Is there any chance I might be sleep deprived if I wake up before my alarm goes off more than 95% of the time?
I’ve been working pretty much every day for the past year but I had two longish breaks. After each of them there was a long period of feeling pretty awful all the time. I figured out eventually that this was probably how long it took me to forget what ok feels like. Is this plausible or am I probably ok given sufficient sleep and adequate diet?
Also, does mixing modafinil and starting strength sound like a bad idea? I know sleep is really important for recovery and gainz but SS does not top out at anything seriously strenuous for someone who isn’t ill and demands less than 4 hours gym time a week.
Is there any chance I might be sleep deprived if I wake up before my alarm goes off more than 95% of the time?
You might be but this would not be evidence for it. If anything it is slight evidence that you are not sleep deprived—if you were it would be harder to wake up.
Modafinil might lead you down the sleep deprivation road but this ^ would not be evidence for it.
Yes. If you have a computer and you’ve haven’t made an unusually concerted effort not to be sleep-deprived, you are almost certainly sleep-deprived by ancestral standards. Not sure whether sleeping more is worth the tradeoff, though. Have you tried using small amounts of modafinil to make your days more productive, rather than to skip sleep?
Is there any chance I might be sleep deprived if I wake up before my alarm goes off more than 95% of the time?
I think that’s possible if you’ve woken up at about the same time every morning for a month in a row or longer, but over the past week you’ve been going to bed a couple hours later than you usually do.
Wikipedia says that this test ‘is not to assess the reaction time, but to see how many times the button is not pressed’. I never missed the button (nor did I ever press it improperly), but it still recommended that I consider medical evaluation. (My time was even worse than RomeoStevens’s, so I’m not saying that I did well if the job is to measure reaction time!)
Is there any chance I might be sleep deprived if I wake up before my alarm goes off more than 95% of the time?
I’ve been working pretty much every day for the past year but I had two longish breaks. After each of them there was a long period of feeling pretty awful all the time. I figured out eventually that this was probably how long it took me to forget what ok feels like. Is this plausible or am I probably ok given sufficient sleep and adequate diet?
Also, does mixing modafinil and starting strength sound like a bad idea? I know sleep is really important for recovery and gainz but SS does not top out at anything seriously strenuous for someone who isn’t ill and demands less than 4 hours gym time a week.
You might be but this would not be evidence for it. If anything it is slight evidence that you are not sleep deprived—if you were it would be harder to wake up.
Modafinil might lead you down the sleep deprivation road but this ^ would not be evidence for it.
I mentally inserted “even” before “if” in that question.
Well then obviously it is possible. This is definitely not the sure-fire way to know whether you are sleep deprived or not.
Yes. If you have a computer and you’ve haven’t made an unusually concerted effort not to be sleep-deprived, you are almost certainly sleep-deprived by ancestral standards. Not sure whether sleeping more is worth the tradeoff, though. Have you tried using small amounts of modafinil to make your days more productive, rather than to skip sleep?
You might want to look into adrenal fatigue.
Yes. Seth Robert would be someone who wrote a lot about his own problem with sleep deprivation that was due to him waking up too soon.
I think that’s possible if you’ve woken up at about the same time every morning for a month in a row or longer, but over the past week you’ve been going to bed a couple hours later than you usually do.
In a different thread, the psychomotor vigilance task was mentioned as a test of sleep deprivation. Try it out.
Wikipedia says that this test ‘is not to assess the reaction time, but to see how many times the button is not pressed’. I never missed the button (nor did I ever press it improperly), but it still recommended that I consider medical evaluation. (My time was even worse than RomeoStevens’s, so I’m not saying that I did well if the job is to measure reaction time!)
Calling bullshit on that test. It says I should seek medical evaluation for testing at an average of 313. In comparison to this: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/stats.php
Are you sure it doesn’t say ‘might be suboptimal’ and ‘Consider seeking medical evaluation’?
I still consider that wildly over the top. But then again, I have an accurate model of how likely doctors are to kill me.
Details?
Robin Hanson.
Do you find it that incredible that somewhere around 10% of Internet users are severely sleep-deprived? :-)
But yeah, probably they used figures based on laboratory equipment and I guess low-end computer mice are slower than that.