[sidm83]

Its not just short breaks. Effect of a good night's sleep are almost magical in this respect.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives.

One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight.

Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.

[kevinkeller]

I too read Why We Sleep, and found it quite interesting. Then I found out that there is some controversy regarding its claims.

Previous discussions on HN:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519

TBH I haven't made up my mind about the book yet, just thought you should know about these things too.

[float4]

People complain about his book a lot, as is their right, but the finger tapping experiment was actually conducted by Walker's team and the scientific paper[0] has been cited over 500 times.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC202318/

[sidm83]

I found these critiques soon after reading the book. However, there are many other researches cited in the book and I would take them on face value for the not very scientific but somewhat valid (for me) reason of personal experience.

I got into the habit of all night slogs right since high school and it persisted till recently due to the pressure of sticking to deadlines. So I could relate well to several experiments cited in the book.

Considering we do not know nearly as much as we ought to know yet, I would rather err on the side of caution and give far more importance to sleep than I have previously.

[raducu]

Do you happen to know what good sleep means?

I've done polysomnography and they told me nothing except I don't have sleep apnea, and got a lot of microawakenings -- to me it felt I didn't sleep at all with all the wires and noise by other patients in other rooms snoring, nurse re-attaching wires, nurse walking on hallways to check on other patients and so on.

My smartwatch tells me I spend 60% in light sleep, 20% in REM and 20% in deep sleep, but I get very little continous deep sleep.

[doggodaddo78]

I just had a sleep study with EEG and visual/audio recording. They said sleep efficiency of 95%, yet I almost always wake-up very tired, with a dull/stabbing headache, and sweating around the neck.

I also have physiological anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, attention/concentration/alertness/consciousness/memory deficits, tachycardia >100, rapid shallow breathing, high blood pressure (diastolic), veinous insufficiency, cold hands (but normal perfusion), almost no sensation anywhere, excessive sweating w exertion, lower blood volume, swelling neck/fingers/toes, and flushed forehead/ears/cheeks.

I wonder if it's a lack of exercise, chronic blood-vessel narrowing, and/or chronic low blood volume.

[atatatat]

Live in a different environment for a few days to a week to rule that out.

[disabled]

That sounds exactly like dysautonomia (autonomic nervous system dysfunction/disorder), and specifically POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome).

I have a rare form of dysautonomia. It is a very rare immune-mediated neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system, called autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy. It is in pharmaceutical remission, which means that it hopefully stays in remission, as long as I take medicine for it, for life.

Anyways, I can help you out with all of this, and really show you the way. I literally have all of the above symptoms. Check out my profile for my email. I will respond to you with advice.

You may want to start here: DYNA (Dysautonomia Youth Network of America) is an awesome organization, and they have a phone line that they answer during the day. You may want to call them first for advice. Adults call the line all the time. I mean, I am a member of it, and participate there regularly, and I am in my early 30s. Anyways, the DYNA office phone number is: 301-705-6995

I strongly encourage you to call them. Also, please contact me. I also promise that I will help you.

Here are some good references:

Dysautonomia Symptoms: http://dynainc.org/dysautonomia/symptoms

About Dysautonomia: http://dynainc.org/dysautonomia

Living With Dysautonomia: http://dynainc.org/living

Finding the Right Doctor: http://dynainc.org/living/finding-right-doctor

For Newly Diagnosed Patients: http://dynainc.org/living/new-patients

There is now a special board certification/subspecialty in neurology in the United States for Autonomic Disorders (my neurologist has this board subspecialty certification also has an autonomic disorder--so I am tremendously lucky to have him). A handful (about 50) doctors in the US are certified in this subspecialty. But, you really need to get an EMG test, since you are having sensory issues. A neurologist does this test. You really need to be seeing a neurologist regularly if you are having these types of symptoms.

Anyways, to find a neurologist with the Autonomic Disorders subspecialty (you need, at minimum, both a neurologist [most important] and a cardiologist/electrophysiologist who deals with autonomic disorders regularly) go to this website: https://www.ucns.org/Online/Online/Diplomate_Directory.aspx

Under "Please choose a subspecialty" (drop-down menu), select "Autonomic Disorders" and press the blue button "Find"

If you want to get better and stay healthy: do not go to Reddit/Social Media/etc. It is a really toxic place with respect to this illness. People on there are extremely dramatic. Also, avoid the organization Dysautonomia International. The people who run it (primarily women--and I am female myself) are drama queens. They also post inaccurate information on their official Facebook feeds all the time. Also, don't read stuff posted to random blogs. Content that is not moderated about dysautonomia tends to really get wild and can be quite harmful. Trust me on this. If you want to get better with this illness, you have to be careful about what you expose yourself to on the internet.

I hope this helps and I hope to hear from you.

[Broken_Hippo]

Kind of.

In general, getting good sleep means that you fall asleep fairly quickly (30 minutes or less), don't wake up often (once or twice), and you get around the average sleep for your age (even if it varies a bit). You should feel pretty well-rested through the day, and not overly tired if you are in good health.

I'd wager that you don't get good sleep, and you are suffering from us not really being able to "fix" sleep very well - in no small part because we are really in the infancy of sleep science. The sleep study, for you, really just ruled out some things, but couldn't provide answers.

[raducu]

> you are suffering from us not really being able to "fix" sleep very well

Yes, the only drug that made me feel like a baby waking up in the morning was trazodone.

But it also made me wake up with painful boners in the middle of the night, so that's out. I'm so envious of a female acquaintance who swears by trazodone.

[mywittyname]

Perhaps she's pairing the trazodone with something else and not telling you. Like a Magic Wand.

[dec0dedab0de]

Good sleep means waking up without an alarm refreshed and ready to face the world. Good sleep means waking up with less physical pain then when you lied down. Good sleep usually means there was a vivid, but unimportant, dream. Good sleep means I stayed on my back the whole night, and woke up in the same position I went to sleep in.

YMMV Of course

[raducu]

I can't sleep on my back and I usually toss and turn all night and when I wake up, I feel like I need just 3 more hours of sleep.

My mileage does value indeed :))

[dec0dedab0de]

When I was younger I forced myself to learn to sleep on my back. I can only do it with a contour pillow, not necessarily the brand name one, but any with that contour in it. I can't always do it, but when I do my sleep quality is significantly better.

[seedboot]

TIL I don't get good sleep

[blandvegetables]

"waking up without an alarm refreshed and ready to face the world"

Does that actually happen outside of stories?

[ImprovedSilence]

I dont use an alarm. Haven’t it years. Whether or not I’m refreshed depends on how late I went to bed.

[corroclaro]

Yep, it is the rule rather than the exception for many who are "natural" deep sleepers. I used to be one of those until I got overweight.

[dec0dedab0de]

yes, it happens to me most days. Except the ready to face the world part, It's usually more like waking up without an alarm refreshed, and ready to browse HN and watch youtube.

edit: the waking up part didn't happen until I started working from home. I was always over-sleeping when I had to get showered, dressed, and commute every morning.

[n4r9]

Hey, it happened plenty for me during the holidays between school and university terms.

[ehnto]

I struggle a bit with perception of how much I've slept. It can often feel like I've been awake the entire night, aware, thinking, I swear I must dream of lying in bed awake.

[tiku]

Plus not sleeping in your own bed/room also has an effect..

[slver]

I can list a bunch of trivial reasons why we sleep, about memory and so on. I can also give trivial explanations like "it's because you're tired and you get rest".

But I wonder if anyone has explained why typing coordination would be worse without sleep. This is a mechanical task where analytical thinking and so on are not involved, just simple motor memory patterns.

[drited]

The book Brain Rules by John Medina is worth checking out for some suggestions on possible answers. I don't think science has definitive answers yet but if I remember correctly it's thought that the circuits involved in what the brain learned during the day are active during certain sleep stages which helps with consolidation of memory due to strengthening of connections involved. It's 10 years since I've read into this but I think the biology involved was that oligodendrocytes lay down thicker myelin on axons that are active, resulting in faster/stronger connections in the circuits involved. There's also inhibitory actions of established networks which have to be overcome by new circuits which takes sustained 'attack' over time. If the inhibition didn't happen the previously learned activities would turn noisy very quickly so there's a tradeoff between learning speed and maintenance of high fidelity signal for existing pathways in the brain. I guess the brain has evolved to accept new networks from actions that are repeated and thought about repeatedly because these generally are important whereas stuff that is thought about only once probably isn't.

[chayleaf]

Playing piano doesn't require analytical thinking either. Motor memory is just another set of patterns, and rest helps establish the patterns in our mind.

[ehnto]

I'm not sure that's entirely true. There are many ways to approach playing piano, although they all require muscle memory there's a huge cognitive portion to improvisation for example. Some do that by feel, and some do that by actively thinking about the theory they're playing.

[slver]

I feel we need to flesh that out more. Because if we just say sleep establishes the patterns, it's almost as if we say a pianist who has been playing for decades forgets how to be a pianist without a day of sleep, and then while sleeping he remembers how to be a pianist.

I feel I need a more detailed explanation here.

Apparently something gets depleted from the brain during the day, that we get back during sleep. Maybe it's structural, not chemical, but something gets depleted.

[monsieurbanana]

In the aforementioned anecdote, the pianist was struggling with a new composition, not general piano skills. Which would make sleep a catalyst for making new neural pathways for that specific composition, not how to be a pianist in general.

That's my take as a layman.

[ehnto]

Learning a new piece usually requires learning novel movements, stuff you've never done before. Maybe you've played a C major before, but you don't always use the same fingers depending on where you're coming from and where you're going, maybe the cadence or intensity is different, and so on.

[slver]

Still, I can witness myself if I haven't slept well not only my ability to figure out complex programming code suffers, but the mere ability to type fast without a ton of typos.

Otherwise I agree after sleep, what we learn seems more readily available.

[rroblak]

The article specifically mentions a previous study that showed that gains from short rests were greater than those from sleep:

> In a previous study, led by former NIH postdoctoral fellow Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., Dr. Cohen’s team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing. Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night’s sleep and were correlated with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms.