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Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

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Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#171

Post by bumbledraven »

meric wrote: post #116
blazingfrog2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 It's called sleep envy and, some nights when I can hear my wife drift off in minutes and I'm not even close to it, it throws me into that mental tailspin that goes through multiple stages like the whiny "why-me", plain anger, frustration and more. The only result, of course, is an even more delayed start of sleep phase.

I count numbers from 1 to X, where X is the number I get to before I fall asleep. I concentrate on the numbers and nothing else. Eventually I get to X and I fall asleep. The speed of counting should fast enough I am not bored, but not so fast that I have to spend effort. The speed varies depending on how close I'm to sleep. The closer I am to sleep the slower I count.

I do math problems in my head.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#172

Post by superuser2 »

encoderer wrote: post #157
superuser2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not a student :). I'd love to choose when to go to bed, but that's not really compatible with a workload challenging enough to appease admissions counselors.

Just curious: Do you think your workload will decrease in the future, or that the workloads of the highly paid professionals here are less than what's required from you in school? Don't expect life to get easier. More rewarding, IMO, but not easier.

I would assume that a highly paid professional spends a much greater percentage of his or her day engaged in actual work, is more efficient than I am, and is required to produce a higher quality output than I am. I'm sure it's cognitively harder, but I doubt it's anywhere near the number of hours.

My dad is an accountant. He gets to work at 7:30am and gets home at 4:30pm. He spends about as many hours at work as I do at school, but when he logs off for the day, he's done. I can't remember the last time I actually completed my obligations for the day. If you do manage to do a good job on all the problem sets and readings before losing consciousness, there's always a test to be studying for or a paper to be revising. I procrastinate because there is literally no such thing as "after homework is done."

I don't mean to complain - I gave myself this courseload and I've done well enough with it that I'll be going to my dream school next year (UChicago - yes, I know, the workload will increase exponentially). Sleep deprivation is a price I chose to pay. But I do think that most professionals have a day which ends - usually before 7pm, but at some point it ends - and several hours to commit to a social life, family, side projects, pleasure reading etc. as they please. Obviously not in 80hr/week fields like law and not in startups about to ship, but on balance. Is this not accurate?

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#173

Post by Centigonal »

SeanDav wrote: post #170
SeanDav wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely F.lux is fairly pointless unless the only source of light in your room is your computer monitor? I would imagine that any windows or external lighting is going to have a far greater effect than F.lux. I tried F.lux a while ago when it was recommended in a previous HN post but for me the only difference it seemed to have, was to make my computer monitor more difficult to read by making it too dim.

Just tried it again. Still can't live with it at night, makes me feel like I am going blind with the shift to red. Might try it 1 more time with a gradual shift and see if that works but right now, certainly not useable for me.

I couldn't stand F.lux the first time either. What I did was set it to where I could barely tell the difference. After a week or so I would find myself thinking "too bluish" staring at my screen at night, at which point I lowered the color temperature slightly.

Within two months, I had found a setting I felt comfortable at (right now it's at 3500K).

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#174

Post by Centigonal »

drostie wrote: post #169
superuser2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not a student :). I'd love to choose when to go to bed, but that's not really compatible with a workload challenging enough to appease admissions counselors.

Just to respond a little, I actually just finished with my Master's in applied physics, so yeah, it can work with an academic life. ^_^ Actually it can even be beneficial, much like turning off the Internet -- where yes, you lose access to help docs, but you also lose access to distractions. If you want a little more unorthodox advice I'd offer, "don't buy the textbook unless either (a) it is a workbook which must be…

My impression from reading his/her comment was that he/she is a high school senior, in which case what he says would make sense. 35 hours a week in classes, plus the activity and homework load he would need to make UChicago, plus meals and transport, add up to at least 14 hours on weekdays, without making allowance for inefficiency, laziness, akrasia, etc or leisure.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#175

Post by charlieok »

processyellow wrote: post #164
charlieok wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happen to use an iPhone, I highly recommend Sol: http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2012/01/sol-sun-clock-for-iph... I'm not sure what the equivalent on Android might be; if anyone knows, hopefully they'll weigh in.

Lux is a good one. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux

That looks cool, but it's solving a different problem.

The app I linked to is basically a clock that shows you your local solar times (day, night, golden hours, and twilight) at a glance, and can set alarms by them. If you want to wake at civil dawn, or at sunrise, for example, it'll do that.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#176

Post by sneak »

aclevernickname wrote: post #168
sneak wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Ubuntu doesn't work properly, give OSX a try. Does the exact same thing and works perfectly for me.

That's funny, because I have the opposite anecdote; I have been regularly converting OS X user to Kubuntu Lucid/KXStudio (with backports) for the last year or so. Know all those guys that are avoiding Lion and Mountain Lion like the plague that they are? Yeah. that's my market. Tons of people with 3yo MBP's with an install of Snow Leopard, looking longingly at how pretty and useable my little powerless Netbook with 2…

Top dollar for hardware that lasts 36 months (the length of applecare) means $100/month. For people who "get stuff done" this is nothing. I literally spend more on bottled water than I do my top-dollar computers.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#177

Post by thisisnotatest »

gingerlime wrote: post #75

Interesting post, but I'm not sure if some of this advice can work for me. I've tried earplugs, but to be honest, it makes me paranoid that I won't hear the fire alarm or burglar coming in, which makes me much less relaxed. This isolated feeling is also weird for me. Covering my eyes just feels uncomfortable and also isolating. It's probably just me. Also, I'm not entirely sure where I heard/read it, but I thought it…

I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of earplugs. You might not hear a cat's scampering on the floor, but you are not going to miss anything like someone speaking at a normal volume in the room, much less a fire alarm. As one data point, I have never missed my smartphone alarm clock in five years of sleeping with earplugs.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#178

Post by eropple »

aclevernickname wrote: post #168
sneak wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Ubuntu doesn't work properly, give OSX a try. Does the exact same thing and works perfectly for me.

That's funny, because I have the opposite anecdote; I have been regularly converting OS X user to Kubuntu Lucid/KXStudio (with backports) for the last year or so. Know all those guys that are avoiding Lion and Mountain Lion like the plague that they are? Yeah. that's my market. Tons of people with 3yo MBP's with an install of Snow Leopard, looking longingly at how pretty and useable my little powerless Netbook with 2…

> They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing

I am skeptical of your anecdote. My 2010 MBP was perfectly happy running Xcode, IntelliJ, and pretty much any other applications I'd care to run, and that was before I put a SSD in it (which, naturally, helped a lot).

I think you're stretching the truth by a great deal.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#179

Post by path411 »

eropple wrote: post #178
aclevernickname wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, because I have the opposite anecdote; I have been regularly converting OS X user to Kubuntu Lucid/KXStudio (with backports) for the last year or so. Know all those guys that are avoiding Lion and Mountain Lion like the plague that they are? Yeah. that's my market. Tons of people with 3yo MBP's with an install of Snow Leopard, looking longingly at how pretty and useable my little powerless Netbook with 2…

> They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing I am skeptical of your anecdote. My 2010 MBP was perfectly happy running Xcode, IntelliJ, and pretty much any other applications I'd care to run, and that was before I put a SSD in it (which, naturally, helped a lot). I think you're stretching the truth by a great deal.

The only application performance a SSD provides is initial load time, and write times.

Re: Sleep: Everything You Need to Know

#180

Post by eropple »

path411 wrote: post #179
eropple wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing I am skeptical of your anecdote. My 2010 MBP was perfectly happy running Xcode, IntelliJ, and pretty much any other applications I'd care to run, and that was before I put a SSD in it (which, naturally, helped a lot). I think you're stretching the truth by a great deal.

The only application performance a SSD provides is initial load time, and write times.

Depends on what you're doing. It helps noticeably if you're swapping, which I can see an "underspecced" older MBP doing. For me, however, it was disk indexing, Maven being able to quickly read in jars when I hit the go-button, etc.
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