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CellBioGuy comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a problem. I refuse to sleep.
I don't mean I can't sleep. I've done experiments where I go to bed with some audio playing that I know, from say a movie, and the next morning I do not remember anything past 5-10 minutes into it. I mean that I just don't sleep. If I have nothing going on in the morning I will stay up until the wee hours of the morning shortly before sunrise regardless of how much sleep I have gotten lately or when I woke up. The only thing that drives me to go to bed is the knowledge that I simply cannot function and feel horrible on less than three hours of sleep. I can also tell after the fact that I am quite foggy on less than 7 hours, but at the time it doesn't feel terribly odd.
I've been tracking my sleep with a tablet under my pillow for over a year now and I average between just under and just over 5 hours a night, depending on the particular month, but the standard deviation is at least two hours and it varies from 2 to 9 hours a night chaotically with no apparent pattern. Worse, in the last six months I think my age (25) is catching up to me - my productivity on low-sleep days has dropped precipitously, and nights that I used to go with 3 or 4 hours of sleep I have a tendency to oversleep through six alarms and wind up with just under 8. I think my body simply can't get by on as little sleep as I used to give it. This leads to me getting into work late (as a grad student done with class-style instruction and just doing my research and talking with faculty my schedule is quite flexible as long as I put in my time) and staying quite late, phase shifting my schedule and screwing up social aspects of my life and encouraging me to go to bed far too late and repeat the cycle.
Again the problem is not with sleeping itself, the problem is with letting myself stop doing things and actually go to bed. There is always something else I want to be doing, be it more research in the lab or reading or internetisms or talking to people 3 time zones west in California. I used to get by but now it is affecting my work and social life.
Any ideas on how to help fix this? I tried going to my university's counseling services but all they did was make sure I wasn't psychotic and suggest ritalin at which point I cancelled the followup appointment.
Artificial lighting (mainly blue light) inhibits melatonin and affects sleeping. Try turning off the lights, dimming screens, using f.lux, or wearing yellow tinted goggles.
This.
I have a tendency to stay up too late as well.
But I've recently taken to reading on my paperwhite kindle before bed. You can turn down the brightness quite low, and I find myself just getting sleepy and going to bed.
You can just have a shade of gray you prefer with a black background instead of fighting with absolutely retarded brightness anti-features.
It's often called "inverted colors" or whatever other cool name the software manufacturer decided to give it.
I'll give that a try, but haven't the UI people pretty well determined a long time ago that you want to read darker text on a lighter background?
Why should the UI people make decisions for you? Try it, you won't be disappointed.
Because lots of money and time are spent by smart people to get this right, and I don't see any reason to doubt that they've gotten this right.
I'll give it a try, though.
People are pretty attached to things being the way they've always been. White on black could leave readers feeling better, but manufacturers would still default to black on white because that's what seems normal to people from printed books.
Ergonomics people have actually studied this.
Have they proved that for moderate contrast rather than extreme contrast?
I don't know what they've proved, but given the sums of money and smart people involved in UI design, I expect they've worked this out. I'm not one to generally trust the authorities, but in this case I don't see any institutional reasons to expect them to get this wrong.
But I'll give it a try on my kindle.
You're confusing the question of whether the UI design people have correctly figured out the population average with the question of whether there is wide individual variation around that average.
It's pretty easy to figure out how you, personally, like to read text on a screen.
Check out http://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info.php for more info.
Have a schelling point for going to bed, get f.lux on your computer, use melatonin a half hour before your schelling point, use an alarm to remind you of your schelling point and use stayfocusd to block your browsing. A combination of these strategies is what worked for me.
Just in case it helps to know you aren't alone: I have a similar problem (and always have, to varying degrees; I'm substantially older than you are). I don't think mine is as severe as yours.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to have wrecked my life too badly. The bad news is that after all these years I haven't fixed it. The good news is that I haven't really tried super-hard. The bad news is that if your character resembles mine in other ways you probably also won't try super-hard. Make of all that what you will.
Maybe you should introduce a non-work step between the work and sleep. Exercise (something easy like yoga) or meditation or whatever. Because then it will not be "from work to sleep" (which is difficult for you now), but "from work to meditation" and "from meditation to sleep" (which could be easier).
(1) Set a bed time for yourself for the next week. (2) Promise to give me $1000 if you do not keep your bed time. (3) If you stick to your bedtime be mindful if you feel happier and more productive. (4) If the answer to (3) is yes then use this to motivate yourself to get to sleep on time in the future.
I have an alarm that goes off at 8:30 pm, at which point I begin winding down my computer use, and eventually switch to reading under a red light for approximately 30 minutes, then I go to bed.
There are people who have success taking melatonin 30 minutes before they want to go to bed, because that makes them tired enough to want to go to bed once it kicks in. This does not work for me because my ability to resist fatigue is greater than melatonin's ability to fatigue me, but I expect it's worth trying, and is likely to help with building up the previous suggestion as a habit.
There are general-purpose self-modification techniques to shift your preferences and habits, and I think restedness is important enough to pull out the big guns. (Commitment contacts, daily affirmations, hypnosis, etc.)
Worth noting that a medical prescribing app lots of doctors use (blanking on the specific one, saw it a few months ago, possibly Epocrates) suggests taking melatonin more like 2-4 hours before sleep, so this parameter may be worth experimenting on.
I recall Eliezer discussing the MetaMed report for him suggesting taking it 5 hours before he wanted to go to sleep, but that was in large part because of his delayed sleep phase disorder. This Reddit thread suggests that 2 hours and 20-30 minutes are both commonly suggested, so agreed that experimentation is likely a good idea.
I've been lurking for a while and wasn't going to join the discussions until I'd finished the sequences, but it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned the possibility of just switching to a 28 hour sleep cycle. I've wanted to try one for years, but college or work always conflicted.
Basically, you go to sleep 4 hours later each night. Your first bedtime is midnight, then 4AM, then 8AM, etcetera. By the 6^th sleep cycle, you will have slipped back a total of 24 hours. Because of this, the crossover point occurs after 7 days. This means it is possible to maintain a relatively normal schedule, so long as you can leave work early on Mondays, and get to work late on Fridays due to sleep.
Xkcd has a rather nice graphical illustration, and the comic explanation is a bit more thorough than I was.
And this schedule will also drive you stark raving mad.
Shift work, especially work where you have to be up at night sometimes but not always, is associated with heart attacks, weight gain and several different psychiatric conditions that involve being miserable and unproductive etc.
If you want to change your sleep schedule without getting jet lagged you should shift your wake up time by no more than 10 minutes per day. So shifting one hour should take almost a week, four hours the better part of a month.
This isn't traditional shift work; in shift work you shift by 8 hours all at once, and then it takes ~5 days for bodily hormones to adjust. Shifting by 2 hours a day has less of an obvious problem. Do you have a source for that 10 minutes claim? IIRC the body's natural cycle in the absence of external cues tends to be ~25 hours, so I would expect the "no jetlag shift" to be asymmetric.
See also c2's 28 hour day and 36 hour day
I agree with tut that this doesn't work as any kind of regular schedule. Possibly temporary when you are young and have enough extra power to burn.
Ways to develop habits: start small, give yourself positive reinforcement, give yourself negative reinforcement, get someone else to force you... Try committing to no matter what go to bed without devices at midnight on Sundays? Try taking short naps at predetermined times and rewarding yourself with chocolate chips when you successfully lie down with an alarm prepped to get you back up? Try putting aside $100 in singles each month and burning one whenever you stay up after thinking "I should go to sleep"? Do you have a roommate? Can you get someone to call you at 11:30 PM each night and stay on the phone until you're tucked in? :) Have you tried reframing sleep to yourself as a productivity booster rather than a time-waster? "Okay present self, you know future you will think you could have gotten more done if you just went to sleep now rather than staying up trying to do things, so hop to bed now"
I'm not exactly sure about the kind of lab research that you are doing. Are you doing research where it's essential to sometimes work at 3 AM?
If that's not the case you could have a hard rule of not doing research, browsing the internet or talking to people after 12PM.
It quite easy to put scripts on a computer that automatically shut down the computer at a specific time.
Try to hack your body into feeling more relaxed so your scholarly zeal calms down a bit and lets your mind rest.
I'll tell you what works for me.
Good luck! :)
EDIT: Oh, also what about psychoactive stuff like coffee and alcohol? Coffee in the afternoons can cause tossing and turning at night even though the wakefulness benefits are long gone. Alcohol is considered a CNS depressant but it can still lead to some difficulty sleeping because of other related effects.
You are not alone. I also have enough concentration to still work 16 hours straight - if I'm interested. At some point in time it degrades but that can be as late as 4 o'clock and then I'm screwed because my children (which also need less sleep than their age average) will wake me in any case. So my motivation to go to bed is much stronger than yours but nonetheless every now and then I will have to make do with 4.5 hours. Luckily my required average amount of sleep is 6,5 hours a day. I use multiple tricks mostly mentioned in other comments too: Red glasses at a fixed time (22:30) , schelling point at midnight, commitment to get up before 6:50 on the first ringing of the alarm (used simulation recently to make that work). All to varying degress of continuity (I form habits slowly). I guess you have to experiment, live with it or indeed use commitments. Partners can be strong motivator on this.
I have had this for the last 10 years. Given that you are a graduate student like me, I think there's no better solution than simply scheduling your day to start in the afternoon. It's far easier to ask that a meeting be held in the afternoon than doing all sorts of crazy stuff to revert your natural sleep cycle. Wiki article on this disorder: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder