6 ms·

How to Avoid Sleep Debt

95 points by ramchip 13y ago

jordo37 13y ago
This is interesting, but week on science or quantitative data. Some of the randoms stats sewn throughout don't even agree with each other.
IbJacked 13y ago
I thought I saw a study that showed sleep debt not to be as cumulative as in this guide, that the amount needed to catch up topped out at something like 10 or 12 hours. I don't have a link, though, so I guess my post is equally suspect :)
- eikenberry 13y ago
  This is similar to what I've read. That the longer you stay up the more it impedes your mental abilities but you don't incur more "debt". That no matter how long you stay up you fully recover your facilities after one good nights sleep.
  - sheepmullet 13y ago
    Do you have any links? It is contrary to everything I have read and my own experiences. When I pull an all nighter then sleep well the next day I am still wrecked.
    - meowface 13y ago
      From anecdotal experience, generally you'll need 2 consecutive nights of recovery sleep to recover from serious deprivation (whether chronic or acute). 1 usually isn't enough.
- sheepmullet 13y ago
  Most research shows there is a cap in that with a few weeks of good sleep, waking up naturally, your body returns to peak performance. I haven't seen much research that suggests you can pay off sleep debt in large chunks so putting the debt in hours doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sleeping 4 hours tonight and then 12 tomorrow night is not equivalent to sleeping 8 tonight and 8 tomorrow
- MereInterest 13y ago
  It is the difference between chronic and acute sleep deprivation. Go 100 hours without sleep, and sure you'll be hallucinating at the end, but you recover after about 16 hours of sleep. On the other hand, get slightly less sleep than you need, and it builds up over time, and requires an equal amount to get back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting_the_effects_of_sleep_deprivation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting...
  - sgeisenh 13y ago
    Inconsistent sleep patterns can also cause circadian rhythm disorders. I struggle with delayed sleep phase syndrome as a result of years of poor sleep hygiene. I use what is called chronotherapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase)) every few months or so in order to put my sleep schedule back at a reasonable time.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    That's not what it says. It says that the recovery is slower for chronic sleep deprivation, not that it takes 'as much'. Do you contend that it could take an entire decade to dig out of a large sleep debt two extra hours a night? After chronic partial sleep restriction, the recovery process of cognitive functioning seems to take longer than after acute total SD. Performance in the PVT was not restored after one 10 h recovery night, but approached the baseline level after two 10 h nights in a study with seven consecutive sleep restriction nights with 5 h sleep/night (Dinges et al 1997). Using the same test, three 8 h recovery nights were not enough to restore performance after one week of sleep restriction
    - MereInterest 13y ago
      Ah, thank you. I was attempting to find a source for something that I vaguely remembered, while rather tired. The irony of delaying on sleep while reading an article about sleep loss was not lost on me.
Aloha 13y ago
I don't think the need for sleep is a constant. It can vary season by season, and week by week. Sometimes I find I need 8 or more hours to feel rested, others I wake up on my own after four and feel as though I've slept a full night. Usually I run at about 7.5 hours, and thats when my body wakes me up. When I was working graveyard I found I needed more sleep overall than when I work days.
- adrianN 13y ago
  For me it definitely varies by season. I don't use an alarm clock and I go to bed roughly at the same time every day (+- an hour at the very most). In summer I wake up around six, in winter I sleep until nearly eight.
  - kijin 13y ago
    If you're not using an alarm clock, then it's probably sunlight (or warmth) that wakes you up. The sun rises earlier in the summer.
tommu 13y ago
Not a very helpful article for the insomniac. Surely a bigger problem for many people is being able to fall asleep at all, let alone sleep for a required number of hours.
- GuiA 13y ago
  If you are truly an insomniac, no article will solve your problem. A doctor, however, is likely to help.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  The article wasn't about dealing with insomnia, so I'm not surprised that it lacked useful advice for dealing with it.
- DanBC 13y ago
  As a rule of thumb anxiety stops people dropping off to sleep while depression causes them to wake early. Sleep apnoea cause very many micro-breaks in sleep. There are different forms of insomnia.
pcarmichael 13y ago
I'm trying to get my business off the ground while raising two kids under 5. I'm constantly between 5-6 hours of sleep a night. It's a vicious cycle - the longer it goes the more I need to work late to catch up. Yet the later I work, the less efficient I become. I know that I need a good sleep reset, but there never seems to be a good time. Exercise become difficult to schedule, and I've definitely gained weight over the last several years. It's not good, but the decline is slow and hard to recognize in the moment. It's been so long (4 years now?) that I think I've forgotten what feeling rested feels like.
- GuiA 13y ago
  The "trick" is to set up a hard rule. If you get up at 6.30 in the morning, be in bed at 10p no matter what so that you will fall asleep by 10.30p-11p at the very latest (8h of sleep). Also, no laptop/phone/tablet/etc. in the bedroom - just books/magazines. Reading before bed is the best way to slowly move towards sleep and not keep yourself up for hours the way that looking at a screen does. Yes, sometimes you feel like you can work for an extra couple hours, etc. - but at the end of the day it's a choice you have to make. If you genuinely care about being healthy, put {sleep | healthy food | exercise } before everything else. The first few weeks might be a bit rough, but the rest will follow.
  - marvin 13y ago
    Making hard rules like these seems to me like the only sensible solution. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that expecting to run a successful early-stage business and being a good parent to two young childen is impossible unless you lower your requirements on one or both fronts. If you don't lower the requirements voluntarily, nature will do it for you. (There are rare examples of people who have extraordinary endurance, but they are by definition extraordinary). Burnout is not fun and it can put your out of business for months, or even years if you have a bad case. (In my case, it was a year and a half of zero productive work). One of my relatives, after a particularly rough Ph.D, claimed that she will never be able to perform at the same level again. It's okay to be ambitious, but I think too many young and ambitious people let their ambition get the best of them. Learning your limits by crashing into them at full speed is not advisable. I don't mean to sound negative or dismissive, but I've experienced this myself and seen too many cases first-hand not to care. The Silicon Valley startup culture is in many places outright destructive when it comes to this aspect of life. More constructively: Setting strict deadlines and schedules that you will maintain unless the sky is falling (change the definition to "no matter what" if the sky is "constantly" falling), balancing your time so you have enough sleep and enough time to yourself is a safe way to ensure that you are working sustainably. This will lower your productivity, though. At least make your sacrifices with both eyes open.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tacoman 13y ago
I work primarily in operations on an entertainment service not too dissimilar from Netflix. Every couple of months I have pager duty for a week. I'm lucky to get 6 hours of consecutive sleep in a day. It seems to take a week to recover from it. Everyone I know who works in operations on services with similar availability requirements seems to have the same problem. It can be extremely difficult at times especially when you're under pressure to get something resolved and your cognitive abilities are shot. There isn't much point to this comment I guess other than to say that yes, good sleep is very important and more important than people realize.
- eikenberry 13y ago
  Do the developers not share in pager duty for their apps at your company? I thought this was now standard practice anymore. I've never seen a company where the devs are on pager duty with the kind of reliability issues you describe. And yes, these were all companies with very tight uptime requirements.
  - Crito 13y ago
    If I am guessing his company correctly, then most development teams indeed do their own pager duty with typical oncalls lasting one week. Some teams have extremely heavy ops load and have support people or even support teams that focus on doing ops and reducing op load. There are several possible causes of such an unusually high ops load. Maybe it's a failing in that team (teams typically track operation load carefully, as it can serve as an early indicator of something in the team dynamics going wrong), that team might be under pressure from management to push out new features on a tight schedule (leaving less time to get things right, or to fix known issues), they may have had the unfortunate luck of inheriting a service written quick and dirty by one of the VP's favored "get shit done fast" teams (a problematic phenomenon that fortunately seems to be becoming less common), or it may just be the nature of their particular work for whatever reason. I have seen teams with extremely high operation load get support teams based out of other timezones, so that 24/7 ops coverage can be done mostly by people working during their regional business hours. Why that hasn't been set up in his case, I cannot say.
  - 13y ago
hawkharris 13y ago
Speaking about sleep in terms of debt is somewhat misleading. A sleep deficit can't be "paid off" as you might pay off a financial obligation. If you overdraw from a checking account, you can settle up by making one larger-than-usual deposit. If you stay awake for three days, then sleep much longer than usual doesn't give you a full cognitive recovery. It might be more accurate to think of staying awake as taking out a loan with very high interest. EDIT: This is a difficult concept to understand because it sounds like a semantic difference. Here's an interesting article that explains it in more detail: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212276021/of-neurons-and-memories-inside-the-secret-world-of-sleep http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212276021/of-neurons-and-memor...
- jonalmeida 13y ago
  Your reply is what I was hoping to see when I saw the title of this post.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  On the other hand, if you get 50 hours behind on sleep, you only need a handful of extra hours to get back to normal. It's both better and worse than actual numerical debt. Paying it off is painful and slow, but you don't have to pay off the original amount.
  - anvandare 13y ago
    Well, not really. During the time where you're building up those 50 'lost hours', your body is performing worse. What you owe in sleep you'll (immediately) pay for in reduced quality of wakefulness: lower mental acuity, worse immune system, poorer physical performance, slower recuperation, etc. Nature only barters, not lends.
izendejas 13y ago
This kind of problem is really fascinating to me. On the one hand, we're all pretty ambitious and would love to do more and that can cause one to sleep less. On the other hand, the more jam packed your schedule the easier it is to become less productive. I'm actually working on an app for myself and hope to release it soon, but it amounts to guiding me on a 5-10 minute workout every morning. I've found that doing so helps me overcome grogginess, gives me an energy boost and even helps me alleviate headaches--which is incredible. So for anyone that feels tired no matter how much you sleep, just do something like the 7-minute workout or tabata workouts (I have my own routine I'll share with the app) and you'll hopefully get a nice energy boost which will last you a while and you'll gradually notice your metabolism will improve, etc. This is not scientifically proven, but exercise is pretty awesome either way. :)
conectorx 13y ago
Oh my god, my kids are going to harvard to learn that if they dont sleep enough, they will be sleepy during the day.... This is funny and sad :(

95 points by ramchip 13y ago

This is interesting, but week on science or quantitative data. Some of the randoms stats sewn throughout don't even agree with each other.

IbJacked 13y ago

I thought I saw a study that showed sleep debt not to be as cumulative as in this guide, that the amount needed to catch up topped out at something like 10 or 12 hours. I don't have a link, though, so I guess my post is equally suspect :)

eikenberry 13y ago
This is similar to what I've read. That the longer you stay up the more it impedes your mental abilities but you don't incur more "debt". That no matter how long you stay up you fully recover your facilities after one good nights sleep.
- sheepmullet 13y ago
  Do you have any links? It is contrary to everything I have read and my own experiences. When I pull an all nighter then sleep well the next day I am still wrecked.
  - meowface 13y ago
    From anecdotal experience, generally you'll need 2 consecutive nights of recovery sleep to recover from serious deprivation (whether chronic or acute). 1 usually isn't enough.
sheepmullet 13y ago
Most research shows there is a cap in that with a few weeks of good sleep, waking up naturally, your body returns to peak performance. I haven't seen much research that suggests you can pay off sleep debt in large chunks so putting the debt in hours doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sleeping 4 hours tonight and then 12 tomorrow night is not equivalent to sleeping 8 tonight and 8 tomorrow
MereInterest 13y ago
It is the difference between chronic and acute sleep deprivation. Go 100 hours without sleep, and sure you'll be hallucinating at the end, but you recover after about 16 hours of sleep. On the other hand, get slightly less sleep than you need, and it builds up over time, and requires an equal amount to get back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting_the_effects_of_sleep_deprivation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Counteracting...
- sgeisenh 13y ago
  Inconsistent sleep patterns can also cause circadian rhythm disorders. I struggle with delayed sleep phase syndrome as a result of years of poor sleep hygiene. I use what is called chronotherapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotherapy_(sleep_phase)) every few months or so in order to put my sleep schedule back at a reasonable time.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  That's not what it says. It says that the recovery is slower for chronic sleep deprivation, not that it takes 'as much'. Do you contend that it could take an entire decade to dig out of a large sleep debt two extra hours a night? After chronic partial sleep restriction, the recovery process of cognitive functioning seems to take longer than after acute total SD. Performance in the PVT was not restored after one 10 h recovery night, but approached the baseline level after two 10 h nights in a study with seven consecutive sleep restriction nights with 5 h sleep/night (Dinges et al 1997). Using the same test, three 8 h recovery nights were not enough to restore performance after one week of sleep restriction
  - MereInterest 13y ago
    Ah, thank you. I was attempting to find a source for something that I vaguely remembered, while rather tired. The irony of delaying on sleep while reading an article about sleep loss was not lost on me.

Aloha 13y ago

I don't think the need for sleep is a constant. It can vary season by season, and week by week. Sometimes I find I need 8 or more hours to feel rested, others I wake up on my own after four and feel as though I've slept a full night. Usually I run at about 7.5 hours, and thats when my body wakes me up. When I was working graveyard I found I needed more sleep overall than when I work days.

adrianN 13y ago
For me it definitely varies by season. I don't use an alarm clock and I go to bed roughly at the same time every day (+- an hour at the very most). In summer I wake up around six, in winter I sleep until nearly eight.
- kijin 13y ago
  If you're not using an alarm clock, then it's probably sunlight (or warmth) that wakes you up. The sun rises earlier in the summer.

tommu 13y ago

Not a very helpful article for the insomniac. Surely a bigger problem for many people is being able to fall asleep at all, let alone sleep for a required number of hours.

GuiA 13y ago
If you are truly an insomniac, no article will solve your problem. A doctor, however, is likely to help.
mwfunk 13y ago
The article wasn't about dealing with insomnia, so I'm not surprised that it lacked useful advice for dealing with it.
DanBC 13y ago
As a rule of thumb anxiety stops people dropping off to sleep while depression causes them to wake early. Sleep apnoea cause very many micro-breaks in sleep. There are different forms of insomnia.

pcarmichael 13y ago

I'm trying to get my business off the ground while raising two kids under 5. I'm constantly between 5-6 hours of sleep a night. It's a vicious cycle - the longer it goes the more I need to work late to catch up. Yet the later I work, the less efficient I become. I know that I need a good sleep reset, but there never seems to be a good time. Exercise become difficult to schedule, and I've definitely gained weight over the last several years. It's not good, but the decline is slow and hard to recognize in the moment. It's been so long (4 years now?) that I think I've forgotten what feeling rested feels like.

GuiA 13y ago
The "trick" is to set up a hard rule. If you get up at 6.30 in the morning, be in bed at 10p no matter what so that you will fall asleep by 10.30p-11p at the very latest (8h of sleep). Also, no laptop/phone/tablet/etc. in the bedroom - just books/magazines. Reading before bed is the best way to slowly move towards sleep and not keep yourself up for hours the way that looking at a screen does. Yes, sometimes you feel like you can work for an extra couple hours, etc. - but at the end of the day it's a choice you have to make. If you genuinely care about being healthy, put {sleep | healthy food | exercise } before everything else. The first few weeks might be a bit rough, but the rest will follow.
- marvin 13y ago
  Making hard rules like these seems to me like the only sensible solution. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that expecting to run a successful early-stage business and being a good parent to two young childen is impossible unless you lower your requirements on one or both fronts. If you don't lower the requirements voluntarily, nature will do it for you. (There are rare examples of people who have extraordinary endurance, but they are by definition extraordinary). Burnout is not fun and it can put your out of business for months, or even years if you have a bad case. (In my case, it was a year and a half of zero productive work). One of my relatives, after a particularly rough Ph.D, claimed that she will never be able to perform at the same level again. It's okay to be ambitious, but I think too many young and ambitious people let their ambition get the best of them. Learning your limits by crashing into them at full speed is not advisable. I don't mean to sound negative or dismissive, but I've experienced this myself and seen too many cases first-hand not to care. The Silicon Valley startup culture is in many places outright destructive when it comes to this aspect of life. More constructively: Setting strict deadlines and schedules that you will maintain unless the sky is falling (change the definition to "no matter what" if the sky is "constantly" falling), balancing your time so you have enough sleep and enough time to yourself is a safe way to ensure that you are working sustainably. This will lower your productivity, though. At least make your sacrifices with both eyes open.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tacoman 13y ago

I work primarily in operations on an entertainment service not too dissimilar from Netflix. Every couple of months I have pager duty for a week. I'm lucky to get 6 hours of consecutive sleep in a day. It seems to take a week to recover from it. Everyone I know who works in operations on services with similar availability requirements seems to have the same problem. It can be extremely difficult at times especially when you're under pressure to get something resolved and your cognitive abilities are shot. There isn't much point to this comment I guess other than to say that yes, good sleep is very important and more important than people realize.

eikenberry 13y ago
Do the developers not share in pager duty for their apps at your company? I thought this was now standard practice anymore. I've never seen a company where the devs are on pager duty with the kind of reliability issues you describe. And yes, these were all companies with very tight uptime requirements.
- Crito 13y ago
  If I am guessing his company correctly, then most development teams indeed do their own pager duty with typical oncalls lasting one week. Some teams have extremely heavy ops load and have support people or even support teams that focus on doing ops and reducing op load. There are several possible causes of such an unusually high ops load. Maybe it's a failing in that team (teams typically track operation load carefully, as it can serve as an early indicator of something in the team dynamics going wrong), that team might be under pressure from management to push out new features on a tight schedule (leaving less time to get things right, or to fix known issues), they may have had the unfortunate luck of inheriting a service written quick and dirty by one of the VP's favored "get shit done fast" teams (a problematic phenomenon that fortunately seems to be becoming less common), or it may just be the nature of their particular work for whatever reason. I have seen teams with extremely high operation load get support teams based out of other timezones, so that 24/7 ops coverage can be done mostly by people working during their regional business hours. Why that hasn't been set up in his case, I cannot say.
- 13y ago

hawkharris 13y ago

Speaking about sleep in terms of debt is somewhat misleading. A sleep deficit can't be "paid off" as you might pay off a financial obligation. If you overdraw from a checking account, you can settle up by making one larger-than-usual deposit. If you stay awake for three days, then sleep much longer than usual doesn't give you a full cognitive recovery. It might be more accurate to think of staying awake as taking out a loan with very high interest. EDIT: This is a difficult concept to understand because it sounds like a semantic difference. Here's an interesting article that explains it in more detail: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212276021/of-neurons-and-memories-inside-the-secret-world-of-sleep http://www.npr.org/2013/08/15/212276021/of-neurons-and-memor...

jonalmeida 13y ago
Your reply is what I was hoping to see when I saw the title of this post.
Dylan16807 13y ago
On the other hand, if you get 50 hours behind on sleep, you only need a handful of extra hours to get back to normal. It's both better and worse than actual numerical debt. Paying it off is painful and slow, but you don't have to pay off the original amount.
- anvandare 13y ago
  Well, not really. During the time where you're building up those 50 'lost hours', your body is performing worse. What you owe in sleep you'll (immediately) pay for in reduced quality of wakefulness: lower mental acuity, worse immune system, poorer physical performance, slower recuperation, etc. Nature only barters, not lends.

izendejas 13y ago

This kind of problem is really fascinating to me. On the one hand, we're all pretty ambitious and would love to do more and that can cause one to sleep less. On the other hand, the more jam packed your schedule the easier it is to become less productive. I'm actually working on an app for myself and hope to release it soon, but it amounts to guiding me on a 5-10 minute workout every morning. I've found that doing so helps me overcome grogginess, gives me an energy boost and even helps me alleviate headaches--which is incredible. So for anyone that feels tired no matter how much you sleep, just do something like the 7-minute workout or tabata workouts (I have my own routine I'll share with the app) and you'll hopefully get a nice energy boost which will last you a while and you'll gradually notice your metabolism will improve, etc. This is not scientifically proven, but exercise is pretty awesome either way. :)

conectorx 13y ago

Oh my god, my kids are going to harvard to learn that if they dont sleep enough, they will be sleepy during the day.... This is funny and sad :(