Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain

I slept around 5 hours last night split up into two periods because my baby daughter woke up crying from fever and wanted to play / was hallucinating / etc. She's totally fine now but I am wondering if there is a correlation between dementia and having kids.

Probably negatively correlated cause you have someone to interact with in your old age/better chance of community :)

I remember this quote from when we had young kids:

"Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children."

And then as soon as they are in their 20s and reasonably self sufficient we had to get a puppy to keep me sane!

Long days and short years.

Did you have empty nest syndrome?

I’m on my 3rd (she’s 1 week old today) at 42. With the first 2 it was only terrible for the first couple months. Once I just got used to going to sleep at 9:30 I was mostly fine.

This kind of fear is a quick route to insomnia. One of the most effective ways to reduce sleep is to worry about it.

Yeah that's the trick, sleep asap

We're expecting our first in a few months.

NGL I'm low key wondering if my messed up natural rhythm of 9pm-4am is going to be potentially handy.

And when that happens, of course HN has the answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15997016

More like empty head syndrome - but getting a dog was the best thing I've done in years.

Memory loss from sleep deprivation is an evolutionary advantage. If you remembered how rough the first few months of new children are, you wouldn't do it again.

I mean the baby stage doesn't last very long. I dont even remember the sleepless nights from my own kids anymore lol

Chronic sleep deprivation is the larger issue. And how we really don't have treatments on how to fix that, and how ultimately sleep phase issues are a social issues (being forced to follow a fixed modern schedule). Not to mention how closely that's tied to ND people. So a lot of us deal with sleep issues since we were little, but work and school dont give us the flexibility we need. For example, flex hours could be helpful here. I would rather work 10am to 6pm or 11am to 7pm most days. Or 5-6 hours during the day and 2-3 hours late at night.

What have you done when your toddler wakes up at random hours during the night to interrupt your sleep and come and play? That's what has truly obliterated our sleep. Everything else was a passing fad that was minimally painful at best..

I think CBTI is pretty horrible but I'm happy it works for some people.

There's so much helpful stuff out there now it's rather a blessing.

"Chronic sleep deprivation is the larger issue. And how we really don't have treatments on how to fix that"

Sure we do, however, not everyone is willing to hike 20-30 miles a day and sleep in a tent. It's not practical but it is very effective.

Physically exhausting yourself isnt a solution. Its tangential to the real issue. Its a bit like suggesting you can solve anxiety caused by trauma by drinking large amounts of alcohol everyday. No, instead we should be treating trauma. Its like putting autistic kids through rough ABA therapy, no instead we should finding accommodations and support for autistic people.

People have natural sleep rhythms. Society should conform to that, instead capitalism demands we conform to what it deems profit maximizing.

I have a similar natural rhythm, or I should say "had". For the first year, especially the first few months, it was a godsend (for my wife, especially), but now that we're in a fairly consistent sleep routine with our two year old (~8pm-7am), I've shifted to something more like 8pm-1am out of necessity.

Although... I was up until 4am and got up at 6:30am and feel surprisingly great, so it still happens from time to time. :)

Not physically exhausting yourself is the real issue. It's our natural state as humans. We're not meant to be staring at screens having discussions about chronic sleep deprivation on an internet forum, we're meant to be outside moving our bodies.

Ah, those days were the absolute grinder for me. How a precious and sweet little baby girl can become an absolute monster all night long, and then wake up the next day back to her normal self while leaving me a hollowed out mess of a human is a mystery for science to solve someday.

As a father of two I would say "nope", primarily because you won't be deciding the rhythm. Best you can do is coordinate sleep with your partner so that there's at least one somewhat functioning parent at all times.

As I'm typing this my 1.5yo is napping. I had maybe 6h of sleep but I'm after (part time) work and at home already, so I should probably nap as well.

Can't. My adult body won't go to sleep right now even though I'm feeling drowsy because it's too bright, too loud and chiefly I already had too much caffeine in the morning and I have like 15 minutes until I'll have to head out to collect my older child from preschool.

My SO is knocked out cold at the moment though, so I'll be relying on her this evening.

Also I think of (hopefully at least one of) my three kids as a diversed retirement portfolio :)

I suffered chronic insomnia most of my life and seen my fair share of experts and read a few books about it. There are definitely treatments for the majority of insomniacs.

Sleep deprivation is often caused by alcohol, inconsistent sleep/wake times, high color temperature lighting (>3000K) in the hours before bed, failure to spend time outdoors in natural light in the morning, temperature too warm (68F is ideal), caffeine (or other stimulants) in the afternoon, associating the bedroom with tasks other than sleep and sex, or simply spending too much time in bed.

Following doctor's advice for the last one: Start by going to bed at, say, 1am and waking up at 6am. Follow this without fail for a few weeks. You'll be exhausted but keep at it. Eventually you should find yourself falling asleep quickly. If you wake up exhausted, pull back bedtime by 10 minutes. Do this for a week. Rinse and repeat until you are waking up at 6am refreshed. That is how you determine how many hours your body needs to sleep, and how long you should be in bed. Helped me.

aren't they the best though? but yeah, back to the grind, and now i also have her respiratory disease and am trying to launch my startup off the ground ...

I'm autistic with delayed sleep-wake cycle. For autistics DSWPD is pretty common. There's just no fixing that for the vast majority of us, we're just expected to follow strict schedules and if we are underslept, too bad for us.

ND people get this pretty badly. 2023 study: The incidence of sleep problems in ASD patients ranges from 32 to 71.5%, especially insomnia, while an estimated 25–50% of people with ADHD

Insomnia is different, but tbf, insomnia for many people can't be treated well or if not at all. CBT is helpful if you look at the studies and ignore the follow up studies showing relapses between 40-70%. We can stuff people with melatonin and hypnotics but after a while that no longer works. So looking at this, it looks like things like drugs and CBT can help 70% of insomnia sufferers but the relapse rate is as high as 70%, so we're looking at people who can actually be cured as low as 15-20% of total insomnia sufferers.

Its not caffeine or screens for us, its just how the machinery of the human body works. This is like telling a depressed person to just 'cheer up.' I'm glad that worked for you, but your story is just an anecdote, and the science for this is still pretty dismal unfortunately.

The science can't work because at this point we're going against our nature. A lot of people cannot subscribe to a modern industrialized sleep schedule because its not natural for us to have extremely strict sleep and wake times.

I agree with you. I regularly have strong insomnia and I have tried physical exhaustion.

It usually works for the first few days of doing it but then it's like my body (probably moreso my mind) gets used to it and it doesn't help with sleep anymore.

Arguably it feels even more unhealthy because it's like my body is fully exhausted and tired but my mind won't let me sleep so no restoration can happen.

Thanks for elaborating. I have an autistic child, and you might've just explained why my kid has more energy at night than during the day. She tends to fall asleep around midnight (but at least gets a solid 8 hours of sleep from there). We're lucky to have a school with a late start time.