The answer above is not a direct response to the question as asked, but it is still a very good list of interventions for improved sleep.
I'd add a few points. That the sleep literature is very big on maintaining a good circadian rhythm (entrainment) and a few interventions follow from that.
It might be helpful to have sleep tracking to have a better idea of what you need.
There's hardware like https://dreem.com/en/product that promises to help people sleep better.
General tips for better sleep are about avoiding blue light right before bed. I sat my f.lux so red that green and black became the same color. In addition I have Philips Hue lights that dim red.
Cool down the room when you are sleeping.
Make the room in which you are sleeping pitch black.
Don't eat anything 2 hours before going to bed.
Thanks, I'll try this out! Zeo had already been shut down when I went to buy one, so I'm excited to see there's a similar product on the market.
I'm not perfect about avoiding blue light but I do usually sleep in a cold room, stop eating well before bed, and wear an eye mask (although my room isn't as dark as it should be).
Hopefully the Dreem will still help me get a better understanding of the factors that impact my sleep though.
An off-label use of fluoxetine (Prozac) is that it can caused prolonged sleep, possibly by reducing anxiety in ways that make it easier to stay asleep longer but specific mechanism of action is unknown. Worked well for me in treating narcolepsy-related sleep depravation, i.e allowed me to stay asleep 10 hours a night so I got enough sleep to avoid sleep attacks during the day. I'm no longer on it and still able to get enough sleep; my theory there is that regular meditation replaced the need for a drug to produce the same effect, allowing me to stay asleep longer.
I remember reading somewhere that meditation has been shown to reduce the need for sleep but was skeptical. If there's any literature on this that you consider trustworthy, please share!
Methods I've personally found useful for improving productivity when temporarily my cognitive ability or conscientiousness is lowered, not necessarily due to sleep deprivation:
You seem to assume that your lowered ability is caused by sleep deprivation. Is that an assumption? If so, I would encourage you to track your sleep quality and your cognitive performance and see if they really correlate, if you can think of a way to do it.
My fully subjective impression is that my insomnia never impacted my cognitive performance. I used to stress about it impacting my bodybuilding. Then I started believing that the impact of my sleep deprivation is minimal, if any, and that new belief probably helped me improve quality of my sleep.
Sitting next to a big window and spending a lot of time people-watching. I don't understand why it worked, but I noticed it would put me in a rhythm where I would make slow but consistent progress with my work.
Going for a long walk similarly seemed to help temporarily.
You seem to assume that your lowered ability is caused by sleep deprivation. Is that an assumption? If so, I would encourage you to track your sleep quality and your cognitive performance and see if they really correlate, if you can think of a way to do it.
This is an assumption in the
I face the same problem; currently my "solution" is to do a bunch of busy work (replying to emails, reading blog posts I've been meaning to read, life admin stuff etc.) that isn't cognitively demanding. I'm lucky in that sleep issues are rare enough that when they happen I do have enough of this busy work to fill the day.
I used to think I didn't get anything from trying to nap, since I never fell asleep during one. Then someone reported that I had been snoring during one of those naps in which I hadn't noticed any sign that I'd fallen asleep. Now I'm uncertain whether naps are worthwhile.
I worked as a strategy consultant for several years, with an unreasonable work-life balance, and in college generally did not get enough sleep, so I have some experience to draw on here :-).
I've found transcending-based meditation to be super restorative and often much easier to drop into than a 20 minute nap. I practice Natural Stress Relief Meditation ($40 self study course at nsr-usa.org), but I read a recommendation for the 1 Giant Mind app, which teaches a similar technique and I think is free.
As for being productive while awake: I've found the following most effective:
Maximizing energy
Staying focused
Maximizing clarity of thought:
Thanks! These are good recommendations!
I used to do cold showers but stopped a while back. Maybe I'll revive the practice.
Eating low carb and as little as you can
I'm curious about this one. You find that eating low carb/less keeps you sharper on days when you sleep very little? I've anecdotally noticed that fasting gives me an energy boost on days when I sleep well, although at the cost of making me a bit more jittery, but haven't noticed the same effects on days when I don't sleep enough. Is this purely anecdotal or can you share some articles/papers about this?
Sorry, long hiatus from LW so just saw this comment.
I actually found / find eating low carb maximizes my energy levels generally, sleep deprivation or no. Or, more specifically, it avoids the sluggishness / energy dip that often comes after eating a satiating amount of carbs. I know Atkins and other low-carb proponents claim that it provides more / more sustained energy (IIRC, the mechanism of action is avoiding blood sugar swings), but I haven't looked into it rigorously, TBH.
Sleep deprivation is cumulative over the span of weeks. Being short 30 min each day for two weeks is disastrous. Almost no one is near top capability with even 7 hours. Memory formation and recall are especially limited on low sleep, even if you drug to overcome the lapses in attention. Physical health is also severely harmed (look at how attractive someone is after 'beauty sleep' vs deprived), perhaps mostly via poor diet choices but honestly why would evolution not layer on physical garbage collection processes when mental ones are already underway ... further, a bunch of micro naps doesn't give you the same concentration of deep sleep as the last 3 hours of an 8.5 hour bout would (8.5 is my ideal; 8 is tolerable).
While not directly a response to the question as asked, I agree with many of the other contributors that sleep tracking is valuable as part of an overall sleep strategy.
I use a FitBit Ionic to track my own sleep and feel that it is quite accurate, at least as far as sleep/wake times go. I can't really assess sleep stage accuracy, but I've found that's of less value than simply tracking sleep/wake/duration. After a year of not trying to be that disciplined, I recently started paying more attention again to sleep tracking and my sleep behavior in general.
What always strikes me when I look at my sleep data after a few months of not looking at it is that my subjective sense of my sleep behavior is just way off. I'll think that I've been going to sleep 11-12pm each night with occasional nights of staying up to 1-2am, but then the data says 1-2am is the norm. Similarly I'll think that most nights I'm getting enough sleep the for data to tell me that's the minority.
Related to the importance of a consistent routine and well entrained circadian rhythm, I'm now focusing more on sleep time and wake time than whether I successfully slept enough hours or how many times I wake up in the night (a struggle for me). The time I got to sleep is especially an input I much more directly control than the output of whether it was a good night's sleep. It seems good to focus directly on the thing I can control, separately checking whether it is having the desired flow-on effects.
Fitbit's out of the box sleep dashboard is pretty nice, but doesn't make the data I most care about immediately apparent. It's got one graph which shows sleep and wake times over the course of the past week, but I feel it's not quite enough as a feedback loop on my behavior. As a solution to that, I recently set up my own report derived from the data to be emailed to me each day. (I did something similar in 2016 except with an online dashboard. The dashboard had the disadvantage that after a few months when I got busy and distracted I stopped checking it. Since I check email daily, I'm hoping I'll be far less likely to stop looking at my new report.)
. . .
You can see a sample of my sleep report here.
My sleep is not quite as consistent as I'd like yet, but a 5x improvement of previous months. I do allow myself exceptions for social events and other unusual circumstances; for now I'm focused on avoiding those nights when it just wasn't worth it to stay up late and I'm pointlessly sacrificing tomorrow in particular and my overall sleep hygiene in general.
Stimulants are an excellent short term solution. If you absolutely need to get work done tonight and can't sleep amphetamine (i.e. Adderall) is a great solution. Indeed, there are a number of studies/experiments (including those the airforce relies on to give pilots amphetamines) backing up the fact that it improves the ability to get tasks done while sleep deprived.
Of course, if you are having long term sleep problems it will likely increase those problems.
I've recently been finding that I struggle much more with intellectual work (math, hard programming, writing, etc.) when I sleep less 6.5-7 hours. While I'm at peace with the fact that I seem to generally require >7 hours a sleep, it's frustrating that even though I set aside enough time for adequate sleep, I'll often wake up after only ~6 hours of sleep and not be able to fall back asleep.
My cognitive ability seems to be impacted by a single night of bad sleep even when I've been sleeping well in the recent past. Concretely, if I've slept 8 hours every night for two weeks, a single night of poor sleep can still result in a ~50% less productive day.
In addition to impacting productivity, acute sleep deprivation also leaves me much less capable of entertaining myself by thinking, so I become much more inclined to seek out distracting forms of entertainment like scrolling through the internet. It also seems to increase my cravings for generally "unhealthy" foods (I've seen references to this in literature, but won't bother linking them since it's not the focus of my question).
Other useful notes about my general sleep habits/history include:
I'd love to hear others' strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognitive ability. I've done some preliminary searching for papers, articles, etc., but those that I've found focus on reducing tiredness rather than on returning cognitive ability to baseline. I'm open to trying strategies including but not limited to diet changes, supplements, medication, and habit changes.