I've recently been finding that I struggle much more with intellectual work (math, hard programming, writing, etc.) when I sleep less 6.5-7 hours. While I'm at peace with the fact that I seem to generally require >7 hours a sleep, it's frustrating that even though I set aside enough time for adequate sleep, I'll often wake up after only ~6 hours of sleep and not be able to fall back asleep.
My cognitive ability seems to be impacted by a single night of bad sleep even when I've been sleeping well in the recent past. Concretely, if I've slept 8 hours every night for two weeks, a single night of poor sleep can still result in a ~50% less productive day.
In addition to impacting productivity, acute sleep deprivation also leaves me much less capable of entertaining myself by thinking, so I become much more inclined to seek out distracting forms of entertainment like scrolling through the internet. It also seems to increase my cravings for generally "unhealthy" foods (I've seen references to this in literature, but won't bother linking them since it's not the focus of my question).
Other useful notes about my general sleep habits/history include:
- I'm not sure if I've always been this sensitive to sleep deprivation and just notice it more due to a combination of more introspective and spending more time on certain activities or if something's changed and I've become more sensitive.
- I generally have 1 cup of coffee in the morning around when I wake up. More cups of coffee do not seem to offset sleep deprivation's impact on my cognitive ability, and in fact have at times exacerbated it.
- I've tried napping when it's fit with my schedule and each time ended up lying awake for the 20-40 minutes during which I intended to nap.
I'd love to hear others' strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognitive ability. I've done some preliminary searching for papers, articles, etc., but those that I've found focus on reducing tiredness rather than on returning cognitive ability to baseline. I'm open to trying strategies including but not limited to diet changes, supplements, medication, and habit changes.
And that's why I kept hanging out on Facebook more, for two reasons.
There has been some previous discussion about this topic (including several meta posts) on LW, where I tried to participate in the conversation in ways I wasn't doing, and found it annoying, so I thought it'd be productive to post my own thoughts on this in an attempt to avoid these kinds of comments.
Since it looks like in-person conversation is not a good locus of conversation, after all, this probably has a lot more to do with "let's speak truth" than "let's talk truth".
The first time I got into any social circle, it felt like I had a lot more friends than I had and a lot more commitments. So, I wrote something on Facebook:
Hi there everyone, I'm a longterm supporter of truth-oriented group house organization HPMOR, which works on our summer fundraising drive now.
I feel like we're growing very quickly, and it's growing very quickly; I'm currently studying maths and some theoretical physics after summer courses in my free time.
Now that I've read the Sequences, I feel like I'm always going to be doing something stupid, and it's definitely worth wasting my time and energy on doing more research into artificial intelligence or decision theory.
It took me some time to actually get myself to do this. I'd like to "see where we're coming from" but it's really bad for at least the rest of my life and I feel like my habits are slowing me down.
Thanks for making this possible! Hopefully we can do another push in the direction of truth (and hopefully humanity will learn something from it).
The rest of my life will probably be relatively less important as I work on the problem now, but I've found it useful to try to "see where we're coming from" and do a lot more research into it. I'd be grateful to Eliezer to endorse his time, energy, appreciation and self-care. His work is dangerously close to nothing, I think, and I'm hoping to contribute more in the future.
Thanks for being a part of this site and reading these posts!