Guzey substantially retracted this a year later. I think it would be great to publish both together as a case study of self-experimentation, but would be against publishing this on its own.
Get minimum possible sustainable amount of sleep → get enough sleep to have maximum energy during the day
Sleep makes me angry. I mean, why on Earth do I have to spend hours every day lying around unconscious?????????
In 2019, trying to learn about the science behind sleep I read Why We Sleep and got so angry at it for being essentially pseudoscience that I spent >100 hours debunking it. In 2020, I slept 4 h/day for 2 weeks and shown that this didn’t make me dumber (not recommended, it was terrible). In 2022, I published Theses on Sleep, with points like “Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.”
What I changed my mind about
1. There’s no good medical reason to sleep more than the minimum you can sustain.
Not this one! Fight me.
2. I can sleep 4h/day, so 6h/day must be easy.
It turns out that sleeping 6h/day is hard… I have to track sleep & adjust for every party I go to, deadline, travel; worry about sleepiness during boring meetings/tasks; etc.
3. It’s fine to sometimes be sleepy.
I tried Adderall and it made me more awake than ever before. I noticed that this made me want to do stuff more, pay more attention, be more intentional, think quicker, have more ideas, and remember more. Conversely, I started to notice that being sleepy has the exact opposite effect.
Therefore, I realized that it’s very important to be as awake as possible and that my model of sleepiness where you can be “awake”, “sleepy” and “asleep” is dumb.
4. I don’t have another 10h/week to spend being dead.
Come on 2022 Alexey, you definitely lose >10h/week to just random bullshit. Ahem, CS:GO.
5. Many impressive people sleep 5-6h (Elon, Napoleon, Thatcher), so I can too.
Sure. And many others (Bezos, Zuck, Isaak Freeman) sleep 7-8h.
What I do now
I default to sleeping 2300-0600. I do my best to always wake up at the same time because I wake up 10-15m before the alarm if I do this for several days in a row.
I don’t worry about sleeping 3-4h occasionally. I’m actually writing this at 4am after <3 hours of sleep. But I avoid doing this often because it messes up my schedule.
Guzey substantially retracted this a year later. I think it would be great to publish both together as a case study of self-experimentation, but would be against publishing this on its own.