I had some thoughts about tiredness, which are plausibly related to caffeine use – perhaps in different ways for different people.
Thoughts:
Tiredness is often intentional, not just a result of e.g. poor organisation.
Intentional tiredness falls within a range of tiredness.
Outside the range, there is
(a) too much sense of obligation from high functioning (i.e. too little tiredness; btw I think this is often related to overreaching, and second-handedness about goals); or
(b) the desire for nothing but to sleep (i.e. too much tiredness).
Within the range, there is the imagined permission (and still the remaining ability) to do certain low-skill things that one wants to do anyway, but which one would be ashamed to do if one’s thinking was less handicapped. E.g. John wants to watch a show, but if John is not fatigued, he beats himself up about having to do some work.
Tiredness is also not necessarily intentional, but tolerated as downside of doing what one wants at night.
Similar to before, the night is generally thought of as a more permissive period than the day. People want to enjoy those extra permissions, so they stay up past a reasonable bed time.
(Even if they subsequently wake up late, not having a disciplined sleep schedule causes them tiredness problems (which they are aware of). There are schedule-based mechanisms in the body that can’t keep up with fluctuating whims about when to go to bed (my understanding).)
I think that there are a couple of key ingredients for solving a lot of people’s tiredness which ~solved mine:
- honest introspection about why your sleep schedule is as it is; and
- learning about why you should value optimised thinking processes (as a result of good sleep), about to what goals those processes can be valuably applied.
Being able to live by default without fatigue is like a superpower. Yet people are not ready to receive it. This is a tragedy.