11 ms·
Some people with insomnia think they're awake when they're asleep
- cut3 2y agoThe article is blocked unless I pay so I can't read it.
- JohnMakin 2y agohttps://archive.is/cs1fW https://archive.is/cs1fW
- Luc 2y agoPrepend the URL with archive.is/ Curiously, it's free for me in France, even in an private window.
- cut3 2y agoawesome thanks Ill do this in the future :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sabrina_ramonov 2y agomy bad, I was able to access it for free without paying so didn't realize
- MarkusWandel 2y agoGreat, just great. I went relatively low-tech and outfitted the mattress I sleep on with an Angel Care sensor pad, connected to some custom homemade datalogging stuff. This is to convince me that what felt like a restless night actually did have significant sleep spells. So I'm just imagining feeling tired and having been awake most of the night, right? Have some coffee and get on with things. And now they're saying that sleep was, in fact, no good? "Significant sleep spells" - sometimes the data, sampled in 1-minute binning intervals, is a flat line - no difference, minute-to-minute, in motion (however significantly above baseline of an unoccupied mattress - I guess that's what the angel care sensors monitor - just the motion energy of breathing. Other times the data is really, really noisy. Is that different sleep or just different body position? Never figured it out. But "awake" is clearly visible - that's noise that never goes down to the "just breathing" baseline at all.
- throwway120385 2y agoIf its based on heart rate and breath rate you could probably do that sonically or ultrasonically. If it's using ultrasound, it's probable that it's just because of your sleeping position. The maternal/infant monitors that the hospital my wife gave birth in used were very sensitive to positioning to the degree that they would stop measuring my son's heartbeat whenever she changed positions whereupon the nurse would come in and reposition the sensor.
- MarkusWandel 2y agoAngel care sensor pad is just a piezoelectric disk and a couple of plastic plates. The real Angel Care box probably does DSP to pick out heartbeat or at least breaths, so it can raise the (frequently false) alarm if something goes wrong, presumably to trigger parent action that's fast enough to prevent a SIDS death. That's the theory anyway. In practice the false alarm rate is too high. The algorithm I do use: Over a configurable number of samples, find maximum and minimum reading. Add the difference to an accumulator. Repeat. Once a minute, retrieve the accumulator and reset to zero. With 1-minute binning, it would be too slow to raise a "not breathing" alarm - but it's perfectly fine for post-analysis. I've used it for years, and can tell with a glance at the graph how bad the night was.
- l33tman 2y ago"The researchers exposed people to a distressing emotional experience for three days in a row: they had to listen to a recording of themselves singing—often out of tune—to karaoke, which aroused shame." Heh.. The researchers have been pretty creative :) But yeah, I've experienced the same thing, you think you haven't slept a second during the night but you probably have
- kunalgupta 2y agoyeah i have this. didnt officially verify but i noticed that theres a direct correlation between hours i am in bed and how rested i feel, even if i feel like i spent the time awake. So i stopped specifically worrying about whether i’m asleep or awake and instead focus on enjoying the break
- xkcd-sucks 2y agoIn consideration of the placebo effect and sleep architecture, I have started trying to think of deep half-awake time as "stage zero sleep"
- EPWN3D 2y agoI've definitely experienced this. It used to happen weekly. My wife would often "wake me up" and say I was snoring, but to me, I was still lying awake trying to fall asleep. It was incredibly confusing, but I just trusted that she wasn't making things up. I've begun taking a small amount of CBD in the form of an edible a few hours before going to bed (a quarter of a 5 mg gummy), and I have minimal sleep issues now.
- xcskier56 2y agoI have this EXACT same experience with my GF but on the other side of things. She'll be snoring so I'll poke her and she'll say she was awake... but was definitely snoring asleep
- wil421 2y agoDon’t try to prove she’s snoring by showing her evidence of the snoring. Let me make that mistake for you.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> Don’t try to prove she’s snoring by showing her evidence of the snoring. For my spouse I highlighted the cracked windows and the house shifted on it's foundation. I tried using circles under everyone's eyes but she insisted those were from food allergies.
- doubled112 2y agoThis is all circumstantial at best!
- ramesh31 2y ago>I've begun taking a small amount of CBD in the form of an edible a few hours before going to bed (a quarter of a 5 mg gummy), and I have minimal sleep issues now. A 1.25mg dose of CBD is essentially homeopathic levels. Either you're confused on the dosage or experiencing a placebo effect.
- gmiller123456 2y agoI actually often have dreams that I'm lying awake in bed. Sometimes I wake up and am in a different position, which is the only way I know it was a dream. I imagine there's a lot of times I think I really was lying awake when I was really sleeping.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoAnecdata: I have observed that my migraines come in cycles with the subjective experience of not having slept. I know I've slept, because I have long stretches of unconsciousness as confirmed by the clock on my nightstand. But I don't feel like I've slept. Then I'll have a migraine and a few nights of really great (subjectively) sleep before the cycle starts over again. It's like there's something building up in my brain that's blocking real REM sleep, and cleaning it out results in the subjective experience of a migraine.
- greentxt 2y agoIf they are able to think, that means they are conscious no? My favorite type of sleep is the sort that precludes conscious mental activity, since I tend to think of work or other mentally fatiguing subject matter and physical sensations like pain and tension. I'd like my sleep to exclude that sort of suffering. Maybe there should be more than one word for sleep. We could distinguish certain aspects, maybe name them or something? Course I'm probably asleep right now and dreaming I typed this.
- appletrotter 2y agoHave you ever heard of lucid dreams?
- lxgr 2y agoDream states are definitely not equivalent to normal/awake consciousness. Try doing math in a dream!
- aidenn0 2y agoI have done math in a dream before.
- lxgr 2y agoWas it any good, though?
- aidenn0 2y agoBasic arithmetic seems to work fine. Antiderivatives, much less so. OTOH doing aintiderivatives while awake doesn't work that great for me either. [edit] Though I should clarify that in my dreams I usually finish the antiderivative (wrongly) when awake I usually just fail to finish the antiderivative.
- withinboredom 2y agoI have been programming in my dreams, but I woke up and had to retype it all!
- renewiltord 2y agoI have definitely experienced this sometimes. Usually it's when I've had too much to drink. Very restless sleep and sometimes I'll tell my wife how I was awake all night counting the hours and she'll tell me I was sleeping haha
- seiferteric 2y agoEvery now and then I will have a night where my brain feels "wired" and I can't sleep and just have thoughts racing through my head. It feels like a don't sleep or barely sleep and yet hours go by pretty fast so I assume I must be sleeping more than I think, but it is a different kind of sleep for sure.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoI get this too. My mind is racing and I feel like I can’t fall asleep but then when I eventually get up to check the time, multiple hours have passed
- msarrel 2y agoThis makes sense to me because for years I have felt like I'm laying in bed awake yet I also feel like I got some sleep. I described this as " I didn't sleep at all last night, but maybe I did because I feel slightly rested even though I was awake." Knowing my background, hyper vigilance and PTSD are probably at play.
- sandworm101 2y agoMind awake and body asleep is nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
- prophesi 2y agoSleep paralysis is a frightening experience, and the one suffering from it is both aware, and correct in their awareness, that they're awake. Article is describing something very different.
- sandworm101 2y agoIt isn't always frightening. It only get scary when you try to move and cannot. Many people suffer "paralysis" that ends as soon as they try to move. Such people are awake but their body is in sleep mode, often snoring. I've experienced it myself when lying in bed wondering who is snoring beside me, only to discover I am alone in bed listening to myself snore.
- skeaker 2y agoRight, but the article describes a scenario where you aren't actually awake.
- kagakuninja 2y agoPrevious guy misstated things. Sleep paralysis is a form of lucid dreaming. You are aware while asleep. From my experience meditating, one can go through stages of body paralysis, and then enter lucid dreaming states, while maintaining awareness. Some advanced meditators claim to be able to be aware at all times, even in deep dreamless sleep.
- namanyayg 2y agoInteresting to see this article and the comments here on how everyone's experience varies. This happens to me when I go to bed while thinking hard on a specific problem, usually related to my startup. It starts off awake with regular thinking, but then at some point it becomes surreal and events that have no cause and effect or basis in reality start occuring. When I feel an "aha" moment where I become of the surreal nature of my recent thoughts, my memories cease and I assume I transition to real sleep. In some cases, I wake up and when I check the time my 30 minutes of "thinking" actually occured over ~3 hours. I find it fun, and as part of my self sleep experiments I try to even recreate it.
- huevosabio 2y agoThis happens to me fairly often, and find it amusing as well. Its become my way of detecting that I'm falling asleep: "oh, that is such a weird, ridiculous thought, I must be falling asleep".
- hadlock 2y agoThis is at least a once a month occurrence, usually weekly+ when I'm working on a big new project. I'll feel like I spent the whole night thinking about how to fix X and only got 3 hours of sleep, but in reality I got more than 6
- elzbardico 2y agoDon't know if this is related, but I really enjoy the dreams when I go back to sleep after my wife wakes up. They are really vivid and imaginative, but at the same I am mostly aware I am dreaming, as if I was partially awake. Of course, this is me, I am a thoroughly weird person. I understand that some other people may find it unsettling.
- WalterSear 2y agoThis was the standard practice for inducing lucid dreaming in the class I took on it at Stanford.
- mtalantikite 2y agoYeah, I've done some dream yoga [1] practice and this is a common instruction in those texts for inducing lucid dreaming as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga
- sandoze 2y agoI experienced this chronically. It was so pervasive that I would convince myself the next day that I was exhausted with only six hours of sleep. I started tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch and soon realized that, I may wake up, it’s usually for minutes and not nearly as often as I thought!
- lxgr 2y agoI've experienced this a couple of times: Feeling like I've been lying awake for at least half of the night, twisting and turning, when my sleep tracker really only shows movement for maybe 2-3 stretches of 5 minutes each. That realization has helped me stress out a lot less about "not getting enough sleep" when there's an important even the next day (which makes it easier to find sleep in turn).
- josefresco 2y agoFWIW I had some insomnia a while back and thought "maybe if I just lay here long enough" and so I did that for hours and my smartwatch thought I was asleep. I'm 99% sure I was not sleeping. Maybe my smartwatch sucks, but I don't think most can handle "laying down and not moving but not sleeping".
- withinboredom 2y agoI'd recommend getting a super cheap camera that can record yourself sleeping. You might have actually been asleep (according to this article).
- drdeca 2y agoNot all that infrequently (though not in the last week iirc) I find myself in a state which I think of as being, “half asleep” (or (3/4) asleep, or whatever. Various degrees of “asleep”) and I’m still able to kind-of think about things, but such that it is easier to accidentally forget what I was thinking about, such that I’m not able to keep as much in working memory, more distract-able by random thoughts, etc. . (On rare occasion I find my breathing while in this state to be concerning to I get scared and wake myself up. I’m pretty sure it’s been over a year since that last happened. I think it was mostly when sleeping face down or something?) I suspect the type of state I just described (not the breathing part) is something most people sometimes experience. I don’t think it is unusual. Though I don’t think I’ve often heard people describe it in detail. Does it seem plausible to you that you were perhaps, “20% asleep, but 80% awake” during that time? Edit: also, my understanding is that lying still and resting can work as a partial imperfect substitute for some amount of sleep (though not like, in a way that can be sufficient long-term)
- INTPenis 2y agoI sleep pretty well in general, but when I do sleep poorly I also experience the same thing. I am so convinced that a dream is reality that I wake up confused and have to take a minute to orient myself mentally. But this rarely happens because sleep is very important to me and I worked hard on my habits to get good sleep. Good sleep for me equals no memory of dreams.
- boogieknite 2y agoI have the opposite where my entire life my parents or partners would say they came to wake me up, i sit up, looked at them and clearly say "ok im getting up" and then the return 10 minutes later and im still asleep. When i actually wake up i have no memory of anything. Used to be a big problem when my dad would wake me up at 4am to hunt as a kid. Sometimes people tell me we had conversations and i was making eye contact. I have no option but to believe it bc ive heard it so many times now
- jwalton 2y agoIn my late teens I would frequently be late for university because I’d turn off my alarm or my gf would come wake me up and I’d go straight back to sleep. One day I decided to move my alarm clock to the other side of the room so I’d have to physically get up to turn it off. The next morning I got up, walked over to the alarm clock and turned it off, then I was startled awake as I started to fall over standing in front of the alarm clock. I’d like to be able to blame this on some kind of medical problem, but I think mostly I just stayed up late playing Counterstrike too much. :P
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIn the apartment I live in, I don't have a distance large enough I could put my alarm clock that I wouldn't be able to cross to turn off the alarm, then cross it again to get back to bed, and not even remember it later. Adding a lock or some puzzles to solve only results in me either solving them and not remembering, or continuing to sleep while the alarm wakes up half the apartment building. Fun fact: turns out I'm really good at mentally adding and multiplying 2 and 3-digit numbers while unconscious.
- noman-land 2y agoHang the alarm clock from the ceiling :).
- brookst 2y ago
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240611151714/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-people-with-insomnia-think-theyre-awake-when-theyre-asleep/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240611151714/https://www.scien... https://archive.ph/9yqQY https://archive.ph/9yqQY
- drewcon 2y agoSample size of 1. A disc herniation caused me pain all night until it eventually destroyed my circadian rhythm. Even after it healed and the pain went away I had terrible sleep disruption. Up every 90 minutes, couldn't fall asleep until 4 am, waking up at 4 am. The works. Going on a few months. Then I found sleep restriction. First two weeks were brutal, but then biology takes over. And just like that, in a couple weeks, you rebuild you ability to fall asleep naturally and you're back to normal. And in retrospect, this is exactly the approach we took to sleep training our young children. I swear by it.
- e12e 2y ago> Then I found sleep restriction. Get up when the alarm rings, no naps? Ed: Ah, I see - mechanism is basically that - but the addition of not going to bed "too early" (compared to when you plan to get up): > Some sleep-restriction methods involve shortening a person’s time in bed to the average amount that they actually sleep per night. Other methods delay a person’s bedtime.” For example, If a person objectively sleeps for 5.5 hours, the experts allow the person to be in bed only for six hours. A preliminary lab study in which participants delayed their regular bedtime by two hours showed that such sleep restriction can reduce the number of arousals during REM.
- darajava 2y agoWhat’s sleep restriction?
- lazyeye 2y agoIts basically forcing you to stay awake on a very specific schedule in order to reset your circadian clock. If you can find a way to watch this doco it goes into the topic in detail. (RIP Michael Mosley) https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/australias-sleep-revolution-with-dr-michael-mosley https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/australias-sleep-r...
- darajava 2y agoI can’t access that in my country but thanks anyway. I’ll look it up on Youtube.
- sqeaky 2y agoFrom the end of the article: > For example, If a person objectively sleeps for 5.5 hours, the experts allow the person to be in bed only for six hours. A preliminary lab study in which participants delayed their regular bedtime by two hours showed that such sleep restriction can reduce the number of arousals during REM. I Like how science and medicine are more frequently taking account individual differences into account in a measured and sensible way. That is as opposed to ignoring it or making everything statistics.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoI know for a fact that during some of my insomnia episodes, I would fall asleep and dream of struggling to fall asleep. I would know it because of false awakenings and sometimes getting the dream to be lucid and noticing something wrong with the environment. This kind of sleep never felt restful by any means, though.
- jerf 2y agoMy favorite is when I roll out of bed in the morning absolutely convinced I got no sleep. But then I review my night, yup, tossed, turned, used the bathroom, tossed, turned, opened the window, tossed, turned, rode a unicorn to work in the Thousandth Broken Dimension, tossed, turned, fluffed my pillow... record scratching noise wait, what was that about the unicorn? Guess I got some sleep after all.
- vrc 2y agoI was in the ICU for an extended period of time, and as you can imagine, with the pain, discomfort, noise, and constant monitoring, I really "wasn't sleeping at all". I remember getting frantic and trying to discharge AMA, and the attending came to talk to me and listened to my principal complaint of not sleeping. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, "I'm a sleep doctor who's been watching sleep studies for 30+ years now, and I can assure you, outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues, everyone sleeps. You may not feel like you slept, and can be convinced you were awake, but the body forces you to sleep throughout. And sometimes, when you think you fell asleep immediately, you actually didn't sleep for a while but you stopped forming memories as you were drifting off to sleep". It absolutely did nothing for me in that moment, but it's given me a lot of peace of mind since around sleep. You might still feel like crap, but you won't have anxiety on top of it!
- tomcam 2y agoI am coming around to that idea myself, and I too was given a similar come-to-Jesus lecture by a sleep specialist. This is separate from the fact that ICUs are unforgivably noisy and chaotic. We will look at this part of medical history with horror. Yes, I do understand that making things appreciably better for patients in ICU is a massive and complex undertaking. I am not at all blaming the staff and docs.
- groestl 2y agoI did a 24 hours blood pressure monitoring once. Every 30min it would go off. I was worried I'd never fall asleep and blood pressure would not show the normal rhythm, and it absolutely felt that way, but the reading definitely showed I was asleep at night.
- konschubert 2y ago> outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues He is likely referring to FFI. This is a genetic disorder. You cannot "catch" it. Your anxiety won't cause this. If you are the kind of person who "can't sleep because you stress about not sleeping", then you can ignore this, your sleep issues are due to anxiety. And the good news for people who have sleep issues due to anxiety: At some point, your body will win and force you to sleep.
- tootie 2y agoIf you read tales of the taking MSLT on /r/narcolepsy, you'll see it's a very common phenomenon. Obviously, a sample bias of people with heavily disordered sleep, but man it was so confusing. They turn off the lights, then turn them on and ask if you think you slept and I just had no idea. I took 5 naps in 5 tries but didn't know until I saw the results.
- swayvil 2y agoHave you ever entered a room and forgot why you entered the room? I think a similar thing happens in sleep. What happened in dream doesn't carry over into waking memory. And maybe vice-versa. It seems that memory splits when environment splits.
- immibis 2y agoSleep has something to do with batch-processing long-term memories. We don't know exactly what. But that means (speculation warning) long-term memory circuits are switched into a different mode than during the day, and from an outside perspective they recall all sorts of random nonsense. That's probably what causes dreams. If the short term memory is unaffected and works normally, this explains why you can sometimes remember the nonsense when you wake up. Sleep has been used as a form of regularization in neural networks before, although it's not in the transformer LLMs we're all using this year. This form of regularization makes the network generate outputs from no inputs, and then gradient-ascends (opposite direction from normal) away from those samples. Hey, that sounds a bit like human sleep, doesn't it?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 2y agoIn sleep my fundamental thingy, "that which observes", is catapulted out of the matrix. To the shores of the outer world probably, further maybe. The stuff is real but hallucinating happens too. And I carry my universal translator with me too. Converting the strange experiencestuff into common time-space-meat format. But yes, it is deeply strange. A profound loss of familiar context. And with it the associated anchors of memory. So yeah
- taeric 2y agoI actually thought this was well established? Largely, it isn't just a complete lack of sleep that is the problem, it is lack of functional rest. Usually leading to lack of functional waking time, as well? Specifically, my understanding was that a complete lack of sleeping is rather fatal.
- pedalpete 2y agoThis is quite common for me. I am a chronic insomniac, but there are also nights when I "feel" I'm awake, but somewhat know that I'm not. It's not quite lucid dreaming, though I think it isn't completely different (I've experimented with that a bit, and I work in neurotech/sleeptech).
- shepardrtc 2y agoA few years ago I had severe sleep issues caused by anxiety disorder. Instead of getting proper medication, I used marijuana, phenibut, and eventually benzos (prescribed by a doctor) to sleep every night. I was only on the benzos for a couple weeks but that was enough. Combined with everything else, I was in a bad place. I stopped the marijuana immediately, and over the next 3 months I weaned myself off the phenibut. Phenibut, if you've never heard of it, is one of the most addictive drugs out there. During that time I would maybe sleep an hour at night, if that. Some nights I never went to sleep at all. And occasionally I would dream while I was half-awake. It was such an odd experience - one that is very hard to describe. I was aware that I was still somewhat awake, but my mind would start to dream. Maybe it was just hallucination. Or maybe I really was sleeping, but I just thought I was still awake. Overall it was a terrible experience that felt very much like torture. In the end I get on the proper meds and I sleep fine now with no more issues. PSA: Remember kids, just say no to drugs.
- rbongers 2y agoWhen I went for a sleep study, I was wired awake for half the night, up in bed reading waiting for the study to be over. According to the study though, I was in sleep stage 2 the entire time I was sat up in bed reading.
- HocusLocus 2y agoUntil age ~40 my sleep cycles were chaotic and stressful around the clock, and the morning was very stressful and sometimes (racing to work in morning traffic barely 30 minutes awake) probably dangerous. I would abuse snooze alarms. I would misplace things (keys, etc) by putting them down at night and confidently making a mental note to remember. Then on the other side after sleep a complete blank and a bomb-level search under stress to find them. It didn't change until I developed a serious yearning for quality time in the morning. 'Quality' is any span where you do not have to be conscious of the passage of time (yet). First 5am and now 4:30am, the span from awakening 4:30 until 7:00 when work begins for example, was enough to impose a clean 24 hour cycle of habit. The next hurdle was that I sleep with a loud fan which helps mask environmental noise and helps me to sleep. But at 4:30am it means that the cell phone alarm would have to be very loud and I'd typically awaken apartment neighbors through thin walls who sleep in silence. I'd hear them moving around and know that I had probably awakened them. My solution was a programmable digital clock relay. At 4:30am it turns off the fan, and my mind is conditioned to awaken instantly while the fan is spinning down. Sometimes I even hear the 'click' of the relay. Then I get up quickly, because the cell phone is just out of reach and set 4:32am and I know it will be penetrating and shrill in the silence. Getting up to turn it off breaks my first level of snooze-abuse syndrome. I now (correctly) associate snooze abuse with stress and unpleasant outcomes, call it 'maturity' if you like. So now I can awaken with time to spare in 'silence' and my neighbors can stay asleep.