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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2304 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 13, 2023

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I am currently struggling with holding myself accountable for being reliable and reliably productive. I am having trouble achieving goals that I set for myself and am passionate about (e.g. finish a draft of X project by Y date). The part that makes this challenging for me is as best as I can tell my lack of productivity is downstream of two rare sleep disorders I have. (I was much more productive before these disorders worsened.)

I have a “sleep quality disorder”, which greatly reduces the restorative quality of my sleep, and I have a “sleep schedule disorder”[1], which makes it hard to predict my sleep/wake times on a daily basis.

I am currently pursuing medical treatments for both disorders, and I have had a lot of success treating the sleep quality disorder. Now, there’s roughly an 70% chance each “sleep session” that I will have a normal, restful amount of sleep. This seems to be the point of diminishing returns for treating the sleep quality disorder; more improvement will come only with much more effort.[2]

So now I’m in a state where I follow roughly this algorithm:

  • When I wake up, I try to tell if I got high quality sleep in my “sleep session”, where I generally sleep for 8 to 10 hours.
  • If I did, which happens about 70% of the time, I go about my planned activities, staying awake for roughly between 12 to 18 hours before falling asleep again.
  • If not, which happens about 20% of the time, I will generally be so exhausted as to easily fall asleep back asleep within 2 to 3 hours. I’m not really able to think clearly or be productive during this time. I will then wake up and try again.
  • About 10% of the time, I think I’m rested well enough, but after trying to be productive for a bit it becomes clear I am not, and I end up wasting a bunch of time until I fall asleep regularly again in 12 to 18 hours.

This works okay, but I have the following problems:

  1. I find it really hard to tell when I’m being unproductive for normal reasons (e.g. distraction/laziness/procrastination) versus when I’m just having a run of "bad luck" with my sleep.
  2. I find it hard to interface with the wider world on a calendar-day scheduled basis. I basically deliver work on a “it’s done when it’s done, best effort” basis, which people who have to collaborate with me find frustrating.
  3. I struggle with building habits, because a bad run of sleep will inevitably cause me to “miss twice” on my new habitual tasks, which is really fatal to habit formation. I also don’t really have reliable daily cues to hang my habits on, although with much effort I’m starting to build a “wake up” and “bed time” routine.[3]
  4. Because my sleep + wake time is offset from the daily 24 hour cycle, I eventually end up having periods where I’m primarily awake at night, which gets me a bit depressed and saps my productivity a bit.

Currently my plan of attack is basically:

  1. Track good versus bad sleep days and timing. Use this data to better estimate work and coordinate times for things where I interface with the outside world and evaluate treatment success.
  2. Try to stick to all habits at least on good sleep days. Intellectually, this should work, but I’ve found it really lengthens the amount of time it takes for a habit to “stick” in practice. It seems like the habit parts of my brain don’t ignore the bad sleep days.
  3. Use sleep aids to sleep again more quickly on the 10% of days I do not sleep well enough to be productive but not badly enough to fall asleep. (It’s unclear if this makes the schedule problem worse, but it does net back higher productivity by having fewer totally wasted days)
  4. Continue to iterate with light exposure therapy and melatonin to reduce variability/noise from sleep schedule disorder long term and improve mood.

If anyone has any advice or thoughts or brainstorming on how to better manage this, I’d be all ears. I think the lowest hanging fruit right now is working on concrete better ways to improve my habits/routines and make the most of the time I’m productive. So for the short term, I’m trying to find ways to make the most of what I have.

[1] The sleep schedule disorder has been medically diagnosed as non-24 circadian rhythm similar to what Eliezer Yudkowsky has. Mine seems to be more erratic and irregular than his is. The solution that worked for him has not (yet) worked for me, but I'm still tweaking.

[2] I have sought out world-expert level medical advice for the sleep disorders, and we seem to have squeezed all the easy improvement from treatment there.

[3] When the sleep quality disorder was at its worst, I just fell asleep and woke up pretty randomly. Now I'm trying to rebuilt routine around waking up and going to sleep, especially so I can try to find some better objective way of discerning low quality and high quality sleep sessions, so maybe we can debug that further.

(Meta Note: I posted this previously on an earlier Wellness Wednesday thread, but it got eaten by the automatic moderator, so the mods have said it is fine if I repost.)

I know non-24-hour sleep disorder is a real thing, but since it's most obviously a real thing for blind people, maybe among the sighted it's often something like 'idiosyncratically weak response to day/night lighting cues' -- have you really maxed out the intensity of your day/night cues? Is it as bright as possible in the day and as dark as possible in the night?

I fixed my delayed sleep phase problem (which tended toward non-24-hour during the winters) by being unreasonably aggressive about darkness in the evening. I bought a pack of rechargeable LED candles and if I use no other light source for three hours before I intend to sleep, I reliably sleep at my chosen hour, which is about 4 hours earlier than I'd tend to otherwise, and my sleep time no longer creeps later and later every day like it used to in the winter. Previous attempts at fixing this with super bright lights in the morning, or avoiding blue light in the evening, or avoiding screens in the evening, or using a 'reasonable' degree of dimming in the evenings, all failed. If my evening darkness procedure hadn't been enough, I'd have tried blackout curtains to maximize intensity of nighttime darkness.

Maybe you've already exhausted all your possible gains here, and if you lived in a tent in the woods for a week or two with no artificial lights at all you'd still not entrain with the sun -- but if you haven't tried something roughly that extreme, maybe push harder in that direction.

Not OP, but as someone struggling with delayed sleep problems, this is an incredibly helpful and inspiring comment.

How do you deal with the desire to do electronic things during your evening hours?

Somewhat poorly. It helps that screens can be dimmed a lot, with third-party tools (Twilight, etc) if necessary, and a screen can be useable (for non-graphics tasks) when extremely dim if the surroundings are dim too. I also have a red-backlit keyboard -- looks a bit like fireplace embers.

I'm not religious about this stuff, and I trade off my sleep timing against other concerns. Sometimes I do stuff out in public at later hours under bright lights, and in recent weeks my sleep time slipped because I liked keeping my Christmas lights on late. But I can be confident now that when I want to sleep earlier, being more religious about the lighting situation is an effective way to do it.

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:

Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.

Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:

Inspiration is the act of drawing up the chair to the writing desk.

And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.

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