6 ms·

I've suffered from insomnia most of my teen and adult life (I am 37). I sometimes go up to 3 days without sleep (thus 2 nights, ~60 hours total; 'record' just s

by K0SM0S 7y ago

I've suffered from insomnia most of my teen and adult life (I am 37). I sometimes go up to 3 days without sleep (thus 2 nights, ~60 hours total; 'record' just shy of 80 hours), then sleep for ~12 hours. I usually work almost the entire time. My "default" day seems to last 25~30 hours, give or take, which means that naturally there are more like 6 'days' per week for me. ('days' roughly defined as periods of wake time >12h between sleep times >6 hours) Sometimes, a 'night' just skips, well beyond 30 hours into the 40's or more — a no show, literally — and I simply go on for that time... But knowing this, and being a workhorse in permanent training — I made a point in my early 20's to train myself to become able to work for 12~16 hours a day if I want to, because it seemed like a skill in demand — I've largely accustomed myself to my weird body rythms. It's OK. Not that I can do a marathon in the last 20 hours, but I can function intellectually, emotionally and socially normally 'enough' that people don't notice unless I tell them — goes like: “btw, sorry if I'm a little slow, I haven't slept in 40 hours...” “WHAAAT!?... couldn't tell, but please don't die right now!” The best judge is quality of work, right? Well, on the next day after a good night's sleep, when I look back at it, I'm often amazed actually at the level of detail and attention, the elegance sometimes (think code, writing, making stuff/systems). Productivity is admittedly not great due to numerous breaks (coffee, eating helps a lot, just strolling for 10-15 minutes too), but not bad at all. 'Good' or 'deep' is more important to me than 'fast' anyway, so I probably geared for that along the years. I know all the risks of acute and chronic sleep deprivation, biological, psychological, I know. It's just surprisingly easy for me, and my body / thought just won't shut down anyway. I know I may die young — actually at any time whenever I'm beyond 40 hours awake... which may happen 10-20 times per year easily. Sometimes twice in a row (2 nights / 7 days). Nonetheless... it's proved impossible for me, for now, to just shut down. I admire people who can just go to bed and fall asleep 'on demand'. What is this sorcery?! Why can't I? I feel like I have unlocked the 'intelligence switch' quite early in my life (not 100% but well enough), and recently around 34 I unlocked the 'happiness switch' (took two decades but I basically 'solved' mental states and happiness for myself, I hope others too when I write this blog/book). I just hope the 'sleep switch' actually exists, and isn't 20 more years down the road for me. I'll say this: this condition is much harder from a social / career standpoint than from a physical one. It's easy on my body, but it's been incredibly hard and frustrating for my mind and heart to be out of sync with civilization for as long as I can remember. I mostly live in sync with NA, from Europe... (would that help a remote position? haha) I really don't know what to think of it, I just cope basically, and make the best out of it.

dwd 7y ago
I can fall asleep quickly, but I would also fit into the definition of chronically sleep deprived. (4 1/2 or 6 hours each night, sometimes only 3 hours) I never use an alarm and rely on daylight to wake up. You could try all those meditative techniques to get your brain to stop thinking actively about things but what I would suggest if you've tried everything else is - work out your sleep cycle and time going to bed to sleep some multiple of that. For me it's 90min, so if I need to get up at 6:00am, I strictly get to bed by 11:55pm, 1:25am, etc allowing myself 5 min to fall asleep. Seems to work for me.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  This is very good advice, thank you. I've known about sleep cycles for a long time and indeed, I do follow such patterns — my sleep, as little as I get, seems perfectly normal from a clinical standpoint. I just have the hardest time waking up at the desired time — just as difficult for me as falling asleep. I don't do well with too-short nights either, when my body decides to sleep it's largely best I let it sleep for as long as it needs (rarely more than 12h, it's weird how I clock 8-9 hours without an alarm most of the time like anyone 'normal'). However I've never tried correlating sleep time with wake time in terms of full cycles, and I'm pretty sure I could. I'll definitely try! Thanks again, so much.
miscellaneous 7y ago
Thank you for the detailed and interesting comment. I wish I could maintain my productivity for extended periods of time like you do. Unfortunately I find that my cognitive abilities drop-off very quickly when become tired. Also you talk of an 'intelligence switch'. Could you explain what you mean by that?
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Sure. It might be quite long if I really explained in detail, though. I really need to write the book of that eventually. Here's the very incomplete gist of it. The idea of an intelligence switch is basically a set of methods, a system, to train and foster the use of some "meta" forms of intelligence so to speak, whose primary purpose is to improve / enable / train intelligence itself. It's very much not a hack (efforts...) but does yield compound-like growth. It's very transdisciplinary in nature in that it does require exposing yourself to many fields and many mental frameworks or logics/models (the more, the better I suppose). I guess you could say it's a framework for the languages of intelligences, whose output (UI) is conscious thought and effect is actual real-world skills (actions) or models (world views) — technical, mental, social, emotional, political etc. What an exquisitely cheesy yet accurate-enough metaphor. It's pratically very comprehensive and probably sounds like "be great all-around with a super-trained brain" to most people, I'm afraid. Not quantum science though, elements and concepts are quite simple, but there's no shortcut to training each step. If you want pointers you might recognize, there's the book "Mindset" by Carol Dweck (2008, iirc), and a certain branch of (very practical, down-to-earth) philosophy dating back to Ancient Stoics all the way to 20th century Stephen Covey (the famous "7 habits", at least one in particular), passing by Viktor Frankl ("3rd" school of psychoanalysis dubbed "logotherapy" from logos, speech). You might have heard the quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Well, the training/building of this "space" + a "growth" mindset, I argue, can take 80% of people at least halfway there (leaps and bounds further than whatever is/are current average intelligences, well enough to kickstart and reap massive further improvements over the next generations). Knowledge of these methods and principles reminds me a lot of the Scientific Method for instance, hard at first to mold your brain with such rigor, but once internalized a formidable enabler of thought — at a civilizational scale. It's just vastly more general in scope than science or logic, and encompasses — by definition, not necessarily easily/always felt — all possible forms of intelligence, including meta-intelligence itself. It's no secret either, most of it is out there for the taking, has been for decades, sometimes millennia; but there is so much noise and intox obfuscating.

by K0SM0S 7y ago

dwd 7y ago

I can fall asleep quickly, but I would also fit into the definition of chronically sleep deprived. (4 1/2 or 6 hours each night, sometimes only 3 hours) I never use an alarm and rely on daylight to wake up. You could try all those meditative techniques to get your brain to stop thinking actively about things but what I would suggest if you've tried everything else is - work out your sleep cycle and time going to bed to sleep some multiple of that. For me it's 90min, so if I need to get up at 6:00am, I strictly get to bed by 11:55pm, 1:25am, etc allowing myself 5 min to fall asleep. Seems to work for me.

K0SM0S 7y ago
This is very good advice, thank you. I've known about sleep cycles for a long time and indeed, I do follow such patterns — my sleep, as little as I get, seems perfectly normal from a clinical standpoint. I just have the hardest time waking up at the desired time — just as difficult for me as falling asleep. I don't do well with too-short nights either, when my body decides to sleep it's largely best I let it sleep for as long as it needs (rarely more than 12h, it's weird how I clock 8-9 hours without an alarm most of the time like anyone 'normal'). However I've never tried correlating sleep time with wake time in terms of full cycles, and I'm pretty sure I could. I'll definitely try! Thanks again, so much.

miscellaneous 7y ago

Thank you for the detailed and interesting comment. I wish I could maintain my productivity for extended periods of time like you do. Unfortunately I find that my cognitive abilities drop-off very quickly when become tired. Also you talk of an 'intelligence switch'. Could you explain what you mean by that?

K0SM0S 7y ago
Sure. It might be quite long if I really explained in detail, though. I really need to write the book of that eventually. Here's the very incomplete gist of it. The idea of an intelligence switch is basically a set of methods, a system, to train and foster the use of some "meta" forms of intelligence so to speak, whose primary purpose is to improve / enable / train intelligence itself. It's very much not a hack (efforts...) but does yield compound-like growth. It's very transdisciplinary in nature in that it does require exposing yourself to many fields and many mental frameworks or logics/models (the more, the better I suppose). I guess you could say it's a framework for the languages of intelligences, whose output (UI) is conscious thought and effect is actual real-world skills (actions) or models (world views) — technical, mental, social, emotional, political etc. What an exquisitely cheesy yet accurate-enough metaphor. It's pratically very comprehensive and probably sounds like "be great all-around with a super-trained brain" to most people, I'm afraid. Not quantum science though, elements and concepts are quite simple, but there's no shortcut to training each step. If you want pointers you might recognize, there's the book "Mindset" by Carol Dweck (2008, iirc), and a certain branch of (very practical, down-to-earth) philosophy dating back to Ancient Stoics all the way to 20th century Stephen Covey (the famous "7 habits", at least one in particular), passing by Viktor Frankl ("3rd" school of psychoanalysis dubbed "logotherapy" from logos, speech). You might have heard the quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Well, the training/building of this "space" + a "growth" mindset, I argue, can take 80% of people at least halfway there (leaps and bounds further than whatever is/are current average intelligences, well enough to kickstart and reap massive further improvements over the next generations). Knowledge of these methods and principles reminds me a lot of the Scientific Method for instance, hard at first to mold your brain with such rigor, but once internalized a formidable enabler of thought — at a civilizational scale. It's just vastly more general in scope than science or logic, and encompasses — by definition, not necessarily easily/always felt — all possible forms of intelligence, including meta-intelligence itself. It's no secret either, most of it is out there for the taking, has been for decades, sometimes millennia; but there is so much noise and intox obfuscating.