= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Mass_Driver comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (524)
Does anyone have suggestions for how to motivate sleep? I've hacked all the biological problems so that I can actually fall asleep when I order it, but me-Tuesday generally refuses to issue an order to sleep until it's late enough at night that me-Wednesday will sharply regret not having gone to bed earlier.
I've put a small effort into setting a routine, and another small effort into forcing me-Tuesday to think about what I want to accomplish on Wednesday and how sleep will be useful for that; neither seems to be immediately useful. If I reorganize my entire day around motivating an early bedtime, that often works, but at an unacceptably high cost; the point of going to bed early is to have more surplus time/energy, not to spend all of my time/energy on going to bed.
I am happy to test various hypotheses, but don't have a good sense of which hypotheses to promote or how to generate plausible hypotheses in this context.
Melatonin. Also, getting my housemates to harass me if I don't go to bed.
Mass_Driver's comment is kind of funny to me, since I had addressed exactly his issue at length in my article.
Which, I couldn't help but notice, you have thoughtfully linked to in your comment. I'm new here; I haven't found that article yet.
If you're not being sarcastic, you're welcome.
If you're being sarcastic, my article is linked, in Nick_Tarleton's very first sentence; it would be odd for me to simply say 'my article' unless some referent had been defined in the previous two comments, and there is only one hyperlink in those two comments.
Gwern, I apologize for the sarcasm; it wasn't called for. As I said, I'm new here, and I guess I'm not clicking "show more above" as much as I should.
However, a link still would have been helpful. As someone who had never read your article, I had no way of knowing that a link to "Melatonin" contained an extensive discussion about willpower and procrastination. It looked to me like a biological solution, i.e., a solution that was ignoring my real concerns, so I ignored it.
Having now read your article, I agree that taking a drug that predictably made you very tired in about half an hour could be one good option for fighting the urge to stay up for no reason, and I also think that the health risks of taking melatonin long-term -- especially at times when I'm already tired -- could be significant. I may give it a try if other strategies fail.
I strongly disagree, but I also dislike plowing through as enormous a literature as that on melatonin and effectively conducting a meta-study, since Wikipedia already covers the topic and I wouldn't get a top-level article out of such an effort, just some edits for the article (and old articles get few hits, comments, or votes, if my comments are anything to go by).
I've been struggling with this for years, and the only thing I've found that works when nothing else does is hard exercise. The other two things that I've found help the most:
EDIT: Apparently keeping your room lights at a low color temperature (incandescent/halogen instead of fluorescent) is better than keeping them at low intensity:
"...we surmise that the effect of color temperature is greater than that of illuminance in an ordinary residential bedroom or similar environment where a lowering of physiological activity is desirable, and we therefore find the use of low color temperature illumination more important than the reduction of illuminance. Subjective drowsiness results also indicate that reduction of illuminance without reduction of color temperature should be avoided." —Noguchi and Sakaguchi, 1999 (note that these are commercial researchers at Matsushita, which makes low-color-temperature fluorescents)
That all sounds awfully biological -- are you sure fixing monitor light levels is a solution for akrasia?
No, the items I've given will only make you more sleepy at night than you would have been. If that's not enough, I agree it's akrasia of a sort, also known as having a super-high time preference.
Does that imply that HIDs are safer for long drives at night than halogen headlights?
If you use Mac OS, Nocturne lets you darken the display, lower its color temperature, etc. manually/more flexibly than F.lux.
For Linux, there's Redshift. I like it because it's kinder on my eyes, though it doesn't do anything for akrasia.
There is also Shades, which lets you set a tint color and which provides a slider so you can move gradually between standard and tinted mode.
What do you do instead of going to bed? I notice myself spending time on the Internet.
Either that or painting (The latter is harder to do because the cats tend to want to help me paint, yet don't get the necessity of oppose-able thumbs ... umm...Opposeable? Opposable??? anyway....)
Since I have had sleep disorders since I was 14, I've got lots of practice at not sleeping (pity there was no internet then)... So, I either read, draw, paint, sculpt, or harass people on the opposite side of the earth who are all wide awake.
Ah, that puts the causal chain opposite mine - I stay up because I'm doing something, not vice-versa.
I used to be more like MatthewB, but now I'm more like RobinZ. I tend to stay up browsing the Internet, reading sci-fi, or designing board games.
The roommate idea has worked in the past, and I do use it for 'emergencies.' My roommates don't really take akrasia seriously, though; they figure if I want to stay up all night and regret it, then that's just fine.
Random ideas:
Set an alarm clock or two for the time you want to go to bed, so you don't "lose track of the time."
Find some program that automatically turns off your Internet access at a certain time each night.