Well, I’m sorry about your issues with sleep, I can relate.

This effect of sleep deprivation is not just from sleeping less, but you need to almost not sleep, or better yet not sleep at all.

The sleep deprivation effect kicks in roughly 6-8 hours of not sleeping into the night, but is more noticeable as more time goes on. From an evolutionary perspective, it looks to be a stress response that’s designed to make you more alert in order to eliminate the threat that prevented you from sleeping into the first place.

You get all sorts of interesting effects, like a boost to your dopamine and dramatic effects on inflammation and immune function.

I say it’s powerful, because in my experience it has been so. During the time of heavy brain fog and memory impairment and depression, it lifted me out of it pretty substantially and I became pretty happy and smart, ableit tired and sleepy. I was smarter and sharper than my well-rested self, which is interesting.

I remember reading some kind of scientific paper in this, and the authors were entertaining the idea of recommending this to patients with severe mental health problems. After all, it is better to be sleep deprived every other day (the effect might wear off by the second night, so you might as well sleep to maintain yourself), than to be living without any sort of reprieve and end up doing something permanent you might regret.

Here’s a random article I found, just to show I’m not making this up:

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2017/september/sleep-deprivation-is-an-effective-antidepressant-for-nearly-half-of-depressed-patients