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Houshalter 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.