Intro

The sources link to publications that support the author’s observations.

I recently made a trip to another country to attend a special event. The journey, as great and fun as it was, had some obstacles such as:

• having a night of blissful sleep cut short by modern sleep’s greatest villain: the alarm clock.
• traveling throusands of kilometers to another country with a vastly different climate
• having to stay up and awake come hell or high water to meet and greet people of blood and other relations

In this little write up, I want to share my experiences of the effects a rather modest case of sleep deprivation had on me and, after I suffered throu…ahem…overcame what nature, time and life put on my agenda dealt with the effects as fast as possible with the mightiest weapon humanity created: science. So take a sip of your favorite beverage, and enjoy my first hand account of…

Sleep deprivation and how I overcame it on my travels.

The setup and effects

Waky waky

Ok ok, I admit it, I am weak when it comes to schedules and wakefulness. If I am forced out of my usual sleep cycle, I get cranky at best and otherwise show all the usual signs of sleep deprivation (you can check them out here: About Sleep).

So when my alarm blared through the darkness, I didn’t jump up full of energy and ready to tackle the day. Instead, I reached out with the grumpy threat of a bear; slow and grumpy enough to jump at anything that disturbed the sweet embrace of sleep I enjoyed just moments ago.

Tired like a puppy, I turned and stared up at the villain who dared to continue to blare at me. It took way longer than I care to admit until my eyes adjusted themselves far enough to the state of wakefulness to recognize the 2 am flashing over my phone’s screen.

Endlessly rolling over and pondering over the upcoming trip until the weee hours of the previous day hadn’t supported my overall mood and feeling of wakefulness. I estimated that I got two, perhaps two and a half hours of sleep, maybe.
Not even two sleep-cycles and probably interrupted in the middle of one.

Scientists say that different people handle and are affected by sleep loss differently [Dongen 2004, Killgore 2010]. In my case every fiber of my being demanded sleep, but being a good german, I got up.

Airport and flight

During the drive to the airport I felt surprisingly alert. No “one second sleep”-scares for me and only a couple of occasional yawns to signal my co-travelers that I was at least as sleepy as them. Nevertheless, a tiny part of my brain took the drive as an opportunity to rally a force of ambition.
I planned to work during the flight and finish at least one article.

My resolve even went so far that after we arrived at the airport I broke one of my cardinal rules and drank a coffee. And for the next six or so hours of the flight I was active, and focused, and efficient, and worked. At least I felt as if I did. Only when I looked at the pile of words that were the product of this “power-session” did I realize that it was true what I read about caffeine.

Caffeine doesn’t wake you, it only makes you feel awake.

[Snel 2011]

My primary output of the flight, was the reordering and reorganization of my 2nd brain, the digital-garden, where I keep all and everything knowledge-related in.

It is an important task to be sure, but one that is fun to me and therefore normally reserved to evening-sessions on slow days.

Me not working on the article meant that I was unfocused, had no creativity, little patience for writing, or the necessary memory capacity and instead turned to an easy task that gave me the illusion of activity [Andreazza 2010, Diekelmann 2010, Drummond 2000, Goel 2009, Harrison 2000-2, Horne 1988, Killgore 2010, Lim 2010, Thomas 2000, Walker 2006]. And I still made tons of mistakes [Lim 2008].

Arrival in paradise

Then came the crash. It started when we got off the airplane and I dove into an especially nasty mixture of heat and humidity.

In comparison to the…let’s call it tempered climate of home, the temperature change of more than 20°C enveloped me like a giant’s fist, squeezed all the remaining strength out of my body and then, for good measures, hit me like a dumptruck.
It was as if the universe wanted to show me how tired I really was and used the local climate as a catalyst [Haack 2009, Kundermann 2004].

From that moment on, all that remained was tiredness. Without any conscious strength left, my thoughts wrapped themselves up into an incomprehensible tangle of strings. Any attempt to clear it up felt like walking through a swamp and was about as successful [Killgore 2010].

During the drive from the airport I tried to take a nap. Looking back at it, I probably reached NREMS stage 2 and sometimes even 3.
But all attempts to shake off the fog of sleepiness remained in vain. I only managed to give into my body’s growing most baseline desire and came out on the other side worse than before.

“Happy” greetings

When I arrived and met my family, I truly was my worst self.

I was impatient, hungry, impolite, short tempered, spent more time on social media then in conversation with my relatives and kept to myself [Kahn-Greene 2006, Killgore 2008, Pejovic 2010b Tempesta 2010].
The only thing I wanted was to take a shower and sleep. And my inner child was angry and ever more angry because it couldn’t [Chua 2006, Drummond 2006, Killgore 2010, Thomas 2000].

Instead, it had to endure a joint family dinner, filled with all the delacies the local quisine had to offer. A celebration for all taste buds wide and far, and the only thing I took out of it was the satisfaction of an overly filled stomach.
I ate too much; too much and too unhealthy [Herzog 2013, Hoyos 2015, Knutson 2008, Magee 2009, Schmid 2008, Spiegel 2005, Stern 2014, Taheri 2004].

When I finally went to bed, I wasn’t just grumpy, but a new state that transcended grumpyness and looped back to a weird drunken happiness that probably would have made Grumpy McGrumpness proud.

The cure

When the day finally ended and I got to my roomb I could have just falled to bed and probable would have slept almost immediately. But knowing what I know and being an engineer at heart I didn’t leave things and leave my state of mind and body to the nilly willingness of a simple night’s rest.
Instead, I put every scrap of knowledge I cut out of the papers and reviews of the previous weeks’ research to use.

Preparations

I turned down the temperature to achieve thermoneutrality when clothed at about 20°C (those PJs are just too nice Pan 2012).

Then I let go of my personal fashion-sense and wore en eye-mask to reduce my light exposure [Cho 2013, Mason 2022]. It wasn’t something I was worried about during the night, but in the morning. I wanted to make sure that I could sleep long and well without my ascending reticular activating system sounding the alarm at the first glimmer of light.

In the same spirit I wore ear plugs to block out as much noise as possible [Caddick 2018, Jones 2012, Kawada 1995, Matsumoto 2017, Wallace 1999, WHO-Europe 2009].

And did it work? It sure did.

Results

I slept undisturbed until 07:00 am, which in the context of my life could just as well be called “late o’clock”. And not only that. After a well deserved toilet run, I went back to bed, turned and fell right back asleep. It was the chef’s kiss to the night and not even an angel’s choir could have trumped the feeling of wakefulness I experienced when I got up.

But did all my preparations make up for the devastation the previous day’s sleep deprivation caused.
How about I let you be the jugde of it as I wrote this article in one session on the very next day after the flight during a drive to another city.

What I can tell you is: The landscape is beautiful, the people around me laugh and smile, and I am happy.

Sources

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