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My father once told me, before he passed:
"No matter what you need to fix in your life, start with sleep and food. You'll have difficulties improving anything else if these two basic needs aren't fulfilled"
That sounded very Captain Obvious at the time, but as I'm getting older, I realize more and more he was so right.
"Sleep is the most powerful Performance Enhancing Supplement" is another remark that feels true.
And as I get older, the more I realize how hard it is despite the best intentions.
Is it possible that people who lack self-control also have a poor sleep schedule? I know that I personally can be rather poor at telling myself to go to bed…
This is covered in the article: "Procrastinators sometimes fail to get enough sleep due to bedtime procrastination..."
I think the point the article is making is that if you want to reduce your procrastination, you should first try to regulate your sleep. Procrastinators who get a good night's sleep, will have a better chance of not procrastinating.
I’m just one data point, but I have definitely noticed that I procrastinate more when I haven’t slept as well.
From a shallow skim, it looks like this study compared the same people across multiple days.
I have a lot of trouble sleeping. One thing I've noticed is that when I'm not sleeping well not only do I procrastinate but a whole host of other negative things like overeating start to happen. The lack of sleep is clearly a cause for at least one of those things, but I suspect that many of the rest are chain reactions.
I am a pathological procrastinator and don't find that lack of sleep has much to do with it. Sleeping is in fact one of my go-to procrastination tactics.
On the flip side, I also seem to sleep poorly when I procrastinate. So not sure which way causation flows yet ;)
Definitely the same here.
That's also why I end up here half the time.. back to work.
I've become a heavy user of the phone app and browser extension called Forest that lets you blacklist a set of sites for a variable amount of time.
"you should first identify why you’re going to sleep later than intended, and then create a plan of action which allows you to deal with your specific set of reasons for procrastinating instead of going to sleep."
If only it was this simple.
The decision for me is basically "right now I'm playing video games/working on passion project, if I go to sleep I have to stop that, be unconscious for a while, and then go to work and not play video games/work on passion project".
Staying up later always wins.
I agree that this usually isn’t easy to accomplish, especially if bedtime procrastination is a serious issue for you. However, if you do decide to try and tackle this problem, this approach (identifying why you procrastinate and then tailoring a personal solution) is the way to go.
For example:
* If you can’t stop browsing social media before going to sleep, install an extension that cuts your access after a certain hour.
* If you feel too energetic to sleep, reduce caffeine intake/blue light exposure in the hours before bedtime.
* If you don’t feel motivated enough to go to sleep, use motivational techniques such as marking down streaks of days on which you successfully go to sleep on time.
Again, I'm not saying that it's easy, but if you’re willing to put in some effort, there are a lot of effective techniques you can use: https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-procrastinati...
> If you feel too energetic to sleep, reduce caffeine intake/blue light exposure in the hours before bedtime.
I struggled with this for a long time. I'd decide that I wanted to go to bed earlier, and wake up earlier, but would always fail with the former. I'd get in bed in time, but would never be able to fall asleep. It turns out the solution is really simple...
The silver bullet was:
Don't focus on bed time. That will come naturally. Go to bed whenever you can. The key is to WAKE UP early, every morning. Regardless of what time you went to bed, WAKE UP at your target hour the next morning.
Also - exercise each day. For me, lifting heavy weights and sleeping too little, quickly fixed my "too much energy" at night problem.
I feel like one out of my every three posts on HN are about the same thing, but this is dangerous advice for people with bipolar disorder, who could be up to 2% of the population.[0]
Not long ago there was a stigma about this thing that wasn't just about hiding it, it was about "it won't happen to me, I'm not crazy". But you can be in your mid 40s or early 50s before you have a first episode[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder [1] http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516...
Go to sleep when you can, wake up early and lift weights is dangerous advice for people with bipolar? It almost seems like you responded to a different comment (pull an all-nighter to reset your cycle).
It is. Lost sleep is a snowball. It's very easier for bipolars in a manic or even hypomanic state to sleep 5, 4, 2 hours a night and feel well-rested and ready to pull weights.
But diagnosed bipolar people know this. This is potentially harmful advice because many people may not know they have a latent bipolar disorder that hasn't manifested yet. In my parent comment I gave a histogram of the age of onset of one's first episode -- it's well possible to be a nondescript software engineer in one's early 40s and literally go crazy.
Of course, your proposal also has merits, so people should weigh risks and benefits. Also note family history, history of depression, etc. which are also risk factors.
Here's a recent survey of what w know about bipolars and sleep https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935164/
But basically this has been known empirically since old-timey asylums. Hippocrates probably has a hint of this as a factor of the "sacred disease". It's a fact.
But the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the population is like, 1% right? So if you have disturbed sleep in that sense (sleep 4-5h for weeks on end, but feel alert and well-rested) it is still quite unlikely to be due to undiagnosed bipolar? (vs needing less sleep naturally, using too much coffee, blue light, whatever)
I've had cases where I exercised and I couldn't sleep because I felt like I was burning up. My body was putting out loads of heat and I couldn't relax. This is at least 6 hours after. Maybe I need longer?
It turns out that neither of your two solutions has worked for me. In fact, the only thing that came remotely close was giving up caffeine. Sleep is complex.
Honestly, after years of sleep issues, it worked out more or less like that. The trick is that the "why" can be many layers deep.
In my case, lighting turned out to be a big issue. All of the following proved necessary:
* Blackout curtains that made my room darker at night * But, they were curtains. So, they were not so dark that no light came in in the morning. This helped me wake up * Better interior lighting for night. I bought some "bedtime bulbs" after I saw them on HN, and installed them in my lamps. They're very warm, and I feel sleepier * A red light in the lamp by my bed for reading * Morning light. First thing I do upon waking is walk outside in the light, and try to get in the sun. Even in Canadian winter * Morning light, part 2. I use a wakeup light, after reading about the one Sam Altman used here: http://blog.samaltman.com/productivity * I use "reduce white point" on my phone past seven or so. It's set fairly high * I make a point of getting ready for bed, and avoiding screens. So last hour is just getting stuff wrapped up for the day, hanging out, etc * Sleep tracking. I use an apple watch, and auto sleep. I more or less centre everything around getting as much as I can. It's massively improved everything else in my life. This tracking is also how I measured the effectiveness of the changes above.
All of the above basically reset the circadian rhythm. That was why I kept going to sleep later than intended. Again, I had years of what seemed like onset insomnia. Now, I more or less don't. I still take longer to fall asleep than my girlfriend does, but I regularly am asleep before 11, rather than 1-2 am. And I feel much happier for it.
I also use .3 msg of melatonin, around 5-6 pm, following a tip here about dosing. (Apparently it's either that, or a larger amount right before bed)
Just now, I noticed I felt awake and realized I had left the overhead lights on. While typing this comment I turned them off, turning on the lamps with warm lights, and feel sleepier.
I suspect that's not quite how the original article meant it, but looking at my process in hindsight, it was fairly simple. Just basically continual assessment focussed on "why". Why was I not sleeping? And what do experts recommend for circadian rhythm.
Honestly for me it's mood dependent. Feel good during the day -> enjoy staying up literally pacing till 2AM. Feel like an unmotivated lump that can't do anything -> sweet, sweet oblivion.
I guess that's related to what another commenter said, that essentially we stay up because it's more fun than the alternative. One thing that works for me as a result is focusing on dreams or stories I tell myself at bedtime to generate fun dreams. Another thing is give myself a goal where bedtime is somehow the reward (I will fold all the laundry and bake cookies, but then I have earned going to sleep) and it will make me feel like going to sleep is desirable even if in actuality laundry and cookies sounded much better.
Interesting, it's the opposite for me. If I'm feeling rotten, unmotivated, unproductive, and guilty about it, I'll tend to stay up later because my "self-discipline for the day" will feel eroded and I'll want to procrastinate the arrival of the next day where I'll be faced with dealing with the thing I put off. I can only usually make myself go to bed early if I feel like I'm already in a "disciplined state" for the day.
From my experience lack of sleep or low quality sleep will cause all kinds of problems. When I am sleep deprived I can't think straight, get irritable, anxious and depressed. And I think I observe this in other people too.
Lack of sleep causes lack of sleep for me.
I can't get anything done, so I lie away worrying about the things I didn't do. Repeat.
The only fix for me seems to be adrenaline. Working on something exciting, playing games, exercise - I don't feel tired. But brain work is hopeless and I struggle to get through the day.
I can correlate with this. My primary tool at work is my own brain and it's stressful to watch myself make mistakes due to my own choices, such as going to bed late, overeating, and overdrinking.
It's solvable, though, and I'm taking steps to help myself.
The original study (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0202...) is not recent as the article kicks off with; it was Received: 14 January 2018; Accepted: 02 October 2018; Published: 02 November 2018.
Also, this seems to be observed only in those "who have low trait self-control".
Adjusting the title for those two points may be more helpful.
In the scope of research, that's super recent - it probably took the authors 2 years or more to conduct the research they described.
Of course, anything could be adjusted for recency if you adjust the scope. However, if you read new research everyday, that's far from recent.
As for the probable 2 years period, it doesn't look like it is the case in the paper; "Seventy one full-time employees participated [...] Participants completed a one-shot general electronic questionnaire"
Another commenter recently posted a link to a lecture by Tim Pychyl [0] on another post about procrastination. I decided to watch it and came away feeling deeply informed about procrastination, why we do it, and how to solve it. It's a nuanced topic. Highly recommended if you have an hour to listen to this articulated lecture.
[0] http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA (2012, 60 mins.)
Pocrastination->loss of sleep-> procrastination->depression over procrastination->desperation->breakthrough->manic high productivity
That is my friends pattern. Kind of rough.
Why not give participants a fitbit or a smart watch to monitor their sleep quality? Are they just not accurate enough at the moment?
Fitbit are quite accurate (and it seems they're the most accurate right now), but they're real scum and don't allow chronologic data export. I got one since they have that as a feature, but it's such a shitty dataset that it's impossible to do anything with it. It's even a stretch to call it a dataset.
I'm still using mine in comparison with pencil and paper sleep charts, they agree well. It's just a shame I can't show the data from fitbit to my specialist.
Chronological sleep stages data appears available via the API: https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/
What would a good export look like?
What system do you have in place to prevent the battery being dead at inconvenient times? It's the main reason I don't use my fitbit enough, that and I find it uncomfortable to sleep with.
I recently found that nearly all of my procrastination problems in life could be relatively straightforwardly traced back to internet surfing on sites with infinite sources of novelty. As the meme goes, one nacho cheese Dorito has more extreme nacho cheese flavor than a medieval peasant would get in their entire lifetime. [https://twitter.com/matthewpcrowley/status/62107825382700236...] Our brains just aren't equipped to deal with novelty of this magnitude.
I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low accountability environment.
So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access.
The two that I've found to work the best for me are http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.... for Android.
I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've blocked apps like Chrome and the Youtube app permanently, and it's impossible to get around without wiping my phone (which I'm probably too lazy to do). I had to go ahead and install the Reddit app and mobile Firefox when I discovered I could install apps remotely through the Play Store on my laptop (ha!). I also block the Play Store app on the phone.
This makes my phone a phone, text messager, podcast player, audiobook player, and maps device rather than a source of infinite novelty.
For my laptop it's a little harder since I can't block the browser and and still do web dev, but the Cold Turkey app is the best app I've found to be as undefeatable as possible while still filtering specific sites. You can set up schedules, so I block sites after a certain time at night. Since, a key part of the procrastination cycle is staying up too late and then getting up later or tired, getting a bad start to the day, etc etc as the article suggests.
Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever, but it makes a very strong effort to disallow itself from being uninstalled. It's a desktop application, not a browser plugin, so it can actually prevent the whole "I'll just use IE to browse Reddit" problem that Chrome plugin blockers have. And having admin privileges, it can actually enforce blocks.
This may be a bit extreme, but modern life isn't really "normal" in any possible way for our meat sack bodies and brains.
I wouldn't say I've exactly "solved" this problem, as I do still think relaxation and getting new information are valuable. But making Reddit more than just a ctrl+t -> r -> enter away is helpful.
A great book about all of this that was also helpful for further motivating me to try to be proactive here was Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism [http://calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/].
It's not really a book about "quit Facebook", but rather "be intentional about the technology in your life instead of having technology happen to you. I've determined that Hacker News is a valuable use of my time within moderation, while Reddit doesn't really ever provide any sort of value, whether productive _or_ relaxing.
Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever
Err no, you just change the date/time and voila.
I tried changing the date and time to defeat some active blocks and it didn't seem to affect anything. Also it made Chrome complain about SSL certificates due to the clock being wrong, so I'll at least consider that to be enough hassle to keep me from trying it too much.
I am trying guided sleep to fall asleep faster and relaxed. It's helping me a lot.
I say this from experience that good sleep makes all the difference between a productive and a sucky day. You feel more focussed after a good sleep. Make good sleep a habit.
That explains a lot. I guess I need to start getting better sleep. Maybe I'll start next week. Or maybe the week after that.