I'm on the same schedule you were (working till sunrize), but I dont have a family or other obligations yet. If you were in my position do you still think its worth it to try and change to a more regular cycle? I really enjoy my nights.
On the topic of noise, there is one thing I wish could be more recognized as a nuisance, and that is the damn leaf blowers. Especially now that everyone is forced to work from home, every day around here for a couple of hours you are subjected to that.
Not a sleep expert by any means. I think it all depends on the quality of sleep you get. I don't see a problem with that as long as you get the sleep you need and feel rested during your day.
I used to be a night owl too. But with kids and everything things changed over the years. These days it's hard for me to stay awake past 11pm. I also wake up early around 6am, which in the past was unheard-of for me. I actually enjoy my early mornings alone for the same reasons mentioned in the post about the quiet at night.
One thing I find important is not falling asleep before my usual bed time. It usually happens when I watch a movie or something. After I wake up, unless I'm dead tired, it can take me much longer to fall asleep when I actually go to bed.
Yes, it's very seductive. Until I had a family I didn't see anything wrong with it, that was just an out-of-phase life but it worked well enough for me. Having kids and a business makes it a lot harder to live like that, and working until you drop is an easy way to mask the fact that I had serious problems falling asleep, either at a normal time or even at all. Working until exhaustion seemed like a pretty efficient fix, I'd get a lot done and eventually did get my sleep though not nearly enough of it.
The damage is cumulative as far as I understand it now and even though it gave me an edge for a while I wonder if the price was worth it. Maybe get that book from the library and read up on it (and some critiques of the book as well, it's not all equally solid), then make up your mind as to what is the best approach for your?
> the damn leaf blowers
They're a complete nuisance and utterly ineffective as well. Also, everybody has their own schedule for running them. Fortunately here they are not too popular but the few that are there really get me worked up.
Having trouble to fall asleep and sleeplessness is typically called insomnia, that it is paired with delayed sleep phase is an unfortunate side-effect for those days that I did get (some) sleep, and from my preference for working when it is quiet (ie: nights).
The one feeds into the other which eventually results in missing lots and lots of sleep. I was under the - mistaken - impression that you can get by on 4 hours of sleep or less but this is really not the case so if you suffer from this in some for or other then better take it serious.
Sticking to a routine, avoiding stressful subjects just before sleep, relaxing activities (music, reading) before trying to fall asleep all helped in making it easier to fall asleep. Staying asleep is another matter, and addressing the noise that reaches my bedroom is one more thing I plan on tackling to avoid frequently waking up during the night.
Ironically I'm reading this as the clock reads 5:23am and I'm just winding down for the night. Out my office window I can see the sun rising.
I've broken this habit in the past. When my wife was working as a teacher and I dropped her off at work every morning, I was up and out every weekday at 7:30am, and at work by 7:50. I got a ton of stuff done in the morning because no one else started showing up until 9am at least.
But now, during quarantine, we set no alarms. No one in the family has to be anywhere at any particular time. And so we've all shifted, even the kids. All of wake around noon, and the kids go down around 2am (and the adults between 4am and 6am).
Late nights just seem to be our natural schedule, but all it takes is an alarm and an early morning responsibility to shift the family schedule.
> Late nights just seem to be our natural schedule, but all it takes is an alarm and an early morning responsibility to shift the family schedule.
That's an interesting take. My dogs are hyper-active at night and sleepy in the day. Dogs have been with human for a longtime, so either they have the same sleep schedule or the reverse (as they should guard when the human is asleep?).
But if humans are hunters, then it might make sense that they are more active at night.
When I was a teenager, during the summers (no school) I would generally go to sleep at 4am or 5am and wake up around 1-2pm.
I found that time of night (12am - 4am) really conducive to creativity. If I could go back to that schedule, I would. I don't like waking up any time before 9, and neither does my body.
> After reading many reviews I kept on coming back to the same brand which I had sworn to never buy another item of due to their disrespect of users’ systems integrity, aka the ‘rootkit debacle’
Does Sony really have the best noise cancelling headphones? What brands/models have worked for people here? I've continuously struggled with distracting noises through my education.
Bose are very good. I've a pair of wireless over ear headphones and my girlfriend has the wireless in-ear ones. Noise cancellation is very good with both, especially for constant background noise.
All over ear headphones will tend to cause your ears to warm up, so the in ear ones are more comfortable. But the integrated microphone with the in-ear headphones is surprisingly poor for phone calls.
How large are their OTA headphones? I've been wondering about OTA noise-cancelling headphones for a while for both music and cycling as I've bad ears and excess wind leads to repeated otitis on short order (making actual non-stationary cycling problematic). But I also have large ears, so most OTA would literally sit on the ear cartilage and pressing it against the ear, making wearing them for extended periods very uncomfortable. I remember AKG cans having large-enough pads that they'd fit properly.
I use Sennheiser's PXC 550s and have recommended them before. The cost is reasonable compared to Bose/Sony, and the quality of the product is excellent.
I am dealing with sleep issues right now. My 2 game changing habits are:
- melatonin
- doing my best to wake up at 06:00.
In reality, I wake up at 07:00 or even 09:00 but it is guaranteed to save me a few hours of sleep deprivation. In general with these 2 “tricks” I have 2 hours less sleep deprivation than normal. They also have a lot of synergies.
One other thing I am now thinking about is to have a color coded night light with red (you have to sleep), orange (you can wake up if you’re wide awake and truly can’t sleep) and green (you’re in the wake up zone) as color codes. By doing this, I wouldn’t feel the need to check my time at night. Or maybe I should program an app that has some Siri integration (if that’s possible, probably isn’t). By having this, I wouldn’t feel inclined to check the time.
> Finally, the world is asleep and even a person who has trouble focusing in the face of distraction has a chance of getting something done.
"The world is asleep" is basically my definition of serene and peaceful.
---
A while back, there was a national holiday, so I had the day off. I didn't actually have anything I wanted to do with that day, so I used it to plan out my next work project. It was a very productive day where I went from being very unsure of how to do the project to having a blueprint that directed what I did for months to come. The project would be in a much worse place if it weren't for the thinking I was able to do on that one day.
It wasn't a productive day in the sense that I got a lot of things done (my usual definition of productivity), but it was productive in the sense that I got some important, deep thinking done. It's rare to get a chance to do such deep thinking.
This kind of productivity is hard to achieve in the face of distractions. But I think it is actually worse than that: It is hard to achieve when there is even a _risk_ of distractions. When my brain knows that someone could demand my attention at any time, it seems to limit the amount of working memory, focus, and time I can spent thinking about something.
But if I know that I don't have to pay attention to interruptions, the problem I'm thinking about can take over and I can spend time swimming in the problem instead of just splashing my toes in.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that knowing you _might_ be interrupted can be almost as bad as actually being interrupted.
To me, it's a matter of degree. Reading slack, reading emails, 1:1s, project sync meetings, merging PRs, etc all require nearly no depth of thinking. Creating a design for a small problem or understanding unfamiliar code requires a bit more, debugging more still.
The possibility (and actuality) of interruptions is also a matter of degree. A day with one meeting after lunch and nothing on fire allows for deeper focus than a day with nothing but 30 minute gaps between meetings and 15 people on Slack all wanting something.
The deepest thinking - the kind that is best suited to having an entire day of space - helps the most with the hardest problems: planning a complex project, understanding a new bit of type theory, etc.
(And it is not necessarily true that these problems are impossible to solve in the face of distractions, but a day of focus might match the output of a distracted week - and sometimes it's hard to budget a whole week just to think about something!)
edit: s/is only strictly necessary for the hardest problems/helps the most with the hardest problems/
I've had horrible sleeplessness all my adult life.
I have a 10 month old baby now and with the pandemic, it's been hard to get things done since both my wife and I work full time.
A few things that have helped:
- going to sleep when the baby sleeps ~8:30p-10p.
- getting up super early ~3:30a-4:30a
- cutting out coffee and replacing with a mixture of black/green tea.
- not having caffeine after 8a.
- following this routine even on weekends.
My sleep quality is WAY better and I don't feel so tired during the day. Also I get a lot done in the morning and spend the afternoon with my daughter.
Your list is a perfect subset of mine. Transitioning into no caffeine has revolutionized my sleep and productivity. One additional point that has really helped me a lot is realizing that I should never eat anything within 2 hours of bed time. It took me a while to connect the dots on my waking up at 12-1am back to having had eaten half a pizza at 9pm. Anything with a delayed action like that is very tricky to keep an eye on. This is the principal reason I dropped the caffeine. The effects/side-effects just became too unpredictable.
Caffeine is too useful for me to give up entirely. I had similar success with a rule: no caffeine after 12 PM (not even caffeinated soft drinks). Caffeine has a long half-life, which is especially problematic for people who, for genetic reasons, respond more to a given amount of caffeine. What I usually do is I have 2 cups of coffee back to back before 11 A.M. I feel the benefits for most of the day. It may be tempting to violate the rule and have an afternoon coffee “just this once” at the beginning but you get used to it. Furthermore, if you feel the need for more coffee in the afternoon, that’s a sign that your work habits and distractions need to change, not your physical energy level.
> if you feel the need for more coffee in the afternoon, that’s a sign that your work habits and distractions need to change, not your physical energy level.
Out of curiosity, why does this apply to the afternoon coffee and not the morning coffee? Maybe finding coffee useful at all is a sign?
Because cafeine breaks down over time so your evening/afternoon coffee has a much bigger effect on your later sleeping attempts than morning coffee. I don't drink coffee at all so that does not apply to me but I can see the confusion in the GP and your response to it.
Correct, that's what I was referring to with the long half-life. The later you consume caffeine, the more likely it is to disrupt your sleep. A logical extension of that is the following: if you know that caffeine has a worse reward-to-harm ratio in the afternoon, and you consume it even though it might disrupt your sleep (assuming it does), you might be grasping for productivity straws. Alternatively, caffeine pretty much only has upside when it is consumed in the morning. It increases wakefulness and several academic studies found that coffee specifically improves your health (not sure how much of that is due to the plant material vs. the caffeine).
For those who cannot or would not give up caffeine, consider that the reason you wake up prematurely is because you're going through withdrawals. When I started having my last cup in the late afternoon I started waking up too early less often.
I had bad insomnia during graduate school, tried just about everything under the sun (medication, sleep studies, lifestyle changes, herbs) and eventually did CBT-I with a therapist, and that was my ultimate solution. She had me start with going to bed at 3am and waking up at 7am for a week. I was absolutely exhausted, felt like my days were dreams. Then, we pulled forward he’s time to 2am. Checked how long it took me to fall asleep, and if I reported it was quick, then pull it to 1am, etc. until I was falling asleep quickly but also felt refreshed. I kept this all down on some worksheets provided.
The key was absolutely no matter what, no matter how tired I felt, I had to wake up at 7am and get out of bed. No naps.
We found the optimal spot to be 11pm lay in bed, and wake up at 7am. I always keep that schedule, deviating only by 30min or so even on weekends. Haven’t had trouble sleeping since!
I also think going from graduate school (little solid schedule) to a corporate 9-5 job helped. Covid has mangled that a bit, but I still keep the same sleep schedule.
CBT-i more or less fixed me too. It should be noted that sleep restriction (the practice you're describing here) is only part of CBT-i but it seems to be the most important.
I also gave up coffee and I stop looking at screens 30-60 mins before my bed time. Before the therapy ~30% of my nights were sleepless.
Really good point - there was a bunch of other restrictions/lifestyle changes that probably helped contribute. I think the main one was going from two cups of coffee (morning, and then afternoon) to one cup (morning) really helped me.
Also the recommendation that if I couldn’t fall asleep within 15-ish minutes, to get out of bed and do something until I’m tired again instead of lay there and “try” to sleep.
Yes the 15-20 min rule helps a lot! I tried a morning coffee again recently (I miss it) but it messed up my sleep that night. But that could be due to my mind playing its tricks on me rather than the caffeine remaining in my system.
If you suffer particularly bad insomnia, I encourage you to do a sleep study. It was life-changing for me.
I was able to discover that I suffer from narcolepsy, a rare but nonetheless real condition. It's not at all like most people think: you don't randomly fall asleep during the day. But your sleep schedule isn't really a schedule so much as a stochastic random walk.
Even if you don't have a rare disorder, there's a good chance a sleep study will benefit you. For example, a coworker said that a CPAP machine was similarly lifechanging.
I just had a sleep study, but because of snorting, not insomnia. I was playing around with one of the many snoring apps available now and was mortified at how I sound all night! They gave me a take-home apparatus to wear one night an then I had a call with a doctor who interpreted the results to me. He said I wasn't a horrible case but recommended I try a CPAP for a few months, which I'm now in the process of getting.
After decades of trouble falling asleep, I've found a simple technique that works for me. The goal of this technique is to replace words/monologue with images in your stream of consciousness. I do this by picturing three shapes, each engulfing the previous one. Start with a sphere. Just imagine a sphere and nothing else. Then picture a 5 sided pyramid that perfectly engulfs the sphere so that the sides are tangential. As this happens the sphere shrinks so the pyramid takes up the space of the sphere. Then repeat, but with a cube. So the cube encompasses the pyramid, with the bottom planes the same and the 4 upper edges intersecting with the 4 upper corners of the cube. Then shrink that and put it in a sphere, starting the process over.
I've found that when I'm really tired I have no trouble conjuring this imagery and sometimes within just a few cycles, vivid explosions of color will flood in and I go to sleep. Other times, I struggle to picture a sphere and start off with the 2d equivalents - circle, square, triangle. The whole thing is a bit like counting sheep, but that never worked for me.
I haven't tried this, but I could absolutely see this working for me as well. I've noticed that my visual imagination gets much more vivid just as I'm drifting off to sleep, so I have in the past tried to gently nudge that along by jumping between visual thoughts. It did work fairly well, but I also never had enough trouble sleeping to hone the technique or quantify its effectiveness.
Sometimes I have hypnagogic hallucinations of people talking, sometimes I can't understand the words, but it's nice because then I know that I'm falling asleep.
I get the same thing, but I've found that I can understand the words if I focus on them and try to understand them, though the problem is that as soon as I do I become more awake and it takes time to get back in to the hypnagogic state again after that, so I usually don't bother.
I have a similar technique that I really need to document I think about random ideas in succession very quickly. For example:
if I hammer an icecube I’ll get to the meeting on monday. But then that’s apple day. Better running away. There are dogs falling from the sky so I’ll take my fork. Etc.
It works every single time. Takes around 10-15min of doing this
I've noticed words are the problem too. Thinking in words seems to engage something in my brain that just won't let me rest. Images are better. I'll have to try this trick.
For whatever reason though, I sometimes notice myself falling asleep which jerks me wide awake (different to restless legs which I sometimes also get). I would love to drop that habit.
I have a similar approach too. Not shapes or colors, simply I imagine a cat that is sleeping and try to see things from a cats perspective. It's weird but gets me to sleep almost instantly. Obviously it can be anything but I picked cats because they are the best sleepers I know of :P
Years ago, I started sleeping with earplugs. I can't sleep without them now. I get the best and deepest sleep this way. I feel like it turns off my subconscious, because my brain is no longer processing external input.
Could you share some information about the earplug type/brand that works for you?
I am looking for a decent sleeping earplug or earbud as I have recently moved to a noisier place. I’ve tried sleeping in noise-cancelling over ears and AirPods with white noise but neither worked for me, they were far too uncomfortable. I am also concerned that an industrial ear protector would prevent me from hearing alarms or emergency situations.
Not parent, but I've tried a few different earplugs for sleeping, and settled on Hearos Ultimate Softness Series [1]. I buy them in a box of 100, which lasts for ages (I generally get 3 days out of a pair).
Other ones I tried tended to cause pain after a day or two. It did take a couple of days to get used to having them in, but now I really miss them if I don't have any with me.
Regarding alarms/emergencies, I always wake up to my phone alarm, and I find that I'm generally able to hear 'past' them for things I'd usually be on the alert for.
I personally like this model [1]. Cheap. Sometimes they can get uncomfortable or even fall out in the middle of the night, but usually if I reseat them, they are fine.
The trick to getting them in easily is to squish and lick them. Totally gross, but you get used to it and it really works well. I wash mine every morning with water and just keep reusing them for a while.
Agreed with the other, you rarely sleep through stuff you really need to wake up for like a phone alarm next to you.
You might be surprised how well the brain can filter things while asleep, at least for some people (and will change over time). I have a light alarm clock that also has bird sounds and one place I lived there were birds just outside my window with the same song as the alarm and they would start a bit earlier than I woke up (hopefully I wasn't disrupting them too much :/). I would sleep through the birds that were at least as loud as the alarm but still wake up to the alarm. I suspect the light part of the alarm helped in that case, but I've had other cases with just very quiet audio alarms that also woke me up, in some cases a radio set to an empty channel at a barely audible level. The light alone does not wake me up most of the time.
Relatedly, a friend once told me about a method of just telling yourself when you need to wake up right before you go to bed. I've tried that quite a few times and always wake up within about 15 minutes of the intended time.
For me, waking up is the easy part, but I really don't function well at all with little sleep and actually getting out of bed can be almost impossible if I've had little sleep. I can't relate to how anyone can work on very little sleep over a long period of time, although lately I have been doing a bit better on little sleep when not using alarms at all (and predictibly returning to an irregular Non-24 schedule).
In my imagination it works something like: If melatonin levels have to exceed cortisol not challenging yourself physically would never require a lot of melatonin? You might still sleep but barely?
I think my biggest problem is that I don't exhaust myself physically. Humans are built for constant labor. We're the endurance-running champions of the animal kingdom. As recently as last century, almost all jobs were physically exhausting.
Mind work is exhausting as well, but in a different way. At the end of a strenuous day of coding, and endless meetings, I'm drained. Completely wiped out. I feel physically exhausted, but I'm not, at all.
On the rare occasions that I physically exhaust myself, be it home remodeling, yard work, or canoeing, I sleep like the dead. No insomnia, solid rest. I still have all the same things going on in my life; the same job, same bills, all the anxieties large and small that "keep me awake" other nights. Which is why I don't think any of it is psychological. My body just isn't worn out enough.
I'm not looking for advice. "You should exercise more! Have you tried X?" This is my observation. We aren't constructed for office work.
Completely agree. Being mentally drained and physically drained are completely different things. I personally think we need a balance of physical and mental pursuits in our lives to be truly healthy. Anecdotally, my insomnia has improved massively since I started running for an hour every day after work a few years ago. Even so, I wish my job didn't require me to be so sedentary.
I was about to post that. It's definitely true in my experience. Only thing that's ever worked for when I get real bad insomnia is strenuous cardio/HIIT-type workouts.
But that's something people can't sell you so that's the last thing people try.
Even this advice that Jacques says about no napping during the day. IF I'm working out, I need that nap. I suggest he try cutting everything out except for the morning bike ride and see how far it takes you.
And yeah, people shit far too much on that book, "While We Sleep" maybe some of the findings need more data but they do ring true, especially the part about underestimating lack of sleep does to our mind and body.
Methinks our body just reacts very well to physical exhaustion, trigger molecule cascades that make us very content.
Physical exercise pushed too far is as nasty as mental efforts in a bad context (too difficult, too quick, etc).
That said I've been aiming for simple physical jobs as a free therapy kind of way.
Another point is that being physically fit has a very positive effect on your mind, it's like one big concern removed and you get more motivation for other ventures.
Lastly, who thinks having physical breaks during the day is good for pacing your mental flow ? even better with group sports ..
ps: many people feel like swimming is a particularly good form of exhaustion. I had a similar experience doing soft kungfu/taichi. But I wonder what else causes deep drain and fatigue that just resets all your system.
It doesn't take much time to exhaust yourself physically, at least to exhaust specific muscle groups. Systemic exhaustion (steady state exercise, like running) is another matter. It doesn't even cause sweating, as it is over too quickly. I have been experimenting lately with pushups to failure just before I turn out the lights and climb into bed. By failure, I mean MMF (momentary muscular failure), not being able to repeat the motion as hard as I try. An alternative is body weight squats by the bed, to failure. Pick the range of motion to be in the hard (low) part of the squat, move slowly (SuperSlow protocol is 10 seconds concentric, 10 seconds eccentric) to failure, and make it hard enough to fail in less than 90 seconds. Crawl into bed and fall asleep easily (after your heart stops pounding). Of course, you will also build muscle mass over time, which doesn't hurt.
> Humans are built for constant labor. We're the endurance-running champions of the animal kingdom.
I mean, sure, we can do that. But most of our ape relatives lay about all day socializing and taking advantage of their social cohesiveness to hunt-and-gather very quickly (and then get back to lazing around.) They have many capabilities, but rarely use them, because social organization is just so OP compared to the defenses of most of the animal kingdom.
The big strong apes (e.g. gorillas) don't use their strength for anything day-to-day; they just use it in occasional tribal territorial disputes and social-hierarchy disputes, which don't take up all that much of their time, all-said. Certainly not enough to wear them out by the end of the day, every day.
I don't see any reason that our sleeping habits would have gone through a big evolutionary shift relative to all the other apes; so if they can—and do—sleep just fine without exhausting themselves, we very likely can as well. If we can't, it's very likely not "lack of exhaustion" that's the cause.
IMHO, exhaustion seems to just be a hack, overriding the concerns of some other part of us that thinks it important for us to stay awake; rather than the proper resolution of that mechanism's concerns.
I wonder if the big difference is the amount of crap constantly taking up our attention. Apes don't have to worry about waking up at a precise time, picking up groceries, the softball game on Friday, etc. etc. Physical exhaustion seems to draw on the same pool of energy that we use to ruminate and stress about all of this crap, so maybe that's part of the reason it helps.
Apes spend over 50% of their day chewing food, and most of the rest sitting around digesting. Their diets are low-energy and they really can't do much else. We require over 25% more calories (adjusted for total body mass). There are some large physiological differences. This is what they're doing while socializing. We really are turbocharged engines by comparison. Our bodies are still adjusting, poorly, to the shift to agriculture and its higher caloric supply. Until recently agriculture was also hard work for everyone in a society. Apes can't wear themselves out in the same way because they lack the horsepower. They're maxed-out.
Have there been any studies on the differences in behavior of apes fed high-calorie diets? (Presumably non-interventionist studies, of e.g. apes that scavenge from urban areas encroaching into their habitats.)
For that matter, how about the "city" monkeys of Lopburi, who eat human food (either from human offerings, or by stealing it)? Anyone looked into their sleep cycles?
I'm approaching the limit of my simian expertise. Those are interesting questions. I know captive apes outside laboratory conditions (zoo animals, pets, entertainment) are prone to diabetes, heart disease, and other modern human medical plagues, but I don't know their sleep habits.
> I mean, sure, we can do that. But most of our ape relatives lay about all day socializing and taking advantage of their social cohesiveness to hunt-and-gather very quickly
I think you underestimate how much energy you use walking around even short distances for 6 hours a day compared to a typical office job. I had a step counter on my phone at one point, and found that if I spend a day outdoors, I can easily walk 10k-20k steps without feeling like I've done anything at all. Whereas my number for a typical office day where I didn't specifically exercise was much lower.
Since starting to wfh daily due to the pandemic, I've found I'm not nearly as mentally wiped out at the end of the workday, and as a result it's a lot easier to get a bit of physical exercise in the evening.
I knew I found my commute tiring, but I don't think I realized how much. After a workday + commuting home I was always wiped out mentally and physically, and now I'm only mentally tired, but not so much physically.
I'm fairly convinced that my body wants a 27-hour day, when external forces are removed. Being in the sun all day is certainly more tiring than indoor activity. The physical exertion seems to work well enough without the sun. I used to live in Cayman and got tons of sun daily, and still slept better after exertion.
That's why I started dancing (ballroom, etc), after a day job of coding.
You need to work your mind, and your body, if you want to sleep. I could come home feeling exhausted, but that was all mental. I could get up and dance for hours, and feel great.
But if I tried to go to sleep without exercise, it was hard. My body wanted to do something.
Any type exercise would probably work, I used to do weights before bed, that worked very well. I slept like a log.
It's an individual journey for everyone. For me it's:
* Regular exercise
* Earplugs (at night)
* Light control - dim lights and no computer use before bed.
* Schedule
Night is definitely better than day in all aspects, but the price of staying awake is too high. I can't stand noise-canceling headphones, but lucky enough regular over-the-ear headphones with Pink Floyd work well enough for me.
Modern offices suck big time (penny-wise pound-foolish), but it looks like in many cases office workers are going to be put out to work "from home". In OP's case specifically he works from home, so if worse comes to worse, at the end of the day he can move to quieter, more rural part of Netherlands.
> Humans are built for constant labor. We're the endurance-running champions of the animal kingdom
That is a contentious assertion. Yes, perhaps we can go for longer distances than other primates, but it doesn't mean that this has anything to do with our ideal exhaustion, nor that it was something we did regularly, nor that it is free of negative side effects, nor that other primates couldn't do it if we could design some (very unethical) experiments.
Experiments on the health effects of high intensity short duration exercise are very compelling.
I agree with you that we are not generally adapted to modern lifestyles, but there are a whole host of other factors to insomnia in that grab bag (terrible diets eaten year round, artificial light, social isolation).
This is not advice, just an observation from years of dealing with health issues that had my sleep extremely deranged for years:
The lymphatic system is run by muscle action. This is how it works:
Lymph is blood, minus certain blood products, like red blood cells. It leaves the blood and seeps into the tissues, where it gets labeled by humans as interstitial fluid. Then it somehow has to make its way back to the blood system.
The problem is that the blood system is run by the action of the heart. How do you pump fluid once it is beyond the reach of the heart to make it flow back into the circulatory system? The answer is: The rest of the muscles.
When you are physically active, lymph flows back into the blood system at multiple times the rate at which it normally seeps slowly back into the blood system. One source I saw suggested it flows back at 6 to 8 times its normal speed when you are active.
Lymph is how the body takes out the trash. It's how your body cleans up garbage in the system.
Walking regularly has proven to be critical to my ability to manage my genetic disorder. My genetic disorder boils down to being a bottleneck in the system and taking out the garbage regularly in a sustainable fashion that doesn't overwhelm my frail system has proven critical to my health and has helped me reverse a lot of issues that the world tells me cannot be reversed.
The brain has a separate lymphatic system with a separate name. I think they call it the glymphatic system.
The brain only takes out the trash when you are a sleep. Flushing fluid from the brain is a primary reason we sleep.
In my experience -- my long healing journey -- naps follow physical activity because taking out the trash in the rest of the body triggers improved capacity to take out the trash from the brain.
Brain/nerve tissues are the slowest to heal of the entire body. Cartilage gets no direct blood supply. It gets all nutrients and all garbage removal via osmosis. All surrounding tissues have to be cleaned up and improved in status before cartilage starts to heal.
Brain tissue is also "last served" and seems to follow a similar model that all other tissue has to be improved before the brain gets served. The fact that the brain's lymphatic system is a separate system and there is a blood-brain barrier regulating the flow of various things into and out of the brain are likely factors in why exercise promotes sleep.
I've had a lifelong struggle with insomnia. Last year, I worked with a sleep therapist to help get things under control. I still have bad nights, and jet lag still messes me up. But I don't take nearly as much sick leave for insomnia as I used to.
I had tried individual "sleep hygiene" things over the years with little success. She helped me realize that I was running a system that lent itself to bad sleep. Single changes were unlikely to help. For me in particular, keeping a regular routine, getting sunlight exposure, and minimizing caffeine were important. It's amazing how much impact a few fundamentals have.
Normally, I would fall asleep anytime from 12 to 3 and wake up between 8 and 9. I committed to falling asleep at 11:00, waking up at 7:00 every day and immediately going for a walk. Ordinarily I would have resisted these measures, but I had been in a bout with insomnia for months at that point. I was willing to try anything. Over time, this helped set a regular rhythm.
I was also overcaffeinating myself. She gave me some helpful guidelines for determining when I've had too much coffee. This amounted to taking the half-life of caffeine, measuring how much will still be in your bloodstream at bedtime, and asking yourself, "Would you drink that much coffee at that time?" I also would use caffeine to fix bad nights of sleep. She suggested replacing extra caffeine with midday walks. This helped quite a bit.
I don't have problems falling asleep (just staying asleep), but she recommended wearing orange safety glasses that block blue light. I would feel sleepier before bedtime when I did this. I didn't keep this measure going, but I still have them in case I ever have trouble falling asleep. I also wear a sleep mask, which is the single-best change I've made.
This came with some sacrifices. I went on a beach vacation with some friends last year, and I went to bed at 11 while they all stayed up until 1. This created a weird dynamic. But I had just started to overcome my severe insomnia bout, so I didn't want to throw it all away. Now, I find myself continuing to stick with the schedule because I know that I get results. This means that I leave a lot of events earlier than other people. But it feels easier to say "no" now that I'm in my 30s.
It also had some benefits. I now have an hour and a half before work that I use for side projects. It turns out that despite my mental model of being a night owl, I'm actually very productive in the morning. I've maintained a regular writing schedule and have managed to do some side project work. Previously, I had struggled to fit time in for these things.
I feel like I leave this comment every few months on HN but the podcast “Sleep with Me” has been so immensely helpful to me that I take every opportunity to share it. Something about Scooter’s voice and the way he talks about nothing gets my brain in just the right spot to turn off. It has been more effective for me than any sleep aid medication I’ve tried.
I know it won’t be a magic bullet for everyone but trying a podcast for a few nights is about as low-risk as a potential insomnia solution gets.
I’m not affiliated with the podcast at all other than being a very happy listener. Or maybe non-listener is a more accurate term? I’m usually asleep in the first ten minutes or so.
ASMR works well for me, most of the time (quality of ASMR matters - what's popular is just clickbait and not great content). Other times I need to meditate for a while to calm down and clear my head.
Personally, the most important thing for me is to not work or think about anything that would get me in the obsessive problem-solving or worry mode, around the bed time hours.
I never made the link with the sound levels before.
I just figured this out recently too. >6pm when people left the office and >8pm when the dull humming of the HVAC turned off gave this odd feeling of calm like it had been subconsciously aggravating me for hours.
Also stumbled on a wiki article on "Directed Attention Fatigue" [1] which implied that the brain's way of focusing is not like turning up the heat on a laser, but more like applying multiple blinders to a horse to create a tiny reticle of focus. That basically meant clear out as many visual-field and sound distractions as possible to minimize the energy required for attention (and increase stamina, too).
One thing I also try w/ the noise-cancelling headphones is only wear them during productive work, so that my brain subconsciously associates headphones on = work time.
A few years ago I found myself experiencing a different sort of very debilitating sleeping problem. It started, as I recall, as something that would just happen on airplanes, my legs would feel almost like a buildup of lactic acid unless I moved them around. I could keep them still maybe for a few second at most, until the sensation built to a point where it was irresistibly uncomfortable and swinging or tapping my feet would instantly provide relief. Restless leg syndrome.
While at first confined to trying to sleep in an airplane chair (interestingly it never happened while sitting in front of a computer to work, or sitting at the dinner table, just when sitting to sleep) eventually it followed me into the bedroom, where it became a serious problem. Basically within seconds of lying down my legs would start winding up. Think like, in order to get them to settle down having to rapidly kick against the bed for 15 seconds and getting like a 2 minute window to try to fall asleep before the sensation built back up. And then even in my sleep, I would still be kicking around. Not very practical to say the least.
What finally solved it for me was a doctor suggesting I try trazodone. It’s an SSRI which was originally developed as an antidepressant, turns out to suck for that, but it is a very nice little sedative. As long as I have 6hrs to sleep, 25mg completely stops the restless leg syndrome and doesn’t make me wake up groggy. It was an absolute lifesaver.
On a separate note, I can absolutely relate to getting my best work done at night. Many times an all-nighter would result in more productive work than multiple days that led up to it. The next day would be a wash, but usually I could find myself back to a diurnal rhythm within a day or two. I never went full vampire because frankly I find it far too exhausting to be trying to keep that level of focus day after day, but many times over the years when workload got out of control a shift to working nights was a crucial strategy.
You might want to check your nutrition. Sometimes issues like this are caused by nutritional imbalances (such as getting too little or too much of a certain nutrient). For instance, iron deficiency can be a cause for restless leg syndrome. Though please be careful with iron, and only take it under the supervision of a physician, as too much iron can be deadly.
I'm reading this book(Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker) right now. The number one piece of advice it provides is to set an alarm to go to bed and try to fall asleep at the same time every night, even on weekends. Other pieces of advice include lowering the temperature to 65°F at night(really), reduce or stop caffeine and alcohol intake, avoid screen time and light at night, and several other pieces of advice.
It's an okay book. Not the best I've read, but if you feel tired during the day, it's worth a read. My sleep quality has markedly increased since starting to read it.
I enjoyed the book. If you're interested, my comment history on HN contains a reference to i somewhere, where someone linked to serious criticism about many of the book's claims, and a reply to said criticism by Matthew Walker.
Regarding the alarms: I find that consistency is much more important for mee than total hours of sleep. I'm much better on a consistent 7h/day than on 8h/day where my sleep/wake time moves around.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadOn the topic of noise, there is one thing I wish could be more recognized as a nuisance, and that is the damn leaf blowers. Especially now that everyone is forced to work from home, every day around here for a couple of hours you are subjected to that.
I used to be a night owl too. But with kids and everything things changed over the years. These days it's hard for me to stay awake past 11pm. I also wake up early around 6am, which in the past was unheard-of for me. I actually enjoy my early mornings alone for the same reasons mentioned in the post about the quiet at night.
One thing I find important is not falling asleep before my usual bed time. It usually happens when I watch a movie or something. After I wake up, unless I'm dead tired, it can take me much longer to fall asleep when I actually go to bed.
Yes, it's very seductive. Until I had a family I didn't see anything wrong with it, that was just an out-of-phase life but it worked well enough for me. Having kids and a business makes it a lot harder to live like that, and working until you drop is an easy way to mask the fact that I had serious problems falling asleep, either at a normal time or even at all. Working until exhaustion seemed like a pretty efficient fix, I'd get a lot done and eventually did get my sleep though not nearly enough of it.
The damage is cumulative as far as I understand it now and even though it gave me an edge for a while I wonder if the price was worth it. Maybe get that book from the library and read up on it (and some critiques of the book as well, it's not all equally solid), then make up your mind as to what is the best approach for your?
> the damn leaf blowers
They're a complete nuisance and utterly ineffective as well. Also, everybody has their own schedule for running them. Fortunately here they are not too popular but the few that are there really get me worked up.
The one feeds into the other which eventually results in missing lots and lots of sleep. I was under the - mistaken - impression that you can get by on 4 hours of sleep or less but this is really not the case so if you suffer from this in some for or other then better take it serious.
Sticking to a routine, avoiding stressful subjects just before sleep, relaxing activities (music, reading) before trying to fall asleep all helped in making it easier to fall asleep. Staying asleep is another matter, and addressing the noise that reaches my bedroom is one more thing I plan on tackling to avoid frequently waking up during the night.
Insomnia means you don't get enough sleep at all.
I've broken this habit in the past. When my wife was working as a teacher and I dropped her off at work every morning, I was up and out every weekday at 7:30am, and at work by 7:50. I got a ton of stuff done in the morning because no one else started showing up until 9am at least.
But now, during quarantine, we set no alarms. No one in the family has to be anywhere at any particular time. And so we've all shifted, even the kids. All of wake around noon, and the kids go down around 2am (and the adults between 4am and 6am).
Late nights just seem to be our natural schedule, but all it takes is an alarm and an early morning responsibility to shift the family schedule.
I'm still working from 9am so the mornings are pretty rough at the moment, But something about the lockdown is trouble.
Similar to https://xkcd.com/320/ but not deliberately.
That's an interesting take. My dogs are hyper-active at night and sleepy in the day. Dogs have been with human for a longtime, so either they have the same sleep schedule or the reverse (as they should guard when the human is asleep?).
But if humans are hunters, then it might make sense that they are more active at night.
I found that time of night (12am - 4am) really conducive to creativity. If I could go back to that schedule, I would. I don't like waking up any time before 9, and neither does my body.
Does Sony really have the best noise cancelling headphones? What brands/models have worked for people here? I've continuously struggled with distracting noises through my education.
All over ear headphones will tend to cause your ears to warm up, so the in ear ones are more comfortable. But the integrated microphone with the in-ear headphones is surprisingly poor for phone calls.
Yeeep.
> I can't imagine 'over the air' headphones :)
Well bluetooth are kinda OTA as opposed to wired 'phones.
https://www.soundstagesolo.com/index.php/features/178-eardru...
- melatonin
- doing my best to wake up at 06:00.
In reality, I wake up at 07:00 or even 09:00 but it is guaranteed to save me a few hours of sleep deprivation. In general with these 2 “tricks” I have 2 hours less sleep deprivation than normal. They also have a lot of synergies.
One other thing I am now thinking about is to have a color coded night light with red (you have to sleep), orange (you can wake up if you’re wide awake and truly can’t sleep) and green (you’re in the wake up zone) as color codes. By doing this, I wouldn’t feel the need to check my time at night. Or maybe I should program an app that has some Siri integration (if that’s possible, probably isn’t). By having this, I wouldn’t feel inclined to check the time.
Oh, and this would be alongside an alarm.
https://www.drweil.com/videos-features/videos/the-4-7-8-brea...
"The world is asleep" is basically my definition of serene and peaceful.
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A while back, there was a national holiday, so I had the day off. I didn't actually have anything I wanted to do with that day, so I used it to plan out my next work project. It was a very productive day where I went from being very unsure of how to do the project to having a blueprint that directed what I did for months to come. The project would be in a much worse place if it weren't for the thinking I was able to do on that one day.
It wasn't a productive day in the sense that I got a lot of things done (my usual definition of productivity), but it was productive in the sense that I got some important, deep thinking done. It's rare to get a chance to do such deep thinking.
This kind of productivity is hard to achieve in the face of distractions. But I think it is actually worse than that: It is hard to achieve when there is even a _risk_ of distractions. When my brain knows that someone could demand my attention at any time, it seems to limit the amount of working memory, focus, and time I can spent thinking about something.
But if I know that I don't have to pay attention to interruptions, the problem I'm thinking about can take over and I can spend time swimming in the problem instead of just splashing my toes in.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that knowing you _might_ be interrupted can be almost as bad as actually being interrupted.
To me, it's a matter of degree. Reading slack, reading emails, 1:1s, project sync meetings, merging PRs, etc all require nearly no depth of thinking. Creating a design for a small problem or understanding unfamiliar code requires a bit more, debugging more still.
The possibility (and actuality) of interruptions is also a matter of degree. A day with one meeting after lunch and nothing on fire allows for deeper focus than a day with nothing but 30 minute gaps between meetings and 15 people on Slack all wanting something.
The deepest thinking - the kind that is best suited to having an entire day of space - helps the most with the hardest problems: planning a complex project, understanding a new bit of type theory, etc.
(And it is not necessarily true that these problems are impossible to solve in the face of distractions, but a day of focus might match the output of a distracted week - and sometimes it's hard to budget a whole week just to think about something!)
edit: s/is only strictly necessary for the hardest problems/helps the most with the hardest problems/
- going to sleep when the baby sleeps ~8:30p-10p.
- getting up super early ~3:30a-4:30a
- cutting out coffee and replacing with a mixture of black/green tea.
- not having caffeine after 8a.
- following this routine even on weekends.
My sleep quality is WAY better and I don't feel so tired during the day. Also I get a lot done in the morning and spend the afternoon with my daughter.
- removing caffeine completely
- getting enough direct sunlight (hours per day)
- losing weight
Everything else (melatonin, blue light, exercise, sleepy tea, other drugs, etc) never helped or made my quality of life worse.
Also exercise helps.
Out of curiosity, why does this apply to the afternoon coffee and not the morning coffee? Maybe finding coffee useful at all is a sign?
The key was absolutely no matter what, no matter how tired I felt, I had to wake up at 7am and get out of bed. No naps.
We found the optimal spot to be 11pm lay in bed, and wake up at 7am. I always keep that schedule, deviating only by 30min or so even on weekends. Haven’t had trouble sleeping since!
I also think going from graduate school (little solid schedule) to a corporate 9-5 job helped. Covid has mangled that a bit, but I still keep the same sleep schedule.
tl;dr- CBT-I was a life-changer for me.
I also gave up coffee and I stop looking at screens 30-60 mins before my bed time. Before the therapy ~30% of my nights were sleepless.
This article helped a lot: http://ilya.sukhar.com/blog/an-algorithmic-solution-to-insom...
Also the recommendation that if I couldn’t fall asleep within 15-ish minutes, to get out of bed and do something until I’m tired again instead of lay there and “try” to sleep.
I was able to discover that I suffer from narcolepsy, a rare but nonetheless real condition. It's not at all like most people think: you don't randomly fall asleep during the day. But your sleep schedule isn't really a schedule so much as a stochastic random walk.
Even if you don't have a rare disorder, there's a good chance a sleep study will benefit you. For example, a coworker said that a CPAP machine was similarly lifechanging.
I've found that when I'm really tired I have no trouble conjuring this imagery and sometimes within just a few cycles, vivid explosions of color will flood in and I go to sleep. Other times, I struggle to picture a sphere and start off with the 2d equivalents - circle, square, triangle. The whole thing is a bit like counting sheep, but that never worked for me.
if I hammer an icecube I’ll get to the meeting on monday. But then that’s apple day. Better running away. There are dogs falling from the sky so I’ll take my fork. Etc.
It works every single time. Takes around 10-15min of doing this
For whatever reason though, I sometimes notice myself falling asleep which jerks me wide awake (different to restless legs which I sometimes also get). I would love to drop that habit.
Years ago, I started sleeping with earplugs. I can't sleep without them now. I get the best and deepest sleep this way. I feel like it turns off my subconscious, because my brain is no longer processing external input.
I am looking for a decent sleeping earplug or earbud as I have recently moved to a noisier place. I’ve tried sleeping in noise-cancelling over ears and AirPods with white noise but neither worked for me, they were far too uncomfortable. I am also concerned that an industrial ear protector would prevent me from hearing alarms or emergency situations.
Other ones I tried tended to cause pain after a day or two. It did take a couple of days to get used to having them in, but now I really miss them if I don't have any with me.
Regarding alarms/emergencies, I always wake up to my phone alarm, and I find that I'm generally able to hear 'past' them for things I'd usually be on the alert for.
[1] https://hearos.com/collections/sleep-1/products/ultimate-sof...
The trick to getting them in easily is to squish and lick them. Totally gross, but you get used to it and it really works well. I wash mine every morning with water and just keep reusing them for a while.
Agreed with the other, you rarely sleep through stuff you really need to wake up for like a phone alarm next to you.
[1] https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/b683124e-a538-4bec-9dfa-5bd...
Relatedly, a friend once told me about a method of just telling yourself when you need to wake up right before you go to bed. I've tried that quite a few times and always wake up within about 15 minutes of the intended time.
For me, waking up is the easy part, but I really don't function well at all with little sleep and actually getting out of bed can be almost impossible if I've had little sleep. I can't relate to how anyone can work on very little sleep over a long period of time, although lately I have been doing a bit better on little sleep when not using alarms at all (and predictibly returning to an irregular Non-24 schedule).
Mind work is exhausting as well, but in a different way. At the end of a strenuous day of coding, and endless meetings, I'm drained. Completely wiped out. I feel physically exhausted, but I'm not, at all.
On the rare occasions that I physically exhaust myself, be it home remodeling, yard work, or canoeing, I sleep like the dead. No insomnia, solid rest. I still have all the same things going on in my life; the same job, same bills, all the anxieties large and small that "keep me awake" other nights. Which is why I don't think any of it is psychological. My body just isn't worn out enough.
I'm not looking for advice. "You should exercise more! Have you tried X?" This is my observation. We aren't constructed for office work.
But that's something people can't sell you so that's the last thing people try.
Even this advice that Jacques says about no napping during the day. IF I'm working out, I need that nap. I suggest he try cutting everything out except for the morning bike ride and see how far it takes you.
And yeah, people shit far too much on that book, "While We Sleep" maybe some of the findings need more data but they do ring true, especially the part about underestimating lack of sleep does to our mind and body.
Btw, didn't know you played synths.
Physical exercise pushed too far is as nasty as mental efforts in a bad context (too difficult, too quick, etc).
That said I've been aiming for simple physical jobs as a free therapy kind of way.
Another point is that being physically fit has a very positive effect on your mind, it's like one big concern removed and you get more motivation for other ventures.
Lastly, who thinks having physical breaks during the day is good for pacing your mental flow ? even better with group sports ..
ps: many people feel like swimming is a particularly good form of exhaustion. I had a similar experience doing soft kungfu/taichi. But I wonder what else causes deep drain and fatigue that just resets all your system.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU
[1] "Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week" https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...
I mean, sure, we can do that. But most of our ape relatives lay about all day socializing and taking advantage of their social cohesiveness to hunt-and-gather very quickly (and then get back to lazing around.) They have many capabilities, but rarely use them, because social organization is just so OP compared to the defenses of most of the animal kingdom.
The big strong apes (e.g. gorillas) don't use their strength for anything day-to-day; they just use it in occasional tribal territorial disputes and social-hierarchy disputes, which don't take up all that much of their time, all-said. Certainly not enough to wear them out by the end of the day, every day.
I don't see any reason that our sleeping habits would have gone through a big evolutionary shift relative to all the other apes; so if they can—and do—sleep just fine without exhausting themselves, we very likely can as well. If we can't, it's very likely not "lack of exhaustion" that's the cause.
IMHO, exhaustion seems to just be a hack, overriding the concerns of some other part of us that thinks it important for us to stay awake; rather than the proper resolution of that mechanism's concerns.
For that matter, how about the "city" monkeys of Lopburi, who eat human food (either from human offerings, or by stealing it)? Anyone looked into their sleep cycles?
I think you underestimate how much energy you use walking around even short distances for 6 hours a day compared to a typical office job. I had a step counter on my phone at one point, and found that if I spend a day outdoors, I can easily walk 10k-20k steps without feeling like I've done anything at all. Whereas my number for a typical office day where I didn't specifically exercise was much lower.
I knew I found my commute tiring, but I don't think I realized how much. After a workday + commuting home I was always wiped out mentally and physically, and now I'm only mentally tired, but not so much physically.
Are you sure it's actually the physical exhaustion and not the hours of exposure to direct sunlight which calibrates your circadian rhythm?
You need to work your mind, and your body, if you want to sleep. I could come home feeling exhausted, but that was all mental. I could get up and dance for hours, and feel great.
But if I tried to go to sleep without exercise, it was hard. My body wanted to do something.
Any type exercise would probably work, I used to do weights before bed, that worked very well. I slept like a log.
Modern offices suck big time (penny-wise pound-foolish), but it looks like in many cases office workers are going to be put out to work "from home". In OP's case specifically he works from home, so if worse comes to worse, at the end of the day he can move to quieter, more rural part of Netherlands.
That is a contentious assertion. Yes, perhaps we can go for longer distances than other primates, but it doesn't mean that this has anything to do with our ideal exhaustion, nor that it was something we did regularly, nor that it is free of negative side effects, nor that other primates couldn't do it if we could design some (very unethical) experiments.
Experiments on the health effects of high intensity short duration exercise are very compelling.
I agree with you that we are not generally adapted to modern lifestyles, but there are a whole host of other factors to insomnia in that grab bag (terrible diets eaten year round, artificial light, social isolation).
This is not advice, just an observation from years of dealing with health issues that had my sleep extremely deranged for years:
The lymphatic system is run by muscle action. This is how it works:
Lymph is blood, minus certain blood products, like red blood cells. It leaves the blood and seeps into the tissues, where it gets labeled by humans as interstitial fluid. Then it somehow has to make its way back to the blood system.
The problem is that the blood system is run by the action of the heart. How do you pump fluid once it is beyond the reach of the heart to make it flow back into the circulatory system? The answer is: The rest of the muscles.
When you are physically active, lymph flows back into the blood system at multiple times the rate at which it normally seeps slowly back into the blood system. One source I saw suggested it flows back at 6 to 8 times its normal speed when you are active.
Lymph is how the body takes out the trash. It's how your body cleans up garbage in the system.
Walking regularly has proven to be critical to my ability to manage my genetic disorder. My genetic disorder boils down to being a bottleneck in the system and taking out the garbage regularly in a sustainable fashion that doesn't overwhelm my frail system has proven critical to my health and has helped me reverse a lot of issues that the world tells me cannot be reversed.
The brain has a separate lymphatic system with a separate name. I think they call it the glymphatic system.
The brain only takes out the trash when you are a sleep. Flushing fluid from the brain is a primary reason we sleep.
In my experience -- my long healing journey -- naps follow physical activity because taking out the trash in the rest of the body triggers improved capacity to take out the trash from the brain.
Brain/nerve tissues are the slowest to heal of the entire body. Cartilage gets no direct blood supply. It gets all nutrients and all garbage removal via osmosis. All surrounding tissues have to be cleaned up and improved in status before cartilage starts to heal.
Brain tissue is also "last served" and seems to follow a similar model that all other tissue has to be improved before the brain gets served. The fact that the brain's lymphatic system is a separate system and there is a blood-brain barrier regulating the flow of various things into and out of the brain are likely factors in why exercise promotes sleep.
I had tried individual "sleep hygiene" things over the years with little success. She helped me realize that I was running a system that lent itself to bad sleep. Single changes were unlikely to help. For me in particular, keeping a regular routine, getting sunlight exposure, and minimizing caffeine were important. It's amazing how much impact a few fundamentals have.
Normally, I would fall asleep anytime from 12 to 3 and wake up between 8 and 9. I committed to falling asleep at 11:00, waking up at 7:00 every day and immediately going for a walk. Ordinarily I would have resisted these measures, but I had been in a bout with insomnia for months at that point. I was willing to try anything. Over time, this helped set a regular rhythm.
I was also overcaffeinating myself. She gave me some helpful guidelines for determining when I've had too much coffee. This amounted to taking the half-life of caffeine, measuring how much will still be in your bloodstream at bedtime, and asking yourself, "Would you drink that much coffee at that time?" I also would use caffeine to fix bad nights of sleep. She suggested replacing extra caffeine with midday walks. This helped quite a bit.
I don't have problems falling asleep (just staying asleep), but she recommended wearing orange safety glasses that block blue light. I would feel sleepier before bedtime when I did this. I didn't keep this measure going, but I still have them in case I ever have trouble falling asleep. I also wear a sleep mask, which is the single-best change I've made.
This came with some sacrifices. I went on a beach vacation with some friends last year, and I went to bed at 11 while they all stayed up until 1. This created a weird dynamic. But I had just started to overcome my severe insomnia bout, so I didn't want to throw it all away. Now, I find myself continuing to stick with the schedule because I know that I get results. This means that I leave a lot of events earlier than other people. But it feels easier to say "no" now that I'm in my 30s.
It also had some benefits. I now have an hour and a half before work that I use for side projects. It turns out that despite my mental model of being a night owl, I'm actually very productive in the morning. I've maintained a regular writing schedule and have managed to do some side project work. Previously, I had struggled to fit time in for these things.
I know it won’t be a magic bullet for everyone but trying a podcast for a few nights is about as low-risk as a potential insomnia solution gets.
I’m not affiliated with the podcast at all other than being a very happy listener. Or maybe non-listener is a more accurate term? I’m usually asleep in the first ten minutes or so.
The author has my sympathy. I’ve learned to ignore noise, but I understand not everyone can do that.
Personally, the most important thing for me is to not work or think about anything that would get me in the obsessive problem-solving or worry mode, around the bed time hours.
Any recommendations?
I just figured this out recently too. >6pm when people left the office and >8pm when the dull humming of the HVAC turned off gave this odd feeling of calm like it had been subconsciously aggravating me for hours.
Also stumbled on a wiki article on "Directed Attention Fatigue" [1] which implied that the brain's way of focusing is not like turning up the heat on a laser, but more like applying multiple blinders to a horse to create a tiny reticle of focus. That basically meant clear out as many visual-field and sound distractions as possible to minimize the energy required for attention (and increase stamina, too).
One thing I also try w/ the noise-cancelling headphones is only wear them during productive work, so that my brain subconsciously associates headphones on = work time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_attention_fatigue
While at first confined to trying to sleep in an airplane chair (interestingly it never happened while sitting in front of a computer to work, or sitting at the dinner table, just when sitting to sleep) eventually it followed me into the bedroom, where it became a serious problem. Basically within seconds of lying down my legs would start winding up. Think like, in order to get them to settle down having to rapidly kick against the bed for 15 seconds and getting like a 2 minute window to try to fall asleep before the sensation built back up. And then even in my sleep, I would still be kicking around. Not very practical to say the least.
What finally solved it for me was a doctor suggesting I try trazodone. It’s an SSRI which was originally developed as an antidepressant, turns out to suck for that, but it is a very nice little sedative. As long as I have 6hrs to sleep, 25mg completely stops the restless leg syndrome and doesn’t make me wake up groggy. It was an absolute lifesaver.
On a separate note, I can absolutely relate to getting my best work done at night. Many times an all-nighter would result in more productive work than multiple days that led up to it. The next day would be a wash, but usually I could find myself back to a diurnal rhythm within a day or two. I never went full vampire because frankly I find it far too exhausting to be trying to keep that level of focus day after day, but many times over the years when workload got out of control a shift to working nights was a crucial strategy.
It's an okay book. Not the best I've read, but if you feel tired during the day, it's worth a read. My sleep quality has markedly increased since starting to read it.
Regarding the alarms: I find that consistency is much more important for mee than total hours of sleep. I'm much better on a consistent 7h/day than on 8h/day where my sleep/wake time moves around.