The link is alarming enough you should think seriously before taking things like Zzzquil, Benadryl, Tylenol PM, etc. if you value your mental faculties.. But maybe the correlation in this article is at least partially explained by this other link. Personally the other theories (brain garbage collection during sleep, etc.) also make a lot of sense. And don't forget about the fungal theory: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24614898
I don't have much to add, but I know some of these drugs (ie DPH) are serious deliriants at high doses. It causing a loss of mental faculties with long term use would not surprise me.
True. But it's also well known that Alzheimer's increases the buildup of amyloid-beta, which latches into hippocampus (memory) and thalamus (which controls sleep). With lack of sleep, your brain is unable to get rid of the excess of amyloid-beta.
It's unknown if lack of sleep causes the onset of Alzheimer's, but the opposite is likely true: Alzheimer's patients don't sleep well. So once it starts to develop, it spirals down likely because of sleep deficiency, thus accelerating memory loss.
Source: "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker. We had a few threads recently about the book here [1], [2].
Before downvoting me, please google your shit. Ok, I used the wrong term here, I meant synapses. If you engage regularly in mental stimulating activities, you increase the number of synapses and thus halting or postponing the development of Alzheimer disease. Google for Nun study.
"According to the new book Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the sleep people get on sleeping pills like Ambien is not true sleep. Drugs like these simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain,” he explained to New York Magazine, “and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” That’s not sleep; that’s cryogenics. According to Walker, sleeping-pill sleep doesn’t have the same restorative powers—and there are lots, from an immune boost to emotional resilience—as good, old-fashioned zzzzs."
No, melatonin is the actual thing your body produces to go to sleep.
However, having used it, if your brain chemistry is sufficiently screwed up, you may find it hard to wake up fully if you don't also take Co q 10 in the morning. That's the coenzyme for melatonin. It wakes you up.
A. I took enough (prescription) drugs for enough years that it isn't possible I got through that without deranging my brain in some manner. In fact, I think different, I dream different etc. I'm absolutely positive my brain was permanently altered by the experience.
B. After all those drugs, I was incapable of sleeping well. In a nutshell, I fixed this with several years of Co q 10 in the morning, melatonin at night. I sleep pretty well most nights these days.
C. Every time someone tells me I imagined the whole thing and it is placebo effect, my sons have a good chuckle about how that must make me the most powerful psychic on the planet that I apparently cured myself solely with the power of some idiotic, unscientific belief. (Darth Vader, fear me!)
I don't see why anyone should doubt your observations about the quality of your sleep over time. You've surely paid closer attention than they have, what with it being your sleep. Causality is harder to prove though. Was it really long-term conditioning through melatonin and Coq10? I moved to a new apartment recently and my sleep improved. I thought it might be because of a brand new, very clean aircon. Then my sleep got worse again with nothing else obvious changing. Who knows what confounding variables may exist. Stress, diet, season, etc.
As for the theory of placebo effect (where a placebo actually has some type of therapeutic impact), I don't think we've really concluded whether it exists or not -- I'm not a doctor but my understanding is that there is evidence in both directions and the debate is ongoing.
I did a lot of other things too. That wasn't all I did.
But I was able to successfully alter my circadian rhythm on short notice when I worked the night shift and had to occasionally show up for the day shift by using Co q 10 in the morning and melatonin at night and making no other changes. So I'm absolutely certain this combo can move the needle on the circadian rhythm in specific.
Are you saying that there are no hormones that affect brain function? Or that all people's bodies are always perfect at regulating those hormones? Either way, that is a completely crazy thing to suggest.
Disproven is a strong word, trying to type on a cellphone with your elbow is a more apt description, not to mention blaming everything on "chemistry imbalance"
But yeah, Melatonin do induce sleep (if it's a good sleep is probably debatable, and it's definitely not my first choice)
You weren't there. I was. I later bought microdoses, basically, in order to be able to keep using it without feeling like I was half asleep for days at a time.
People have known this since the 90s. Here's an article from November 3, 1999 [0]. I'm not the parent commenter but I'm not sure why you feel like you were the only one who knew about this.
Many people have scales that can detect small doses of supplement and medicine for a variety of reasons. I personally use a cheap jewelry scale that can do the trick to take wait for it a microdose of melatonin once in a while.
I personally take less than .01 gram and it does the trick as long as I get ~9 hours of sleep. I try to not take it more than once every other week.
Is that a reality-based statement, based on some sort of data? If so, please share.
Since I can remember, I've had episodes of pretty gnarly insomnia, and have sought all manner of medical and other help, from mainstream to fairly ridiculous ones done out of desperation. I tried cardio, weight-lifting, slow-walking 5 miles a day; I quit drinking, quit smoking, tried drinking more, stopped caffeine, tried meditating, sex every day, minimal sex, vegan diet, paleo meat diet, calorie-restricted diet, melatonin in various dosages, all-lights-off-at-dusk, blue/fullspectrum light therapy, read only books for entertainment, play 4 hours of video games every day, ice baths in the morning, and lots of other last-ditch n-1 experiments.
Ambien is the only thing that helped. I'm pretty leery of it, what with all the stories about people having sex with strangers in the park and not remembering. Also, I really really don't want to develop any new dependencies that make it even harder to sleep naturally.
However, if I have 2-3 consecutive nights where I can't sleep more than 2-3 hours, I take an Ambien and then I sleep through the night. And the next day I feel like I slept through the night. That happens maybe on average once a month (but the cadence is more like 2-3 months no problem, then several bouts of insomnia in a month).
So while I still have the insomnia problem like I always have (43% through my projected 100-year life span), the Ambien makes it manageable.
The scientist that developed treatment for narcolepsy (GHB supposedly normalizes sleep), he is currently investigating GHB in dementia patients: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16837107
This isn't actually a particularly new idea- Barbara Oakley's Coursera course ("Learning How to Learn") actually cites another researcher (name forgotten) in the same field working with similar sets of theoretical assumptions.
Something else to consider - what if the reason these plaques are unable to be cleaned out in some is the result of a life (decades)-long “deep” sleep deprivation (i.e, still getting sleep but not a good amount of regular, deep sleep where this cleaning process would normally occur), and the reason for this chronic sleep deprivation was some genetic pre-disposition, such as bruxism, which would cause little to no “deep sleep,” or perhaps brought on form of chronic dehydration due to a genetic predisposition for diabetes / sugary drinks / blood sugar imbalance, causing brain fogginess rather than deep sleep during a period of involuntary fasting, or a myriad of other unnoticeable deep- sleep-depriving illnesses?
I am not suggesting I have any answers; only questions and curiosities for the puzzling subject.
You're just considering "involuntary" lack of sleep, when there seems to be a serious epidemic of voluntary sleeplessness as indicated by frequent boasting about how little sleep one can get by on.
Chronic insomnia is still extremely poorly understood, unfortunately, and as other commentators have mentioned in this thread sleep medications are a short term bandage that come with their own harmful side-effects.
As someone who's a chronic insomniac and has been my entire life since I was a baby, I've tried almost everything to sleep with no success. At this point I'm still in my 20s and young, but I worry about having memory and health issues as I age. For now I'm just trying to stay healthy despite it and make a habit of documentation in case my memory does become compromised.
I've almost completely switched to decaf coffee (which still has 15-30% the amount of caffeine normally found in regular coffee) after reading "Why Do We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.
And half of the office here is either reading it now or wants to start reading it
The American standard for decaf coffee is to remove 97% of caffeine content[0]. (Note - I couldn't find specific CFRs on an official government site, so it's possible this is just a recommendation and not actually enforced. However, a quick google will confirm that this is the consensus on how things are supposed to operate - I make no comment on how they actually operate.)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadThe link is alarming enough you should think seriously before taking things like Zzzquil, Benadryl, Tylenol PM, etc. if you value your mental faculties.. But maybe the correlation in this article is at least partially explained by this other link. Personally the other theories (brain garbage collection during sleep, etc.) also make a lot of sense. And don't forget about the fungal theory: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24614898
It's unknown if lack of sleep causes the onset of Alzheimer's, but the opposite is likely true: Alzheimer's patients don't sleep well. So once it starts to develop, it spirals down likely because of sleep deficiency, thus accelerating memory loss.
Source: "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker. We had a few threads recently about the book here [1], [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17381235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446932
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/A-better-way-of-diagnosing...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/better-th...
However, having used it, if your brain chemistry is sufficiently screwed up, you may find it hard to wake up fully if you don't also take Co q 10 in the morning. That's the coenzyme for melatonin. It wakes you up.
B. After all those drugs, I was incapable of sleeping well. In a nutshell, I fixed this with several years of Co q 10 in the morning, melatonin at night. I sleep pretty well most nights these days.
C. Every time someone tells me I imagined the whole thing and it is placebo effect, my sons have a good chuckle about how that must make me the most powerful psychic on the planet that I apparently cured myself solely with the power of some idiotic, unscientific belief. (Darth Vader, fear me!)
As for the theory of placebo effect (where a placebo actually has some type of therapeutic impact), I don't think we've really concluded whether it exists or not -- I'm not a doctor but my understanding is that there is evidence in both directions and the debate is ongoing.
But I was able to successfully alter my circadian rhythm on short notice when I worked the night shift and had to occasionally show up for the day shift by using Co q 10 in the morning and melatonin at night and making no other changes. So I'm absolutely certain this combo can move the needle on the circadian rhythm in specific.
But yeah, Melatonin do induce sleep (if it's a good sleep is probably debatable, and it's definitely not my first choice)
There are very specific reasons it's not sold in 'microdoses'.
Many people have scales that can detect small doses of supplement and medicine for a variety of reasons. I personally use a cheap jewelry scale that can do the trick to take wait for it a microdose of melatonin once in a while.
I personally take less than .01 gram and it does the trick as long as I get ~9 hours of sleep. I try to not take it more than once every other week.
[0] http://news.mit.edu/1999/melatonin-1103
Since I can remember, I've had episodes of pretty gnarly insomnia, and have sought all manner of medical and other help, from mainstream to fairly ridiculous ones done out of desperation. I tried cardio, weight-lifting, slow-walking 5 miles a day; I quit drinking, quit smoking, tried drinking more, stopped caffeine, tried meditating, sex every day, minimal sex, vegan diet, paleo meat diet, calorie-restricted diet, melatonin in various dosages, all-lights-off-at-dusk, blue/fullspectrum light therapy, read only books for entertainment, play 4 hours of video games every day, ice baths in the morning, and lots of other last-ditch n-1 experiments.
Ambien is the only thing that helped. I'm pretty leery of it, what with all the stories about people having sex with strangers in the park and not remembering. Also, I really really don't want to develop any new dependencies that make it even harder to sleep naturally.
However, if I have 2-3 consecutive nights where I can't sleep more than 2-3 hours, I take an Ambien and then I sleep through the night. And the next day I feel like I slept through the night. That happens maybe on average once a month (but the cadence is more like 2-3 months no problem, then several bouts of insomnia in a month).
So while I still have the insomnia problem like I always have (43% through my projected 100-year life span), the Ambien makes it manageable.
"... causes poor sleep" or does it?
Which one is it? Neither yet both?
Come on folks, we learned this in 3rd grade. The real answer is "it's complicated".
Causality? No, just jumping to conclusions like this article.
I am not suggesting I have any answers; only questions and curiosities for the puzzling subject.
As someone who's a chronic insomniac and has been my entire life since I was a baby, I've tried almost everything to sleep with no success. At this point I'm still in my 20s and young, but I worry about having memory and health issues as I age. For now I'm just trying to stay healthy despite it and make a habit of documentation in case my memory does become compromised.
http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/matthew-walker
I learned a lot, and it changed my sleep behaviors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXflBZXAucQ
And half of the office here is either reading it now or wants to start reading it
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination#Caffeine_conten...