Submitted via IRC for Bytram
For two decades, Francesco Benedetti, who heads the psychiatry and clinical psychobiology unit at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, has been investigating so-called wake therapy, in combination with bright light exposure and lithium, as a means of treating depression where drugs have often failed. As a result, psychiatrists in the USA, the UK and other European countries are starting to take notice, launching variations of it in their own clinics. These 'chronotherapies' seem to work by kick-starting a sluggish biological clock; in doing so, they're also shedding new light on the underlying pathology of depression, and on the function of sleep more generally.
"Sleep deprivation really has opposite effects in healthy people and those with depression," says Benedetti. If you're healthy and you don't sleep, you'll feel in a bad mood. But if you're depressed, it can prompt an immediate improvement in mood, and in cognitive abilities. But, Benedetti adds, there's a catch: once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you'll have a 95% chance of relapse.
So pulling more all-nighters makes me feel better?
Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180123-can-staying-awake-beat-depression
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:37PM (9 children)
Sleep deprivation's not good long term, at least not for me.
Concur, I lose now and then (about twice a month) a night of sleep, but after getting back my sleep I'm feeling shitty for days after.
Skipping sleep more than two nights a month not only mak ethe matter worse, but physiological side-effects are worrisome for my age (elevated and somehow irregular pulse)
What keeps me balanced: nicotine. Actually known for quite a long time, many smokers and non-smokers depressives respond well to nicotine [google.com].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:56PM (5 children)
I had similar sleep issues before I had a triple bypass about 3 years ago. Maybe once a month. That's totally gone now.
The only thing that keeps me from sleeping is coding or debugging late into the evening. I'll be chased all night by murderous broken function calls, buffer over runs, and branches to nowhere. Tylenol seems to suppress existential angst [smithsonianmag.com].
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:10AM (4 children)
Paracetamol, you mean? It makes me conscious I have a liver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:16AM (3 children)
One or two a month certainly won't hurt you as much as the anxiety keeping you awake.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
I got adjusted to my anxiety, I let it be; sorta I'm able to detach from it - about 20 ciggies/day certainly helps with.
Lost sleep comes mainly from a certain amount of stress (some tech problem on its way to solution but still in early topics) or 'tklectual excitement (most of the time some crazy ideas unrelated to IT).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:11AM
Yeah, that certainly sounds healthier than an occasional paracetamol...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:51AM
Taking drugs for anxiety is asking for trouble. Unless you've got extreme anxiety and need the pills in order to get treated, it's a very, very bad idea.
Anxiety exists for a purpose, if you haven't been taught how to manage it without the pills, you're just masking it over. Anxiety is one of the areas where modern psychology does a pretty good job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:12AM (2 children)
Yep, take nicotine away from me and... you don't want to know. But when it comes to sleep, I think that the big problem are fixed schedules.
What works for me is light. In summer, when the days are long, I don't care about sleep much, I can wake up with sunrise at 3:15 in the morning and feel fine. Close the curtains and I'll wake up with the alarm at 7 and the day will be bad. Sometimes just keeping the old ways would do better, wake up when it's light and go to bed when it's dark. Or simply wake up when you've had enough of sleep and go to bed when you're tired, take a nap in the middle of the day if needs to be.
But then, try keeping a 'natural sleep cycle' in present-day society => not working => not comfortable => not happy => depressed from not being able to live as you'd need, and it could be so simple.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:27AM
My degree is in Physics but I've been working as a coder since my Junior year back in the Pleistocene era.
This because I knew lots of coders - SCO was once really in Santa Cruz - and they all worked at night.
I decided that becoming a coder was my only hope for getting a real job.
I often sleep through one or two days a week on my current contract. I was at first quite mortified that I was being so flaky but then their Engineering VP came right out and said "I don't care how or when you work".
Strictly speaking it is illegal for consulting clients to set the hours that their consultants may work. It's one of the "20 Factors" that the IRS uses to determine whether you are a consultant or an employee.
That is, which kind you are, in the eyes of the IRS, has nothing to do with any job title you may have or what was in a contract you signed: whether your are an employee or a consultant - again in the IRS - is strictly defined by the relationship you have with your employer or client.
A while back this lead every last Microsoft contract programmer to sue MS for the job benefits that MS employees receive but that were denied to the contractors.
The contractors prevailed.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:28AM
(never pushed any to you in the first place)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:37PM
Time to sleep;
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:45PM (2 children)
I wrote about it in 2003 [warplife.com]. I'm puzzled that this wasn't a solved problem fifty years ago.
I have hypersonia when I get depressed. I have insomnia when I'm manic.
"When you're not sleeping, it's an emergency." -- a witch doctor I once consulted.
I once called 9-1-1 and asked for an ambulance because I couldn't get to sleep that night. SRSLY. The emergency room gave me two milligrams of Ativan then I slept for twenty hours or so.
When I experience depressive hypersomnia it is quite clear that I need to sleep much less. Depression causes excessive sleep, excessive sleep makes depression far worse. There have been a couple times in my life when I slept continuously, only getting out of bed to use the restroom or have something to eat.
Despite sleeping less being a quite clear way to relieve my depression, it is a very difficult cycle to break.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:25AM
I'm puzzled that this wasn't a solved problem fifty years ago.
Well the article did mention that there isn't exactly a lot of research funding available for testing this stuff, since there's nothing to patent and no drugs to sell.
Maybe some "sleep centers" should fund the research so they can expand their business into wake therapy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:57PM
I know from experience what you're talking about. It's a really shitty feeling to sleep 12-16h a day, yet still being sleepy and exhausted the couple waking hours left. Even though you have tons of stuff to do, you can't get your ass out of bed or keep your head focused. Caffeine in copious amounts doesn't do jack shit except making you cranky. Just went through such a phase.
I've taken to self-medicate to break these cycles. Amphetamine* in low dosages breaks me out of the depression-enhancing sleep patterns and lets me get right back and focus on whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish at the time. The feeling of "getting shit done" further helps breaking out of the depression.
The only problem is consistently getting good quality. I've tried asking doctors, but my symptoms don't align with the very strict requirements for getting the stuff as a prescription, so I'm left with the adventure of making friends with drug dealers. This part is important and takes time and money, but the goal is to eventually be able to buy from their "family" supply instead of the nasty shit cut with anything from talcum powder to laundry detergent that you'll get if you ask some random dude on the street.
*Please don't mix this up with methamphetamine, which I hear is much more common in the US. While straight-up Amph is a drug that is easy to handle and in controlled dosages pretty easy on the body, meth I would not want to even try.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:54PM (5 children)
It's better than drugs, and you think sideways and come up with great stuff. I always enjoy going 2-3 days without sleep
(Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:59PM
But brilliant solutions you come up with and write down during a sleepless night make absolute no sense the next day.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:32AM (2 children)
Back in 2009 I determined that I could stay awake and work for four days at a time. I knew when it was time to go to bed because I had subtle visual hallucinations. For example one time my bathroom rug was sparkling, another time my bedroom window screen looked like an animated Mondrian painting.
I started having brain seizures in 2010. They weren't diagnosed for several years when I had a seizure at the mall and some right chap called 9-1-1 for me.
I feared that pulling all-nighters so frequently was damaging my brain.
For me to give up all-nighters was just as difficult as it is for alcoholics to stop drinking. I am absolutely serious.
I'm happy to report that I haven't had a seizure in over two years.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:20AM (1 child)
That is a clue about seizures - if you start seeing things, bad things can happen soon ;) We need sleep to filter the crap out of our brains and seizures are a result of that system failing (or unable to function).
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:23PM
Hmmph Some people just gotta take the fun outta everything ; )
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:28AM
Yeah, I come up with brilliant ideas when tired. Until I revisit the code the next day and tear my hair out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:16AM
It actually makes sense. Depression is inability or not think about bad thoughts. It's inability to concentrate on the positives, so you keep thinking about some negative crap. I know, it happened to me. Now, sleep deprivation tends to kill your brain, or at least your ability to think clearly. So if you stay awake long enough, eventually you will stop thinking about the thoughts that are causing your depression.
But anyway, depression is something people need to learn to fix in their own lives. It's mostly self-induced (like addictions), and the cure is too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:12AM (5 children)
Somebody kindly file a bug. Yes it's minor but still a bug.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:10PM (4 children)
Thanks for noticing it was missing! It is one of the few places in the story editing process where the editors have a chance to creatively express themselves. I, forone, can attest there are times when I have a LOT of fun coming up with something deep or witty or even insipid to fill in that field. There are times, though, when I start to wonder if anyone even notices the field is there.
That said, the "dept" line is just a field to be filled in for a story.[*] The submitter of a story may propose a dept line in their submission. Then the story goes into the submission queue.
When an editor selects a story from the submission queue, they are faced with two situations:
Generally, we try to have every story reviewed by a different editor before it "goes live".[***] The "2nding editor" can remove the dept line, accept it as-is, or replace it with something else.
In the vast majority of cases, somebody comes up with something to put in the dept line. One in a while, though, the Muses [wikipedia.org] fail us and "we got nuthin'". There have been times when I would spend 10 or even 15 minutes trying to come up with some kind of interesting dept line.
Here, it seems, creativity failed us and the field was left blank.
[*] Occasionally, there will be a discussion on the #editorial channel on IRC. "Any ideas on a dept line for $foo?" Some of the most creative foolery I have ever seen has followed from such an entry. And, at other times, comes up with just *crickets*.
[**] User-suggested dept line came about as a request from the community.
[***] It does not take long for things to turn into "word soup" and a mistake becomes opaque to the original editor, but a second set of eyes can readily see it. As all of this work is done by volunteers, this does not always happen, but we generally do succeed in 2nding the majority of storuies htat make it onto the site.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:18PM (3 children)
Oh, I notice!
The "dept" line, the "This page was generated by a [xxxxx] of [yyyyy]s for [zzzzzzz] and the MOTD at the bottom right are all fantastic little touches that make my day just a little more meaningful. More to the point, they're a breath of fresh air compared to all the ridiculously sanitized, disingenuous, corporate-friendly mantras that infect most other websites.* It's proudly nerdy and unashamedly counter-culture. Keep it up!
*I won't mention any names but a site that's not red defnititely sanitized themselves.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:20PM
s/defnititely/definitely/
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Friday January 26 2018, @01:55AM (1 child)
Yes, I generally look at all of those... especially the fortune at the bottom of the page.
Here's another one to add to your list. "Wait, there's another one?" you ask? Yep! Look at the "Response Headers" returned from a page request and there is an "X-Bender" entry, too!
For example, here's the X-Bender line from the page I loaded to reply to you: "X-Bender There! That oughtta convert a few tailgaters."
Enjoy!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday January 26 2018, @04:47AM
Fantastic, thanks!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:26AM (3 children)
Whatever happened to the "uberman" sleep schedule thing that was in the news a few years back? Surely it's been long enough that someone has tried it long term and got some results about whether it's sustainable..?
For those that don't remember, the uberman schedule was a system whereby you only sleep for about 2 hours out of every 24. Yes, you (allegedly) get ~22 hours of productive waking activity out of every day.
Those two hours of sleep are in the form of 20 minute naps, evenly-spaced and rigidly adhered to throughout the day.
The premise is that most of our daily eight-hour sleep is "junk sleep": The only useful bit is the 20 minutes of deepest sleep buried in the middle of all that tedious lying around. By forcing yourself[1] to stick to this schedule and bringing on extreme exhaustion, you eventually condition your body to skip the junk sleep and go straight into the good sleep the moment your head hits the pillow. Twenty minute later you get up, refreshed. After a few days you get used to it and the exhaustion goes, allowing you to get all the sleep you need packed into a few hours and be fully awake for the other 22. The downside is that you CANNOT miss a nap, or even delay it or you get seriously screwed up.
There was also a brief fad for people living and sleeping around a 6 day week / 28-hour clock or something, which somehow got you more productive time per day. Anyone remember that?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:29PM (1 child)
Could it be you are thinking of this early xkcd (#320) [xkcd.com]? See this interview of March 4, 2008: Randall Munroe, writer of xkcd, talks about the comic, politics and the internet [wikinews.org].
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:59PM
The fine print / info-text pop-up on that comic is good info.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:17PM
You mean polyphasic sleep [wikipedia.org]?
Ask some ISS astronauts how it works out for them in an environment that by its nature has much faster light/dark cycles. I think this is probably the biggest hurdle for practicing such sleep cycles on earth: we have adapted evolutionary to the day and night cycle and going against it can have unintended consequences.
(Score: 1) by zugedneb on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:29PM
One would be that you "being" is the most difficult computational object in the universe.
And the control mechanisms around it should also be pretty complicated...
Have noticed, may of course be wrong, that depressed people can not stop paying attention to the own self.
Instead, they enforce a feedback loop, where thinking about the self moves them into certain moods or mindsets.
In the same way that the body has a "starvation" mode, the brain might also have various states, where resources are allocated in a different way.
Perhaps, mild or a bit above mild sleep deprivation can cause the brain to change the mode of operation off the mechanism that makes you able to "sense" your own self and being, and that in its turn leads to other mental processes have more attention, and more hardware available.
Anyways, the above is one of the reasons i like allnighters and computer games. In both situations and get an attenuated impression of own being, and get a more stable mood.
Also, one method of not getting tired is to stay away from thoughts that provoke strong chemical reactions. Less hormones and chemicals, less need to rest... Or so some say...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax