Item — HN Reader

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...

1 comments

> 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)

Edit: maybe this communicates it better to some people - bipolar is a tail risk of sleep deprivation / experimentation with sleep schedules / etc. It is low-probability.

But not fucking with your sleep is "antifragile". If you agree with Taleb generally, you won't risk it. The downsides are immense. You can easily spend all your savings in one weekend buying soviet filmmaking gear. And that's just the financial side. Bipolar is treatable but doesn't go away. It's just easier to handle. You go to the grave with your pillbox in hand, just in case they buried you alive.

The minor disruption of having to take a handful of pills every night, 3 minutes times 365 days times 35 years = 2100 hours. You could probably learn French, German and Italian in that time. I'm refraining from talking about the major downsides. Educate yourself.

--- You can also have a latent allergy to peanuts but you always ate small portions. Then someone says "eat only peanuts for a week" and someone says "beware, some allergies are cumulative-exposure, you could be especially sensitive". Then you weigh your risks and benefits. Maybe have someone around to help you if you choke.

With bipolar you won't know what's happening right away. It will seem you're having the best period of your life (and you are!). Weigh your risks and benefits. What's being proposed is a lifehack. You could also try to sleep right the way your mother taught you to.

That makes sense. I've never spent my life savings but I did behave in a way that was both way out of character and quite shameful once as a result of an inconvenient flight schedule. It's weird how people speak of sleep deprivation as, well, not exactly healthy, but not downright dangerous. I guess that's how they talked about cigarettes back in the day too.

Perhaps there need to be more pushback from us tech workers when we hear about, e.g., all night hackathons or polyphasic microsleep experiments or the need for nap rooms in offices to compensate for all those 2am coding sessions or something. That some people definitely experience adverse effects where the consequences can be hard to control and some people's lives can be literally wrecked by the thing.

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.