21 ms·

Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

357 points by rustoo 6y ago

quichelorraine 6y ago
I remember reading the results of a study a few years ago that said people in poverty suffered something like a drop in cognitive ability. I wonder if the effect reported here is related.
raghuveerdotnet 6y ago
Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.
- reedf1 6y ago
  I think it goes beyond resilience, at least for me. Sleep is required to experience a state without stress.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  The thing is, that when you have a high level of stress, you will find it hard to sleep well. "Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep" So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.
  - johnnujler 6y ago
    I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.
- hyperpallium2 6y ago
  > revenge bedtime procrastination: a phenomenon in which people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
  - hnick 6y ago
    For me, it started as more of a reverse-Christmas situation - if I go to sleep, the next thing I know I'll be having to got to work and I really don't want that! Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  During a very difficult time in my life recently, I found it impossible to sleep. I would have stress nightmares and even when i did fall asleep, I would soon wake myself up with specific scenarios my mind was trying to work out. I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation. I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep. Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again. This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists. My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills. I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds. Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience. I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping. Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.
  - PKop 6y ago
    Sounds similar to why many watch these types of videos: [0] I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1] As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA
  - sedgjh23 6y ago
    I am sorry you are going through this. Thank you for sharing.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Wow, "revenge bedtime procrastination" is such an apt term (not being cynical). In Chinese, it's a single, uhm, guess you could call it a word: 報復性熬夜 See also: https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/advice/living/article/3113045/what-revenge-bedtime-procrastination-and-why-do-we-do-it https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/advice/living/article/31130...
- closeparen 6y ago
  I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived. This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.
  - mcbuilder 6y ago
    In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch. Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work. And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      > In the real world Do we just live in the different real worlds? Because in my real world, deadlines are almost always arbitrary and fungible so long as the right kind of communication is made -- the only times I've seen that not be the case for me/folks in my network is 1) when they're working on something that's actually time critical (rare but does happen) and 2) when they're working in a dysfunctional, top-down environment (far more common). I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea that you might lose a client by missing a deadline by 2-3 weeks (rather than not selling them well enough). Is this a hypothetical situation you're talking about? Sometimes, 2-3 weeks is as fast as they'll get back to you with a single hop of communication. The other example of engineers get down-evaluated for ending up jumping on the grenade of a task that gets significantly longer (sometimes by months) -- I do see that happen from time to time but whether the manager down-evaluates is often inversely correlated with that manager/management chain's capability. The good managers understand that scope creep and an unforeseen gotchas happen; they don't want to take those instances as failures but rather . > When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days. Why? That sounds like unproductive, unhealthy self-martyrship. It's the complete opposite of how a competent professional works through things. Do you simply like to suffer? There's a reason people don't work like that in the "real world" and it's because there are actual real dollars on the line and competent organizations understand that such behavior purely results in expensive unforced errors.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  The other thing is that if you’re not an individual contributor, trust your people and let go of things. I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory. Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.
- aantix 6y ago
  You're leaving out nutritional deficiencies. Specifically, magnesium, for which most are deficient. When you increase your levels of magnesium, suddenly it's easier to be present, meditate, mental endurance increases, you can endure much more mental stress. If you're deficient, it can lead to a bad, downward spiral. Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3672/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3672/htm "The idea of a bidirectional relationship between magnesium and stress was first introduced by Galland and Seelig, in the early 1990s [9,10] and then referred to as the vicious circle. This vicious circle implies that stress can increase magnesium loss, causing a deficiency; in turn, magnesium deficiency can enhance the body’s susceptibility to stress"
- notacoward 6y ago
  > nothing helps as much as a good night sleep ...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.
seibelj 6y ago
I have anxiety / stress / depression issues and when it gets really bad I toss and turn all night, unable to sleep. By day 3 all of my muscles and joints ache terribly. During sleep your body is clearing itself of waste and healing. So not only are you a miserable zombie, your body itself is falling apart! I have enormous empathy for anyone who suffers from mental health issues. I take Lexapro daily, have a low-dose benzo for situational anxiety that I try never to take except it true emergencies, practice mindfulness / meditation, see a therapist off and on. You get better at managing it but it's a problem that never truly goes away.
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  I experienced similar things and eventually I concluded they were due to lack of sleep and taking "being active/productive" too seriuosly. If you work a lot I recommend trying to get more vegetative time. Lots of guilty pleasure meals (sugar can be helpful here), take work less seriously and get a lot of relaxation/rest or doing only activities you enjoy. Got rid of the symptoms and SSRIs that way.
ZacharyPitts 6y ago
And with that... I'm going to go take a nap
KMag 6y ago
Working from home, needing to log in to work with 2FA, if I'm very tired, I find it difficult to keep the 6 pseudorandom digits in memory simultaneously for long enough to log in. Also, I should learn to touch-type the digits. It's funny that I've been touch-typing Dvorak for 20 years, but still haven't picked up the digits.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Number pads are a bit out of fashion, but they are awesome for touch-typing digits. That being said, if you can't remember 6 digits, just imagine how the rest of your work suffers at that point. Everyone is better served by you taking a nap first
- toast0 6y ago
  Finding a way to get better sleep is, of course, the proper answer to this problem, however there are mant situations where better sleep is elusive, so... As a former sender of six digit codes, I worked hard to make them visually (and auditorially) appear to be two three digit codes; we thought that would make it easier for people to process. If you make a habit of processing the codes as two three digit codes, it might help when you're over tired.
uppsalax 6y ago
Thank you so much for sharing, this is a really insightful article! By the way, a friend of mine is doing a Master's thesis in work psychology at the University of Turin on this subject. I am a bit ignorant about this topic since I have a business background + work in tech-startups. But I am genuinely passionate about this kind of thing. The gist of the thesis is that all these dynamic and interdependent aspects (e.g. lack of sleep, stress, social pressures, even for athletes before, after and during a race, even if we think about the influence on self-perception in relation to other people and related expectations on personal performance) can lead to somatization which can come in the form of concussion, but also to burnout or multiple injuries (as my friend is researching on the thesis) and as it happened to me too, in my life. Practicing yoga or simply going for a walk daily, helped me a lot along that path... and helped many friends of mine as well. But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect". All of these are very interesting talking points and the inherent dynamics behind vicious cycles (echoing @raghuveerdotnet's comment) is still not crystal clear and needs further research and experimentation. What are your thoughts?
- wongarsu 6y ago
  > But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect". What would a placebo effect even be when talking about lack of sleep, stress, etc.? In medicine the size of the placebo effect seems to depend on the procedure. A placebo surgery is more effective than a placebo injection, which is more effective than a placebo pill. So if you want to test if an injection is better than a placebo you compare it to a placebo injection like saline water, something where there's no way it can have a medical effect beyond the psychological effect. But that would mean that to evaluate meditation you would have to compare it to some kind of fake meditation, maybe breathing exercises that have no viable way to be effective beyond the placebo effect. But we don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to come up with such a thing.
waihtis 6y ago
I had great success picking up a consistent meditation habit with the greasing the groove-approach[1].. in essence, every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. It usually results to 3-5 sessions per day. It's such a great mental reset, and I haven't since experienced the kind of complete depletion that you get from pushing yourself hard through the day. I bet some Zen master would reprimand me for this being the wrong approach, but I found it quite difficult to get into the habit of doing, say, a single 30-60 minute session per day. Now I can consistently drop into the meditation session with no urge for procrastination and have also successfully experimented with longer ones. [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
- amirs 6y ago
  Highly doubt any Zen master would reprimand you. Any habit you want to keep needs to be sustainable, if it doesn't fit the way your life works, you probably won't keep it. They would however most likely encourage you to challenge yourself from time to time when possible to see if you can get comfortable doing a longer session once in a while.
  - pedalpete 6y ago
    Seriously... a zen master who reprimands doesn't sound very zen. :)
- hh3k0 6y ago
  > … every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. Hey, that's what I do too! I've never read anything meditation-related and consequently do not know any of those approaches but I once realized that lying in bed/on the couch/on the floor for a few minutes while freeing my head of all thoughts really helps with mental fog (I have ADHD and fog tends to build up even with meds). I tend to jokingly refer to the process as 'clearing my cache'.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway Happy to see this concept references here!! I've started thinking about a lot more things in my life in terms of greasing the groove, IE: how can I make the healthy things convenient and the unhealthy things inconvenient? I want to be lazy with my willpower when I can.
sradman 6y ago
Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. Heart rate variability at rest is one of the best indicators of stress and these devices are pretty good at estimating sleep duration and sleep cycles. Regulators need to recognize that continuous tracking devices are a new tool for establishing a health baseline and they should not be expected to match the performance of single-test medical devices. Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit need to build standards to share this baseline data with medical professionals and offer analytics to determine when changes occur. Questionnaire based medicine seems backwards given the digital tools available.
- gedy 6y ago
  I will say that learning about and monitoring my HRV after getting a smart watch has been useful to monitor stress and trends. Like with anything though, I've had to try and not self-induce more stress watching this number continuously ha.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  There's a DIY-ish service that can be self hosted (not sure if it's still maintained) that tracks all kinds of data in a way that you can share with a physician. It's called Fluxtream, and might take a few extra keywords to find. Written in Java+Spring. I haven't used it myself. Putting more and more of our data, especially health data, in the hands of others is the wrong direction to be moving IMO.
  - kiddico 6y ago
    Oh boy, you're not wrong. People apparently love using that to name projects. Found it though: https://github.com/fluxtream https://github.com/fluxtream
- klyrs 6y ago
  > Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. I don't know how representative you folks are. I know a few people who invest time, money, and effort into tracking and measuring every aspect of their health. It looks like neuroticism to me. Especially when they look for explainations of every blip on every chart.
EamonnMR 6y ago
Anecdotally, the symptoms of a concussion resemble feeling sleep deprived and even the slightest adverse situation will lead to excessive stress.
kzrdude 6y ago
Anyone have tips for managing sleep in the winter months? It seems like I can stay up forever (until 02-04) and don't get so tired. I need to be in bed by 23 actually.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  - Exercise, not too late in the day. - Do not eat or drink anything but water at least 3 hours before when you are going to bed. - Do not have screens in the bedroom. - No screens 1 hour before before bed. (That last one I utterly fail at, but I am mainly doing textual things not from an attention-economy leach on the screen so, and it works out. Either the other 3 is enough or that screen time is sufficiently less stimulating.)
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    Excercise is maybe the most important, but it's hard when it's cold outside (and gyms are shut) :) I've figured lately that working "hard" at chores at home can replace some of it, the point is to not be too lazy.
    - watwut 6y ago
      > Excercise is maybe the most important, but it's hard when it's cold outside (and gyms are shut) : Good quality sports cloth are not that expensive anymore and make winter outside exercising possible and pleasant. Really, buy merino shirt and sport pants. The other option is fast wall outside, but that have to be longer to amount to exercise. Third option is to have a look at bodyweight exercising. Most of it you can do at home with zero equipment and don't require much space. Some of it requires stomping, so you may have to skip those is someone lives under you.
    - bloodorange 6y ago
      I found that (for me) the key to making a habit out of some things is to eliminate as much friction as possible in just getting started. If I were you, I'd look at the simplest things like "7 minute workout" to just get started with something easy enough to fit into my routine and once it becomes a habit, one could consider making it more intense. There are interesting challenges like the "100 pushups" or "200 squats" challenge for which you only need a bit of free space on the floor.
gedy 6y ago
One challenge I've found is it gets harder to sleep long as you get older. That coupled with knowledge work stress staring at a screen all day makes things doubly hard.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
I once had a seizure because of sleep deprivation. I try to keep a better hold of it now - if nothing else, I want to be allowed to keep on driving - but I'm far from comfortable telling my employer I'll be late because I want to sleep in.
m3kw9 6y ago
No mention what consists of “lack” of sleep.
graeme 6y ago
I’ll never be sure, but I may have had this to a high degree. I got hit on the ehad by a frisbee two years back, was diagnosed with a concussion, and had post concussive symptoms for about nine months until I found a therapist who did vestibular and visual rehab. Funny thing was, I had some of the symptoms to a lesser degree before the blow. So was it brain damage, or did the blow merely worsen my visual and vestibular systems and cause more fatigue? I’ll never know. But a key thing is that in the two years prior to the blow I had some burnout, seasonal cashflow issues in my business (thankfully resolved), and worse sleep. I fixed those and I have my old energy back. But for months leading up to the blow I hardly felt able to go to the gym, and old tasks felt tiring. Fatigue, some headaches, etc
tombert 6y ago
I used to have really bad insomnia in my early 20s, and throughout my 20s I have always been that guy who could push off sleeping for long periods of time, and it was something I was bizarrely proud of. In the last couple years I’ve come to realize how idiotic that position is; just because I don’t immediately collapse from exhaustion every time I get insufficient sleep doesn’t mean that my body doesn’t need it, and that it won’t have long term effects if I push it off too much. For the last couple years, and even more since COVID, I’ve been making a point of getting regular exercise, and trying to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night (usually 8 or 9). I feel healthier, and I do think it has helped a lot with my depression.
snappieT 6y ago
Sorry to hear you're suffering through this experience. I can emperically recommend Moana (the pixar movie) for perfect familiar background noise - it was my go-to on red-eye flights for a long time.
greysteil 6y ago
If you haven’t already read it and are interested in sleep research, I found “Why we sleep” was a wonderful, accessible summary of the literature.
hntrader 6y ago
Related (on how to fall asleep quickly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944
- hnick 6y ago
  Thanks for this, I learned the word Hypnagogia from the discussion. Now I know what to say without sounding as crazy when I mention seeing things to a doctor next time. For some reason it's always spiders.
zackmorris 6y ago
This mirrors what I experienced when I went through a severe burnout 2 years ago. I had some health issues like sleep apnea and digestive problems converge before I knew about them, so even though I was working out heavily 5 times per week, I was fat and unhealthy and had lost my resilience. My work put us on call at night 1 week out of 3 to monitor an ailing server and my productivity fell precipitously almost immediately. That was the last straw, so even though I thought I had the discipline to handle it, my body thought otherwise and I started crashing (falling asleep at my desk, having so much brain fog that I struggled with basic chores, etc). I miss that job often, but the writing was on the wall at least a year before that when I noticed that nobody listened to my expertise, they just wanted output. That's the surest route to burnout that I know of so far. I did have a lot of concussions in elementary school, but all I remember is the nausea and laying in bed for days. Severe burnout/depression feels similar in that one loses their executive function. To me, burnout felt like what I imagine having a stroke might feel like. My problem-solving faculties shut down, so it was like my mental muscle memory of everything I had learned was no longer there so I was consciously aware of every single step I had to perform (which left me frequently overwhelmed). It also felt like maybe the left and right sides of my brain weren't talking. When I thought about doing any task at all, no matter how minor, I felt low grade pain over my entire body like the feeling you get as you walk slowly into a cold body of water. Where there used to be excitement at the anticipation of doing things I enjoyed, there was now only a void of apprehension and dread. Everything felt like work, even recreation. I had to start from the beginning and relearn how to write todo lists, journal about what I wanted out of life, address all of the physical issues I could, etc etc etc. The self-help stuff is all true. The only part they are missing is that IMHO as much as 80% of our mood is derived from physical sources. The science of vegetarianism isn't quite there yet. So for example, I was eating more beans (legumes) and nightshades each day than most people probably eat all week. The anti-nutrients had lowered my absorption of iron, zinc and I'm pretty sure iodine, not to mention that I wasn't taking enough of the basics like B vitamins. Each time I reintroduced traditional foods like bacon, I received outsized returns because of things like tryptophan turning into serotonin. Nutrition is huge. Anyway, when it's all said and done, the best treatment for me was to slow down and emphasize things like how priceless consciousness is (dignity), and deemphasize artificial human constructs like worth/productivity (materialism). Also I learned that habits take about 2 weeks to form, so it was helpful to list 1 or 2 things I was struggling with, then perform them manually and dispassionately until the habit stuck. Negative self-talk is huge too. I adopted a continuous mindfulness as a set of rules so that whenever my inner monologue is critical, I note it and file it away without engaging. Over time, the positive thoughts grew as my inner child learned that positive reinforcement works. I'll stop there since I could talk about this literally forever, but I highly recommend talking to someone and seeing a doctor or nutritionist and trying some integrative and holistic approaches. Don't lose years like I did.
markc 6y ago
I wake up after about 4.5 hours of sleep "no matter what". Bedtime of 10pm or 2am, exercise or no, light exposure or no, late eating or no - always the same result. Then I'm awake for a few hours, then get my "second sleep" of 1 to 2 hours. I've been going like this for a decade without daytime sleepiness (a few oz of coffee and I'm charged up for the day), but these kinds of articles really worry me. I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?
- porcc 6y ago
  This seems perfectly healthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep
  - markc 6y ago
    I had not heard of this. Reading now - thanks!
- carlmr 6y ago
  You probably have a very natural sleep rhythm. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleepless-in-america/201609/in-the-middle-the-night-it-may-be-natural https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleepless-in-america...
  - markc 6y ago
    Good read, really interesting. Thanks!
- loceng 6y ago
  If you're overweight at all, even by a little, losing that weight that greatly impact your sleep and health overall. Also if you eat any inflammatory foods - sugar, carbohydrates, dairy, etc - then that inflammation can cause issues with sleep, especially for brain related inflammation, sleep time when brain channels are meant to open up to clear waste; inflammation is linked to Alzheimer's now because of this process.
Tade0 6y ago
Whenever I'm showing symptoms of sleep deprivation my SO, who at a certain point in her life spent a few weeks helping a young man regain basic communication skills after a stroke, asks me if I'm having one at the moment. One sign, which I observed in a few other sleep-deprived people as well, is the inability to form a coherent sentence - or even say a single word sometimes.
the_only_law 6y ago
Now I just need a concussion to compare.
dsego 6y ago
Sleep seems so essential to our lives and yet we understand very little. I had two car accidents due to lack of sleep the night before. Whenever I don't get my sleep I can't focus, my recollection is poor and I have trouble doing basic stuff. You can find texts online about people literally dying from chronic insomnia. I always wonder how some people can function well with little sleep and almost everybody seems to do better than me. And I'm convinced that lack of sleep accumulates because I can sleep till noon if I have no obligations that day. For my schizophrenic sibling one of the most troubling aspects of his condition is bad irregular sleep. Sometimes he can't sleep all night and then he sleeps the whole next day. But it's never enough sleep, nothing but constant drowsiness and lack of energy. Psychosis sure does resemble dreaming while awake, you accept weird ideas, things just happen etc, same as in a dream. And once medication kicks in, seems like slowly waking up and dream fades out. Somehow it's all connected and whoever figures out the puzzle of sleep will make the world a much happier place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tobmlt 6y ago
In the last two years I had my first child, finished a PhD, moved across the country away from all family, Moved again and changed jobs to a much more stressful, demanding, and higher paying job during the pandemic, bought a house in a high income area, lost two grandmothers, and had a second child. In approximately that order. The amount of insomnia I’ve been battling from all this has made it rather disconcerting to read about all the damage it does.
missedthecue 6y ago
"Symptoms range from persistent headaches, dizziness and fatigue to anxiety, insomnia and loss of concentration and memory" These are the symptoms one would experience after anything happened to them that involved their brain, be it a little lost sleep or getting knocked out by a 300 lbs linebacker. Given this, the headline seems a little exaggerative and reductive to the point of being meaningless. I mean, spinning around in an office chair a dozen times will cause a few of these symptoms, but that's not anywhere near the level of harm caused by getting concussed.
TheJurgen 6y ago
The thing about stress is that it can creep up on you. It’s easy to develop resilience debt. Tracking things like HRV, heart rate at sleep, respiratory rate and heart rate at rest help identify early warning signs of stress before they manifest into actual stress. Exercising regularly and eating right helps of course but most people don’t actually know what a good exercise should feel or what reaction a meal has in their body. Personal anecdote, when I’m getting more stressed I start getting a heart spike at sleep. I’ve tried ignoring it and it turns into anxiousness and stress.

357 points by rustoo 6y ago

I remember reading the results of a study a few years ago that said people in poverty suffered something like a drop in cognitive ability. I wonder if the effect reported here is related.

raghuveerdotnet 6y ago

Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.

reedf1 6y ago
I think it goes beyond resilience, at least for me. Sleep is required to experience a state without stress.
hutzlibu 6y ago
The thing is, that when you have a high level of stress, you will find it hard to sleep well. "Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep" So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.
- johnnujler 6y ago
  I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
> revenge bedtime procrastination: a phenomenon in which people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
- hnick 6y ago
  For me, it started as more of a reverse-Christmas situation - if I go to sleep, the next thing I know I'll be having to got to work and I really don't want that! Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.
koheripbal 6y ago
During a very difficult time in my life recently, I found it impossible to sleep. I would have stress nightmares and even when i did fall asleep, I would soon wake myself up with specific scenarios my mind was trying to work out. I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation. I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep. Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again. This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists. My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills. I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds. Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience. I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping. Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.
- PKop 6y ago
  Sounds similar to why many watch these types of videos: [0] I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1] As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA
- sedgjh23 6y ago
  I am sorry you are going through this. Thank you for sharing.
einpoklum 6y ago
Wow, "revenge bedtime procrastination" is such an apt term (not being cynical). In Chinese, it's a single, uhm, guess you could call it a word: 報復性熬夜 See also: https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/advice/living/article/3113045/what-revenge-bedtime-procrastination-and-why-do-we-do-it https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/advice/living/article/31130...
closeparen 6y ago
I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived. This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.
- mcbuilder 6y ago
  In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch. Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work. And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    > In the real world Do we just live in the different real worlds? Because in my real world, deadlines are almost always arbitrary and fungible so long as the right kind of communication is made -- the only times I've seen that not be the case for me/folks in my network is 1) when they're working on something that's actually time critical (rare but does happen) and 2) when they're working in a dysfunctional, top-down environment (far more common). I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea that you might lose a client by missing a deadline by 2-3 weeks (rather than not selling them well enough). Is this a hypothetical situation you're talking about? Sometimes, 2-3 weeks is as fast as they'll get back to you with a single hop of communication. The other example of engineers get down-evaluated for ending up jumping on the grenade of a task that gets significantly longer (sometimes by months) -- I do see that happen from time to time but whether the manager down-evaluates is often inversely correlated with that manager/management chain's capability. The good managers understand that scope creep and an unforeseen gotchas happen; they don't want to take those instances as failures but rather . > When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days. Why? That sounds like unproductive, unhealthy self-martyrship. It's the complete opposite of how a competent professional works through things. Do you simply like to suffer? There's a reason people don't work like that in the "real world" and it's because there are actual real dollars on the line and competent organizations understand that such behavior purely results in expensive unforced errors.
Spooky23 6y ago
The other thing is that if you’re not an individual contributor, trust your people and let go of things. I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory. Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.
aantix 6y ago
You're leaving out nutritional deficiencies. Specifically, magnesium, for which most are deficient. When you increase your levels of magnesium, suddenly it's easier to be present, meditate, mental endurance increases, you can endure much more mental stress. If you're deficient, it can lead to a bad, downward spiral. Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3672/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3672/htm "The idea of a bidirectional relationship between magnesium and stress was first introduced by Galland and Seelig, in the early 1990s [9,10] and then referred to as the vicious circle. This vicious circle implies that stress can increase magnesium loss, causing a deficiency; in turn, magnesium deficiency can enhance the body’s susceptibility to stress"
notacoward 6y ago
> nothing helps as much as a good night sleep ...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.

seibelj 6y ago

I have anxiety / stress / depression issues and when it gets really bad I toss and turn all night, unable to sleep. By day 3 all of my muscles and joints ache terribly. During sleep your body is clearing itself of waste and healing. So not only are you a miserable zombie, your body itself is falling apart! I have enormous empathy for anyone who suffers from mental health issues. I take Lexapro daily, have a low-dose benzo for situational anxiety that I try never to take except it true emergencies, practice mindfulness / meditation, see a therapist off and on. You get better at managing it but it's a problem that never truly goes away.

posix_me_less 6y ago
I experienced similar things and eventually I concluded they were due to lack of sleep and taking "being active/productive" too seriuosly. If you work a lot I recommend trying to get more vegetative time. Lots of guilty pleasure meals (sugar can be helpful here), take work less seriously and get a lot of relaxation/rest or doing only activities you enjoy. Got rid of the symptoms and SSRIs that way.

ZacharyPitts 6y ago

And with that... I'm going to go take a nap

KMag 6y ago

Working from home, needing to log in to work with 2FA, if I'm very tired, I find it difficult to keep the 6 pseudorandom digits in memory simultaneously for long enough to log in. Also, I should learn to touch-type the digits. It's funny that I've been touch-typing Dvorak for 20 years, but still haven't picked up the digits.

wongarsu 6y ago
Number pads are a bit out of fashion, but they are awesome for touch-typing digits. That being said, if you can't remember 6 digits, just imagine how the rest of your work suffers at that point. Everyone is better served by you taking a nap first
toast0 6y ago
Finding a way to get better sleep is, of course, the proper answer to this problem, however there are mant situations where better sleep is elusive, so... As a former sender of six digit codes, I worked hard to make them visually (and auditorially) appear to be two three digit codes; we thought that would make it easier for people to process. If you make a habit of processing the codes as two three digit codes, it might help when you're over tired.

uppsalax 6y ago

Thank you so much for sharing, this is a really insightful article! By the way, a friend of mine is doing a Master's thesis in work psychology at the University of Turin on this subject. I am a bit ignorant about this topic since I have a business background + work in tech-startups. But I am genuinely passionate about this kind of thing. The gist of the thesis is that all these dynamic and interdependent aspects (e.g. lack of sleep, stress, social pressures, even for athletes before, after and during a race, even if we think about the influence on self-perception in relation to other people and related expectations on personal performance) can lead to somatization which can come in the form of concussion, but also to burnout or multiple injuries (as my friend is researching on the thesis) and as it happened to me too, in my life. Practicing yoga or simply going for a walk daily, helped me a lot along that path... and helped many friends of mine as well. But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect". All of these are very interesting talking points and the inherent dynamics behind vicious cycles (echoing @raghuveerdotnet's comment) is still not crystal clear and needs further research and experimentation. What are your thoughts?

wongarsu 6y ago
> But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect". What would a placebo effect even be when talking about lack of sleep, stress, etc.? In medicine the size of the placebo effect seems to depend on the procedure. A placebo surgery is more effective than a placebo injection, which is more effective than a placebo pill. So if you want to test if an injection is better than a placebo you compare it to a placebo injection like saline water, something where there's no way it can have a medical effect beyond the psychological effect. But that would mean that to evaluate meditation you would have to compare it to some kind of fake meditation, maybe breathing exercises that have no viable way to be effective beyond the placebo effect. But we don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to come up with such a thing.

waihtis 6y ago

I had great success picking up a consistent meditation habit with the greasing the groove-approach[1].. in essence, every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. It usually results to 3-5 sessions per day. It's such a great mental reset, and I haven't since experienced the kind of complete depletion that you get from pushing yourself hard through the day. I bet some Zen master would reprimand me for this being the wrong approach, but I found it quite difficult to get into the habit of doing, say, a single 30-60 minute session per day. Now I can consistently drop into the meditation session with no urge for procrastination and have also successfully experimented with longer ones. [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway

amirs 6y ago
Highly doubt any Zen master would reprimand you. Any habit you want to keep needs to be sustainable, if it doesn't fit the way your life works, you probably won't keep it. They would however most likely encourage you to challenge yourself from time to time when possible to see if you can get comfortable doing a longer session once in a while.
- pedalpete 6y ago
  Seriously... a zen master who reprimands doesn't sound very zen. :)
hh3k0 6y ago
> … every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. Hey, that's what I do too! I've never read anything meditation-related and consequently do not know any of those approaches but I once realized that lying in bed/on the couch/on the floor for a few minutes while freeing my head of all thoughts really helps with mental fog (I have ADHD and fog tends to build up even with meds). I tend to jokingly refer to the process as 'clearing my cache'.
yowlingcat 6y ago
> [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway Happy to see this concept references here!! I've started thinking about a lot more things in my life in terms of greasing the groove, IE: how can I make the healthy things convenient and the unhealthy things inconvenient? I want to be lazy with my willpower when I can.

sradman 6y ago

Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. Heart rate variability at rest is one of the best indicators of stress and these devices are pretty good at estimating sleep duration and sleep cycles. Regulators need to recognize that continuous tracking devices are a new tool for establishing a health baseline and they should not be expected to match the performance of single-test medical devices. Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit need to build standards to share this baseline data with medical professionals and offer analytics to determine when changes occur. Questionnaire based medicine seems backwards given the digital tools available.

gedy 6y ago
I will say that learning about and monitoring my HRV after getting a smart watch has been useful to monitor stress and trends. Like with anything though, I've had to try and not self-induce more stress watching this number continuously ha.
nitrogen 6y ago
There's a DIY-ish service that can be self hosted (not sure if it's still maintained) that tracks all kinds of data in a way that you can share with a physician. It's called Fluxtream, and might take a few extra keywords to find. Written in Java+Spring. I haven't used it myself. Putting more and more of our data, especially health data, in the hands of others is the wrong direction to be moving IMO.
- kiddico 6y ago
  Oh boy, you're not wrong. People apparently love using that to name projects. Found it though: https://github.com/fluxtream https://github.com/fluxtream
klyrs 6y ago
> Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. I don't know how representative you folks are. I know a few people who invest time, money, and effort into tracking and measuring every aspect of their health. It looks like neuroticism to me. Especially when they look for explainations of every blip on every chart.

EamonnMR 6y ago

Anecdotally, the symptoms of a concussion resemble feeling sleep deprived and even the slightest adverse situation will lead to excessive stress.

kzrdude 6y ago

Anyone have tips for managing sleep in the winter months? It seems like I can stay up forever (until 02-04) and don't get so tired. I need to be in bed by 23 actually.

Ericson2314 6y ago
- Exercise, not too late in the day. - Do not eat or drink anything but water at least 3 hours before when you are going to bed. - Do not have screens in the bedroom. - No screens 1 hour before before bed. (That last one I utterly fail at, but I am mainly doing textual things not from an attention-economy leach on the screen so, and it works out. Either the other 3 is enough or that screen time is sufficiently less stimulating.)
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Excercise is maybe the most important, but it's hard when it's cold outside (and gyms are shut) :) I've figured lately that working "hard" at chores at home can replace some of it, the point is to not be too lazy.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > Excercise is maybe the most important, but it's hard when it's cold outside (and gyms are shut) : Good quality sports cloth are not that expensive anymore and make winter outside exercising possible and pleasant. Really, buy merino shirt and sport pants. The other option is fast wall outside, but that have to be longer to amount to exercise. Third option is to have a look at bodyweight exercising. Most of it you can do at home with zero equipment and don't require much space. Some of it requires stomping, so you may have to skip those is someone lives under you.
  - bloodorange 6y ago
    I found that (for me) the key to making a habit out of some things is to eliminate as much friction as possible in just getting started. If I were you, I'd look at the simplest things like "7 minute workout" to just get started with something easy enough to fit into my routine and once it becomes a habit, one could consider making it more intense. There are interesting challenges like the "100 pushups" or "200 squats" challenge for which you only need a bit of free space on the floor.

gedy 6y ago

One challenge I've found is it gets harder to sleep long as you get older. That coupled with knowledge work stress staring at a screen all day makes things doubly hard.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

I once had a seizure because of sleep deprivation. I try to keep a better hold of it now - if nothing else, I want to be allowed to keep on driving - but I'm far from comfortable telling my employer I'll be late because I want to sleep in.

m3kw9 6y ago

No mention what consists of “lack” of sleep.

graeme 6y ago

I’ll never be sure, but I may have had this to a high degree. I got hit on the ehad by a frisbee two years back, was diagnosed with a concussion, and had post concussive symptoms for about nine months until I found a therapist who did vestibular and visual rehab. Funny thing was, I had some of the symptoms to a lesser degree before the blow. So was it brain damage, or did the blow merely worsen my visual and vestibular systems and cause more fatigue? I’ll never know. But a key thing is that in the two years prior to the blow I had some burnout, seasonal cashflow issues in my business (thankfully resolved), and worse sleep. I fixed those and I have my old energy back. But for months leading up to the blow I hardly felt able to go to the gym, and old tasks felt tiring. Fatigue, some headaches, etc

tombert 6y ago

I used to have really bad insomnia in my early 20s, and throughout my 20s I have always been that guy who could push off sleeping for long periods of time, and it was something I was bizarrely proud of. In the last couple years I’ve come to realize how idiotic that position is; just because I don’t immediately collapse from exhaustion every time I get insufficient sleep doesn’t mean that my body doesn’t need it, and that it won’t have long term effects if I push it off too much. For the last couple years, and even more since COVID, I’ve been making a point of getting regular exercise, and trying to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night (usually 8 or 9). I feel healthier, and I do think it has helped a lot with my depression.

snappieT 6y ago

Sorry to hear you're suffering through this experience. I can emperically recommend Moana (the pixar movie) for perfect familiar background noise - it was my go-to on red-eye flights for a long time.

greysteil 6y ago

If you haven’t already read it and are interested in sleep research, I found “Why we sleep” was a wonderful, accessible summary of the literature.

hntrader 6y ago

Related (on how to fall asleep quickly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671944

hnick 6y ago
Thanks for this, I learned the word Hypnagogia from the discussion. Now I know what to say without sounding as crazy when I mention seeing things to a doctor next time. For some reason it's always spiders.

zackmorris 6y ago

This mirrors what I experienced when I went through a severe burnout 2 years ago. I had some health issues like sleep apnea and digestive problems converge before I knew about them, so even though I was working out heavily 5 times per week, I was fat and unhealthy and had lost my resilience. My work put us on call at night 1 week out of 3 to monitor an ailing server and my productivity fell precipitously almost immediately. That was the last straw, so even though I thought I had the discipline to handle it, my body thought otherwise and I started crashing (falling asleep at my desk, having so much brain fog that I struggled with basic chores, etc). I miss that job often, but the writing was on the wall at least a year before that when I noticed that nobody listened to my expertise, they just wanted output. That's the surest route to burnout that I know of so far. I did have a lot of concussions in elementary school, but all I remember is the nausea and laying in bed for days. Severe burnout/depression feels similar in that one loses their executive function. To me, burnout felt like what I imagine having a stroke might feel like. My problem-solving faculties shut down, so it was like my mental muscle memory of everything I had learned was no longer there so I was consciously aware of every single step I had to perform (which left me frequently overwhelmed). It also felt like maybe the left and right sides of my brain weren't talking. When I thought about doing any task at all, no matter how minor, I felt low grade pain over my entire body like the feeling you get as you walk slowly into a cold body of water. Where there used to be excitement at the anticipation of doing things I enjoyed, there was now only a void of apprehension and dread. Everything felt like work, even recreation. I had to start from the beginning and relearn how to write todo lists, journal about what I wanted out of life, address all of the physical issues I could, etc etc etc. The self-help stuff is all true. The only part they are missing is that IMHO as much as 80% of our mood is derived from physical sources. The science of vegetarianism isn't quite there yet. So for example, I was eating more beans (legumes) and nightshades each day than most people probably eat all week. The anti-nutrients had lowered my absorption of iron, zinc and I'm pretty sure iodine, not to mention that I wasn't taking enough of the basics like B vitamins. Each time I reintroduced traditional foods like bacon, I received outsized returns because of things like tryptophan turning into serotonin. Nutrition is huge. Anyway, when it's all said and done, the best treatment for me was to slow down and emphasize things like how priceless consciousness is (dignity), and deemphasize artificial human constructs like worth/productivity (materialism). Also I learned that habits take about 2 weeks to form, so it was helpful to list 1 or 2 things I was struggling with, then perform them manually and dispassionately until the habit stuck. Negative self-talk is huge too. I adopted a continuous mindfulness as a set of rules so that whenever my inner monologue is critical, I note it and file it away without engaging. Over time, the positive thoughts grew as my inner child learned that positive reinforcement works. I'll stop there since I could talk about this literally forever, but I highly recommend talking to someone and seeing a doctor or nutritionist and trying some integrative and holistic approaches. Don't lose years like I did.

markc 6y ago

I wake up after about 4.5 hours of sleep "no matter what". Bedtime of 10pm or 2am, exercise or no, light exposure or no, late eating or no - always the same result. Then I'm awake for a few hours, then get my "second sleep" of 1 to 2 hours. I've been going like this for a decade without daytime sleepiness (a few oz of coffee and I'm charged up for the day), but these kinds of articles really worry me. I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?

porcc 6y ago
This seems perfectly healthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep
- markc 6y ago
  I had not heard of this. Reading now - thanks!
carlmr 6y ago
You probably have a very natural sleep rhythm. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleepless-in-america/201609/in-the-middle-the-night-it-may-be-natural https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleepless-in-america...
- markc 6y ago
  Good read, really interesting. Thanks!
loceng 6y ago
If you're overweight at all, even by a little, losing that weight that greatly impact your sleep and health overall. Also if you eat any inflammatory foods - sugar, carbohydrates, dairy, etc - then that inflammation can cause issues with sleep, especially for brain related inflammation, sleep time when brain channels are meant to open up to clear waste; inflammation is linked to Alzheimer's now because of this process.

Tade0 6y ago

Whenever I'm showing symptoms of sleep deprivation my SO, who at a certain point in her life spent a few weeks helping a young man regain basic communication skills after a stroke, asks me if I'm having one at the moment. One sign, which I observed in a few other sleep-deprived people as well, is the inability to form a coherent sentence - or even say a single word sometimes.

the_only_law 6y ago

Now I just need a concussion to compare.

dsego 6y ago

Sleep seems so essential to our lives and yet we understand very little. I had two car accidents due to lack of sleep the night before. Whenever I don't get my sleep I can't focus, my recollection is poor and I have trouble doing basic stuff. You can find texts online about people literally dying from chronic insomnia. I always wonder how some people can function well with little sleep and almost everybody seems to do better than me. And I'm convinced that lack of sleep accumulates because I can sleep till noon if I have no obligations that day. For my schizophrenic sibling one of the most troubling aspects of his condition is bad irregular sleep. Sometimes he can't sleep all night and then he sleeps the whole next day. But it's never enough sleep, nothing but constant drowsiness and lack of energy. Psychosis sure does resemble dreaming while awake, you accept weird ideas, things just happen etc, same as in a dream. And once medication kicks in, seems like slowly waking up and dream fades out. Somehow it's all connected and whoever figures out the puzzle of sleep will make the world a much happier place.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tobmlt 6y ago

In the last two years I had my first child, finished a PhD, moved across the country away from all family, Moved again and changed jobs to a much more stressful, demanding, and higher paying job during the pandemic, bought a house in a high income area, lost two grandmothers, and had a second child. In approximately that order. The amount of insomnia I’ve been battling from all this has made it rather disconcerting to read about all the damage it does.

missedthecue 6y ago

"Symptoms range from persistent headaches, dizziness and fatigue to anxiety, insomnia and loss of concentration and memory" These are the symptoms one would experience after anything happened to them that involved their brain, be it a little lost sleep or getting knocked out by a 300 lbs linebacker. Given this, the headline seems a little exaggerative and reductive to the point of being meaningless. I mean, spinning around in an office chair a dozen times will cause a few of these symptoms, but that's not anywhere near the level of harm caused by getting concussed.

TheJurgen 6y ago

The thing about stress is that it can creep up on you. It’s easy to develop resilience debt. Tracking things like HRV, heart rate at sleep, respiratory rate and heart rate at rest help identify early warning signs of stress before they manifest into actual stress. Exercising regularly and eating right helps of course but most people don’t actually know what a good exercise should feel or what reaction a meal has in their body. Personal anecdote, when I’m getting more stressed I start getting a heart spike at sleep. I’ve tried ignoring it and it turns into anxiousness and stress.