I heavily sympathize with a lot of the views from this post.
I used to sleep much more (~9 hours), but as I’ve aged, I now tend to sleep between 3-5 hours a night. This was a rather conscious choice on my part, but now I find it hard to revert to my previous behavior. I switched to various forms of polyphasic sleep during my bender through academia from 2004-2006, and while I eventually abandoned polyphasic, I haven’t switched gone back to a “regular” sleep schedule since.
I do find that at my most acute stage of sleep deprivation I become much more mono-focused. I have to stay interested to stay awake, so I dive into everything my ADHD wants me to focus on to stay locked in. As long as I can ride this mode of operation, I can stay awake truly ridiculous numbers of hours without dipping into modafinil/adrafinil or other anti-sleep agents.
At the risk of dipping into anecdote territory, my biggest concern with having “lived this” for the last decade or two is the apparent sharp impact on cortisol levels.
I gained a ton of productivity for the first decade or so of this practice, but then failed to adequately manage my weight. Now I have a number of health issues that correspond to chronic inflammation.
I still consider on net to have made a gain with the use of ‘front-loading’ my conscious time on earth, but I do feel the need to consider these longer term impacts on cortisol and core body fat. Recently I’ve been trying to find the right middle ground to give my body enough time to recover from exercise and still retain high-focus. e.g. using semaglutide off-label to bring weight under control.
If I had it to do over again, I would probably try to be a lot more careful about monitoring such things BEFORE I reached the point of having to do more drastic steps to bring things back into line.
I heavily sympathize with a lot of the views from this post.
I used to sleep much more (~9 hours), but as I’ve aged, I now tend to sleep between 3-5 hours a night. This was a rather conscious choice on my part, but now I find it hard to revert to my previous behavior. I switched to various forms of polyphasic sleep during my bender through academia from 2004-2006, and while I eventually abandoned polyphasic, I haven’t switched gone back to a “regular” sleep schedule since.
I do find that at my most acute stage of sleep deprivation I become much more mono-focused. I have to stay interested to stay awake, so I dive into everything my ADHD wants me to focus on to stay locked in. As long as I can ride this mode of operation, I can stay awake truly ridiculous numbers of hours without dipping into modafinil/adrafinil or other anti-sleep agents.
At the risk of dipping into anecdote territory, my biggest concern with having “lived this” for the last decade or two is the apparent sharp impact on cortisol levels.
I gained a ton of productivity for the first decade or so of this practice, but then failed to adequately manage my weight. Now I have a number of health issues that correspond to chronic inflammation.
I still consider on net to have made a gain with the use of ‘front-loading’ my conscious time on earth, but I do feel the need to consider these longer term impacts on cortisol and core body fat. Recently I’ve been trying to find the right middle ground to give my body enough time to recover from exercise and still retain high-focus. e.g. using semaglutide off-label to bring weight under control.
If I had it to do over again, I would probably try to be a lot more careful about monitoring such things BEFORE I reached the point of having to do more drastic steps to bring things back into line.