Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It is. Lost sleep is a snowball. It's very easier for bipolars in a manic or even hypomanic state to sleep 5, 4, 2 hours a night and feel well-rested and ready to pull weights.

But diagnosed bipolar people know this. This is potentially harmful advice because many people may not know they have a latent bipolar disorder that hasn't manifested yet. In my parent comment I gave a histogram of the age of onset of one's first episode -- it's well possible to be a nondescript software engineer in one's early 40s and literally go crazy.

Of course, your proposal also has merits, so people should weigh risks and benefits. Also note family history, history of depression, etc. which are also risk factors.

Here's a recent survey of what w know about bipolars and sleep https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935164/

But basically this has been known empirically since old-timey asylums. Hippocrates probably has a hint of this as a factor of the "sacred disease". It's a fact.

But the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the population is like, 1% right? So if you have disturbed sleep in that sense (sleep 4-5h for weeks on end, but feel alert and well-rested) it is still quite unlikely to be due to undiagnosed bipolar? (vs needing less sleep naturally, using too much coffee, blue light, whatever)

Edit: maybe this communicates it better to some people - bipolar is a tail risk of sleep deprivation / experimentation with sleep schedules / etc. It is low-probability.

But not fucking with your sleep is "antifragile". If you agree with Taleb generally, you won't risk it. The downsides are immense. You can easily spend all your savings in one weekend buying soviet filmmaking gear. And that's just the financial side. Bipolar is treatable but doesn't go away. It's just easier to handle. You go to the grave with your pillbox in hand, just in case they buried you alive.

The minor disruption of having to take a handful of pills every night, 3 minutes times 365 days times 35 years = 2100 hours. You could probably learn French, German and Italian in that time. I'm refraining from talking about the major downsides. Educate yourself.

--- You can also have a latent allergy to peanuts but you always ate small portions. Then someone says "eat only peanuts for a week" and someone says "beware, some allergies are cumulative-exposure, you could be especially sensitive". Then you weigh your risks and benefits. Maybe have someone around to help you if you choke.

With bipolar you won't know what's happening right away. It will seem you're having the best period of your life (and you are!). Weigh your risks and benefits. What's being proposed is a lifehack. You could also try to sleep right the way your mother taught you to.

That makes sense. I've never spent my life savings but I did behave in a way that was both way out of character and quite shameful once as a result of an inconvenient flight schedule. It's weird how people speak of sleep deprivation as, well, not exactly healthy, but not downright dangerous. I guess that's how they talked about cigarettes back in the day too.

Perhaps there need to be more pushback from us tech workers when we hear about, e.g., all night hackathons or polyphasic microsleep experiments or the need for nap rooms in offices to compensate for all those 2am coding sessions or something. That some people definitely experience adverse effects where the consequences can be hard to control and some people's lives can be literally wrecked by the thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com