site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2333 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 15, 2023

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).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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 challenge to solve for me is I think it is downstream of two rare sleep disorders I have. 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.

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

  • When I wake up and 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 decently, 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 bad run of luck with my sleep.
  2. I find it hard to interface with the wider world on a calendar-day scheduled basis. I basically deliver 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”, 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.
  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 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. I think this because I’ve sought out world-expert level medical advice for the sleep disorders, and we seem to have squeezed all the easy improvement from treatment there. 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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats