Throwaway as I don't want to admit that I feel permanently cognitively impaired.

Anecdotal, but I spent years not sleeping through university and sleeping in airports or on the train. Studied engineering and did a lot of hackathons and events and stuff. I figured out then that I didn't need full cognition or excellent decision making. I needed more hours cranking out work. I spent years sleeping just a few hours and often not sleeping on Saturday at all.

I do a lot less of that now as work never has 2AM deadlines but it is as though I am permanently in that 80% functionality state. I never felt that I got out of that state. I have never regained my ability to be detail oriented. I am still reliant on the crutches of spell check and Grammarly and my IDE to make sure I don't do something stupid. I use task lists for every little thing in my day.

So it is not that it does not impact cognition (at least in my case), it is that you get used to that impaired state and can't find a way back.

Only a year and a half removed from that, so maybe it takes more time, but I still feel heavily optimized for output over quality, even though that is no longer needed.

My baseline cognition was already impacted. More sleep just did not repair it.

From my own experience: go get therapy, meditation classes and Ritalin! It wasn’t until I turned 26 and got access to all three that I could finally _learn_ what concentration really was. I went through Highschool without having to study a single day, getting very good grades nevertheless - while being on very little sleep with a total lack of a regular rhythm. College didn’t go so well, but other interests and pursuits were fulfilling. Meanwhile, the rise of social media trained my attention span to be shorter and shorter and shorter - until I had finally realized I couldn’t reed a single page of a book without drifting away. The above mentioned three-part intervention worked because A) in therapy, I could get i) help how to navigate the day-to-day problems and ii) help understanding why and how I got to that point, e.g. learned behavior, but also genetic predisposition, B) thanks to the medication, I could experience a state of high focus I hadn’t had in years - maybe ever - and enjoy a kind of focused flow, where I was completely in charge of what I do (compared to a state of flow where you just follow external and internal impulses ) and C), meditation (especially in the time I took ritalin) helped me learn how to focus on something, let go of that focus, and re-focus again (I used headspace for that).

I cannot tell you if a change in my sleeping habits was the result of all that, if it has been a coincidence or if it preceded any improvements - but it certainly didn’t hurt the process.

Today, I don’t need therapy or medication anymore, can focus good enough on my work and in the stories my significant other tells me. I don’t get nervous anymore anytime I have to wait in a line, I do fewer mistakes, I can read a book and feel less bored, more happy. It’s something I had to learn, but I needed some help with that. It’s worth a try!

Today, I also realize a significant decrease in performance and happiness if I get a single night of bad sleep. Before I knew how my days could really feel, I didn’t care about that - but I’m sure I had been impacted badly, nevertheless.

recommending Ritalin to someone that has suffered or still suffers from insomnia is bad advice as it is notorious for inducing insomnia.

OP stated he’s 18 months out of insomnia, but the adhd-like symptoms still prevail up to a point where he is suffering so much that he hides his (or her) identity when speaking about it. He describes himself as “permanently cognitively impaired”. I used to believe in all that fear mongering about stimulants for years, but as long as you stick to your doctor’s prescription, start with low doses and pay as much attention as possible to yourself and how you react - through therapy supported by mindfulness - the risks are very low compared to the risks of having a “cognitively impaired” life. That state, however you label it, does not only hurt your performance at work, it hurts your relationships (healthy relationships are correlated with mental health and longevity), it increases your risk of car accidents (some of them kill) and it exposes you to financial risks. It’s not a good place to be, and I support everyone in that place with a simple message: go to a doctor, get therapy, get medication, be mindful about it.

Recommending Ritalin at all as a first response is dangerous as well...

If you would check again: it’s the third advice, not the first. You cannot get it without consulting a psychiatric MD, and at least in Germany, you have to commit to long term behavioral therapy as well. To make it as clear as possible: I would not recommend popping pills as a solution to the problems faced by the parent comment, but as a viable part of an integrated solution. Fear mongering doesn’t help anyone.

>From my own experience: go get therapy, meditation classes and Ritalin!

This is your first advice. Anyway, no need to get pedantic. Fact is you're carelessly suggesting the use of some pretty heavy and specific medicine, to someone you don't know, based on a few words of text he wrote on an anonymous internet forum.

What degree of heaviness is okay for drugs to be an okay recommendation on a quite specific problem? Did you ever recommend someone to get an Aspirin due to headache? Hope you didn’t - Aspirin is so dangerous, there’s no way we would allow it on the market according to today’s regulation. That said, the point here cannot be the danger of medication, but the public perception. Ritalin in adults is very safe if prescribed and monitored by a doctor and supervised by therapy. Taking into account the rate of comorbidities of untreated adhd symptoms (btw, as far as science goes, it’s a spectrum, not a classification, so you’re higher high or low in such treats), such as depression, implying Ritalin were dangerous even if taken as a part of a broader treatment regimen, is much more dangerous.

It depends on when you take it.

Since I had a child, I started questioning whether cognitive decay in aging people was really caused by aging or a change in sleep patterns. Now my kid makes his nights mostly without problems, but the ~2 years of insufficient sleep feels like it had a toll.

I totally agree.

My sleep was somewhat destroyed from having kids. Not that I was extremely underslept, but my brain somehow stopped sleeping deeply it felt like. I awoke from every minute sound the kids made.

Today theyr'e 7 and 9 and I still wake from silly sounds.. Some sounds the kids make is like driving a knife through my ears. It is getting better but still...

The upside from this is now I don't need anywhwre near 8 hours of sleep anymore! 7 hours is almost too much, 6 works perfectly most of the time. 5 hours though is when I get into zombie-mode during daytime.

Same. I mean there are probably multiple factors in play but I can't imagine the interrupted sleep, plus the baseload stress and anxiety, are good for long term mental health. Hopefully counteracted by long term benefits of rewarding family relationships.

From your description, it's possible that you have undiagnosed ADHD, though probably not caused by lack of sleep. It's always worth talking to a doctor about these things — there might be a way to get your focus back.

I second this. I have been diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and my experience, before medication, sounded very similar.

There's little evidence that this is sleep related. There are a lot of people who aren't detail oriented and rely on spell check, for a very wide variety of reasons.

If you feel this has impacted your life to the point where you need to hide your identity, maybe you should try therapy or a medical examination. Or just get more sleep

Well, humans are also extremely error prone. Spell check, IDE helpers, delinters, automated testing, etc, all help check that things are correct automatically, which saves huge amounts of pain.

I personally would always put more faith in someone who carefully checks their work than someone who thinks they don't need to. The second person is making mistakes and just doesn't realize it.

I had a similar experience from severe burnout - I was overly ambitios and worked for 12 hours + poor sleep. Its like you feel dumb and that you will never regain the clarity of mind. It took me a couple of years to get back to normal (around four I think). That included a year of therapy and a half of year of just doing the stuff that I like with no job commitment. Some downtime is needed.

Even when I'm "full focused" I still use stuff to automatic check my work (same as you). However I'm bit worried on how you seem functioning on "automatic"... I really do recommend going to a doctor.

If I have some auto checker i start to concentrate my errors into things the checker will find. Make errors that the compiler will find, so that once it compiles it should pass tests at once.

But why are you doing this to yourself? The impact of not getting minimum sleep will have all sorts of bad effects on your body, not just cognition. Try to find a balance and what you consider as permanent cognitive impairment may revert, but even if it doesn’t you don’t want to make it worse

The parent is not continuing the practice, and has not for 18 months.

It is noted in many sleep science studies that you cannot “recoup” lost sleep so this is plausible.

The insane stress levels from being in their situation also affects cognition.

So I am not surprised if merely looking at sleep amounts fails to explain differences.

Highly likely this is a confounding factor - and compensating for it is essentially every decent policy for the last 50 years in the West.

There is also a dynamic systems side to sleep rhythms. Quite likely there are stimuli you can randomly experience that shift your sleep cycle into a chaotic regime and then you need a good knock to the light and activity levels to reset to stability.