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.
While not directly a response to the question as asked, I agree with many of the other contributors that sleep tracking is valuable as part of an overall sleep strategy.
I use a FitBit Ionic to track my own sleep and feel that it is quite accurate, at least as far as sleep/wake times go. I can't really assess sleep stage accuracy, but I've found that's of less value than simply tracking sleep/wake/duration. After a year of not trying to be that disciplined, I recently started paying more attention again to sleep tracking and my sleep behavior in general.
What always strikes me when I look at my sleep data after a few months of not looking at it is that my subjective sense of my sleep behavior is just way off. I'll think that I've been going to sleep 11-12pm each night with occasional nights of staying up to 1-2am, but then the data says 1-2am is the norm. Similarly I'll think that most nights I'm getting enough sleep the for data to tell me that's the minority.
Related to the importance of a consistent routine and well entrained circadian rhythm, I'm now focusing more on sleep time and wake time than whether I successfully slept enough hours or how many times I wake up in the night (a struggle for me). The time I got to sleep is especially an input I much more directly control than the output of whether it was a good night's sleep. It seems good to focus directly on the thing I can control, separately checking whether it is having the desired flow-on effects.
Fitbit's out of the box sleep dashboard is pretty nice, but doesn't make the data I most care about immediately apparent. It's got one graph which shows sleep and wake times over the course of the past week, but I feel it's not quite enough as a feedback loop on my behavior. As a solution to that, I recently set up my own report derived from the data to be emailed to me each day. (I did something similar in 2016 except with an online dashboard. The dashboard had the disadvantage that after a few months when I got busy and distracted I stopped checking it. Since I check email daily, I'm hoping I'll be far less likely to stop looking at my new report.)
. . .
You can see a sample of my sleep report here.
My sleep is not quite as consistent as I'd like yet, but a 5x improvement of previous months. I do allow myself exceptions for social events and other unusual circumstances; for now I'm focused on avoiding those nights when it just wasn't worth it to stay up late and I'm pointlessly sacrificing tomorrow in particular and my overall sleep hygiene in general.