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Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t
- codyb 8y agoI've always said to insomniacs that they should read textbooks. They'll either end up geniuses or fall asleep like the rest of us. Is it making light of what's probably a very serious issue, I suppose so. This article makes me very glad that I can fall asleep easy at night. Just another thing to be thankful for. The few nights I can't fall asleep quickly are torture, I cannot imagine what it must be like for someone to suffer through that frequently.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI fall asleep easily, but frequently wake up at 2:30AM and have trouble getting back to sleep until 4:00AM, which is just an hour before I would normally get up. It does kinda suck, but I'm sure it could be a lot worse. I used to keep my old physics textbook next to my bed. Interesting enough to find something to read, dry enough to put me to sleep in a couple paragraphs. Ha!
- nemonemo 8y agoThe same here. For me, exercises seem to ease the problem. But the amount of exercise is important, and once in a while I need to take some rest, then the same issue hits me again. Maybe I need my own dry textbook..
- mirekrusin 8y agoSame here, had this problem for few years, the thing that helped me was a bit surprising - Magnesium L-Threonate. I must have been depleted of magnesium, maybe from drinking coffee? Other forms of magnesium didn't helped (but I haven't done proper experimentation on myself). With this form of magnesium the results were pretty much immediate. You can try it if you want, it may help as well.
- redcalx 8y agoI had a similar experience but with magnesium citrate, I think any organic salt of mg will likely help as they all have good uptake/absorption qualities, as opposed to mg oxide. I also got some beneficial effects from medium strength b vitamin pills and a high dose of b12 in the methylcobalamin form, taken sublingually.
- ignorantguy 8y agoSeems like a great idea. I will try this.
- codyb 8y agoYou'll have to change your username after just a few sessions! ;-). I will say, the problem for me, and I have very few sleep issues, is that when I do try this technique, I get very involved in whatever it is I decide to start studying. It's a great relief from whatever's been keeping me up, but not a great solution for sleep. At least in my case. So I recommend things which aren't screen related. Math books, with their problems you can hand write are a great fit. Alternatively fiction works well for me too. I key every vocabulary word I learn into Anki which helps as well. Good luck and happy new years, I hope you get some rest my friend.
- winrid 8y agoThis is what I do, with a little yellow led reading light. The light is very important. Red might be better (last rally codriver said it's easier on his eyes at night...) but haven't tried yet. On another note it also helps to pay attention to my heart rate and what I am thinking about. IE if I think about scaling an in memory graph db my heart rate jumps and I can't sleep. Maybe common sense but fun to play with.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- a-saleh 8y agoWhen I was too stressed out to sleep during college exam periods, I did actually use my introduction to group-theory to lull me to sleep :-)
- anonytrary 8y agoReading textbooks doesn't work if you're interested in the subject. If you're a software engineer, writing code doesn't help either. Doing anything you like to do doesn't work. One thing that helps me is playing a very lengthy fiction audiobook like LOTR or ASOIAF while I lay in bed with the lights off. I love those books, but I usually get tired after listening to a chapter and fall asleep within the next 15 minutes. Note that this is at 4-5am... so... it's not like I've solved my problem.
- timClicks 8y agoThe thing that helps me get to sleep is thinking in fiction. Any non-fiction subject results in my brain going into overdrive.
- usaphp 8y agoSame with me. I start to think fiction and then I kind of blur the line between a dream and my thinking and just falling asleep.
- luos 8y agoI like to think about scifi stuff when I can't sleep and someone recommended audio books in one of the comments. There is a podcast by Isaac Arthur about science and futurism, and he provides narration only versions. Honestly this is a miracle for my sleep. It's very interesting and because it doesn't have music and loud sounds it will not wake you up if you fell asleep. https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746a https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746a (I think there is a bug in soundcloud where the RSS feed does not show past a few tens of older episodes? Not sure where to get all of them) I think you can import the URL into your podcast reader.
- sayno3 8y agoProblem for me is that brain no work good in this state. Like trying to read with massive headache.
- Steve44 8y ago> I've always said to insomniacs that they should read textbooks. I'm not a good sleeper and quite like reading. If I'm in a state where I'm very tired but also having trouble getting off to sleep then I'm generally too tired to read. I may be able to manage a paragraph or two before my eyes start to lose focus but that's it. I'm not wide awake and fully functioning, I'm lying there tired but unable to get off to sleep - these are quite different states. The best thing I can do is to close my eyes and build 3D models in my head and fly around them. That sometimes helps, I think it concentrates the mind.
- torgian 8y agoI’ve started doing that whenever I have trouble sleeping. I start with a random world, set it to orbit, then make another world, have it orbit the first world, then add a third. I let them all orbit eachother.
- Klover 8y agoThat’s super cute! Do people who do this 3D modelling in their mind thing do a lot of visual things regularly? I would find it difficult to start doing that without being distracted by the million thoughts after 10 minutes.
- torgian 8y agoWell, I’m not sure. I used to do a lot of drawing when I was a kid, but now I do more programming and teaching. I think the exercise is really just to distract me from thinking “go to sleep go to sleep” over and over lol.
- cloverich 8y agoThat's meditation. I do the same thing but slowly imagine athletic form in sports moves (e.g. positioning of hips while kicking a soccer ball). Imagining and focusing on an imaginary dot in your vision is the same thing I think, but I can't seem to do that well. I wonder if anyone with this realization has taken it into awake meditation -- e.g. starting a daily meditation practice using the tools they've been developing to fall asleep.
- wodenokoto 8y agoAbout reading textbooks: you'll get tired, put it away, turn of the light and then can't sleep and is not tired. Turn on light, read again, get tired ... Etc. You don't learn anything and you don't sleep.
- jkukul 8y agoTry audiobooks! No need to turn of the light, just listen in the darkness :) Many audio-book apps have a sleep timer feature, so you don't have to worry about the book playing the whole night if you fall asleep in the meanwhile.
- chillwaves 8y agoI want to second audio things. I don't do audio books, I have a philosopher with a soothing voice I listen to when I go to sleep. https://www.dropbox.com/s/opaoujvykzxxtzo/Eckhart%20Tolle%20Overcome%20Your%20Mental%20And%20Emotional%20Pain.mp3?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/opaoujvykzxxtzo/Eckhart%20Tolle%20... This is the track if any are interested. I find the content engages my mind but is relaxing, it is easy to slip into sleep.
- cbanek 8y agoI do the same with listening to NPR, the BBC World Service, or some Ken Burns documentary. Sometimes just some classic tv works too. Anything to provide a bit of background noise and something for me to listen to other than my own repetitive thoughts. Plus having a bit of background noises drowns out any other noises that might wake me up. And if I can't fall asleep, at least it's something interesting.
- war1025 8y agoI also find NPR great for falling back to sleep for an hour or two when I wake up and it's technically morning, but not my normal wakeup time. Worst case, I'll get to listen to the radio for a little longer in the morning. Almost always it ends up calming me down enough that I fall back to sleep though.
- cbanek 8y agoExactly. And one of the reasons why I think NPR is different from other things I can listen to is the lack of ads. I know there's placement and sponsorship, but they don't have other ads spliced in (usually at a much louder volume, with random noises and music and ways to get attention) that easily wake me up.
- zeta0134 8y agoNew Yorker has wised up to content blockers, and appears to be postfixing their class IDs with random gibberish. This is a common trend; I can't say I'm terribly surprised by it. Fortunately their prefixes are relatively sane, and CSS supports wildcard matches. I like to block the sidebars on article sites like these because they usually contain the bulk of the distracting content, and this rule works wonderfully: www.newyorker.com##div[class*=ArticlePageSidebar] Just thought I'd share.
- y4mi 8y agoYou might want to look at your adblock subscriptions if you're manually creating rules. There are very dedicated and helpful people doing that already :)
- delinka 8y agoI’m out if touch with HTML & CSS, and I use something like umatrix instead of an ad blocker so I’m curious... How is it that the entire web isn’t already obfuscated to make this as thorny as possible? If we’re passing our JS through minifiers, why aren’t we doing similar to HTML such that element IDs are randomized/hashed every time the page is generated?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fredsted 8y agoIt's been happening for a while, but it makes it harder for developers to debug their sites. We'll see full minification of css soon, but of course we'll probably also see machine learning systems for blocking ads, too.
- Steve44 8y agoA little while ago I read that various historical records indicated that we would naturally sleep in two sessions overnight. This was changed by a combination of artificial light and also the industrial revolution giving us more regimented working hours. "The myth of the eight-hour sleep" at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783 is an interesting starting point.
- Tomte 8y agoThat's disputed by Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep. He writes that biphasic sleep was a cultural phenomenon with no basis in sleep science, and that only one Western society ever really practiced it, whereas e.g. "primitive tribes" all have one uninterrupted phase of sleep.
- Escolte 8y ago.
- fermienrico 8y agoI understand your frustration but this isn’t a place to vent out profusely. If you have nothing to add to the discussion, please refrain. Hope it gets sorted out for you.
- Escolte 8y agoOkay, sorry.
- fermienrico 8y agoThank you
- interlocutor 8y agoI have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills are addictive and you have to take them for the rest of your life. As a software engineer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem as opposed to the quickfixes these doctors were offering me. After much research I figured out the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem is magnesium deficiency. As a software developer I am using my brain more intensely than most people. This is the stress the doctors are talking about. Stress depletes magnesium. The cells in our body depend on two essential minerals for normal function: Calcium and magnesium. Cells go into ON state when calcium goes in, and OFF state when calcium goes out. Calcium doesn't go out on its own: magnesium has to go in and displace the calcium. When you are low on magnesium, cells can't go into OFF state. When that happens your muscles become stiff and you need massages, and your brain can't turn off and you can't sleep. The solution is magnesium supplements. This fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special compound of magnesium called magnesium l-threonate is especially helpful for sleep because it can penetrate the "blood brain barrier". Scientific sources for this are hard to come by. I had to piece together all this from multiple sources. Here are some: https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/magnificent-magnesium/ https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition... http://www.drsinatra.com/benefits-of-magnesium-supplements-for-heart-health/ http://www.drsinatra.com/benefits-of-magnesium-supplements-f... http://paleoforwomen.com/soul-crushing-stress-and-the-miracle-of-magnesium/ http://paleoforwomen.com/soul-crushing-stress-and-the-miracl...
- not_a_moth 8y agoGood on you. As pointed out in Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”, most doctors don’t have a lot of experience or training in sleep science. I’ve heard of magnesium supplements for increasing melatonin levels, since your body needs it in the production of the latter. Do you think that was the underlying cause? While I’m here commenting, my breakthrough moment in getting good sleep was having a strictly enforced bed time. It took a couple weeks of struggle and mediocre sleep to get there, but it has made getting to sleep a lot easier now.
- MRD85 8y agoI had medication-induced insomnia a few years ago due to some drugs I was on for another condition. It was horrible, I was so tired but wide awake and couldn't fall asleep. I would go multiple nights with zero sleep and my mind wouldn't function. I wouldn't even get close to sleeping. The doctors had to give me antipsychotics to get me to sleep since I wouldn't even react to sleeping pills. I did learn a lot about myself and I now have amazing sleep hygiene. I don't do math or programming before bed but I will read books on the topics. Anything that makes me think too hard is gone. I've actually shifted my sleep routine to 8pm-4am so I can wake early and do programming.
- mortond 8y agoIf you don't have, or don't think you have, a concrete reason for your insomnia then try this. When you yawn or feel drained go to bed, take a nap, or find a quiet toilet cubicle and close your eyes for ten minutes. Don't ignore your body. If your at home and have the option to sleep what I find works for me is lying flat on my back. Then relax, in sequence, your forehead, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, fingers, chest, stomach, groin, upper legs, lower legs, toes. Take around 1 minute to relax your whole body. If you can't relax something tense it up, then release it. Once your fully relaxed close your eyes and clear your thoughts. What works for me is trying to focus on a spot in the dark directly in front of me. As your mind wanders pull it back to focusing on the spot in the dark. Sometimes I need to repeatedly relax my forehead and eyes while doing this, just let your eye sockets go limp. Occasionally when you are pulling yourself back from your thoughts to focusing on that spot in the dark it can be jarring. Just keep trying. Eventually I fall asleep. I've noticed recently that this is meditation, except without the sleep part.
- throwanem 8y agoI can vouch for this method; when I remember to use it, it works.
- ninegunpi 8y agoWhat you are describing is effectively two aspects of the first step of traditional buddhist meditation Shamatha - awareness on chosen object and awareness on present signals of the body, so yes, meditation is is.
- war1025 8y agoThe thing I've found works to calm me down when I'm trying to sleep is to take a series of deep breaths. Long and slow in and out, but not awkwardly so. Usually on about the 5th breath the nature of it changes quite a bit and I can feel the tension drain out of me. From there, falling asleep is usually not far off.
- MegaDeKay 8y agoI have had some luck with this method [0]: "The trick is reportedly used by the US army to help them fall asleep when in situations that are less than peaceful, such as on battlefields." It has some similarities to yours, but some interesting differences as well. I've modified it a bit to say “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think” to myself over and over for a minute or two instead of 10 seconds https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fall-asleep-two-minutes-how-to-military-secret-trick-a8520991.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fall-asleep-two-min...
- jm__87 8y agoI found CBT for sleep helped my insomnia. A good book on this is called Goodnight Mind. I also read Matthew Walkers book while I was going through insomnia as well, and I can say this book is likely to make your insomnia worse. Half of it is just telling you all the ways in which you're killing yourself by not sleeping. Not a great thing to read when you can't sleep.
- purplethinking 8y agoI can second that. Got worse when I started reading it. I'm guessing it's aimed at people who can sleep but don't think it's important. I secretly despise those people. It's sort of like they're being perfectly healthy but choose to smoke while I'm forced to work in a dusty coal mine. I know it shouldn't bother me but it does.
- maroonblazer 8y agoI would often wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep. I'd toss & turn for hours, absolutely miserable. It was made worse by the fact that with every passing minute I'd agonize over another lost minute of sleep. It was only when someone suggested to me that simply lying still and focusing on my breathing was better than tossing and turning and worrying about not sleeping. If I couldn't sleep I could at least do that. It made a huge difference and helped me fall back to sleep.
- sidcool 8y agoTry the Navy Seal technique to sleep quickly. Has helped me.
- coldcode 8y agoTimely article, after listening to 4 hours of constant firecrackers in the neighborhood from 10pm-2am, I did not fall asleep until 6AM; thankfully today is not a workday. At least once a month, and in the past year more like once or twice a week, I can't fall asleep until right before I have to get up. Yet other nights I do exactly the same things and sleep 7 hours or so. When my body is in the no sleep mode (which I presume is an excess of cortisol) no matter what I take nothing will put me to sleep until that wears off. Working in a high stress environment writing code and managing a team in something with CEO level visibility (in a big company) I am sure its stress related. I can see why Michael Jackson went to ridiculous extremes trying to sleep (and paradoxically not actually sleeping). It's a miserable experience to trying to function one hour of sleep and do anything complex.
- int0x80 8y agoSomething you can try: exercise. Really. Get tired. It may work for you too.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoMan, this article really set me up for disappointment. > It is a beguiling idea, that one might transform one’s sleep, and the rest of one’s life, with a few virtuous acts of renunciation—no electronics in the bedroom, no coffee after 2 P.M.—and a few dreamy self-care rituals involving baths and tea. Okay, great. I'm ready to cut through the bullshit. Let's go. > Aristotle called sleep “a privation of waking,” and a simultaneous longing for and resistance to that privation seems to lie at the heart of insomnia’s torment. Oh.
- wallflower 8y agoIf you are having trouble sleeping or want to improve your sleep, a sleep monitor may help your situation. While a 6-lead EEG that you would wear during a sleep study is the most accurate way to determine your quality and quantity of sleep, consumer-grade sleep trackers are accurate enough to give you ballpark numbers on your sleep. You can start with a Fitbit (Apple Watch battery isn’t robust enough for monitoring all night). The best is to use a non-wearable sleep tracker so that you do not have to wear or remember to do anything. https://amp.businessinsider.com/best-sleep-tracker https://amp.businessinsider.com/best-sleep-tracker https://www.nosleeplessnights.com/best-sleep-tracker/ https://www.nosleeplessnights.com/best-sleep-tracker/ I found that adjusting the thermostat down 5 degrees Fahrenheit at night helps from waking up in the middle of the night. Also, if you want 8 hours of sleep, it means you need to be in bed for about 9 hours.
- azag0 8y agoI haven’t been able to find whether the recommended 7-9 hours per night refers to the time in bed or to actual sleep time (~1 hour less). Does anyone know?
- GatorD42 8y agoI've wondered the same thing. I assume it means time in bed, otherwise the recommendation would need a disclaimer about sleep efficiency and time in bed vs actual sleep. Some people are able to get by with around 6 hours of sleep, I've assumed these people have higher sleep efficiency while the 8 hour recommendation is for people with around 85% efficiency.
- dpark 8y agoIf it meant “time in bed”, then they’d need the disclaimer about “efficiency”. Someone who takes an hour to fall asleep would be “inefficient” and need more time in bed, but they wouldn’t actually need more sleep.
- dpark 8y agoSleep. The recommendation is always 7-9 hours of sleep. 7-9 hours of laying in bed is not healthy or restful if you’re only sleeping for 3 hours of that time.
- hemling 8y agoThis is how I fixed my insomnia. I changed three things: 1. Before going to bed I meditate (I usually listen to the app from Sam Harris) 2. No more caffeine after 11 in the morning 3. Strict "bed hygiene", meaning: when I go to bed I immediately switch off the lights and sleep. I do nothing else. Also, I try to always sleep around the same time, even on weekends. I believe 3) has made the biggest difference. I used to read and even sometimes watch movies in bed. I miss reading in bed but since I stopped doing that and only focus on sleeping I have never had problems to fall asleep anymore, despite going through some stressful times. I do sometimes still wake up during the night, but since I sleep well before I can handle those days pretty well. My life has changed a lot for the better, one of the best things I have done recently