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Not to downplay the severity of people's health problems when it comes to certain sleep conditions, but I've observed a basic principle in life: When you try to

by TrevorJ 17y ago

Not to downplay the severity of people's health problems when it comes to certain sleep conditions, but I've observed a basic principle in life: When you try to work in ways that go against the basic design of your body you have to resort to a lot of complicated things to coddle and cajole your body into going along with it. 300 dollar sleep devices, mattresses, alarm clocks et al. At the end of the day, I wonder how many sleep issues would go away if we ate correctly, stayed active, turned the lights out at dusk and kept the blinds open for when dawn peeks through the curtains. When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors. Encumbered with our mass of tools, plans, pills and procedures designed to enable us to survive outside the envelope. Necessarily? Sometimes yes. Elegant? Almost never.

edw519 17y ago
"When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors." Agreed! I try to live this way, but I have one nagging problem... We weren't meant to sit for 8 to 12 hours per day staring at a little box. All my bad habits flow from this. I love what I do, but this one item makes me second guess my career choice all the time.
- TrevorJ 17y ago
  I am in the same boat. There are a few things I try to do to minimize this: -Walk to work, or if that's not possible drive only partway there then walk. -Use all of my break times to get up and be active in some capacity (Even if it is just walking to get some water) -Do my planning 'offline'. In the moments when I'm strategizing and thinking I try to walk around or use pen and paper. Execution has to be in the little box, but the thinking doesn't need to take place staring at the screen. -I moved my monitors onto a drafting table so I can sit or stand while working depending on what I feel like. Between walking partway to work, walking at lunch, breaks and walking home it feels a lot less as if I have a desk job, even though I do.
  - lliiffee 17y ago
    I would be interested to know how you secured your monitors to the drafting table. Do you adjust the tilt, or only move the table up/down?
ghshephard 17y ago
I couldn't agree with you more - but, the challenging part is, what does it mean to take on a healthy lifestyle for a particular individual, to maximize their sleep health? I've found not eating a snack at night means that the next morning I have a _very_ difficult time waking up. But, at the same time, eating the wrong type of food (heavy on carbs, too much liquid) means that my sleep health is reduced, though I am able to at least wake up quickly the next morning. A half-cup of caffeinated coffee around 6:00, counter-intuitively, seems to let me transition into a deep sleep a bit better (particularly with a walk at that time) six hours later. A walk around the neighborhood 3-4 hours before I go to sleep seems to be about perfect for increasing the value of my sleep, but has little value 6-8 hours, and, is counter productive 1-2 hours before. I think the goal of devices like the "MyZeo" isn't so much to improve the health of your sleep, but to let you know whether the tweaks you are making to your lifestyle, are actually having a positive or negative benefit. Does opening my blinds (and allowing night lights in) improve my wakeup with the morning light but reduce the quality of my sleep? What about adding one of those eye-shades? How about putting on headphones with some nice background noise? What I like about the MyZeo is I can get some quantitative data and "Hack" my sleep and see the results.
- TrevorJ 17y ago
  That is a good point. If a natural solution can't be arrived at through intuition then more data may help steer us to the solution. I think your point may be even more accurate today than it would have been years ago since the artificial stuff in our environment tend to mess up our intuition a lot so you can't really rely on just going with what 'feels' right until you retrain your body. For instance artificial sweeteners taste the same as sugar to us so when we want sugar we go for them, but it does little to solve the underlying reason why we craved the sweets in the first place. (Low bloodsugar)
deleted 17y ago
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by TrevorJ 17y ago

edw519 17y ago

"When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors." Agreed! I try to live this way, but I have one nagging problem... We weren't meant to sit for 8 to 12 hours per day staring at a little box. All my bad habits flow from this. I love what I do, but this one item makes me second guess my career choice all the time.

TrevorJ 17y ago
I am in the same boat. There are a few things I try to do to minimize this: -Walk to work, or if that's not possible drive only partway there then walk. -Use all of my break times to get up and be active in some capacity (Even if it is just walking to get some water) -Do my planning 'offline'. In the moments when I'm strategizing and thinking I try to walk around or use pen and paper. Execution has to be in the little box, but the thinking doesn't need to take place staring at the screen. -I moved my monitors onto a drafting table so I can sit or stand while working depending on what I feel like. Between walking partway to work, walking at lunch, breaks and walking home it feels a lot less as if I have a desk job, even though I do.
- lliiffee 17y ago
  I would be interested to know how you secured your monitors to the drafting table. Do you adjust the tilt, or only move the table up/down?

ghshephard 17y ago

I couldn't agree with you more - but, the challenging part is, what does it mean to take on a healthy lifestyle for a particular individual, to maximize their sleep health? I've found not eating a snack at night means that the next morning I have a _very_ difficult time waking up. But, at the same time, eating the wrong type of food (heavy on carbs, too much liquid) means that my sleep health is reduced, though I am able to at least wake up quickly the next morning. A half-cup of caffeinated coffee around 6:00, counter-intuitively, seems to let me transition into a deep sleep a bit better (particularly with a walk at that time) six hours later. A walk around the neighborhood 3-4 hours before I go to sleep seems to be about perfect for increasing the value of my sleep, but has little value 6-8 hours, and, is counter productive 1-2 hours before. I think the goal of devices like the "MyZeo" isn't so much to improve the health of your sleep, but to let you know whether the tweaks you are making to your lifestyle, are actually having a positive or negative benefit. Does opening my blinds (and allowing night lights in) improve my wakeup with the morning light but reduce the quality of my sleep? What about adding one of those eye-shades? How about putting on headphones with some nice background noise? What I like about the MyZeo is I can get some quantitative data and "Hack" my sleep and see the results.

TrevorJ 17y ago
That is a good point. If a natural solution can't be arrived at through intuition then more data may help steer us to the solution. I think your point may be even more accurate today than it would have been years ago since the artificial stuff in our environment tend to mess up our intuition a lot so you can't really rely on just going with what 'feels' right until you retrain your body. For instance artificial sweeteners taste the same as sugar to us so when we want sugar we go for them, but it does little to solve the underlying reason why we craved the sweets in the first place. (Low bloodsugar)

deleted 17y ago

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