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Cooling your body down before going to bed will have the opposite effect if your goal is to go to sleep. By cooling your body it will start to try and warm itse

Cooling your body down before going to bed will have the opposite effect if your goal is to go to sleep. By cooling your body it will start to try and warm itself and trigger a stress reaction. Eating and working out before bed will similarly raise your heart rate and sympathetic nervous system activity, the opposite of what you want. Sleeping pills are also bad for sleep, ask any sleep doctor. They are great and knocking you out, but that's not what sleep is. Saying you did "meditation" for a year doesn't tell us much, just the same as you saying you "exercised" for 4.5 hours a week doesn't tell us much. Both of those terms can mean a great number of things qualitatively speaking. Counter-intuitively you could warm yourself 1-2 hours before bed with a hot bath or sauna session. This triggers the body to bring blood closer to the surface and extremities to shed heat, in effect "helping" the body cool itself as it approaches bedtime. Based on these observations I think maybe you haven't tried "absolutely positively everything". And even with all the environmental and body things you've tried, the mental aspect cannot be understated. EDIT: based on some of the replies about temperature. The hot bath method because it will help your body cool in a physiological way while a cold bath will do the opposite. A cool environment will do the same while a hot one will do the opposite. So hot bath 1-2 hours before bed and lower the room temp for the best of both worlds. Some people go further with chilled blankets such as the Ooler.

dijit 7y ago
Rising body temperature is correlated with tiredness, that's why you feel exhausted after you've been home for 5 minutes. Meditation itself was 'mindfulness', some of it was guided, most of it was not, guided meditation was once a week (I'm not counting the yoga, which was also meditative), I spent 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at lunch, 15 minutes when I got home and 5 minutes before bed. (and I'm pretty well disciplined so I stuck to that routine). The reason I say I've tried everything is because I've seem therapists/psychologists and taken their recommendations on board, I've researched and taken more information on board and this is not the first thread where "night owl" information has come up, and I took information from there too. And, like I said, I'm rigorously self-disciplined; so I'm able to stick to things... But, I will happily take your advice on board and try that. Since I don't care about whinging, I care about results.
- immy 7y ago
  Check out the somatic work of Thomas Hanna. 30 minutes of supine coordinated movement is great for the parasympathetic. EDIT: the one I use is paid on Glo.com. Found a free one that seems similar https://youtu.be/F0jwdoSWsio https://youtu.be/F0jwdoSWsio
  - dota_fanatic 7y ago
    Thank you so much for the reference and especially the link. I tried it last night before going to sleep and it felt great. You can bet this is going into my daily wind down routine. :)
- dota_fanatic 7y ago
  The only thing I can recommend that's helped me significantly in a rigorous way is tracking HRV overnight (heart rate variability). This is an objective indirect measure of HPA axis activity (parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous systems). Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless in helping you determine what things you're doing in the day that is actually having an effect on your stress levels one way or the other. As I'm sure you can imagine, my best sleep is on nights when my HRV is high. I no longer drink alcohol or work on software after 7PM in general after seeing just how much those activities would wreck my body's ability to sleep well. I use an Oura ring for this but I bet there are cheaper methods, perhaps with a heart rate chest strap, though there's an additional bonus with the ring in that it tracks sleep phases as well.* *to some degree of accuracy (~66%?) I use it directionally only since the values have big error bars.
  - cj 7y ago
    > Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless I'm surprised to hear this, although I'm glad it works for you. I wear an Apple Watch Series 3 night and day, which reports HRV. I've found it to be pretty difficult to draw conclusions from since the measurement stays pretty much the same even when significantly changing lifestyle/habits. Over the past year I have went pure vegan (went down 15% body weight), went from exercising 0 days a week to 6x 1 hour high intensity, went from chronically sleep deprived to 7-8 hours / night, and HRV has been exactly the same. Perhaps the accuracy of the apple watch isn't so great compared to what you're using. My measurement tends to fluctuate between 25ms - 40ms throughout the month with an average of 30ms over the entire month for the past year, despite the dramatic lifestyle changes mentioned above. I've noticed Apple Watch's VO2 max measurements are also -very- unreliable. Mine has decreased 25% in the past year despite being at a dramatically higher cardio fitness level. Curious if anyone else with an Apple Watch has had a similar experience with these measurements. I really like the idea of using them as a feedback loop, which is partly why I wear an apple watch to begin with, but hasn't quite panned out.
flippyhead 7y ago
This is really surprising. All the studies I have read say precisely the opposite. The theory goes that because, in the environment in which our minds evolved, the temperature would ALWAYS drop at night, this is one of several signals your body responds to to prepare for sleep. Others include lower availability of food and darkness.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  It goes against my experience as well. Years ago someone on HN equated an ice bath to elephant tranquilizer. So I tried it and can confirm it had a similar effect on me. In addition, I grew up in a cold climate. Being cold and absorbing my reflected body heat under the blankets made it so much easier to sleep. In contrast, hot humid nights were impossible. Edit: Fixed phone’s stupid autocorrect.
cgriswald 7y ago
When my sleeping issues were at their worst, having the pills knock me out for a night or two meant I felt tired the following nights and got normal sleep. And just having the pills really helped with the mental aspect. I knew that if I had a bad night it wasn’t going to turn into months long ordeal.

dijit 7y ago

Rising body temperature is correlated with tiredness, that's why you feel exhausted after you've been home for 5 minutes. Meditation itself was 'mindfulness', some of it was guided, most of it was not, guided meditation was once a week (I'm not counting the yoga, which was also meditative), I spent 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at lunch, 15 minutes when I got home and 5 minutes before bed. (and I'm pretty well disciplined so I stuck to that routine). The reason I say I've tried everything is because I've seem therapists/psychologists and taken their recommendations on board, I've researched and taken more information on board and this is not the first thread where "night owl" information has come up, and I took information from there too. And, like I said, I'm rigorously self-disciplined; so I'm able to stick to things... But, I will happily take your advice on board and try that. Since I don't care about whinging, I care about results.

immy 7y ago
Check out the somatic work of Thomas Hanna. 30 minutes of supine coordinated movement is great for the parasympathetic. EDIT: the one I use is paid on Glo.com. Found a free one that seems similar https://youtu.be/F0jwdoSWsio https://youtu.be/F0jwdoSWsio
- dota_fanatic 7y ago
  Thank you so much for the reference and especially the link. I tried it last night before going to sleep and it felt great. You can bet this is going into my daily wind down routine. :)
dota_fanatic 7y ago
The only thing I can recommend that's helped me significantly in a rigorous way is tracking HRV overnight (heart rate variability). This is an objective indirect measure of HPA axis activity (parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous systems). Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless in helping you determine what things you're doing in the day that is actually having an effect on your stress levels one way or the other. As I'm sure you can imagine, my best sleep is on nights when my HRV is high. I no longer drink alcohol or work on software after 7PM in general after seeing just how much those activities would wreck my body's ability to sleep well. I use an Oura ring for this but I bet there are cheaper methods, perhaps with a heart rate chest strap, though there's an additional bonus with the ring in that it tracks sleep phases as well.* *to some degree of accuracy (~66%?) I use it directionally only since the values have big error bars.
- cj 7y ago
  > Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless I'm surprised to hear this, although I'm glad it works for you. I wear an Apple Watch Series 3 night and day, which reports HRV. I've found it to be pretty difficult to draw conclusions from since the measurement stays pretty much the same even when significantly changing lifestyle/habits. Over the past year I have went pure vegan (went down 15% body weight), went from exercising 0 days a week to 6x 1 hour high intensity, went from chronically sleep deprived to 7-8 hours / night, and HRV has been exactly the same. Perhaps the accuracy of the apple watch isn't so great compared to what you're using. My measurement tends to fluctuate between 25ms - 40ms throughout the month with an average of 30ms over the entire month for the past year, despite the dramatic lifestyle changes mentioned above. I've noticed Apple Watch's VO2 max measurements are also -very- unreliable. Mine has decreased 25% in the past year despite being at a dramatically higher cardio fitness level. Curious if anyone else with an Apple Watch has had a similar experience with these measurements. I really like the idea of using them as a feedback loop, which is partly why I wear an apple watch to begin with, but hasn't quite panned out.

flippyhead 7y ago

This is really surprising. All the studies I have read say precisely the opposite. The theory goes that because, in the environment in which our minds evolved, the temperature would ALWAYS drop at night, this is one of several signals your body responds to to prepare for sleep. Others include lower availability of food and darkness.

cgriswald 7y ago
It goes against my experience as well. Years ago someone on HN equated an ice bath to elephant tranquilizer. So I tried it and can confirm it had a similar effect on me. In addition, I grew up in a cold climate. Being cold and absorbing my reflected body heat under the blankets made it so much easier to sleep. In contrast, hot humid nights were impossible. Edit: Fixed phone’s stupid autocorrect.

cgriswald 7y ago

When my sleeping issues were at their worst, having the pills knock me out for a night or two meant I felt tired the following nights and got normal sleep. And just having the pills really helped with the mental aspect. I knew that if I had a bad night it wasn’t going to turn into months long ordeal.