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

anecdotally, i never feel better than when i haven't slept. spent 8pm tuesday -- 8pm thursday this week awake nursing cheap energy drinks, and not only could i manage a higher-than-usual level of focus, i was genuinely content.

bombed a midterm halfway though, but at least i felt good about it.

Well, not sleeping through the night, you'll feel genuinely euphoric around dawn, it's one of the most immediate "cures" for clinical depression.

I've got pretty bad ADHD and I find that my mind is more quiet, focused and productive on mornings after a night of 2-4 hrs of sleep than it has ever been on meds or anything else. It all falls apart by the afternoon, but for a while it's a nice feeling.

I see the same thing in myself.

I've attributed it to a my brain moving to power-saving mode and muting some of my anxiety / perfectionism tendencies. Does this explanation resonate with you at all?

It's not unusual to feel good after pulling an all-nighter. Sleep is when re-uptake of serotonin takes place, so if you interrupt it you end up with a surplus. Although there are also other possible explanations [1]

1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214505120

Age sounds like a factor here. I know zero long-term healthy ppl in 30s and beyond who act/think this way.

Indeed, as a 20 year old I would stay up all night pretty regularly for work and occasionally fun. At 40 I'm not sure I would live through it, at least not in a cognitive state where I could converse.

anecdotally i feel pretty good when im buzzed but reality is my performance is impaired. there is a teeter-totter of overconfidence and impairment where the liquid confidence actually helps more than the impairment impairs but its a sweet spot

That's possible. It feels a lot like the placebo component in drinking: if you're free to ignore one of the few things you need to /live/, it should be much easier psychologically to be carefree (similar to "oh, haha, i'm drunk, might as well get wacky").

sleep deprivation definitely reduces raw reasoning ability. in some cases, though (and this is true for getting buzzed as well) the trade-off is absolutely productive.

I'm assuming it is similar to the "runners high" people get at the end of a long run? You will feel very energized in ways that don't make sense. And if you don't force yourself to just lay down and pass out, you can keep going for longer than you would have thought. Will crash harder, though, if my experience is common.

I've done a few all-nighters in my 30s and 40s, and they generally feel the same as my 20s. Still get that clear headed, high focus second wind around 4am that carries through until noon or so.

But, I definitely crash harder than I did in my 20s and need longer to recover after. In my 20s, would be fine if the next night was a normal one, now it takes multiple days.

It's definitely something I try to avoid at this age, as opposed to just being standard procedure back in college.