If I have to learn how to be able to read this code and understand what it and its dependencies are doing, where do I start? Is reading their paper an effective strategy?
I sleep between 6 to 7 hrs a day, and find it very hard to go back to sleep if woken up in between. Has anyone successfully changed their sleeping habits? If yes, how?
At 8:30p: Last big glass of water. Put phone on charger in non-bedroom and don’t touch until 7a. Keep the lights low and warm. Do low stimulation activities like reading fiction or watching semi-boring TV or chatting with your family. Lay down when you can’t keep your eyes open anymore.
Big change for me. The phone especially is poison for evening tranquillity.
Also try a multi day hike through the wilderness to reset your circadian rhythm. This combines heavy levels of exercise, no phone access, and you wake up/sleep with sunrise/sunset.
To maintain your circadian rhythm during normal times, try to wake up and go to sleep at the same time every day and eat only during three meals per day at the same time each day, avoid caffeine later in the day and also follow the advice of others here. Keep the room you are going to sleep in very dark and quiet. Don't go to bed until you are ready to fall asleep - don't use tv/phone/computer in bed.
Helpful to know: Exercising hard in general I think is helpful. I am not a morning person but I sleep extremely well when I go climbing in the gym for ~2 hrs or so in the evenings, after dinner. I pretty much have dinner, go there, warm up and climb, go back, shower and sleep, and that guarantees a deep sleep for me. I also tend to wake up with a clear head and can easily solve stuff I was struggling with the day before.
I’m also not a morning person, but another reason why hard exercise wouldn’t work for me, in the morning, is that after hard exercise it takes a few hours for my brain to function properly again (someone on HN a few months ago explained its because the body prioritises getting oxygen to the muscles instead of to the brain). At least, I’m unable to work for a while after going to the gym. For this reason, I bow only go to the gym after work.
Light exercise like going for a walk is ok though.
Another benefit of gym/exercise after work: Makes a great barrier between work life and home life. Ensures you don’t bring work home.
And if you work from an office “I have gym at X hour” is a super socially acceptable reason to leave on time. Nobody questions a gym schedule. Especially if you have a class.
just food for thought, there is quite a bit of research showing that hard exercise right before bed is not optimal. i think its fair to say any is better than none, and if it works for you, it works for you. but the argument is that hard exercise raises you metabolism and body temperature, which is in direct opposition of what your body needs to do to enter deep sleep (lower body temperature)
Parents basically can't do anything leisure-related with electronics or the Internet, at all, if they shut that stuff off at 8:30 every day.
Which might be for the best anyway, but it is so tempting to still try to keep up with movies, TV, video games, side-projects, social media, et c, even though you're effectively working damn near an 80-hour week. Easier to fit in exercise after the kids are asleep, too, unless you save all that for the weekend or take time out of paying work to do it instead. Or get up stupid early. Like, much earlier than 7.
id say its fairly normal to at least answer slack between 700am and 9pm, and thats excluding any recreational/personal non rec screen time after or before those hours
> id say its fairly normal to at least answer slack between 700am and 9pm
Uh...it really isn't.
Unless your job requires being on-call, such as IT, incident response, or site reliability, you shouldn't be getting Slack messages that late. There's no reason a software engineer should be responding to messages 14 hours/day.
Let's start by saying "the world isn't IT" and thus the idea of answering Slack at all is a trade-specific thing. Many people are not as wired to their computers for work. That said:
Do you get paid oncall for your availability past 8 hours?
I'm a consultant (get paid salary but work at a customer site) and I turn off Slack notifications and Teams after 5pm. My boss and core team know how to reach me if something critical comes up. The only time that isn't the case is when I'm oncall, which I don't do in my current role. I'm also not an account manager, but I also don't get paid half a million a year.
And the answer to "screen time afterward" is "don't use a phone screen". The point is to avoid the interactivity of the phone at night. Grab a book/e-book or put on some longer-form video such as a TV show.
In addition to this, I stop letting my mind wander to challenging/interesting/stimulating topics in the last hour of the day. That makes a huge difference, at least for me.
If you are young and grinding to climb up the corporate ladder or in an executive position at a default dead startup and happy doing it then your comment makes sense to me.
If you're not either of those things then your comment is extreme and sounds like you'd be happy in a 996 company. If software was 996 everywhere I would find a different career as I enjoy the rest of life too much.
I don’t think gp means that they are happy to work until that late, I think they mean that they regularly use their phone for non work communication that late because they spend their day at work.
That leaves 2h30 between you finishing work and putting the phone down. It’s not even like @jamwt said “go to bed at 8:30” or even “no screens at all after 8:30”, just put the phone away and chill.
8:30's about when dinner's been cooked, eaten, the kids are in bed, and about 50% of the day's mess has been cleaned up (you'll get the 250% of a day's mess that remains, after 5 week days, cleaned up on the weekend—at least, that's the lie you tell yourself)
I get almost no personal screen time—or other personal time, for that matter—before that (aside from time I steal to post on HN, like everyone else)
I don't mean on call. I mean, work til 6, eat dinner, check the mail. Do a couple chores and bam, it's 8:00. Shutting down at 8:30 will work if you have no friends or family I suppose.
I have friends AND family and I manage it. If you wake up at 6 AM and go to bed at 10 PM, work 9 AM to 6 PM, and shut down all your screens and stuff at 8:30 PM, that gives you 8 hours of sleep a night, an hour to work out in the morning, 2 hours to eat breakfast and do morning stuff before work, 2.5 hours every evening for dinner, chores, screen relax time, as well as communication with friends and family, and then another 1.5 hours for low-stimulation home family time and reading. Sounds perfectly fine for a weekday.
Giving a very generous 1 hour for every meal and daily 1-hour workout, that still gets you 12.5 hours of non-working screen time for your work week, and 7.5 hours of lower-stimulation entertainment. And then you have your weekends for weekend stuff. What does your schedule look like where this is a serious problem?
Being constantly socially online with people you don't live with is honestly overrated. Cutting out social media is a good first step, and strengthened my most important social connections, and completely eliminated ones that I hadn't realized were empty and meaningless (do you really need to be "friends" with everybody you knew from high school?)
If you work until 6 then you presumably don't start until 9:30-10, so you can probably sleep until 7:30 or 8 in the morning. So do the same routine and move it back an hour or so.
Melatonin a half hour before bed has changed my life. That and reading at night instead of watching TV.
Oh and this is the weird one... I sleep with one airpod/bluetooth headphone in. I have ADHD and if I'm not tired enough I'll wake up around 2-4 to pee then be awake thinking about work/family/stupid things I did 10 years ago. I don't know how I got started doing this but now I listen to an audiobook at very low volume on a 15 minute sleep timer. I only listen to books I've read a bunch (currently I cycle between Hyperion books, enders game, LOTR, a handful of King novels, Stoner, The Great Gatsby - pretty much any book where I can pick up at any time and know whats going on without being too interested) and fall asleep to that.
It prevents my mind from drifting and helps me sleep a lot better. As a bonus I get to reread/listen to classics I enjoy several times a year.
I don't know anyone else who does this but I've been doing it for 2-3 years and its changed sleep for me dramatically.
>I sleep with one airpod/bluetooth headphone in. I have ADHD and if I'm not tired enough I'll wake up around 2-4 to pee then be awake thinking about work/family/stupid things I did 10 years ago. I don't know how I got started doing this but now I listen to an audiobook at very low volume on a 15 minute sleep timer
Wow, this is me, I do the exact same thing. Concentrating on the audio gives me something different to focus on and inevitably puts me back to sleep.
and a few others. I'd be interested in learning about more channels with a similar flavor, or if you're familiar with these and can help me find words for their common thread.
I've slept with some kind of audio going for as long as I've had the ability to (i.e. since getting my first tape deck as a kid in the 80s). Certainly my parents found it hilarious that I'd put on a thrash metal tape and be asleep by the second song, whereas in silence I'd be awake for much longer. I've moved from music to speech and these days I wear an earphone because my partner doesn't share my taste in podcasts, but the habit is still strong after ~40 years. I never thought it was particularly weird, and have always assumed a fair number of people do the same. None of my partners have ever thought it odd, or told me so at least.
I can't tell you why I do it, mind. I don't think I'd claim it drowns out unwelcome thoughts - if anything, when my mental health is poor the thoughts drown out the audio. I basically just don't really get on well with silence. To my knowledge I don't have ADHD.
I've always done the same. As you say, it does have to be something very familiar. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy original radio series more often than not, for me. I've tried purpose created material, like This Book Will Send You to Sleep on Audible, but it was too interesting.
I've never tried with a Bluetooth headphone but have always used a wired one, with one line cut off a the Y junction to help avoid tangling. Sometimes have to use a player which supports sending stereo as mono, otherwise you often only get one side of the dialog in dramatisations, like Hitchhiker's.
> Melatonin a half hour before bed has changed my life.
I thought your body habituated to externally-supplied melatonin and it became less effective with time; are you using it only sometimes or did I misunderstand?
I don’t believe this is the case, though it’s worth noting that the doses you typically find at pharmacies are much larger than you actually need. From what I’ve read it’s unlikely to be habit-forming at lower doses and it typically works just as well (if not better) at those doses.
i've wired my brain to fall asleep about 20-30 minutes into my nightly podcast. really makes me enjoy weeknights when my favorite podcast drops, weekends i struggle haha
> very hard to go back to sleep if woken up in between
Melatonin solves this for me. It takes very little (~0.3mg) to achieve about the largest clinically-observed effect. Makes it easier for me to stay asleep.
For getting to sleep earlier (or even just at a normal, but still fairly late time) reliably, I've found two solutions:
1) Approximately no electricity after sundown (or just a little after sundown, in the Winter). No light sources brighter than a few candles (enough to read by). Warm light only. Nothing with a screen except an e-ink reader. You can still: play music; listen to music (if you can be disciplined about it, a couple moments of screen to put on another album is probably fine, if you don't have a screen-free way to do that, or otherwise, find a screen-free way, it can be done cheaply); listen to podcasts or radio (ditto); play board and card games (~10-20 candle power scattered around a room is a tiny fraction of typical nighttime house lighting for a room, but is plenty to do this to); read (aloud!); write; talk. But you must turn off the electricity-powered 24/7 carnival. Entirely. Ultra-bright lighting (once you're used to low-light the amount of light we flood our houses with at night will seem outright insane), computers, video games, Netflix. Zero, zero of that.
2) Weed. [EDIT: I have tried prescription meds for this, too—the ones I tried did work, but not as well, left me feeling like shit in the morning even if I got a solid 8 hours of sleep, and especially left me feeling like shit if I tried to use them late in the evening after I realized I was going to have trouble falling asleep, rather than just taking them every day at a set, earlier time]
> Approximately no electricity after sundown (or just a little after sundown, in the Winter).
Jesus God, where do you live? The sun goes down at 17:00-17:30 for most of the year here. I'd lose all of my free time if I did that.
IME melatonin an hour before bedtime, and setting screen color temperature to a really low value works wonders (I've been using 2000K at night and 3200K in daytime, sometimes even 1800K). I can stare at the screen for 16 hours and then go straight to bed, and be off in a few minutes.
> Jesus God, where do you live? The sun goes down at 17:00-17:30 for most of the year here. I'd lose all of my free time if I did that.
Medium-ish Northern latitude. Dark around 1700 in the depth of Winter, maybe 2130 or 2200 at the height of Summer. Of course that includes daylight savings fucking with the clocks.
Weed helps me get to sleep, but it does not help me get restful sleep. Quite the opposite, in fact: if I smoke weed before bed, I wake up tired the next day.
I had two children, before that I was a terrible sleeper, would take me an hour+ to fall asleep. Now I can close my eyes and go to sleep with no issue. I think it was a kind of training when my kids were young and would wake up multiple times per night, when you got back to bed you made sure you went to to sleep ASAP as you could be up again shortly. There is an alleged military technique that works but I think the practice part is a big factor, https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2018/09/the-secret-..., bad sleep habits are hard to break and good ones hard to build.
Definitely recommend the technique noted here as a good exercise.
Just _Intentionally_ relaxing the muscles in your face can make such a profound difference when trying to get to sleep. Especially when you don't even realize those muscles are not relaxed by default when laying around in bed.
Eye mask. iPhone in sleep mode at 7pm local time. In bed lights out no later than 9-10pm. Alarm set for 8am on wfh days, 7am on rare travel days when I have to catch a flight.
TLDR actively defend your sleep time. People think it’s wasted time, but it’s the most important work for long term health (including long term brain health). Money doesn’t buy back beating your body into the ground.
I have a lot of trouble with eye masks, ear plugs.
Not necessarily that I can fall asleep with them (I do), but they cause me to wake at some point in the night to remove. Maybe I have to develop the habit.
Pricey, but look in to Bose SleepBuds ][. Life changing for me. My wife got a pair later and hated them for the first 3 nights ("they hurt, can't sleep", etc) then it 'clicked' and she loves hers too. My brother picked up a pair for $100 on craigslist and... he likes his too (but doesn't use them every night apparently).
Respectfully, living well isn’t a waste of life. I live to enjoy my life (which I only get one of), and getting enough sleep to enjoy my day being well rested is a component of that. I’m not always sleeping 10 hours, but I’m never getting less than 8 hours. I let me body decide.
I got a white noise machine recently and it has been an absolute game-changer. I live in a pretty dense city and with warmer weather, neighbors have been spending more time hanging out outside. Their noise into the wee hours was keeping me up and preventing me from sleeping or enjoying open windows. I put the white noise machine next to my bed, set the thing on full blast, and have been sleeping through the night peacefully. Probably one of the better $50 spends I've made recently.
I'm not sure if your problem is noise or what but I'd wager that a machine like this could be helpful in a plethora of situations. It's just pretty calming.
Start with lifestyle modifications that help entrain your circadian rhythm. People who spend a lot of time indoors, especially if in dimly lit offices, have a very different light exposure pattern than our ancestors who were outdoors all day. You want to push your light exposure to match outdoor light: Very high intensity during the day, minimal light exposure in the evenings as you relax. Going outside for a 10-15 minute walk at lunch is enough to get started. Dimming the lights at home in the evening and limiting phone/TV usage is also huge. Many find that reading a paper book before bed instead of using a phone makes a huge difference.
Play with the other inputs to your circadian rhythms: Meal timing and physical activity are huge inputs. Try different dinner times earlier and later and you might be surprised to discover some large effects.
Adjust what you eat and how frequently. Some people wake up early because they’ve trained their bodies to run on a constant stream of carbs or sugar, which obviously can’t be sustained while you’re sleeping for many hours.
Stress reduction and addressing any mental health issues is also important. Early morning waking isn’t uncommon in depressed patients and often resolves with depression treatment. Even non-depressed people can benefit from stress reduction and relaxation exercises.
A simple but counterintuitive trick which really had a major impact in my case was spending less time in bed. This way, sleep is maximized as a portion of total time in bed. Your mind starts to associate being in bed more strongly with being asleep.
For example, if you usually spend 7 hours 30 from the moment you go into bed to the moment you get out of it, you could try 6 hours and 45 minutes: you would probably be sleep-deprived for a few days until your body can't take it anymore and will have to use that smaller time-window more efficiently. You could then adjust time in bed depending on your results.
Things that had an impact too, but probably more minor:
- Being exposed to direct sunlight ("direct" meaning with no window in between, looking at the sky for example, not at the sun directly!) as early as possible after waking-up
- Cold shower in the morning (in the evening, better if the shower is warm/hot) for its thermogenic effect
+ of course, the usual advice: no screen in the evening, exercise, dinner early, etc.
All of this stuff is "basic" and if you aren't doing what emptyfile said, you should absolutely expect your sleep quality to be horrible. The other items on the list are:
• Consistent sleep / wake up schedule
• No meals at least 3 hours before bed
• Same story with sugar as caffeine
• Proper temperature in room
• If you want consistency, sleep in a consistent posture and don't move
• Turn off any electronics 30 mins before bed
• Limit alcohol and other substances like User23 said
Sleep is one of those things that has "obvious" solutions and is one of the easiest things to fix in life assuming no underlying medical problems.
The ONLY other thing "this simple" is exercise and rote memorization.
A surprisingly important item is limiting the amount of liquid you consume late at night.
Also eliminating caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol altogether. For me there was a big difference between "a little caffeine in the morning" and "none at all."
I fall asleep with triggers; for me they are mp3s of comedy tv shows. It needs to be something that I know through and through. I sleep with one earbud in and pass out when max a few minutes into an episode. It stays on when I wake up I sleep again (usually don’t even notice that I woke up; sometimes my wife says I did). I am also a lucid dreamer, I can usually get back to the dream I was already in or stop my dream to get into another one. Although I might dream all of that; I do remember a lot of detail in the morning.
I've realized I sleep best when there's absolutely no outside light. I mean NO light. If my body detects even a hint of sunlight in the morning, it kicks off those slow wake up processes.
Have kids and you will be woken up at all hours. Then you will learn the ability to fall back asleep. You also won’t need to set the morning alarm any longer.
It's wonderfully relevant because it takes you through the basics and those are all still the same. Their simulator software was already old when I went through the book a few years ago, but I'm sure it still works fine.
Well... how else do you pay back the loan you take to study in USA? This is a problem for a huge portion of students, immigrant or not.
You can argue that students can go back to their own country and repay the loan? That is practically impossible for almost every student coming from India and China.
Banks cooperate internationally, you're on the hook both in your home country(or whatever country the co-signer is from)and the country the college is in. it's impossible to just skip out on loans nowadays(unless the trusted co-signer disappears with you ofc)
Foreign students get loans from their home country not the US. No US institution will lend to a foreign student without a domestic co-signer, for precisely this reason.
