4 ms·

I know this is anecdotal but I feel it is worth sharing. I've had insomnia for several years. I've tried treating it with drugs, sticking to routines, exercise,

I know this is anecdotal but I feel it is worth sharing. I've had insomnia for several years. I've tried treating it with drugs, sticking to routines, exercise, meditation, diet, controlled lighting, and quite a few other methods. Eventually, I just stopped looking at it as a problem. I sleep about 5 to 6 hours a night now and I feel great. I just accepted I don't have the same sleep patterns as everyone else and moved on with my life. I've read about reaction times and how sleep affects cognition but I really don't believe it, for me. I've tested performance by going shooting and recording scores after various amounts of sleep and found that after more than 7 hours of sleep a night I get worse scores. Science is averages, you might be average or you might not. Test your own performance and find out what you need. If you only need a few hours sleep and your performance is not affected, do that. Many people with insomnia worry about it or try to fix what might not be broken. You might be an outlier and not the average.

veb 15y ago
I've suffered from depression, and random crap like insomania. For years, I'd rely on the doctor and follow the medications. These just made my life and sleep much worse. Then one day, I ate a cookie that had been cooked with marijuana. Suffice to say, I slept a lovely 8 hour sleep that night - and the greatest thing? I've only ever had to use marijuana a _few_ times in the last 3 or so years. So, it seems to work long-term... I've figured it's probably better for my health to stop switching weird medications every 3 months, and have a brownie every now and again. I'm a much healther and happier person by far.
- hartror 15y ago
  Interesting has there been any research done into this application. I have friends who have a little bit and just fall asleep (am not sure the effect on myself as I can't smoke and no one has ever offered me a hash cookie/brownie).
  - chimeracoder 15y ago
    > Interesting has there been any research done into this application. You mean using marijuana to treat insomnia (or sleep disorders in general)? Quite a lot, actually - marijuana is one of the most studied drugs in existence, and its effects on sleep disorders have been documented thoroughly. It depends on the state, but some of the states with medical marijuana laws accept sleep disorders as a valid use.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Yeah, I think this is fairly common but mostly not emphasized in the current debate because it's not as politically sympathetic a position: terminally ill patients using marijuana to reduce nausea make better example cases.
ScottBurson 15y ago
There definitely are people who do just fine on 5 to 6 hours a night. I've known a couple. Alas, I'm not one of them. I really need 8.5 to 9.
- pale_rider 15y ago
  I hear you. Even though I am still in my late 20s, I still need 8-9 hours of sleep a night. Anything less than that and I feel like I was hit with a trunk the next day. I really wish I could get by on 5-7 hours like so many of my friends do, but after a while I just had to accept I couldn't physically do it.
  - narag 15y ago
    In your late 20s? I raise it to my late 40s. I often sleep six or seven hours on work days, but I have to recover in the weekend.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago
  I'm exactly the same. I'm in my 40's now but have always been this way; the big difference that age has brought me is that I'm less flexible about it. In college I could get by with a few 3-4 hour nights in a row, as long as I made it up (and all of it) over the weekend, but now I can't carry a deficit nearly as well, so I don't.
gwern 15y ago
> Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.) Don't try this unless you've actually done some measuring and testing; overconfidence and biases are more common than tests: > Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.ht...
SquareWheel 15y ago
I have a 26-hour circadian sleep-rhythm, and so each night I go to bed 2 hours later than the night before. It made school years absolutely insufferable, but now I have a job where I can set my own hours and I just go with it. I'm not able to do certain things like shop during my "awake during the night" phase, but it usually works out. I'm not sure if I have much to contribute other than "me too". I can confirm though that in my experience, drugs, routines, etc just don't work for me.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  I was also going to note that I have worked shifts that are hard on sleep. When working an overnight shift, for example, I found it impossible to sleep more htan 4 hours per day (day because you get to sleep maybe 8am). The funny thing is the impairment isn't linear throughout the day. There are times when it is really bad (1-3am) and times when it is pretty good (dawn, during the daylight hours etc). In general the only times I found myself impaired was at work. I have talked to people who worked in other industry overnight and their experience was the same. As far as I can tell, without tremendous amounts of caffeine, the brain seems to go partway to sleep, able to recover from approx. half of the outstanding sleep debt per day. Part of the problem is the way in which we use caffeine to compensate.
- espinchi 15y ago
  How can you measure how long your circadian sleep cycle is?
  - SquareWheel 15y ago
    The time you wake up one day, to the time you wake up the next, averaged out over a long period of time. For most people it's right around 24 hours, as it should be. Circadian technically means every 24 hours, so a better word may have been just "body clock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Criteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Criteria
nandemo 15y ago
Wait, is 5-6 hours a night considered insomnia? Or am I misreading you, and you used to sleep less and have improved?
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  I used to sleep between 0 and 14 hours a day (completely irregularly). Now, I sleep a fairly regular 5 to 6 hours per day.
kokey 15y ago
I think the best quote about this, during reports from Prof Jim Horne about people people different in this respect: "In a nutshell, if you sleep for eight hours a night go to work and find yourself lolling and drooling on the keyboard, you aren't getting enough. If you're sleeping five hours and running the country, you probably are getting enough." The latter was in reference to Margaret Thatcher who seemed to function fine with about 5 hours sleep at night.
- patrickk 15y ago
  Margaret Thatcher used to take vitamin B shots to compensate. An a chronic insomniac myself, I really wish this macho, superhuman bullshit about sleep would just die already. I try to get 8 hours and still struggle. Apparently there is a small fraction of people who manage with tiny amounts of sleep because they are geneticically different[1], but there is no use in using that as a standard that 95% of people should live by. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mutation-sleep-less http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mut...

veb 15y ago

I've suffered from depression, and random crap like insomania. For years, I'd rely on the doctor and follow the medications. These just made my life and sleep much worse. Then one day, I ate a cookie that had been cooked with marijuana. Suffice to say, I slept a lovely 8 hour sleep that night - and the greatest thing? I've only ever had to use marijuana a _few_ times in the last 3 or so years. So, it seems to work long-term... I've figured it's probably better for my health to stop switching weird medications every 3 months, and have a brownie every now and again. I'm a much healther and happier person by far.

hartror 15y ago
Interesting has there been any research done into this application. I have friends who have a little bit and just fall asleep (am not sure the effect on myself as I can't smoke and no one has ever offered me a hash cookie/brownie).
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  > Interesting has there been any research done into this application. You mean using marijuana to treat insomnia (or sleep disorders in general)? Quite a lot, actually - marijuana is one of the most studied drugs in existence, and its effects on sleep disorders have been documented thoroughly. It depends on the state, but some of the states with medical marijuana laws accept sleep disorders as a valid use.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Yeah, I think this is fairly common but mostly not emphasized in the current debate because it's not as politically sympathetic a position: terminally ill patients using marijuana to reduce nausea make better example cases.

ScottBurson 15y ago

There definitely are people who do just fine on 5 to 6 hours a night. I've known a couple. Alas, I'm not one of them. I really need 8.5 to 9.

pale_rider 15y ago
I hear you. Even though I am still in my late 20s, I still need 8-9 hours of sleep a night. Anything less than that and I feel like I was hit with a trunk the next day. I really wish I could get by on 5-7 hours like so many of my friends do, but after a while I just had to accept I couldn't physically do it.
- narag 15y ago
  In your late 20s? I raise it to my late 40s. I often sleep six or seven hours on work days, but I have to recover in the weekend.
michaelcampbell 15y ago
I'm exactly the same. I'm in my 40's now but have always been this way; the big difference that age has brought me is that I'm less flexible about it. In college I could get by with a few 3-4 hour nights in a row, as long as I made it up (and all of it) over the weekend, but now I can't carry a deficit nearly as well, so I don't.

gwern 15y ago

> Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.) Don't try this unless you've actually done some measuring and testing; overconfidence and biases are more common than tests: > Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.ht...

SquareWheel 15y ago

I have a 26-hour circadian sleep-rhythm, and so each night I go to bed 2 hours later than the night before. It made school years absolutely insufferable, but now I have a job where I can set my own hours and I just go with it. I'm not able to do certain things like shop during my "awake during the night" phase, but it usually works out. I'm not sure if I have much to contribute other than "me too". I can confirm though that in my experience, drugs, routines, etc just don't work for me.

einhverfr 15y ago
I was also going to note that I have worked shifts that are hard on sleep. When working an overnight shift, for example, I found it impossible to sleep more htan 4 hours per day (day because you get to sleep maybe 8am). The funny thing is the impairment isn't linear throughout the day. There are times when it is really bad (1-3am) and times when it is pretty good (dawn, during the daylight hours etc). In general the only times I found myself impaired was at work. I have talked to people who worked in other industry overnight and their experience was the same. As far as I can tell, without tremendous amounts of caffeine, the brain seems to go partway to sleep, able to recover from approx. half of the outstanding sleep debt per day. Part of the problem is the way in which we use caffeine to compensate.
espinchi 15y ago
How can you measure how long your circadian sleep cycle is?
- SquareWheel 15y ago
  The time you wake up one day, to the time you wake up the next, averaged out over a long period of time. For most people it's right around 24 hours, as it should be. Circadian technically means every 24 hours, so a better word may have been just "body clock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Criteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Criteria

nandemo 15y ago

Wait, is 5-6 hours a night considered insomnia? Or am I misreading you, and you used to sleep less and have improved?

Tsagadai 15y ago
I used to sleep between 0 and 14 hours a day (completely irregularly). Now, I sleep a fairly regular 5 to 6 hours per day.

kokey 15y ago

I think the best quote about this, during reports from Prof Jim Horne about people people different in this respect: "In a nutshell, if you sleep for eight hours a night go to work and find yourself lolling and drooling on the keyboard, you aren't getting enough. If you're sleeping five hours and running the country, you probably are getting enough." The latter was in reference to Margaret Thatcher who seemed to function fine with about 5 hours sleep at night.

patrickk 15y ago
Margaret Thatcher used to take vitamin B shots to compensate. An a chronic insomniac myself, I really wish this macho, superhuman bullshit about sleep would just die already. I try to get 8 hours and still struggle. Apparently there is a small fraction of people who manage with tiny amounts of sleep because they are geneticically different[1], but there is no use in using that as a standard that 95% of people should live by. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mutation-sleep-less http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mut...