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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> It's pretty ironic, because this is how a lot of people study in the library at college,show up and stay all night grinding in the flow state with your phone shut off. Yet when you graduate to the work place, you seldom have the opportunity to work like how you've been training to work for all your advanced schooling ever again.

To be fair, I think staying up all night trying to be productive instead of getting a good night's sleep also makes it hard for most people during the day. As someone who consistently got 6-8 hours of sleep every night in college before a day with classes, I've always been mildly horrified by the fact that "staying up all night studying" is somehow considered a good thing.

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I think you're still missing the point. It isn't that you need to stay up all night, but rather the flow state. In college you typically have classes during the day so you aren't going to get it then. That doesn't make it a great thing but it also isn't exactly relevant to this conversation.

I understand the point they're making, but I'm not sure you understand mine though. If someone talking about weight loss suggested that people should just never eat breakfast to reduce the amount of eating they do in a given day, it would be relevant to offer a critique this may end up being counterproductive overall to the goal due to it just pushing the issue into another part of the day; this is basically the same thing.

I'm not criticizing your logical point, but your choice of example might be unfortunate.

Intermittent fasting seems to be a very effective strategy (for reasons unrelated to your point).

It's possible that my example might not be up to date. In the past I've been given advice that trying to just skip eating an entire meal at a time when one normally would makes someone less likely to be able to follow through with being as strict later in the day. Assuming that this isn't an outdated misconception, I think the comparison still somewhat holds. Studying all night and not sleeping is totally fine if you're able to function fine without sleep, but it's counterproductive if you're not. In the same way, "just eat less" works as long as you're able to follow it, but for some people, trying to follow that strategy without any other caveats might not be particularly effective.

Fad diets like intermittent fasting or any kind of major lifestyle change like that take a lot of willpower and self-discipline, which is also why most diets fail long term.

Better thing to do is have a routine first. A lot of people don't have any eating habits, it's more of an afterthought or a "whenever I'm hungry I'll eat" kinda thing. You can't base a diet off of that.

If you fix your diet by just eating at the same moments, roughly the same amount of time, only then do you have a baseline. Then make tweaks on that baseline. Evolution instead of revolution, only that will be sustainable.

Hum... Isn't that intermittent fasting?

So many people have done intermittent fasting without realizing they could brag about their hipster diet, lol.

The rest of the world calls this lack of readily access to food.

First world problems; there is so much food that we can make lifestyle choices around it. You can pretend to be a caveman and eat "paleo" since meat is neatly wrapped in plastic at the store and you didn't have to hunt it down. (And if you study the Hadza tribe who are one of the last paleo-bros on the planet you'll find that meat is a small part of their diet). You can forgo certain meats and call your self pescatarian since you can find fish in the middle of a city. And you can intermittently fast since you know that you can quit anytime and stuff yourself full of food.

We as a modern society have to be the most smug of all. Think about every predator in the world. We constantly pay to exercise, to burn off EXTRA calories, where as every other animal on the planet conserves them or expends a vast amount to obtain more.

Yeah, but the point you missed was about the uninterruptedness of studying for an exam — a student might be able to dedicate a whole week to learning for an exam and then study each day with minor interruptions.

That those studying session can sometimes be too long to be healthy is certainly true, but was not the point argued here.

When someone argues that a Ferrari is a fast car and you criticize that not all red cars are fast, you are arguing against a statement nobody made while still saying something true.

> Yeah, but the point you missed was about the uninterruptedness of studying for an exam — a student might be able to dedicate a whole week to learning for an exam and then study each day with minor interruptions.

I don't know why you assume that I don't understand that they're saying that their studying is uninterrupted when it's overnight. That doesn't change the fact that sleep deprivation is also something that makes any sort of studying less effective.

> When someone argues that a Ferrari is a fast car and you criticize that not all red cars are fast, you are arguing against a statement nobody made while still saying something true.

In this case, it feels more like someone said that Ferrari is a fast car, and I mentioned that some people can't afford Ferrari's and might find a different car a better fit, and then you came in extremely unhappy with the fact that I dared to mention anything other than a Ferrari because that's the only car OP mentioned. It's extremely common for people to reply to comments making a tangential point, and doing so doesn't at all take away from other people's abilities to have parallel discussions in other subthreads about different points; that's kind of the whole point of this style of forum.

swing and miss ;)

Maybe because you led in with “to be fair”? Perhaps “as an aside” may have been more appropriate, to indicate an intentional context switch?

Your point is valid as a tangent, but it doesn’t read as a tangent to me - it reads as attempting to address the point you are responding to.

Just my two cents here.

I guess that's possible. I don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking about introductory phrases like that either when reading or writing; they mostly convey tone and flow to me rather than being super meaningful, but I could see other people focusing on them more causing a disconnect.

A tip for your future: if someone doesn't understand what you write, say, or draw, that is squarely on you. "I don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking about... ". Putting information or statements into context is a key, core part of effectively communicating. "I guess thats possible" -- no, you don't guess, several people just TOLD you that is how they interpreted your words. Your response can't be indignance or ignorance. Your response must be "I will endeavour to communicate better next time, and clarify my message for you."

> If someone talking about weight loss suggested that people should just never eat breakfast to reduce the amount of eating they do in a given day, it would be relevant to offer a critique[...]

Tangential, but might be interesting to some:

sometime before the pandemic, after (I think) 30 years of always eating some kind of breakfast, I accidentally missed breakfast once and that day I felt I had significantly less brain fog after lunch.

So I tried again to see if it was just a coincidence, but it had happened again and again.

And, I realized, as long as I don't start to mentally prepare for breakfast I don't start feeling hunger either.

I'm not suggesting this is a good idea for everyone, only that for people like me who has followed "best practice" for decades and doesn't feel too enthusiastic about it, testing out alternative approaches might be a good idea.

PS: the total amount of hunger I feel in a day seems to have gone down too.

I noticed that too. I also started skipping lunch for the same reason. If I do eat lunch, it’s only on days with a lot of meetings in the afternoon. If I want focused work, I skip it.

Actually same here: I try to only take a couple of glasses of milk and a brisk walk for lunch.

When I do not eat breakfast, I am unable to focus on work. It does not matter when I am in dysfunctional team (so I was actually not eating breakfast), but the moment I needed to produce, I had to eat.

Seems to be most common.

My comment is only pointing out that for me it is the opposite: I work better without breakfast.

That's very unusual. Your brain needs ready supplies of glucose to function. Not eating breakfast is forcing your body to turn energy stores into glucose in a way that it tries to avoid and probably doesn't give your brain ample supply, or just not function well.

Do you actually work better, or have you decided that you work better?

Many well functioning people, including IIRC navy attack divers, live on a glucose free diet for a long time, so I am not alone.

As for if I work better or just have decided I work better, I only have 4 or 5 years of experience with this but despite the fact that I love breakfast and lunch I still skip them because the brain fog I seem to get between 1200 and 1400 on days when I eat breakfast just isn't worth it.

Even in college with classes, overnight studying is one of the least effective way of studying. And no, you don not need 6-8 hours of consecutive flow to learn anything.

Whatever the reason for celebrating overnights, effectivity of it is not it.

I don't think the parent was suggesting overnights to be celebrated. In my group of high achievers, we joked about all nighters but anytime it actually happened, it was always treated as "we fucked up and were lazy and should have done this ages ago and this is our penance to attempt to claw back some almost positive outcome and passable grade from really poor planning"

Years later some of those kinds of situations were bonding moments, but none of them are considered a good thing.

There is a general accepted "healthy pattern", but I think there more to it:

- not everyone has the same sleep patterns, and while it can usually be coherced, for some that doesn't work or has too many downsides.

- some people have straight sleep issues and, sleeping in 6-8h blocks doesn't help. "then fix the issues" could be the basic advice, but again, that's usually easier said than done, or has worse side effects.

In that respect I agree with parent that it would be nice if "weirs" work patterns were more accepted

Indeed I am night owl. I tried to accommodate myself to go to bad early sleep 8-9h, het up early. Nevertheless, I am energized and happy only when I can get up between 8-9 (Morning;)) Which usually contradicts the social and work expectations…

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