to top-management. In some interviews when the question came 'what do you need to work effectively' I have tentatively asked about this - no early meetings, etc... but there was always pushback. My last company, a standalone Vodafone Group R&D lab allowed all of us researchers these luxuries, but was later consolidated and streamlined.

Is there any company that allows people to work this way? What are the best flexibilities that people have encountered? I'd be curious to know....

As the article mentions, the best route I've found is through either working for yourself or freelancing. Other than that, it's almost the luck of the draw, as corporate rules/guidelines seem to vary over time (as do bosses).

Microsoft has an informal but firm no meetings before 11 pseudo-policy. All the white boards you can eat. General freedom to come and go and work when you want, most of the time. YMMV.

What org? Never heard of this rule.

>no meetings before 11 pseudo-policy

Not in osg they don't.

Not in asg either.

Nor in my research lab.

FYI, I have worked at several bay-area tech startups and none of them has meetings in the morning, probably because many engineers tend to work late at night.

That's essentially true whenever you wake up. If you can remember your dreams you are at height of creativity wave.

Dreams are merely snapshots of random neurons firing, that your brain for giggles sort into a cohesive dream - because for it can't be symbolic.

I used to sleep a lot with South Park blaring in the background. From what I've gathered brain takes stimuli from the last 50 to 30 min, just before waking up and turn in into cohesive whole. How do I know? I read some research and additionally by accident, in my dream I recognized parts of it as South Park episodes (yay lucid dreaming) that ended in my dream. Since the playlist was going sequentially, I could track that it was from a previous episode, however the current episode was halfway done.

There's a weird quantic effect when recalling a dream, it has to happen half consciously. The moment I realize I'm thinking about dream parts, they evaporate and I can barely play the very first seconds in my head and trying to revive the missing part seems like a huge effort.

Our company is completely distributed, and people choose their own schedule.

My company is 100% work from home, and we all have completely flexible schedules. Our leadership specifically makes sure to hire people who are self-aware enough to know when and how they work best, and they want us to find the schedules and methods that help us to offer our best work.

I am sure we are not alone in this, but I have found that in a small successful companies that let you work how you want, nobody ever leaves the place, so we tend to be hidden gems.

Self Employment.

I've seen it work well with "core hours." ie. you had to be in the office, or on IM, between 10-3, and meetings could only be scheduled during core hours. That was a great, simple, rule.

I'm currently at Upverter, where ~75% of the time, I arrive at the office around 3pm. The other ~25% of the time is usually one of: 4am, 11am, 5pm. Basically, it's completely flexible for me.

I'm pretty much ruined for working at other companies though...

Yes. On my team, we have (a) one person who drops their kids off at school, comes in late, leaves early to pick them up again, and works in the evening/night (b) one person who comes in before everyone else and leaves before four (c) several people who come in towards lunchtime and leave late (d) a couple of us who take the shuttles and have a thoroughly normal (8:30-5:30) schedule, and (e) one person whose sleep schedule drifts unpredictably, unmoored from normal daylight rhythms.

In other words, nobody cares as long as you're getting stuff done.

Also, in other words, you should come work here, at YouTube :-)

Need any project managers? :-)

e) totally sounds like me...

I'm working on a very tight deadline for the next couple months, so most of my time and thoughts are dedicated to the project I am working on...

I'm spending less time simply vegging and more actually thinking about what I am working on... as I'm now transitioning from the planning to development phase, my thoughts start to race when I come across an issue to resolve.

This week, I was up until 4-6a a couple days, and a few others crashed when I got home at 5-7p, then up again around 3-4a. Just this morning, I'd woken up around 2a to work through a problem then back to sleep about an hour and a half later...

I'd done a bunch of reading about MVI (Model-View-Intent) as an alternative to the React.js workflow and had some ideas on how to work around a) reusable models, and b) injection and dependency declaration with a system similar to React/Flux's... though it's too late to apply this to the project I'm on, it was an interesting thought exercise.

When left to "just work" instead of being expected to be "in the office" 9-6 it's harder.. usually I'm not "really" awake until after lunch... then I can get some work done, usually pretty productive (staying late a lot till 7-8 or so), and go home to do it again... still not nearly as much as when I'm left to sleep/work as needed/ready.

I did work in a company that set its work schedule entirely based on Lotus Notes calendar. Hour-long meetings anytime but "lunch hour". Phone calls asking why I didn't respond to accept the weekly status update meeting invite. White boards and laptops newer than 6 years old were seemingly banned.

I used to have a pretty irregular sleep pattern, and one thing I definitely noticed was the feeling of euphoria that comes with sleep-deprivation. If I stayed up deep into the night, I would feel great: energetic and ready to get things done. Such a state was also creatively useful: I did a lot of pretty good work in the deep of night. Somewhat paradoxically, I found it easier to focus at that hour.

However, these benefits were only the case for light or mild sleep deprivation. If I was more sleep-deprived, e.g. 4 hours a night for a few days, then the pendulum would swing the other way and I would feel pretty useless and slow.

I should also note that the sleep-deprived, energetic creative state was only useful for projects that I could do in a single push. If I could do some project from start to finish in a single creative burst, then an all-nighter wouldn't be a terrible way of getting it done. There would be few distractions, it'd be easy to get "flow" going, and I suspect that the euphoric, sleep-deprived state marginally reduce inhibitions, which can lead to better work.

On the other hand, it's not that great for tackling a section of a larger project, which I think are better crafted slowly during the day, over the course of a few days.

Sleep deprivation increases dopamine, it's almost like taking amphetamine (Adderall). http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080819213033.ht...

Interesting. I've never taken amphetamines, but I'm not surprised to find that this is the case.

Sleep deprivation causes dramatic deficits in the ability to attend to task, working memory, and mood stability. It is the exact opposite of adderall. More like coming off adderrall.

Maybe both in succession?

>>Somewhat paradoxically, I found it easier to focus at that hour.

This is because everyone else is sleeping and there are no distractions. Also, if you live in an urban area, the ambient city noise tends to be at a minimum at night, which can give a sense of peace and comfort that is otherwise not fully there.

I think this is why I enjoy working on personal projects late at night.

I'm currently the same way. I frequently end up not sleeping for a night during the weekend, and end up going to work on the Monday at 4am because I went to sleep in the afternoon on the Sunday. Fortunately, I don't really have any restrictions on my lifestyle at the moment.

I've tried to explain that not sleeping feels good to people before, but I'm always met with disbelief. I'm glad there's someone else out there who understands.

Yes, I totally understand, but I also feel as if I should point out that it's probably not good. Sleep deprivation is associated with some health problems, and an irregular sleep pattern has effects on your melatonin production.

Moreover, it's common to use sleep-deprivation to self-medicate depression. So, make sure you're all right. :-)

I'm regularly up at 4AM.

At that time, I need to make a decision: Do I produce, or do I consume?

If I produce, I write English or code. I can get in a couple hours of this before I need to wake up the rest of the house, and it's great.

If I consume, I watch a movie or surf or something, and I don't feel all that great in the end. Where did that time go? Doing reading is better, especially if I'm gronking down technical stuff that I've been meaning to read for a while.

In any event, early morning "alone and quiet" time is pretty neat.

> If I consume, I watch a movie or surf or something, and I don't feel all that great in the end.

I wish I could choose to turn off youtube and get things done. It's hard.

>If I consume, I watch a movie or surf or something, and I don't feel all that great in the end. Where did that time go?

Doing something you enjoyed doing instead of what they force you to do everyday?

I've started to use one of those sleep tracking apps several weeks ago and I noticed that I invariably wake up around 4 as well, however only for what looks like around half an hour and without me having any recollection about it the next morning.

I wonder if anyone else observed the same, in other words if this is "normal".

It totally blows my mind people still fall for this bullshit split sleep meme made up by an historian.

So we take medical advice from historians now?

I do know in the world of science that shift workers get a lot of cancer. Which is not split sleep exactly but close enough for me to not be forcing myself against nature to split sleep.

Some creative people work all hours and some bodies are weird but don't buy into this is 'common and natural thing' meme.

Correlation does not mean causation. Perhaps a lot of shift workers happen to be nurses and they work in an environment where it is more likely to contract cancer (from x-rays or whatever). I'm using this as an example.

Also, I don't think it's "made up by a historian", it's more like a "historian commented on common behavior of our ancestors".

I have a friend who works at the American Cancer Society. They constantly have to refute the "[insert something here] causes cancer" myths. They do some pretty insanely large and in-depth studies on these things. They've even investigated the "your couch gives you cancer" myth.

In the end, they say that smoking is by far the biggest risk factor for cancer. After that, there's a "three-legged stool" of obesity + sedentary lifestyle + poor diet, meaning those things compound one another. Genes also have a measurable influence on your likelihood of getting cancer.

After that, very few things significantly increase your risk of cancer. A lot of it is just random. Most of the studies you see linking cancer to something are bullshit. My friend says you should be skeptical of anything shorter than 10 years and with fewer than 100,000 participants, and even then there are many other factors that go into gold-standard research.

How is shift working similar to split sleep? One is working arbitrary schedules, the other could be seen as "I go to bed at 8pm with the sun, and happen to wake up every night at like midnight to work for a few hours and then pass out again". They're entirely different shapes.

Yes, it's reasonable to say we shouldn't take medical advice from historians; but, finding your most creative times of the day isn't really a medical thing, it's a "what works for me" or "what I've noticed about myself" sort of perspective.

How do we measure creativity anyway?

Shift work is not necessarily about differing sleep cycles there evidence it's about working at night and lighting.

But other than that I don't disagree. My beef is about broken sleep existing.

1.5 billion people currently live without electricity and so did their parents and their parents parents.

But broken sleeps evidence is a historian basically cold reading 200 year old fiction books. And even people like gwern are not saying, this is BS where is the evidence broken sleep is a thing?

It might be great for creativity, so is LSD, go for it, I definitely want a more creative world.

I'm just saying know where you stand and quit on the BS that everyone used to do it, unless you have real proof.

>It totally blows my mind people still fall for this bullshit split sleep meme made up by an historian. So we take medical advice from historians now?

Historians can help point to practices that fit the human animal better before modern technology abruptly changed everyday life.

>I do know in the world of science that shift workers get a lot of cancer. Which is not split sleep exactly but close enough for me to not be forcing myself against nature to split sleep.

I can't fathom how an argument in favor of more accurate medical advice and turned into "shift workers are close enough to split sleep for me", ...

>Some creative people work all hours and some bodies are weird but don't buy into this is 'common and natural thing' meme.

Well, there are ways to sleep that are not natural, even if they are common. And there are ways to sleep that fit a person better.

I really wonder what this says about children who wake up in the middle of the night, and the effect on parents. If you follow through with "everyone did segmented sleep", then at least the parents of children might be somewhat mismatched. Children wake up earlier, or take longer to wind back down to sleep. Is that still segmented sleep in the same vein? Maybe it was at one time natural for everyone to wake up at the same time basically, because they were so close together.

Either way, the explicit no children "rule" for experimenting with segmented sleep is an interesting thing to think about.

Of course, 9-5 jobs make it practically impossible anyway, which are assumed to go along with children in many cases

I noticed when I push myself a bit deeper into the night (I normally go sleeping at ~10pm), then at around midnight when I am already tired I have the best ideas for composing electronic music. If I stay awake, I often continue until 2-3am with an outline of a song and while very very tired, I often finish something surprisingly good and balanced so that I just need to refine/add "candy" around to finish the song. Basically I trade enhanced creativity for discomfort and feeling awful the next day, and it works surprisingly well.

fellow electronic music producer here. For me it's not so much about being tired. It's rather that late in the evening I finally managed to mentally "recover" from work.

Cool - have a link to your songs ?

Reminds me of Psalm 63:6 -

  On my bed I remember you;
  I think of you through the watches of the night.

Interesting find

This is a wonderful reflection on the joys and productivity of getting up when you wake up, and running with your naturally wakeful energy while it lasts.

My job is the only thing keeping me on a set schedule. When I retire, or if I make a move to freelancing full-time, I'm really curious to see what becomes of my schedule. I'll stay grounded in time somehow, but I'll also lose myself in time on a regular basis.

The article actually sounds a lot like my sleep schedule.

I retire quite early (9-10PM) compared to my roommates who will game, drink, and socialize into the wee hours of the night.

I have to be up around 6:30AM to do my morning routine. I often find myself waking up around 3:00 or 4:00 though.

I just can't bring myself to "run with my naturally wakeful energy," though. Those next few hours until my alarm goes off are the most precious thing in the world. I bundle up, and try to get back to sleep.

Usually I'm in an odd state of creative reflection, an almost "wakeful dreaming."

It's more like wishful thinking, or a daydream, than an actual dream.

My mind is too busy to sleep, but I can't let it run wild, I have to work in two hours.

---

Then, just as I'm dozing off, my (sleep cycle aware) alarm clock goes off and tells me it's time to get up.

Then I feel lethargic all day; spending my entire day anxious to get home so I can do the same thing all over again.

---

My sleep cycle app tells me I'm a pretty decent sleeper (unless I've had a drink).

Perhaps I'm just naturally a segmented sleeper; but what's a part-time student/full-time employee to do?

You regularly sleep nine and a half hours at night? Maybe waking up at 3 and 4 is when your body's ready to wake up, since it's been 6 or 7 hours.

It honestly sounds like you have some anxiety issues that are interfering with your sleep. It may even be that you feel anxious about not sleeping (and therefore having a lethargic day), which keeps you up.

You should certainly look into "sleep hygiene". If you religiously practice it, you may have better luck. Some of the recommendations are: no caffeine, no alcohol, get out of bed if you can't sleep, don't work in your bedroom, wake up at the same time every day. I can't remember the rest.

You cannot wake up in the middle of the night feeling full of ideas if you've not been sleeping weel (and probably getting more hours of sleep than you really needed).

When I'm on vacations, sleeping my ass off, I routinely wake up in the middle of the night, or 2-3 hours before my regular wake up time and I'm well prepared to think.

Going back to traditional 8-5 work week, I'm glad I have a full night of sleep.

He's made a reasonable historical case for the commonness of a split cycle sleep.

However, I wanted more evidence, so I looked to an ancestor: research on chimpanzees in wild seems to indicate that they start their days at dawn, and sleep mainly uninterrupted through the night...

Did humans really diverge that much? I suppose further studies will tell. (After all, the creative differences seem undeniable, anecdotally...)

I have been changing routine to get some more exercise recently... I've started sailing again. The general routine is work the morning, sail the afternoon, sleep damn early (8:30PM?), wake up 2AM, work awhile, sleep again about 5AM, wake again about 8AM, eat, rinse, repeat.

Yesterday I woke up early for a cancelled meeting, which broke my pattern. As a result, I sailed too early and too long .. and slept right through. This morning three dogs woke me up, apparently they were having sex. I have no doubt they will sleep again :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

I dunno, I haven't slept four hours straight since my baby was born, and this may be the least creative I've ever felt.

I think being woken up rather than naturally reaching the end of a sleep cycle is very very different. When our baby was waking up a lot we were lucky to function much less do anything super creative.

Article tries to make the case that historically people would have a period of wakefulness in the night based on historical writing. I'd like to see some more actual research before modifying my life and sleep habits as I'm not sure that this says anything more than sleep requirements are personal.

My sense from working/living/traveling with lots of different folks is that sleep is just as personal as the types of foods you like to eat. Some people like napping, some don't. Some people like waking up early, some people like staying up early. The only real constants I see is that you absolutely have to get some and that the "experts" don't really know why...

I don't know that you, personally ought to be modifying your sleep schedule any. If you're doing something that works, that's fine.

However, if you do go to sleep early (like 9pm), and wake up in the middle of the night, maybe it's not necessary to stress about that too much. If you can get something useful done, then you can do that, and then go back to sleep in a couple hours.

I think the point is if you're feeling awake in the middle of the night, that isn't necessarily insomnia, and it isn't necessarily a problem. Maybe you can make it work and also get enough sleep to function well during the day.

Ha ha, exactly. I've been there a couple of times and it really made me reflect on what I'd do when I had the time and energy again.

I know your pain. However, I started going to bed for 12 hours a night knowing I'd be woken up a couple of times, and on the odd nights it didn't happen, I woke up on my own and experienced a state like this article talks about, awake but a little foggy, able to practically "see" the things I was thinking about in a way I never do in the daytime.

Anyone else here never have dreams?

I can't remember having a dream for at least 18 years now. So even if I have the flexibility to sleep once at dusk and then work for a couple of hours, I'm not convinced I'll see any benefit.

After a dermatologist prescription I suddenly dreamed every night very detailed and surreal dreams for three weeks. Weird brains are weird.

The wikipedia article for Polyphasic sleep is very interesting - apparently it it possible to reduce the required sleep to 2h per day, split into six 20-minute naps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

I think this article was probably written by people who haven't actually tried it.

I experimented with the Uberman sleep schedule myself as a student (i.e. 2 hours sleep a day, split into 20 minute naps). I stuck rigidly to the schedule over the course of three weeks but despite near-perfect discipline, it only got harder and harder.

The hours between 1am to 5am were the hardest. I would stay awake because the program required it (and supposedly it gets easier as your body 'adjusts') but between these hours I was totally useless. I couldn't read because my eyes would unfocus, I had blackouts where I couldn't remember anything. Usually I would just sit and stare catatonically at a wall.

I started breaking things and falling over due to malcoordination from the sleep deprivation and finally gave up after spending a night hallucinating that strange figures were appearing out of the wood patterns on my desk.

I slept for 24 hours and felt like a completely different person after I woke up.

So I encourage you to actually try this yourself, and see if it works. Just don't drive, operate heavy machinery or in fact do anything remotely risky during the experiment. Sleep deprivation can be dangerous.

Personally, I think the 2 hours is enough theory is garbage.

The concept was tested by Tim ferris in the book 4 hour body. He noted that its a hard thing to keep up with because you have to keep exactly on schedule or you will mess everything up and then you just end up sleeping for a day.

He noted that its a hard thing to keep up with because you have to keep exactly on schedule or you will mess everything up and then you just end up sleeping for a day.

That sounds like one of those excuses people make for something that doesn't really work.

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