Tips request: studying with sleep deprivation

John Pingo January 12, 2021 at 23:13 1550 views 3 comments

My baby completed 3 week now. If you have a child you know how brutal is the newborn stage. I'm sleeping 3 hours a day (4 hours when lucky) - not continuos. I know it will last for some months even one year or so.

BUT, I have to study philosophy (I'm graduating in my local university) and have to read hard books. My brain is just not working. Coffee lost its effects.

Are there any tips in how to cope with sleep deprivation and read hard things (or keep studying)? Anyone else have passed through this?

Comments (3)

Jack Cummins January 13, 2021 at 19:53 #488387 0 likes

Reply to John Pingo
I don't have much experience of babies but I plenty of experience of sleep deprivation through being kept awake due to noise or difficult shift patterns. It is such a problem if you are meant to study or work. I would just say that you can only push yourself so far. To do more than that may make you ill or perform badly, even if you keep reading all the hard books. Perhaps you could have a little sleep in the day to make up for the lack during the night.

I have used enough caffeine for work and studies to know how it creates insomnia. I could not give up my coffee but try to take it earlier in the day. I also think that when coffee stops working it is a sign you have overused it. I often take over the counter tablets to enable me to sleep because I find that if I don't get enough sleep I can't function properly. I am not suggesting that you should take such tablets yourself but I do believe that you might do worse in your study if you just force yourself to study more and survive with hardly any sleep.

I also hope that you get some advice which is more geared up to someone struggling with life around babies, because that is one of the few problems I have not encountered so far.

Metaphysician Undercover January 15, 2021 at 02:13 #488920 0 likes

I think I agree with Jack here. Studying when you're that deprived of sleep is a lost cause, you simply won't get the desired effect because you'll lose the ability to concentrate on the reading. This means that you're asking the wrong question. You ought to be asking how to care for your baby in a way which allows you to get better sleep.

LuckyR January 16, 2021 at 08:35 #489336 0 likes

Firstly, congrats on the baby. Luckily for me I had 6 weeks of paternity leave and I commonly worked nights so getting up in the middle of the night wasn't a big deal for me . Clearly your baby is getting way, way more than 3 hours of sleep a day, so sleep when the baby sleeps.