6 ms·

Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination

172 points by EndXA 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago
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…
- paulgb 8y ago
  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.
  - remyM 8y ago
    Definitely the same here. That's also why I end up here half the time.. back to work.
    - paulgb 8y ago
      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.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    On the flip side, I also seem to sleep poorly when I procrastinate. So not sure which way causation flows yet ;)
  - ams6110 8y ago
    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.
  - jghn 8y ago
    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.
- amanzi 8y ago
  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.
peshooo 8y ago
"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.
- EndXA 8y ago
  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-procrastinating/ https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-procrastinati...
  - rubicon33 8y ago
    > 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.
    - tomcam 8y ago
      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.
maxxxxx 8y ago
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.
- accrual 8y ago
  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.
- hnick 8y ago
  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.
accrual 8y ago
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 http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA (2012, 60 mins.)
PierredeFermat 8y ago
The original study (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02029/full 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.
- ejstronge 8y ago
  In the scope of research, that's super recent - it probably took the authors 2 years or more to conduct the research they described.
  - PierredeFermat 8y ago
    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"
davidscolgan 8y ago
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/621078253827002368?lang=en 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 http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.appblock 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. See also https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/
okonomiyaki3000 8y ago
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.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
Pocrastination->loss of sleep-> procrastination->depression over procrastination->desperation->breakthrough->manic high productivity That is my friends pattern. Kind of rough.
bigbaguette 8y ago
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.
- michaelchisari 8y ago
  And as I get older, the more I realize how hard it is despite the best intentions.
- audiometry 8y ago
  "Sleep is the most powerful Performance Enhancing Supplement" is another remark that feels true.
HiroshiSan 8y ago
Why not give participants a fitbit or a smart watch to monitor their sleep quality? Are they just not accurate enough at the moment?
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  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.
  - HiroshiSan 8y ago
    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.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    Chronological sleep stages data appears available via the API: https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ What would a good export look like?
sidcool 8y ago
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.

172 points by EndXA 8y ago

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…

paulgb 8y ago
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.
- remyM 8y ago
  Definitely the same here. That's also why I end up here half the time.. back to work.
  - paulgb 8y ago
    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.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  On the flip side, I also seem to sleep poorly when I procrastinate. So not sure which way causation flows yet ;)
- ams6110 8y ago
  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.
- jghn 8y ago
  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.
amanzi 8y ago
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.

peshooo 8y ago

"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.

EndXA 8y ago
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-procrastinating/ https://solvingprocrastination.com/how-to-stop-procrastinati...
- rubicon33 8y ago
  > 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.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    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.

maxxxxx 8y ago

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.

accrual 8y ago
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.
hnick 8y ago
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.

accrual 8y ago

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 http://youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA (2012, 60 mins.)

PierredeFermat 8y ago

The original study (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02029/full 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.

ejstronge 8y ago
In the scope of research, that's super recent - it probably took the authors 2 years or more to conduct the research they described.
- PierredeFermat 8y ago
  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"

davidscolgan 8y ago

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/621078253827002368?lang=en 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 http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.appblock 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. See also https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

okonomiyaki3000 8y ago

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.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

Pocrastination->loss of sleep-> procrastination->depression over procrastination->desperation->breakthrough->manic high productivity That is my friends pattern. Kind of rough.

bigbaguette 8y ago

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.

michaelchisari 8y ago
And as I get older, the more I realize how hard it is despite the best intentions.
audiometry 8y ago
"Sleep is the most powerful Performance Enhancing Supplement" is another remark that feels true.

HiroshiSan 8y ago

Why not give participants a fitbit or a smart watch to monitor their sleep quality? Are they just not accurate enough at the moment?

quantum_magpie 8y ago
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.
- HiroshiSan 8y ago
  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.
- brlewis 8y ago
  Chronological sleep stages data appears available via the API: https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/sleep/ What would a good export look like?

sidcool 8y ago

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.