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To everyone thinking about using caffine or other drugs to combat sleep: all of the latest sleep reseach would suggest that 'optimizing alertness during sleep l

To everyone thinking about using caffine or other drugs to combat sleep: all of the latest sleep reseach would suggest that 'optimizing alertness during sleep loss' is a fool's errand if what you want is productivity. The real goal must be to ensure you get enough sleep, not that you medicate yourself with caffine to stop your body from getting sleep signals. Think about it this way: If prolonged sleep were not absolutely essential to your survival and health, sleep would be the biggest mistake evolution has ever made. an animal spending 1/3 of its life unaware of it's surroundings is an incredibly steep evolutionary price to pay. It should be obvious that if we evolved to do that, there would be gigantic benefits to it, considering htat there is not a single known animal with a nervous system that does not sleep (including insects!). If caffine was actually helpful at reducing your need to sleep, an animal would have evolved by now to endogenously produce caffine. There is a substantial body of sleep literature now showing huge benefits to physical / mental performance, willpower and creativity from sleep. Don't fight it, use it. _____________________________________________ Edit: One statistic thats particularily compelling to me: Every year during daylight savings when everyone loses an hour of sleep, the rate of heart attacks rises by 25%. On the day of the year where everyone gains an hour of sleep, heart attacks fall by 21%. Thats the effect of gaining / losing a single hour of sleep.

abandonliberty 8y ago
How much of sleeping is explained by metabolism reduction/calorie conservation?
- eigenspace 8y ago
  In humans, metabolism only goes down ~35% at its very lowest point during deep sleep. In other phases of sleep, your metabolism is ~15% lower than during waking time. If sleep were for metabolic savings, it would be an incredibly inefficient way to go about it. In some senses, wakefulness may be thought of as neurotoxic and much of whats going on during sleep is centred around repairing the damage caused by being awake. For instance, the glial cells between your brain neurons shrink allowing your body to flush the beta amyloid from your brain with cerebral fluid. Beta-amyloid is a neurotoxic protein which causes Alzheimer's an is a byproduct of waking brain function. This explains the link between Alzheimer's and sleep deprivation. Sleep is also the phase where short-term memories are evaluated and either discarded or integrated into long-term memory. It's also essential for your immune health and cancer prevention. Your body produces dozens of cancer cells daily, but they're killed by your immune system. After only a single night's sleep deprivation, your amount of cancer-killing immune cells plummets. This is why shift work is now classified as carcinogenic in several countries. ____________________ Edit: Just on the topic of sleep being for energy savings, did you know that during hibernation (a state actually used for energy savings), bears will actually leave their hibernating state in order to sleep? I think that fact really showcases how important sleep is and should put to rest any notion that sleep is for energy savings.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Sleep deprivation doesn’t just affect cancer. With immune suppression chronic viral infections like warts flare up after a day or two of sleep deprivation. Allergies get worse. Anxiety shows up more easily (in response to milder stressful stimuli), has stronger effects, and takes longer to subside. In general cognitive function is impaired: alertness, memory, attention span, ... The skin and hair get greasier. ...
    - eigenspace 8y ago
      It is amazing how long one can go on listing new, exciting ways one's body begins to fail when sleep deprived.
- ravar 8y ago
  Probably none considering that calories are collected while awake, and there exist animals that collect calories during the night and the day.
  - hexane360 8y ago
    I agree with your conclusion, but this isn't sound logic. This assumes food is never supply-limited. If it is, then it could be advantageous to lie dormant for a period to allow supply to regenerate. Imagine a farmer who plants food (ideally low maintenance food) and then hibernates until it is fully grown.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      Something like human hibernation is reportedly possible for people who live isolated lives in places with tough winters (can’t remember where the article I read about this a few years ago was). It doesn’t happen in the modern world though: abundant food, many distractions, artificial lighting, climate controlled spaces, ...
rojobuffalo 8y ago
Totally agree. Trying to shortcut sleep is to misunderstand what happens in your brain while you are asleep. Your brain uses sleep to run processes akin to garbage collection, pathway reinforcement, and wide-range association building. It's a critical step in complex problem solving. If you're working on a problem during the day, then have a good night's sleep, you will typically find it easier to think about the problem or come up with a solution the following day.
- williamdclt 8y ago
  I don't know about problem solving (it's kinda hard to really experience it). But I've experienced that very regularly while playing music: Try to learn some how to play some complex part (piano, guitar, drums, whatever) sometime in the evening. You struggle obviously, you spend a good hour trying to get it. Give up, go to sleep: the next day you're way better at playing this part than you were after one hour of non-stop training
  - eigenspace 8y ago
    I've heard that one of the biggest things sleep does in this area is helping you fuse together small sequences. When learning a long sequence of actions be it musical or whatever, people learn chunks of smaller sequences (ie. learning to punch in the sequence 486142041 might be broken up into 4861-4202-41 with pauses inbetween that seem impossible to train out of you. As soon as one sleeps through, people suddenly are able to rattle off the whole sequence without the pauses. This is obviously essential for music.
  - rojobuffalo 8y ago
    Good point. There is probably more evidence of sleep's role in learning than problem solving. Reflecting on what I wrote, I think I was thinking about novel problems.
madcaptenor 8y ago
But sometimes you can't get enough sleep. One example is if you have a newborn baby. Ask me how I know.
- eigenspace 8y ago
  Fair enough, but my comment was aimed at people trying to get less sleep in order to fit more productivity into the day. I think there are situations where one has no choice but to be sleep deprived but those are extremis situations like war and having a newborn baby. Sleep science suggests that if we must be sleep deprived we should do everything we can to limit it. If you're the parent of a newborn, that likely means napping every chance you get to at least limit the damage you've done to your sleep through constant interurptions. Caffine will reduce the effectiveness of those naps.
  - madcaptenor 8y ago
    I think the usual advice is to "sleep when the baby sleeps", because they actually sleep quite a lot, just not when you want them to! What I really need is an algorithm that would predict, when I put the baby down, how long I should expect her to sleep (and therefore if I should grab a nap).
    - throwawayzxcz 8y ago
      have you tried just tracking the her sleeps on a spreadsheet or similar? You might see a pattern emerge. Had friends that did this. We never did, but after 3 kids and ~7 years of pretty consistently broken nights from one or other of the kids, I sometimes wish we did. My only other advice would be to take turns with the other parent to give each other a break. Whether it be week on/week off or night on/night off, and may involve someone sleeping in another room to get away from the disruption. I optimistically think a good night's sleep is just around the corner. Cultivating feelings of love and patience is well worth the effort. Having kids that don't sleep well is a special kind of torture, I can see how it would break some people.
merinowool 8y ago
This is a sound advice. I spent 10 years of my life trying to squeeze as much time awake time as I can using tons of coffee and that almost ruined my life and got me nowhere. I have managed to get some success in life once I gave up on that idea and was productive when I was feeling productive without forcing it. If I can't do anything during the day? Fine. If I feel sleepy? I go to sleep. It was important though, to wake up at the same time in the morning. I was unable to kick off the coffee addiction, but reduced it just one cup in the morning. I find coffee more difficult to quit than cigarettes.
- malnourish 8y ago
  I quit tobacco about 4 years ago after using for 7 years. I agree that quitting caffeine is more difficult, but I think part of that is social. I can enjoy sharing a cup of coffee with my SO just about anywhere without any dirty looks.
  - samsonradu 8y ago
    Oh yes, coffee is one of the less harmful pleasures of life! I would never consider quitting it, that doesn’t mean I’d neglect sleep though.
- lambda 8y ago
  I quit coffee for a year or two a while back. It didn't seem that hard to kick; a week or two of headaches and irritability, and then it was fine. I picked up the habit again just because it's nice to have that warm, tasty beverage to start the day, and decaf just isn't the same. As long as you keep it to one in the morning and maybe one in the early afternoon, it's fine.
tytytytytytytyt 8y ago
> It should be obvious that if we evolved to do that, there would be gigantic benefits to it For the environment in which it evolved, right?
petters 8y ago
Arguments by evolution are a bit problematic for modern-day humans. As gwern writes here: https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin > However, we are not in a natural situation, but a profoundly unnatural one. For children in particular, Matricciani et al 2012 demonstrated a drastic fall in their sleep time over the past century, indicating that they are not in any state of nature. But you are of course right that sleep is essential for performing optimally.
- eigenspace 8y ago
  To be fair, the fact that children have undergone a drastic fall in sleep time is not a good thing, and arguably, we can see that from evolutionary reasoning. But yes, I do agree with you that applying such arguments to humans is dangerous territory. My thinking is that evolutionary arguments should be somewhat trustworthy concerning humans and sleep because there's no evidence that we've found anything to replace sleep in humans. I think that the idea that caffeine could be an effective replacement for sleep silly because caffeine is something animals would have evolved to secrete if it was beneficial for them to do so. That said, if we found an intervention that significantly increases people's sleep quality and efficiency or to mimic all the benefits of sleep in waking humans then yes evolutionary arguments about humans and sleep go out the window.
geeCorrelation 8y ago
Every year during daylight savings You mean the holiday season, when people are stressed out by family matters, eating like garbage at seasonal gatherings, shovelling the hell out of some snow drifts, scraping ice off their windshields, and fighting the weather and general sedentary living, amid cabin fever among other things?
- eigenspace 8y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more clear, I was talking about the day that everyone rolls their clocks an hour forwards or backwards. On that day, you lose or gain an hour of sleep and this has measureable and extreme effects on the rate of heart attacks.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
> an animal spending 1/3 of its life unaware of it's surroundings is an incredibly steep evolutionary price to pay. Plants spend 100% of their time in that state. We only need to wake up to feed and fuck (and perform tasks to enable those things).

abandonliberty 8y ago

How much of sleeping is explained by metabolism reduction/calorie conservation?

eigenspace 8y ago
In humans, metabolism only goes down ~35% at its very lowest point during deep sleep. In other phases of sleep, your metabolism is ~15% lower than during waking time. If sleep were for metabolic savings, it would be an incredibly inefficient way to go about it. In some senses, wakefulness may be thought of as neurotoxic and much of whats going on during sleep is centred around repairing the damage caused by being awake. For instance, the glial cells between your brain neurons shrink allowing your body to flush the beta amyloid from your brain with cerebral fluid. Beta-amyloid is a neurotoxic protein which causes Alzheimer's an is a byproduct of waking brain function. This explains the link between Alzheimer's and sleep deprivation. Sleep is also the phase where short-term memories are evaluated and either discarded or integrated into long-term memory. It's also essential for your immune health and cancer prevention. Your body produces dozens of cancer cells daily, but they're killed by your immune system. After only a single night's sleep deprivation, your amount of cancer-killing immune cells plummets. This is why shift work is now classified as carcinogenic in several countries. ____________________ Edit: Just on the topic of sleep being for energy savings, did you know that during hibernation (a state actually used for energy savings), bears will actually leave their hibernating state in order to sleep? I think that fact really showcases how important sleep is and should put to rest any notion that sleep is for energy savings.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Sleep deprivation doesn’t just affect cancer. With immune suppression chronic viral infections like warts flare up after a day or two of sleep deprivation. Allergies get worse. Anxiety shows up more easily (in response to milder stressful stimuli), has stronger effects, and takes longer to subside. In general cognitive function is impaired: alertness, memory, attention span, ... The skin and hair get greasier. ...
  - eigenspace 8y ago
    It is amazing how long one can go on listing new, exciting ways one's body begins to fail when sleep deprived.
ravar 8y ago
Probably none considering that calories are collected while awake, and there exist animals that collect calories during the night and the day.
- hexane360 8y ago
  I agree with your conclusion, but this isn't sound logic. This assumes food is never supply-limited. If it is, then it could be advantageous to lie dormant for a period to allow supply to regenerate. Imagine a farmer who plants food (ideally low maintenance food) and then hibernates until it is fully grown.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Something like human hibernation is reportedly possible for people who live isolated lives in places with tough winters (can’t remember where the article I read about this a few years ago was). It doesn’t happen in the modern world though: abundant food, many distractions, artificial lighting, climate controlled spaces, ...

rojobuffalo 8y ago

Totally agree. Trying to shortcut sleep is to misunderstand what happens in your brain while you are asleep. Your brain uses sleep to run processes akin to garbage collection, pathway reinforcement, and wide-range association building. It's a critical step in complex problem solving. If you're working on a problem during the day, then have a good night's sleep, you will typically find it easier to think about the problem or come up with a solution the following day.

williamdclt 8y ago
I don't know about problem solving (it's kinda hard to really experience it). But I've experienced that very regularly while playing music: Try to learn some how to play some complex part (piano, guitar, drums, whatever) sometime in the evening. You struggle obviously, you spend a good hour trying to get it. Give up, go to sleep: the next day you're way better at playing this part than you were after one hour of non-stop training
- eigenspace 8y ago
  I've heard that one of the biggest things sleep does in this area is helping you fuse together small sequences. When learning a long sequence of actions be it musical or whatever, people learn chunks of smaller sequences (ie. learning to punch in the sequence 486142041 might be broken up into 4861-4202-41 with pauses inbetween that seem impossible to train out of you. As soon as one sleeps through, people suddenly are able to rattle off the whole sequence without the pauses. This is obviously essential for music.
- rojobuffalo 8y ago
  Good point. There is probably more evidence of sleep's role in learning than problem solving. Reflecting on what I wrote, I think I was thinking about novel problems.

madcaptenor 8y ago

But sometimes you can't get enough sleep. One example is if you have a newborn baby. Ask me how I know.

eigenspace 8y ago
Fair enough, but my comment was aimed at people trying to get less sleep in order to fit more productivity into the day. I think there are situations where one has no choice but to be sleep deprived but those are extremis situations like war and having a newborn baby. Sleep science suggests that if we must be sleep deprived we should do everything we can to limit it. If you're the parent of a newborn, that likely means napping every chance you get to at least limit the damage you've done to your sleep through constant interurptions. Caffine will reduce the effectiveness of those naps.
- madcaptenor 8y ago
  I think the usual advice is to "sleep when the baby sleeps", because they actually sleep quite a lot, just not when you want them to! What I really need is an algorithm that would predict, when I put the baby down, how long I should expect her to sleep (and therefore if I should grab a nap).
  - throwawayzxcz 8y ago
    have you tried just tracking the her sleeps on a spreadsheet or similar? You might see a pattern emerge. Had friends that did this. We never did, but after 3 kids and ~7 years of pretty consistently broken nights from one or other of the kids, I sometimes wish we did. My only other advice would be to take turns with the other parent to give each other a break. Whether it be week on/week off or night on/night off, and may involve someone sleeping in another room to get away from the disruption. I optimistically think a good night's sleep is just around the corner. Cultivating feelings of love and patience is well worth the effort. Having kids that don't sleep well is a special kind of torture, I can see how it would break some people.

merinowool 8y ago

This is a sound advice. I spent 10 years of my life trying to squeeze as much time awake time as I can using tons of coffee and that almost ruined my life and got me nowhere. I have managed to get some success in life once I gave up on that idea and was productive when I was feeling productive without forcing it. If I can't do anything during the day? Fine. If I feel sleepy? I go to sleep. It was important though, to wake up at the same time in the morning. I was unable to kick off the coffee addiction, but reduced it just one cup in the morning. I find coffee more difficult to quit than cigarettes.

malnourish 8y ago
I quit tobacco about 4 years ago after using for 7 years. I agree that quitting caffeine is more difficult, but I think part of that is social. I can enjoy sharing a cup of coffee with my SO just about anywhere without any dirty looks.
- samsonradu 8y ago
  Oh yes, coffee is one of the less harmful pleasures of life! I would never consider quitting it, that doesn’t mean I’d neglect sleep though.
lambda 8y ago
I quit coffee for a year or two a while back. It didn't seem that hard to kick; a week or two of headaches and irritability, and then it was fine. I picked up the habit again just because it's nice to have that warm, tasty beverage to start the day, and decaf just isn't the same. As long as you keep it to one in the morning and maybe one in the early afternoon, it's fine.

tytytytytytytyt 8y ago

> It should be obvious that if we evolved to do that, there would be gigantic benefits to it For the environment in which it evolved, right?

petters 8y ago

Arguments by evolution are a bit problematic for modern-day humans. As gwern writes here: https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin > However, we are not in a natural situation, but a profoundly unnatural one. For children in particular, Matricciani et al 2012 demonstrated a drastic fall in their sleep time over the past century, indicating that they are not in any state of nature. But you are of course right that sleep is essential for performing optimally.

eigenspace 8y ago
To be fair, the fact that children have undergone a drastic fall in sleep time is not a good thing, and arguably, we can see that from evolutionary reasoning. But yes, I do agree with you that applying such arguments to humans is dangerous territory. My thinking is that evolutionary arguments should be somewhat trustworthy concerning humans and sleep because there's no evidence that we've found anything to replace sleep in humans. I think that the idea that caffeine could be an effective replacement for sleep silly because caffeine is something animals would have evolved to secrete if it was beneficial for them to do so. That said, if we found an intervention that significantly increases people's sleep quality and efficiency or to mimic all the benefits of sleep in waking humans then yes evolutionary arguments about humans and sleep go out the window.

geeCorrelation 8y ago

Every year during daylight savings You mean the holiday season, when people are stressed out by family matters, eating like garbage at seasonal gatherings, shovelling the hell out of some snow drifts, scraping ice off their windshields, and fighting the weather and general sedentary living, amid cabin fever among other things?

eigenspace 8y ago
Sorry, I should have been more clear, I was talking about the day that everyone rolls their clocks an hour forwards or backwards. On that day, you lose or gain an hour of sleep and this has measureable and extreme effects on the rate of heart attacks.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

> an animal spending 1/3 of its life unaware of it's surroundings is an incredibly steep evolutionary price to pay. Plants spend 100% of their time in that state. We only need to wake up to feed and fuck (and perform tasks to enable those things).