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Wellness Wednesday for December 14, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I generally find there's a one-day lag between sleeping well/badly and feeling energetic/tired. For example, I can sleep for only four hours and be chipper the next day, but then I'll wake up half-dead the day afterwards even if I got eight hours good sleep. Conversely, getting me up to peak energy seems to require several days of good sleep in a row.

Does anyone else get the same kind of lag?

I think lack of sleep dulls perception and masks the tiredness a bit. When I'm running on fumes I don't notice it, when I get my first day off in a while I realise how tired I am.

It’s possible. That would imply that you shouldn’t be able to do difficult things on those occasions, even when you feel fine. I’m not sure whether that’s true for me; I do get slower and clumsier though.

I feel fine enough on those days to go to work (manual labour), but not enough to read a book. It's surprising how much you notice about yourself when you try to maintain a habit of reading, things that you would otherwise brush off become noticeable obstacles when you have to focus.

Personally, I find that if I get little sleep one night (or no sleep at all), then I just get really drowsy the following afternoon, but recover within a couple hours. How awake I feel in the morning seems to mostly depend on how regular I keep my sleep schedule.

I've seen the same thing. Good for procrastinating on exams. It seems like it might just be an effect of adrenaline?

The literature tends to distinguish acute fatigue (lack of rest for a single night), chronic fatigue (sleep debt accumulated over more than 48 hours) and cumulative fatigue (build up over longer periods, i.e. weeks or months).

The thing to test would be to relieve your sleep debt over the following day (maybe 10 hours of sleep + midafternoon nap for 3 hours) and see how the effects are then.

EDIT: Another thing occurred to me while thinking about naps: Perhaps the 4 hours of sleep should be viewed as a nap, as in they are genuinely restful and provide energy for the morning, but the 8 hours of sleep thereafter aren't enough to compensate for the 16 hours of wakefulness since your last rest. Another thing to test would be a midafternoon nap the day you're feeling good (right after sleepless night).