most days I'm my usual self, but every now and then (maybe a day every few months?) I'm just...dumber. And I can pick up on it pretty quickly, for example when I try to think about something that's not ingrained in my routine (such as a work task), it just feels like my mind is...foggy?
And it's not food or exercise or sleep, because especially with the pandemic, my routine is the same.
Does this happen to anyone else? Google searching warranted no lead on the matter.
I suspect it's sleep related because I can generally feel how the day is gonna go within 10 minutes of being awake, but the frustrating part is that hours of sleep seems to have little bearing on how refreshed I feel in the morning. There is some correlation there, but not enough to say it's all about the hours.
It's not sleep apnea or any known sleep disorder either, so please withhold the ensuing deluge of HN faux Dr's and their google-fu diagnoses ;)
I don't recall this being an issue much in my 20's, maybe this is what aging is like. I've had to resort to just taking advantage of good days and doing as much work as possible, and then on bad days I'll just do mundane work I normally would otherwise not want to do.
So at least for me - yes having good and bad days is entirely normal.
How sure are you that you don't have sleep apnea? Did you actually do a study? Everyone I talked to didn't think I had it but I did a study anyway and lo and behold... no matter how much sleep I got, no difference whatsoever, always tired, just like you. But now several years later I did another one and I don't have it anymore. I think if you have it at a particular threshold they might not always diagnose you with it. So if you have a "mild case" like me you might meet the threshold one night and not the next.
A mild ketogenic diet worked wonders for my sleep quality and mental clarity. Intermittent fasting too (on meal a day).
Those can be tough to follow, though. I also found that eating no carbs 4 hours before bed and no big meals 2 hours before bed can help as well.
But it’s just a day every now and then, so doesn’t amount to much. I do wonder whether most high-achievers wake up feeling that way more days than not. God damn life would be so easy and pleasant if that were the case.
Really easy to test — follow a strict elimination diet for a few days. Nothing but rice, potatoes, chicken and water. At least with me I felt like a different human within 3 days.
+ Stress on uncertain situations
+ Lack of sleep
+ Lack of clarity of 'the next thing to do'
I can't solve the first, so I try to handle the latter two with the obvious solutions (sleep more, set next task) but also with other methods. I tried different Mg supplements, Caffeine + L-Theanine, -afinils, and Adderall under these circumstances. Adderall turbo'd my performance back up and past, the -afinils worked if sleep was the problem, and the others didn't help at all.
If you are a disciplined person, then maybe occasional Adderall use will help. I have no dependence issues (use is roughly once / 3 months) but if you have discipline problems, then don't do it, tolerance is easy to build and addiction is possible.
I am currently attempting CBT strategies. Going to give STOPP a shot.
This hits home with me.
Lack of Sleep - This is difficult one. Procrastination ruins sleep. Just try to let it go. Do something boring to make you fall asleep.
Lack of clarity - Talk. Talk to someone in your team even junior dev or your manager. What happens is that our mind ends up in loop which doesn't break. Lack clarity signifies that you either don't understand requirement clear enough to make task out of it or you trying to figure way smarter solution than what you need at hand.
But it's also often totally random to me, if something is uncomfortable (say my back hurts randomly that day from sleeping funny) it's distracting and makes it harder to focus.
If I could maintain my caffeine 'high' all day, I'd be much more successful, but it's not worth the health risk. I do alright, financially, in spite of that, but I'd like to accomplish more meaningful work. The comparison of my work between my morning coffee high and afternoon crash is night and day.
I took Adderall once. I don't know it it was a placebo effect or not, but I knocked out a complicated physical simulation model (that I'd been puting off for months) in about 5 hrs, and to this day I've found very few errors in that model. ...I'm just saying.
It's not a placebo effect. That's what Adderall does. While I never recommend abusing drugs, the fact that you're using caffeine for self treatment and you respond so well to Adderall may mean you have undiagnosed ADHD.
It's worth going to a psych and getting a prescription for it. The great thing about drugs like that is you can take them on days when you really need to knock projects out of the park, and be normal on other days.
The mathematician Erdos apparently did amphetamines for productivity and a friend bet him to quit for a month. He said:
> "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month."
My guess is that he used them for self-medication much like they're used formally now for ADHD treatments. I am NOT recommending you take drugs illegally, but it is fairly easy to get diagnosed for ADHD and get a prescription. It might be a big help.
As another commenter mentioned, migraines can also do this. Not all migraines come with a lot of pain, so that's not always a dead giveaway. But during a migraine, my thoughts are muddy as hell.
As others have mentioned, taking a step back and trying to have in mind the end goal help me get on track. I also try to break the task in smaller steps, either mentally or on a notepad, where I outline the steps I have in mind.
I noticed that it usually happens to me when I'm overwhelmed with the task.
For me the most helpful mantra is "What's the smallest thing I can do right now?" I have no idea how I'm going to rebuild this whole front end in Vue, but I can send a quick email to someone asking them to clarify something, or I can update the text on a single button.
It sounds trivial but if you do that enough times your brain goes "Oh, I guess we're working now" and you get that crucial momentum going.
TODO list breakdowns are great for this.
I've been trying for years to figure out exactly what causes it. Searching online gives you hundreds of possible causes, for ages I thought it was gluten in my diet, sugar, anxiety causing it, and to some extent I think all of these do affect it.
Recently though I've noticed that sleep might be causing it, specifically breathing through my mouth when I sleep causes me to have a foggy feeling throughout the day, so I'm working on trying to breathe through my nose for the whole night now.
Hope this helps!
Also I have times when I just need to step back. For instance I am mostly a hardcore coder but I had to deal with some color and design issues that I felt really foggy when I tried to think about.
After taking a break (and also reading CSS documentation to fill in gaps in my knowledge) it just hit me that the color pink was the answer to one problem and it was downhill from there except for the CSS property that it took forever to find.
But actually: Yes. This is totally normal?
I'm not claiming this will fix your problem, but it could rule out dietary problems or give you a tool to fight the fog.
I wonder also if maybe some nights you aren't sleeping as well and just aren't aware of it. It might be worth monitoring your sleep with some kind of wearable too.
I never figured out why. But ultimately, it doesn't really matter... I imagine that humans are naturally cyclical on the scale of weeks to months.
Different people have different levels of cycles. Bipolar people are cyclical to the point where they cycle between depression / hyperactivity... but even "normal" people have ups and downs.
We aren't machines. We work differently at different times.
I've also seen common cold listed as a potential cause, which definitely jibes with my experience.
This compound is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, so it increases acetylcholine in the brian. It is known to help Alzheimer's patients early in the disease to stay sharp. This fact worries me since I am an ApoE4 heterozygote and so the fact that it works for me may mean I have something wrong :/
That means if one day I am not ok I can rewind and find the culprit very fast, like getting exhausted from doing too hard work the day before.
In your case, you will be simply forgetting what you did once you sleep. Or you could be simply ill.
I usually think very clearly and fast. Usually my mind is never foggy unless when I am ill, like an occasional headache(once in a year) or when I get the flu.
I do not drink coffee nor significant alcohol. Those can make you bog down.
My mind was boggy when I started working from home in front of a computer years ago. I realized I just needed exercise every day.
I find I am the most productive from tue-thu, more productive in the evenings than mornings. I am also more productive in spring and autumn than I am in peak winter and summer.
Overtime you reflect and look inside yourself and learn how to tune your body.
I still feel quite more tired nowadays as a dad but ironically I also feel like I get a lot more done. Mileage varies day to day.
Some days I am just a dumdum and I go home early, play with dog and baby and sleep it off.
Don’t stress too much. Do what feels good. Take care of yourself first before you take care of your work.
This is typically a retrospection thing, and not a revelation that occurs in the midst of the feeling. One day I'll wake up, make a huge breakthrough, feel great, and wonder if I've been asleep for a month. My memory of the period is also fuzzy.
I think our brains are way more nuanced than we appreciate.
What you'll have to do is basically just science on yourself -- make a hypothesis, test it, interpret your findings, and repeat until you know how you work. Therapy is more or less learning how to do that for all the soft emotional stuff in your head and learning how to manage your personal stress.
For me it correlates to elevated stress either in the moment or the few days (or weeks) before. If I've also not slept well or enough, I notice it faster.
I no longer consider it a thing to be fixed, but a fact of life. Delivering at 100% of "potential" every day is not really normal, and some of my most productive moments are in days I've consciously accepted I won't accomplish "normal" amounts, and end up solving some unsolved problem because my brain had the space to process it.
It works out in the end. :-)
But I also had this specific issue on certain days lingering even with ADHD treatment. My doctor suggested I had sleep apnea. Possibly related to sleep habits and possibly a very soft lumpy mattress. My wife and I got a new firm mattress and it really did the trick.
Try One of these apps(all have free basic functionality afaik) symply, careclinic, or foody if you suspect it’s food related gl.
I've had to start doing other things to get that mediative time back- be it exercise, playing with dogs, gardening, whatever else.
That said, I do realize that it's just as likely that I only _feel_ more effective. If I had a decent way to measure developer productivity, I'd be a rich man...
For me I think it is routine related. I almost never have 'dumb' days during the work week but they're fairly common for me on the weekend.
Once in a while, I'll look at some work I did the day before and think "Man, is that stupid. What was I thinking yesterday?"
