<story><title>The Effect of Sleep on Happiness</title><url>https://www.trackinghappiness.com/effect-sleep-happiness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anyfoo</author><text>As someone who also favors long (even very long) sleep, but is planning to have a child, may I ask how old your child is, whether things have already gotten better sleepwise, or whether you think it will?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re only planning for one, and my impression so far suggests that it&amp;#x27;s the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently, and that with one child the majority of the sacrifices are only temporary (and getting better as the child gets older), but it&amp;#x27;s always good to hear some experiences.</text></item><item><author>sbinthree</author><text>I had a nice solid 9h each night until having a child. I find I am actually more creative (uninhibited) when I get less sleep. My brain is firing too hard on perfectionism when I get a good sleep, where I can be a lot more creative and free flowing when I am sleep deprived. I don&amp;#x27;t implement or debug well in that state though, so my cycle tends to involve writing the code and debugging on better sleep nights and having my ideas and catching up on admin if I have a bad sleep.</text></item><item><author>1996</author><text>I sleep 10 to 11h per night. I may trim that to 6h one day but no more than once per month and if there is an absolute emergency - but then I know my productivity will be killed for at least 2 days.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, my inspiration will be higher: I will have more creative ideas on how to combine stuff, but I will be too tired to do any of that. I will just take notes.&lt;p&gt;With adequate sleep, I do not feel happier or sadder than anyone else. I feel more productive however. Sunday I had never done any python because I preferred perl, but for some specific task there was no option but a python library (well, it was also possible in another language I don&amp;#x27;t like either)&lt;p&gt;So on Monday, I learned python, then asynchronous execution with asyncio, then parallelizing with joblib. Tuesday, I coded.&lt;p&gt;Today I have a python3 daemon with error handling and other niceties ready to be deployed to test. It seems robust enough to require minimal oversight by systemd.&lt;p&gt;In any case, it will be deployed on all POPs and in production on Friday - even if I must have a bad night. But that means I will not do much next day. But that means I will have other creative ideas!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guiambros</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d offer a different perspective than others here: it really doesn&amp;#x27;t matter how many kids you have, nor how old they are.&lt;p&gt;If you ignore the initial 6-12 months (once they get into a regular sleep schedule), the impact for the parents for the rest of the time between 1 to 17 yrs-old is pretty much the same. The dynamics will change as they get older, but you&amp;#x27;ll still be spending considerable time on the various family activities: playing with them, having breakfast&amp;#x2F;lunch&amp;#x2F;dinner, going to the park, teaching new things, commuting to&amp;#x2F;from school, attending their friends&amp;#x27; birthdays on weekends, helping with schoolwork, maybe teaching them how to code :), etc.&lt;p&gt;On top of that, you&amp;#x27;ll also need to find time for you and your partner, family, friends, hobbies, reading, etc. Add a full time job, a school that starts starting early morning, a fixed annual vacation calendar, and you pretty much don&amp;#x27;t have many hours left in the day.&lt;p&gt;Sure, some activities can be shared with your partner, and some can be delegated (family member, nanny), but the conclusion is still the same: time management becomes a lot more critical once you have kids.&lt;p&gt;Which then leads me to sleep. In order to dedicate enough time to a restful night of sleep, you&amp;#x27;ll need to prioritize things much more effectively, so you don&amp;#x27;t end cutting corners, and changing drastically your sleep patterns.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Effect of Sleep on Happiness</title><url>https://www.trackinghappiness.com/effect-sleep-happiness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anyfoo</author><text>As someone who also favors long (even very long) sleep, but is planning to have a child, may I ask how old your child is, whether things have already gotten better sleepwise, or whether you think it will?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re only planning for one, and my impression so far suggests that it&amp;#x27;s the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently, and that with one child the majority of the sacrifices are only temporary (and getting better as the child gets older), but it&amp;#x27;s always good to hear some experiences.</text></item><item><author>sbinthree</author><text>I had a nice solid 9h each night until having a child. I find I am actually more creative (uninhibited) when I get less sleep. My brain is firing too hard on perfectionism when I get a good sleep, where I can be a lot more creative and free flowing when I am sleep deprived. I don&amp;#x27;t implement or debug well in that state though, so my cycle tends to involve writing the code and debugging on better sleep nights and having my ideas and catching up on admin if I have a bad sleep.</text></item><item><author>1996</author><text>I sleep 10 to 11h per night. I may trim that to 6h one day but no more than once per month and if there is an absolute emergency - but then I know my productivity will be killed for at least 2 days.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, my inspiration will be higher: I will have more creative ideas on how to combine stuff, but I will be too tired to do any of that. I will just take notes.&lt;p&gt;With adequate sleep, I do not feel happier or sadder than anyone else. I feel more productive however. Sunday I had never done any python because I preferred perl, but for some specific task there was no option but a python library (well, it was also possible in another language I don&amp;#x27;t like either)&lt;p&gt;So on Monday, I learned python, then asynchronous execution with asyncio, then parallelizing with joblib. Tuesday, I coded.&lt;p&gt;Today I have a python3 daemon with error handling and other niceties ready to be deployed to test. It seems robust enough to require minimal oversight by systemd.&lt;p&gt;In any case, it will be deployed on all POPs and in production on Friday - even if I must have a bad night. But that means I will not do much next day. But that means I will have other creative ideas!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baby_sleep</author><text>I am laying next to our sleeping baby, who is about 6 months old. (He is our first and will likely be our only) I was terribly concerned about the lack of sleep as a first time father. Besides hearing “congratulations” when we told people we were pregnant, a close second was “sleep now, while you can.” We have had Very few “rough nights,” if you can even call it that, and for the last 5.5 months, my only sleep deprivation is almost exclusively self inflicted. We credit 1) our amazing baby, who seems to know that nighttime is for sleeping or eating only, and 2) that he sleeps with us in our bed.(Queue horrific gasps.)&lt;p&gt;He is breastfed, and still wakes up about 3 times during his 12 hours of sleep every night to breastfeed. However, that consists of him making minimal noise, and my wife either picking him up or rolling over and feeding him while they lay next to each other. They literally both sleep through most feedings. For his first few weeks of life, he simply slept on her breast, so it was even easier.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, after experiencing and witnessing this arrangement, I can’t imagine that nature had moms and babies doing anything differently for the last few thousand years. Our lives would have been more difficult if we had him in a separate room right now. If that was our arrangement, we could count on waking up to loud cries and walking to another room multiple times a night, and either comforting or feeding our baby, and then walking back to bed afterwards. If we were doing that, I think folks’ warnings would have been true.&lt;p&gt;This was not our plan, but it became our plan after having a very strong instinct to stay close to our newborn when we brought him home.&lt;p&gt;I used to think that we were significantly endangering our child with bed sharing, but then I found these articles from the Mother-Baby sleep lab at Notre Dame : 
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cosleeping.nd.edu&amp;#x2F;articles-and-presentations&amp;#x2F;articles-and-essays&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cosleeping.nd.edu&amp;#x2F;articles-and-presentations&amp;#x2F;articles...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;We don’t fit any of the risk factors associated with SIDS in bedsharing (drug or alcohol use, obesity, smoking, etc), and thus consider it statistically safe enough that the benefits far outweigh the risks. YMMV, but I recommend reading one or two of those articles&amp;#x2F;papers to balance out the blanket warnings against bed sharing that you will inevitably hear if you live in the US.&lt;p&gt;Enjoy parenthood. It’s been the best experience of our lives.</text></comment>