Since 2020 I have manually tracked 35093 data points about my life [1]. And the one parameter that correlates most with my sleep time is how many steps I took during the day.
The median number of steps I take during a day is about 9500.
When I look at the sleep time of the following night, on average I slept an additional 9 minutes after a day with 9500 steps or more compared to a day with less than 9500 steps.
The gap increases to 16 minutes when I look at nights where I walked over 12000 steps in the previous day.
To see if that is just correlation or if there is causation at play, I also started to decide to take an additional walk or not by coin flip. So far, I did that 31 times. 16 times the coin decided to take a walk, 21 times it decided not to. On average, I slept 13 minutes longer after the coin decided that I take an additional walk. 31 is a very small N of course. I hope to have a larger sample by the end of next year.
Makes sense. Also, while overfed idle wealthy people faceplant in CPAP machines, older people in traditional cultures with healthy physical activity and consumption levels continue to live long regardless. For example, the Hunza. Experimental results suggest this is because of both their activity levels and a reduced caloric intake of a low protein, plant based diet high in complex carbohydrates. But what would a continuous culture of longevity know?
I've never heard of the Hunza and kind of suspected that these "older people in traditional cultures" sounds too good to be true, and sure enough:
> A widely repeated claim of remarkable longevity of the Hunza people has been refuted as a longevity myth, citing a life expectancy of 53 years for men and 52 for women, although with a high standard deviation.
Like all modern claims, there's probably a kernel of truth. The "standard deviation" probably masks it. As with the whole world, one doesn't doubt the current population has succumbed to modernity. Similar health can be observed in physically active people with conservative consumption levels globally.
I'm not really sure what "succumbed to modernity" means in this context. World life expectancy went from 46 years in 1950 to 72.63 in 2020 to 73.16 in 2023. Is that the right metric to look at? If it is, succumbing to modernity doesn't sound too terrible.
Isn't that figure from 1950 also impacted by the fact they just had a major war killing millions of young people prematurely? After all this calculation is done over a longer term than 1 year as far as I know.
Worth noting that the only source for that excerpt from Wikipedia, for the life expectancy, is some NYT article written by a journalist in 1996 which is now paywalled.
> older people in traditional cultures with healthy physical activity and consumption levels continue to live long regardless
I agree with the point on physical activity, but the implication that traditional cultures have as long or longer lifespans is easily dismissed as inaccurate.
Why would we exclude child mortality? It isn't clear to me that isn't an indirect product of culture any more that any other longevity indicator.
Blue zones seems somewhat ambiguous but if I'm understanding correctly, they are small areas of people who live more traditionally surrounded by mostly modern people? Seems like by definition those zones are made up of cherry picked people and it's unclear to me that those aren't just outliers.
Yes, I find I sleep better after some proper exercise during the day. But when I was working I worked from home every work day, with only a tour round the block at lunchtime. I did much less exercise but slept like a baby. Not so now.
Sleep quality would be a better metric than duration.
HRV is generally the metric used. You can measure that with a cheap chest monitor, or get a fitness watch that tracks it continuously throughout the day and night.
Good HRV levels are highly correlated to activity level, so your base hypothesis still makes sense.
Is there a standardized way to measure sleep quality? Or are the numbers one measures only compareable as long as one uses the same device?
I would be interested in suggestions which watches measure the HRV / Sleep quality reliably and display the data on screen. Or let me get it from a Linux laptop. I hate having to install an app to get the info off the watch.
My understanding is that different devices measure HRV with different techniques, so they're not necessarily comparable. I've heard Apple Watch is especially bad at measuring HRV, while Garmin and Whoop are good.
One performance and health coach I follow recommends the Polar H10 chest strap to take a measurement every morning.
There's also not an absolute number or threshold that's good or bad. Generally higher is better, but what really matters are the fluctuations from a personalized baseline.
Taking a measurement at the same time every morning helps to establish a consistent baseline so that you can detect changes from day to day. But the latest generation of smart watches can track HRV continuously throughout the day, so if you have one of those then taking specific measurements is less useful.
HRV is indeed a good proxy metric for sleep quality, and I can really recommend Garmin watches for measuring it. Even the cheap models track the "Stress" metric 24/7 (which is HRV under the hood). More expensive ones have pulse ox monitoring and a full blown sleep analyzer that provides sleep stage breakfown and a compound sleep quality score. All from just being worn on the wrist normally through the night.
However, HRV is not the whole story about sleep quality. If you develop sleep apnea, for example, your HRV will not react very much, though your sleep quality will suffer. There is no substitute for sleep study to detect such issues.
HRV is indeed a good proxy metric for sleep quality, and I can really recommend Garmin watches for measuring it
I'm a little skeptical about my Garmin's ability to accurately measure sleep quality.
Sometimes I wake up refreshed and felt like I slept very well, only to have my Garmin tell me that I had poor sleep quality (usually because of too little REM sleep), other times I've had a bad night of sleeping (like the dog needed to go out several times) and I wake up tired, and my watch congratulates me on good sleep quality.
I wonder if one of the sleep monitors that uses a pad on the mattress would be more accurate.
Physical activity definitely makes a difference, but in my experience it will never cause me to sleep like my kids. That ship has sailed. I was very active last year, and had many days of 30k steps, sometimes although rarely 40k steps and I can't say I ever experienced falling a sleep and sleeping 8h rock solid. Maybe once.
edit: just checked, I did a 120km bike ride this year and the next night I slept for around 6h.
> I did a 120km bike ride this year and the next night I slept for around 6h.
Intensive or prolonged exercise (especially close to bedtime) can actually interfere with sleep. I never sleep very well the night after 10k runs or 60km+ rides. There is a sweet spot (for sleep quality) between zero exercise and too much exercise.
Long bouts of cardio nearly always interfere with my sleep. But I don’t think that’s abnormal; the body should be raising cortisol in response to energy demands.
Try weight training in the morning. I’m someone that doesn’t usually nap… but after starting weight training I find myself needing a nap in the afternoon, and it is much easier to fall asleep.
My anecdotal experience agrees with this. Long/intense cardio doesn't improve my sleep but weight training seems to. Occasionally I have to struggle to stay awake to keep my schedule, which is marvelous compared to struggling to fall asleep!
I do early morning weight training two to three times a week. When I get a good workout I noticed the sleepiness in the afternoon too, but I still do not sleep like my kids. To be clear, I don't have insomnia or a very difficult sleep, but the article is in general about sleeping less as you age. Leading a healthy lifestyle will definitely help get a better sleep, but now being around 40 years old, I just don't sleep like when I was a child, teenager or even in my late twenties. I don't need an alarm anymore for instance, I'll just wake up at 6am 6:30 no matter what I do.
What’s the full sleep data, or at least the variance? 31 may be large enough. And if it’s not, getting more by the end of the year may not make a big difference. Power only increases at the square root of the sample size.
End of next year. So in theory I could 10x the number of data points.
But its one of the more annoying experiments to let a coin decide if you have to take another walk :) So I'm not sure how often I will do that. I'm pretty convinced already that walking more is a good thing.
I'm in a hurry right now, but I will probably write a full blog post about the steps-sleep relationship with p values and everything some time next year.
My sleep pattern changed when I had a kid and remained that way. I always needed 7 hours of sleep to feel good and productive, but after the baby, I've found myself being equally productive with 5-5.5hrs of sleep.
Nah, you have just gotten used to being lower functioning. Like an alcoholic who still thinks he can drive equally well after 5 beers. At least, almost all of the existing science points into this direction.
You aren't sleeping less because you need less. You have lost the ability to stay asleep for a healthy amount of time.
Just to add onto this with an anecdote, I experienced this phenomena for a smaller amount of sleep: 1-3 hours per night. But I had other physical effects such as a persistent headache - it was obvious it was bad for me.
It took a lot of effort to reset my body to obtain a more healthy amount of sleep. I think I went about a month with 1-3 hours per night. The initial cause was "sleep regression in twins", but that was only for 2 weeks. The next 2 weeks was how long it took me to get my body to sleep more than a couple hours per night.
While this is likely true, there are differences in the amount of time folks need to sleep in order to recover. There is a gene that is found to be associated with these short sleepers as well. Activating the gene in mice demonstrates a similar reduction in natural sleep cycles with no apparent impact on health.
Nb to observers considering having kids but worried about this, unless you’re badly space-constrained it’s pretty easy to keep sleep for both adults north of 6.5hrs a night, and to have catch-up nights for both on the weekend (9+ hours). Plus the period in which night feedings are necessary, rather than habit, is only 2.5-3 months anyway.
It’s mostly a fairly simple scheduling problem, plus having one adult sleeping somewhere they can’t hear the baby during each “shift” (loud fans help). Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby also lets you slooowwwly stretch your response times longer, which is a nice smooth way work toward the glorious 1-feeding-per-night and finally no-night-feedings period (babies wake up and cry even when not hungry—past the earliest weeks, immediate feeding may not be necessary, and if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer)
All bets off if you have a kid who’s ill, but for most babies, it’s entirely achievable.
> It’s mostly a fairly simple scheduling problem, plus having one adult sleeping somewhere they can’t hear the baby during each “shift” (loud fans help).
Wouldn't it be easier to have a soundproofed room for either the parents or the baby?
Your key assumption is "not badly space-constrained" is plausible, but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
> if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer
Your observations would be in favor of soundproofing where delaying intervention would be a feature, not a bug.
What’s with the soundproofing thing? I don’t follow what you’re getting at. Yes you could solve the problem with soundproofing, but that’s really expensive. Some distance and a loud fan is something more people already have than soundproofed rooms. If you’d rather soundproof, sure, go nuts, I’m not providing an exhaustive list of solutions.
> but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
For parents with 9-5 sorts of jobs, it works fine. You don’t even need “sleep-per-parent x2” amounts of contiguous time available, because there’ll be a gap of usually a hour or three between the last time the kid wakes up for first-parent and the first time they wake up for second-parent, and it’s not like you can’t get any sleep while “on duty”. We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent in the very worst weeks for each kid, and more than that for total sleep, with a sleep window (for us, the parents) of about 10 hours. Not sure what you mean. Yeah inconsistent shift work or something could mess it up, but that messes up everything.
I'm basically non functional at less than 7h of uninterrupted sleep per night.
> We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent
It may not be enough
> What’s with the soundproofing thing?
Soundproof the room where either the parents or the baby are would be more reliable to control the noise level by preventing it from reaching out instead of adding more.
It could also be converted later into a music room
If “just soundproof the room” is an option, I’m guessing a night nanny’s in the budget, too.
What we did was just one of us would sleep in another room with the monitor, and the other in our normal bedroom. Fan and door closed was all the soundproofing we needed in the normal bedroom. But that’s why having little space might make it a lot tougher—ours relied on having three rooms, two of which with sleeping-places for adults.
And Ok we probably weren’t averaging 7 hours uninterrupted until about 6-8 weeks, but total sleep was consistently over 7, and uninterrupted of 6ish is a lot better than what many parents report (the ones where both get up for every feeding… I’ll never understand those folks)
[edit] my overall point is that with just a little thought applied to the problem, and possibly some resources but likely not that much if you already live in a house instead of a small apartment, you’re not guaranteed impossibly-short sounding amounts of sleep just because you have an infant.
> my overall point is that with just a little thought applied to the problem, and possibly some resources but likely not that much if you already live in a house instead of a small apartment, you’re not guaranteed impossibly-short sounding amounts of sleep just because you have an infant.
Oh I absolutely agree, I just wanted to understand the problem better and see if there was something I had missed!
I suspect the above worked for you? this is 100% nothing like my experience and it wasn't a "fairly simple scheduling problem"
and "Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby" made things worse
our experience was a not great to begin with, but the sleep deprivation only lasted around 6-10months per child and for the benefits it gave - I would definately do it again
to all the potential parents out there, please do your own research and try not to fall in the trap of the victorian mindset - which on the whole (massively over simplifying it) seems to suggest actions to make your life easier at the expense of the baby.
Like a charm, three for three. No night feedings past 12 weeks for any of the three. Longest “cry it out” period of the three was three nights (because all were comfortably at a single feeding by then, and used to falling back asleep on their own after more-minor sleep interruptions) All slept great—and as long as medical professionals say they should, which is a thing we notice most other young kids in our circle not coming even close to doing—until old enough to start worrying about death and stuff like that, which—yeah, same here, kid.
[edit] and actually the whole rest of this holds without capping it with that action, it just means you’ll need to keep up the shift thing for 6-12 months instead of 3, and—from what I’ve seen—deal with a couple nights a week of your kid waking up in the middle of the night the whole rest of their early childhood. The shift-sleeping strategy has no bearing on that, but does get you a couple REM cycles a night, even in the worst of it.
To anyone else reading my post and reconsidering having kids: sleep is the tiniest sacrifice that I'm more than happy to make for my kid. The sheer job this little girl brings into my world can't be matched by anything, let alone something as simple as sleep :)
Oh, for sure. The biggest sacrifice isn’t sleep. It’s money. So very, very much money. And having to pare your hobbies down to one or two things to avoid going crazy. Both much worse than any sleep disruption.
Fancy, but I'm much more inclined to believe the causes are simpler. Steadily increasing aches and pains, worry about mortality, worry about younger relatives, multiplication of regrets, or this side of retirement, the sheer stress of modern life, which seems to wear more heavily when there's less time to bounce back, substance abuse maybe.
Can’t speak for others, by my teenage years were pretty worry-free. That may not have been the norm though because I spent most of my free time on my computer, pouring many hours into Photoshop, WoW, and tinkering with code rather than worrying about classmate drama or getting into trouble.
Back then, I was practically always dead asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow and a snooze was always within easy reach no matter when I tried (wasn’t uncommon to have a 1-2 hour nap after coming home from school). Flash forward 16 years to today and getting to sleep isn’t too much of a problem but it’s much more common to have trouble with getting my head stopped long enough to drift off, especially nights when I don’t make a point of doing almost nothing for 2-3 hours prior to wind down.
Perhaps but I think like the rest of the body the brain experiences dysfunction as well, which almost certainly impacts sleep as a fundamental function of the brain.
I find the best way for me to fall asleep is to put on a podcast, my current go to is "Now there's your problem" and just focus on the words being spoken, pushes everything out of my mind.
But also, as I get older I worry less about my own mortality - me, you, everyone we both know - all going to die, and worrying about it isn't going to change that.
Funny that it looks like you’re being downvoted for what seems like an honest reply. I have anxiety about lots of things, mortality among the top of them, and the advice not to worry about things you can’t change is near universal (though very hard to apply; things I can’t change are almost exclusively what I worry about because why would I worry about the things I can?).
Podcasts do sometimes work for me and I have some sleep meditation (yoga nidra) stuff I listen to as well. Combined with the odd supplement or medication, I can usually get some sleep but I’ve yet to find a silver bullet.
For me, pain is definitely part of it. I fall asleep alright, then i wake up with my arms both asleep and my ribs aching where i'm lying on them, and it's quite hard to fall asleep again. To be honest, i might just need a new mattress.
I like the say the worst part of getting older isn’t your body breaking down, it’s the accumulation of things you can’t unsee that keep you up at night.
For me personally I know that what you mention is the problem. My life has become very stressful in existential ways that it wasn't before. I can link my sleep problems to discrete events, which, if they were resolved, would probably resolve some of my sleep problems. Stress is all the explanation that's needed.
Funnily enough when I was much younger I developed amnesia. It was devastating in many levels. Lost friendships, it impacted my long term memory, my concentration. I could go several nights without sleep no matter what I did.
My mind would wander, I would worry about things, it was a nightmare.
Eventually I had to relearn how to fall asleep. I am now much older and I won’t say my sleep is perfect, but I can easily fall asleep within minutes. I had to rewire myself to empty my mind of every external real life related thought. What works for me is to build an imaginary world and dive into it. Eventually that world disappears and I fall asleep.
I know there are other techniques but this works for me.
I'm not who you're responding to, so I don't know what they intended. But sleep issues can certainly lead to memory issues. So, maybe both?
When I was in my mid 30s, I suddenly had extreme memory issues. For example, at dinner time, I had no memory of what I ate for lunch or even if I had lunch at all. I could remember people that I knew, but I could not remember if I talked with them earlier in the day. It was all very scary.
After various neurological tests showed nothing unusual, my doctor thought we should look into sleep issues. It turned out I suffer from something called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome - whereas the average person has a natural bedtime that is ~24 hours after they last went to sleep, mine was significantly longer than 24 hours.
My doctor concluded that this was the source of my memory issues. That confused me a bit, as I experienced trouble sleeping my entire life prior to this diagnosis. She explained that the consequences of inadequate sleep worsen as we age.
It was inconvenient for work and social things, but I was able to start living longer days (i.e., don't go to bed until I'm sleepy). Within a week, the recall issues I'd had were a memory (see what I did there?). I was also able to fall asleep much more quickly than I had before, and sleep duration didn't have the wild swings I'd experienced all my life.
I would love to hear more about how you successfully releared how to fall asleep.
I'm facing a similar battle right now, I've always been a "night person" and on a roughly 28h day, for the past year I've been (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to force myself into a morning person and 24h day. It's kinda worked, though I get btw 3-6h of sleep, which isn't enough.
I struggle with this as well and decided the only thing I can control is wake up, so I stretch those into 45-90 minute periods using increasing music volume to wake up.
Having a time period to wake up makes it more likely I fall asleep in a predictable time period. Going to sleep at X to wake up at Y is all fail for me.
My method is similar to meditation. I focus on my faint tinnitus, and expand the peripheral awareness to any other sounds. When my mind starts wandering I bring the focus back to the sense of hearing. It helps clear the mind and I'm out in minutes, pretty reliably. Only time it doesn't work is when I've had too much coffee (not that I learn from that mistake).
I also tried other methods, like reading a book before sleep, the 4-7-8 breathing pattern, and the white noise generator, but to me they are just distractions.
What do you mean 28h day? Are you going to bed 4 hours later every day than the day before? How can you do this and keep a job, or even schedule appointments several weeks out?
Left to my own devices, I fall into something like that, yes. My ideal world would be one in which I was allowed to stay up and keep being productive, instead of feeling like I'm hitting my stride right as the external world says it's time to go to sleep.
I donno, it hasn't been a big deal. I've worked for startups and also doing consulting work the past 20 years, I always mentioned my weird schedule when interviewing, maybe it's tech, maybe just my bubble, but it's fine. During that time I didn't tend to schedule many appointments.
Now I'm doing a different thing, trying to see if I can actually adapt to be on a 24h schedule and be a "morning person" and all that.
I was feeling motivated last night at 1am, and it took every inch of my body to NOT whip out VS Code.
Still couldn't sleep until 4am. Woke up today at 1pm.
--
I used to think that growing up would mean that I could go to sleep whenever I wanted, and do what I want.
Turns out that growing up means you learn that you shouldn't do those things.
But why? My mornings are usually clear of meetings, and I could just work PST hours from the east coast, and it would be fine.
Turned out that working every evening is not good for your social life, and having a social life is something I try to prioritise more than hacking all day all night.
A battled this for most of my life, the biggest difference surprisingly has been trying to shift meals earlier and earlier in the day. Search for ETRF, early time restricted feeding.
I can't say I've been able to solve this problem 100% but personally visualizing a very cold environment I'm trying to keep warm from helps. Also keeping the room really cool with ample warmth from sheets seems to help.
I have a similar strategy as I've found it's quite hard to just not think about whatever is stressing me out. So I try and plot out novels, or write songs in my head, or come up with weird architectural problems and whatever design might solve them.
I firmly believe that most problems people have with sleep also depend on modern "way of living", that is highly Artificial.
For example, lots of people have Apnea, and Apnea is highly correlated with being obese, and being obese is normal in the Western world, but it was not 100 years ago.
So it is not about being older but about being overweight, something that depends on eating healthy and exercising, that most people do not do.
Another important factor is artificial lighting, again a 100 years old thing, people that have used candles know how dim they are, and people using screens in the bedroom until late, specially social media.
Social Media is addictive, but you don't need to use it, people can stop using it, but they just don't want to.
Also living in the city is noisy, expensive and stressful. Most people are worried about lots of things, and that makes them sleep badly.
Also alarm clocks, caffeine, unnatural sleep schedules. This site[1] has lots of good information, with this basic (unfortunately impossible for many) recommendation:
"There is only one formula for healthy and refreshing sleep: Go to sleep only when you are very tired. Not earlier. Not later. Wake up naturally without an alarm clock."
Unfortunately for me that would entail staying up until 3AM and waking up at 11AM. That might work for me, but it doesn't work for my professional or social life.
Yeah I had a period before I had kids and when I worked for myself where I could sleep whenever I wanted. I’d get tired around 3-4am, go to sleep about 5am, wake up around 12-1pm, and felt great every day. The most energy, motivation, and general good moods I’ve had in my life.
Then kids + career = 10pm-5am sleep schedule and pretty much feel tired (struggling-to-function tired) 24/7.
In the same cart now. Not sure how you can stay functional as a human with a 2 year old who won't sleep past 6am. Going to bed super early doesn't seem to help either. I can force myself to go to sleep before 10pm so in theory I get a full restorative 8 hours of sleep, but I don't feel anywhere near as rested as I was doing 2am-10am.
In my teenage years, I was a nocturnal primate. It worked with my work schedule (retail, 2pm start), but, as has been noted by others here, as well, that simply will not work anymore. Both due to age and due to work requirements. Social life isn't particularly impacted, but tiredness due to lack of sleep has impacted both work effectiveness and even getting work, where I showed up at interviews groggy and clearly slower in responses and ability to express what was my intent vs. what came out.
Haven't figured out a balance yet, but at the very least I have an idea of what causes it, exacerbated by stress and related causalities.
I think the worst aspect of it nowadays is that the cycle seems difficult to break. Thanks to this conversational reminder, I'll try to hit the hay when the body seeks it, no matter how early. Waking up is not a problem. It's the falling asleep part that has caused me to gray severely in the past 3 years, through and post pandemic.
It came on so quickly and strongly, I still feel robbed.
Grey hair is your main concern here? Just dye it. (I assume you are a man. Why? Most women in the developed world start dying their hair to hide grey hair in their 40s.) In East Asia, it is also very common for men to dye their hair to hide grey hair.
To reply to you and previous commenter, it's a combination of both. Literally, I've grayed within the past 2 years excessively (or perhaps normal by hittin 40 - it felt rather quick). The worries and stress and existential this and that (without going into details, we all swallow some bullets) clearly made a difference, and CV-19 didn't help.
It's ultimately a synonym for worry - and whatever it entails.
As for literally dying my hair, I did once a while ago. Never again. It felt awkward, impersonal, awkward (x2), fraudulent, and so on. It's good to feel comfotable in one one's skin, even while it whithers.
During the early pandemic, neither of my kids had school and my wife wasn't working (and I was running my own company and set the meeting time). So we just turned off all the alarms. Went to bed when we wanted, woke up when we wanted.
The kids would go to bed around 2am and wake up around 11am. My wife and I would go to bed around 3-4am and wake up at 11am. It was fantastic.
Sadly modern life doesn't allow for that, as we have to take them to school at a set time and I have to meet with other people now.
That sounds sublime. I'm currently working for a company that allows me to be fairly flexible with my hours and I've found it's been amazing for my productivity.
Some days I wake up late and miss a portion of the work day but I'm able to work later and have a fresh mind for the entirety of my work time. With this routine I've found I'm managing to accomplish way more than I did in a previously more rigid environment.
Currently I'm an IC so it's easier to have this kind of schedule. At past jobs when I was in more of a managerial role so this wouldn't have been as easy due to the amount of meetings with various partners and employees.
This experience has been so positive it's made it so that I'm now pursuing a job/career where I can maintain this lifestyle. I loathe wasting time sitting around because I'm tired.
No, I didn't think it would be that interesting. I tell the story from time to time when it's relevant. :)
I mean, my post above is pretty much all there is. We basically lived on that schedule until my daughter started online kindergarten. Then we made her roll out of bed at 8:38 to be online by 8:40.
Yes, that is correct. And they slept until they weren't tired anymore, which was usually 9ish hours, a totally normal amount of sleep for someone that age.
We live in the Bay Area, so the sun was setting around 8pm since it was spring/summer. Our whole family are night owls, but regular society just isn't designed for that.
Of course now that they have regular school they have a regular bedtime that still gets them 9+ hours sleep (actually closer to 10 hours), but they are still groggy and slow in the morning because it is not when their body wants to be awake.
It sounds like you may have delayed sleep phase disorder -- basically, a late-shifted circadian rhythm. I keep similar hours by default and was diagnosed with DSPD about 5 years ago. It explained a lot of issues in my life and was a relief to hear that I wasn't just "lazy" like all the morning people always told me!
As an additional plus, if you are in the United States, sleep disorders qualify as disabilities, which means employers are generally required to make reasonable accommodations, including later working hours. I find that tech companies are generally fine with varying hours anyway, but it's a nice tool to keep in your back pocket in case you have a manager that insists on 9am meetings.
I'm pretty sure I have this too. In the evenings I'd always have this invigoration even when I was young. And in the morning I just can't get up. My day is always flexible at the end and never at the start.
I wonder where and how to get this diagnosed though.
Tell your doctor about your symptoms and ask them to refer you to a sleep study. They hook you up to monitors and watch you overnight. That's how I was diagnosed.
> "There is only one formula for healthy and refreshing sleep: Go to sleep only when you are very tired. Not earlier. Not later. Wake up naturally without an alarm clock."
I did that for years when I was younger. For me that meant a longer-than-24-hour day which quickly led to being completely nocturnal. Those were dark days, literally and figuratively. I can distinctly remember my first "day" without daylight. It wasn't a nice feeling. I would usually try to correct it when that happened which was like having a 12 hour jet lag.
Whenever I let my schedule go I usually end up in a similar situation. It almost feels like my body would prefer a 19 hour wake period with 7 hours of sleep which would keep my sleep wake cycle rotating throughout a 24 hour period. Not very conducive to working in a business setting with meetings and such.
I did this once. It was great. I still think of it and wish I could go back.
Yes, it causes issues within our society. That's the only thing keeping me from it and I bemoan this on a daily basis. If we were more flexible I could thrive.
For me it wasn't just about society. In the UK in the winter we only have 6 hours of daylight. So I would be sleeping through that for a week and basically living in a dark world. Not only is it thoroughly limiting as there's so much you can only do in daylight, it just seemed really "wrong" and caused depression to set in very quickly.
Do you experiment with light at all? I feel like light is an important mediating nexus between depression and lifestyle that is horrificially underexamined and unexplored
I feel like if you ensure you get the same blast of waking light every day it doesn't really matter what you do, your appetite for sleep and your circ will ensure you crash when that needs to happen and you will entrain yourself to more or less arise at basically the same timeframe
That formula does not work if your cicardian rhythm is untuned, which is the case for many people. It takes lots and lots of repetition to get to the point where you can wake up without alarms at a consistent time.
I wake up with the alarm only if I go to bed too late, otherwise I assume I have to sleep for 10 hours, go to bed and my body naturally wakes up between 830 and 930 hours of sleep. Very resting. Also if I gwt 2 days of 9 hours, the next day usually I end up sleeping 8 and still feel rested, so it seems the body naturally adjusts
My monitor's lowest brightness setting is almost uncomfortably bright in the dark. The same on my phone, but the lowest brightness setting is okay, but the second lowest is far too bright.
If you have an iPhone, you can lower the brightness even further by going to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and enabling “Reduce white point”. Then you can triple press the power button to toggle it.
But I agree with your overall point. It shouldn’t be hidden under accessibility, and more devices should have lower brightness settings.
I assume it's hidden to stop users from accidentally setting brightness to its true lowest and then being unable to revert the change because the screen would now be too dark for most users to see anything at all.
Ive set that to guided access so my child can play with the phone. If anyone from Apple are reading this consider it a feature request to start this and guided access from the top right control panel. I need both.
Yep and actual low brightness settings. Not mess with the contrast so it reduces colour depth, which is what most screens do for low brightness levels :(
It's correlated, but the causality may be reversed. That is to say, sleep apnea probably causes and certainly doesn't help, obesity. There is a strong relationship between not getting enough sleep, and appetite control.
There are also a lot of other causes of sleep apnea, physiology being a big one, also obstructions in the nasal canal.
Agree. While sleep apnea risk does increase with obesity, it has a fairly high baseline. Sleep apnea is one of the most diagnosed conditions in service members separating or retiring from the military, and that is by definition not an obese group.
I have sleep apnea and am one of the most fit people I know. When I was in the military, I encouraged many of my friends who sleep poorly to get a sleep test and many of them - fit and young - were surprised to learn they also had it. I would not be surprised if some significant portion of the population has it and is just unaware. At anything short of severe levels, many people would never even suspect they have it.
Sleep apnea is one of the most diagnosed conditions in service members separating or retiring from the military
Woah. Why? Is there something specific about the (US?) military that causes it? Or do doctors measure/monitor for it more closely -- similar to the "explosion" of ADHD diagnoses in the last 20 years.
It is possible there are legitimate links (I lived and worked near the burn pits and those for sure messed up my respirstory system). But maybe more likely is because you get an automatic 50% disability rating from the VA when you’re diagnosed in service. It’s automatically presumed that if you had no diagnosis before that it is service connected. I.e. you developed it as a result of your service and therefore the VA will compensate you for it.
This means an extra $1-2 thousand per month for life in most cases. So there is this natural experiment where we have a population with a very high incentive to get tested compared to the baseline population.
This is no longer the case as of a year or two ago; they lowered it quite a bit. Even then it was quite hard to fake it; it just encouraged everyone to get tested.
It's not like you can just fake sleep apnea. The VA makes you get a sleep study. But it does raise the question of whether it's more common than we think for people to develop it between 20 and 50 or so and we simply don't realize it for non-veterans because they're less likely to get tested.
As someone who retired after 22 years in the US Military:
Because the toll that way of life takes on your body is at least a magnitude more than most civilians realize.
Years of little sleep in poor condition while under constant low level stress, being in unfamiliar conditions where you never quite feel safe sleeping, constant interruptions because the military activities don't stop while YOU sleep, poor temperature control (hot or cold), poor hygiene availability, poor sleeping surfaces, odd work schedules, short sleeping schedules...
Those are just the factors that you deal with for decades that relate to sleep. I wasn't a grunt; I did do a lot of move fast and don't break things or people die stuff (Nuclear Power, SAR Aviation, Amphibious Operations) and that was just how life was.
We had a few overweight people, but they were the exception. Those of us who were more senior were just all broken in so many ways. I don't THINK I have sleep apnea, but I do have trouble sleeping from the pain I'm in every night from a back injury and multiple autoimmune issues that cause flareups and pain.
The cost on those that serve is absolutely astounding. I don't recommend service to anyone.
“ Interactions Between Obesity and Sleep Apnea
Among the risk factors for OSA, obesity is probably the most important. Several cross-sectional studies have consistently found an association between increased body weight and the risk of OSA.16 Significant sleep apnea is present in ≈40% of obese individuals,17 and ≈70% of OSA patients are obese. Furthermore, in a population-based prospective study of 690 randomly selected Wisconsin residents, a 10% weight gain was associated with a 6-fold increase in the odds of development of sleep apnea (Figure 4).18 In the same study, a 10% weight loss predicted a 26% decrease in the apnea-hypopnea index (Figure 4). Similarly, in several other case-control studies, weight loss in OSA patients led to a significant decrease in apnea frequency.1”
> In the same study, a 10% weight loss predicted a 26% decrease in the apnea-hypopnea index
This isn't as earth shaking as you imagine. The minimum AHI for diagnosis (in the US) IS 5. 20ahi (meaning you stop breathing 20 times per hour on average), is pretty mild. Some people have ahi over 100. Meaning a 26% decrease isn't actually doing much for you.
What I can tell you is that I know several people who seem to have sleep apnea, complaining about the symptoms, who were told by their PCP that they don't need a sleep study because they weren't fat. When your partner complains about you choking in your sleep all night, you probably should a get it checked out regardless of your BMI. I honestly believe that doing a sleep study once every couple of years should be considered routine for everyone. We check our eyes, blood pressure, testicles, skin... Why not check for sleep quality prophylactically?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the OP using the condition as proof of societal causes of sleep issues is way off the mark. Skinny people can experience it. Children experience it. Bodybuilders are quite prone to it. As tissues loosen and sag with age across the body, old people are prone to it.
The increasing incidents of removal of wisdom teeth seems to indicate the human jaw is getting smaller due to our dietary changes since we moved on from hunter gatherers to pastoral farming.
Sleep apnea is not because you have fat in your neck obstructing your airway but your tongue relaxing at night and the area below the uvula falling backwards then obstructing your airway.
In particular sleep apnea is extremely common among weightlifters. It turns out that even modest weightlifting tends to increase muscle throughout the body and even a small increase in the size of the muscles of the neck can fundamentally change breathing during sleep.
Another important factor is pain. Pain prevents sound sleep. My mom, who has bad rheumatoid arthritis, says that a regular strength Tylenol will knock her out.
This is because it reduces her baseline pain to a point where she can rest.
This is a great point. I remember having my wisdom teeth removed in early university. The pain was unbearable at night. I would take pain killers... then wake up 4-6 hours later after they wore off. Waking up from pain is an incredible experience. I can still clearly remember it. And, to state the obvious: After surgery, good sleep is important for healing!
But they're not challenging them, are they? If they were challenging the opinions then there would need some sort of rebuttal. Instead they're essentially saying that OP worded it wrongly and therefore their points are invalid.
Call it what you want, pushing back on someone's opinion is acceptable, fine, and should be encouraged.
What we need to stop doing is making arguments that something being an opinion means it shouldn't be pushed back on.
It's one thing if someone says I like broccoli better than pizza, it's another when someone makes a statement that is not about their own preferences. Many of those opinions are bad and should be challenged.
this is slicing and dicing of words to try and weave a narrative.
The poster reacted to an opinion negatively and pointed out that people need to stop that behavior.
Can you imagine if someone said "raping children should be ok" and someone else tried to argue that saying people should stop raping children means they attacked the person and not the opinion?
right, they challenged the opinion, stop with the wordplay.
This may be obvious to most, but if you can’t sleep and your mind is empty, you probably have something bio going on.
If you can’t sleep and you have ten things you’re worrying about then it’s probably more psychological and you might have to get that sorted before expecting night bliss.
Have been amazed the number of people who complain about sleep and have all sorts of drama going on. People have this sense that the act of laying down and closing your eyes = sleep mode.
I believed this strategy when I was a kid to think about a problem before you go to sleep and while you sleep your brain will figure it out for you. You’ll wake up with the problem solved. I believed it just like I believed countless other unverified truths. I think it caused me a lot of sleep problems over the years because I’d be mentally grinding away in the dark, trying to prep my brain for all the wonderful problem solving it was going to do, and… ending up never going to sleep because I had worries, ideas, things to do.
I now work hard on meditation-style “make your mind blank” effort at sleep time. Any worry I have, it can be handled tomorrow. (But I have to in good faith have a plan to address it in the morning.) This has made it much easier to fall asleep.
IIRC, the explanation of Matthew Walker, a well respected sleep researcher and author, (https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...) involves melatonin. It's a sleep timer: Melatonin levels peek in the middle of the day and are lowest around midnight. "Around" is the important part. As we get older, melatonines gets is earlier and earlier, say 1am for a juvenile but 8pm for a retiree. But the retiree doesn't got to sleep at 8pm because of social activities, watching a movie or a late night sports game. By the time he goes to bed, it's already too late and at 4am, melatonin levels are so high that he cannot sleep anymore, despite being tired.
I've read that Matthew Walker isn't a good source on sleep, as he tends to just make up some claims or bend the data to support whatever point he wants to make [1].
According to the blog post, the treatment for some sleep disorders is to take a dose of melatonin during the day, which moves your natural melatonin production earlier for unclear reasons. Maybe there's confusion between when you take the melatonin and when melatonin is naturally highest?
Yeah, it was my understanding that melatonin is secreted under low-light conditions according to one's circadian rhythm.
> A substantial number of studies have shown that, within this rhythmic profile, the onset of melatonin secretion under dim light conditions (the dim light melatonin onset or DLMO) is the single most accurate marker for assessing the circadian pacemaker. Additionally, melatonin onset has been used clinically to evaluate problems related to the onset or offset of sleep. DLMO is useful for determining whether an individual is entrained (synchronized) to a 24-h light/dark (LD) cycle or is in a free-running state. DLMO is also useful for assessing phase delays or advances of rhythms in entrained individuals. Additionally, it has become an important tool for psychiatric diagnosis, its use being recommended for phase typing in patients suffering from sleep and mood disorders. More recently, DLMO has also been used to assess the chronobiological features of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). DLMO marker is also useful for identifying optimal application times for therapies such as bright light or exogenous melatonin treatment. [1]
I don’t know about melatonin specifically, but some people react differently to chemicals than others. I’ve got a friend who could drink half a can of caffeinated soda and literally be wired as if he’d taken a recreational upper. I found I slept easier when I took adderall which would have the opposite effect on most folks.
This finding seems to be at odds with what I have heard about melatonin. Everything I have read says higher melatonin helps promote sleep, otherwise why would taking small doses near bedtime work?
Since I almost never sleep for more than 5-6 hours, in my early 20s I wanted the cycle to be more like 32 hours, or at least 28. Now, 20 years later, I think 32 would be too much but 28 is still looking attractive to me, especially with an afternoon nap just after lunch.
I’ve slept better as I age because there isn’t a government enforced mandate to force me to wake me up early in the morning and go into a room with my same age peers. Not being in poverty helps as well.
I found children were set up to fail so spectacularly when it comes to sleep that I wonder why it would become more elusive with age.
> a government enforced mandate to force me to wake me up early in the morning and go into a room with my same age peers
When someone jumps into a discussion and reframes a well known concept in a way that's intended to make people angry so that they can further a point of view that is orthogonal (x) to the current discussion, I always wonder, why?
Has life taught you that this is a useful way to further a discussion?
Do people respond well to it?
Or do you just like strong reactions to what you say and you have found that stating things in a way designed to elicit anger is a good way to get those?
(x) This article is about sleep patterns in adults over 60 versus younger adults, not sleep deprivation in children and teens who are forced to get up early for school. Your point is not totally unrelated, it's worth discussing, and it's also orthogonal to the actual discussion here. So again, why did you feel the need to jump in and try to make people angry about it?
I feel you are seeing it wrong. You are feeling anger where it wasn't meant to be.
The way I read these types of comments is trying to reframe typical human actions in an "impartial " light. Everybody knows kids should go yk school, if someone dared to say otherwise people would jump to "cancel" them because "think of the children". So trying to put the argument in a different light to avoid the knee-jerk reactions helps drive conversation.
I hate that English is not my first language, so my argument here surely reads somewhat funky.
I greatly appreciate when people reframe old ideas in a new light. It's not only helpful to the conversation, but an effective way to communicate with people who have entrenched ideas and need help getting out of a rut. Perhaps the discomfort you're feeling is from being challenged.
I waited way too long to do mine and learned so much afterwards.
In my case, while I don't have apnea (many MANY people do, and not just fat people!), I learned that I have a deviated septum that causes airflow problems primarily during sleep, especially in our dusty ass house. (I have since installed air purifiers.)
My daily sleep quality improved considerably after using breathe right strips, Flonase and melatonin, all at the direction of my ENT. I still have episodes of maintenance insomnia (waking up at night), but they've gone way down.
I also didn't know that taking melatonin 1.5-3hr before bed and Flonase 30m before falling asleep can greatly help induce sleep quickly. Melatonin is also non-habit-forming and is produced naturally by the body, so taking SMALL amounts of it daily is completely fine. (small = 1.5-3mg)
There's other stuff that can affect sleep quality for sure (staying in bed when you can't fall back asleep; inconsistent sleep/wake times; doing things other than sleeping or aggressive snuggling), but getting a sleep study done and ruling out physical reasons is so, so, so important.
GET A SLEEP STUDY DONE!
(Also, if you're struggling with insomnia, look into CBT-I. It's hard work, but your sleep will improve demonstrably if you stick to the program. But not before getting your sleep study done!)
I feel like maybe one of the causes of apparently such widespread sleep apnea is how most people, as far as I gather, sleep with their windows closed. This is deeply unnatural—we evolved to sleep more or less outside, or at least in a shelter with a steady airflow—so of COURSE sleeping in an unventilated box with stale, stagnant air is going to result in not getting enough air while sleeping. A CPAP machine is basically doing the same thing. This is pure speculation, so I’m curious if anyone else has any perspective on this.
This is indeed pure speculation and not how a CPAP works or even sound in thesis.
There is not an oxygen supply problem in a room even if it isn’t actively being ventilated. If there was, you’d have bigger problems. Also plenty of people do have some form of ventilation or air circulation in their homes.
Unless you’re sleeping in a tiny cramped space that is almost fully sealed, this is not an issue.
Yes the sleep study people are the same people selling CPAP machines. So, yet it feels a bit like a scam “hey, what do you know, you need to buy our products!” But, most of the people I know who have used CPAP machines are very happy with the improvement in rest. So, it seems beneficial even the results seem biased in favor of the merchants. Maybe it’s just a big problem.
While that is definitely possible, the ENT who conducted my study was eager to tell me that I _didn't_ have it. He only recommended the procedure I'm getting after I mentioned using Breathe Right strips.
Never slept better getting older; I used to do 3-5 hour nights in my 20s because of stress for my company, sold the company and had no worries anymore so slept 8-9 hours/day. Opened another company but with far less worries (if it fails it’s sad but far from the existential stress the first company was) so now into my 50s I lay down, pass out and wake exactly 8 hours later. Usually remembering at least a few dreams.
I remember my granddad having the complete reverse; he slept well when younger (during WOII, which I would think is an actual existential threat vs monetary one) and when he was 50, he would take heavy sleeping pills and then even only get 4 hours or so.
I have never noticed that sleep gets more elusive as I get older. In fact it seems the opposite. As a teen and young adult it was not uncommon for me to toss and turn for hours before I could sleep. Something I almost never have now.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadSince 2020 I have manually tracked 35093 data points about my life [1]. And the one parameter that correlates most with my sleep time is how many steps I took during the day.
The median number of steps I take during a day is about 9500.
When I look at the sleep time of the following night, on average I slept an additional 9 minutes after a day with 9500 steps or more compared to a day with less than 9500 steps.
The gap increases to 16 minutes when I look at nights where I walked over 12000 steps in the previous day.
To see if that is just correlation or if there is causation at play, I also started to decide to take an additional walk or not by coin flip. So far, I did that 31 times. 16 times the coin decided to take a walk, 21 times it decided not to. On average, I slept 13 minutes longer after the coin decided that I take an additional walk. 31 is a very small N of course. I hope to have a larger sample by the end of next year.
1: https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking
> A widely repeated claim of remarkable longevity of the Hunza people has been refuted as a longevity myth, citing a life expectancy of 53 years for men and 52 for women, although with a high standard deviation.
I agree with the point on physical activity, but the implication that traditional cultures have as long or longer lifespans is easily dismissed as inaccurate.
All so-called "blue zones" are in traditional cultures (food and general lifestyle wise).
Blue zones seems somewhat ambiguous but if I'm understanding correctly, they are small areas of people who live more traditionally surrounded by mostly modern people? Seems like by definition those zones are made up of cherry picked people and it's unclear to me that those aren't just outliers.
HRV is generally the metric used. You can measure that with a cheap chest monitor, or get a fitness watch that tracks it continuously throughout the day and night.
Good HRV levels are highly correlated to activity level, so your base hypothesis still makes sense.
Is there a standardized way to measure sleep quality? Or are the numbers one measures only compareable as long as one uses the same device?
I would be interested in suggestions which watches measure the HRV / Sleep quality reliably and display the data on screen. Or let me get it from a Linux laptop. I hate having to install an app to get the info off the watch.
One performance and health coach I follow recommends the Polar H10 chest strap to take a measurement every morning.
https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens/status/1723334537235607989
https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens/status/1473672665541984259
There's also not an absolute number or threshold that's good or bad. Generally higher is better, but what really matters are the fluctuations from a personalized baseline.
Is it even possible to sleep with the H10 strap?
However, HRV is not the whole story about sleep quality. If you develop sleep apnea, for example, your HRV will not react very much, though your sleep quality will suffer. There is no substitute for sleep study to detect such issues.
I'm a little skeptical about my Garmin's ability to accurately measure sleep quality.
Sometimes I wake up refreshed and felt like I slept very well, only to have my Garmin tell me that I had poor sleep quality (usually because of too little REM sleep), other times I've had a bad night of sleeping (like the dog needed to go out several times) and I wake up tired, and my watch congratulates me on good sleep quality.
I wonder if one of the sleep monitors that uses a pad on the mattress would be more accurate.
edit: just checked, I did a 120km bike ride this year and the next night I slept for around 6h.
Intensive or prolonged exercise (especially close to bedtime) can actually interfere with sleep. I never sleep very well the night after 10k runs or 60km+ rides. There is a sweet spot (for sleep quality) between zero exercise and too much exercise.
Try weight training in the morning. I’m someone that doesn’t usually nap… but after starting weight training I find myself needing a nap in the afternoon, and it is much easier to fall asleep.
But its one of the more annoying experiments to let a coin decide if you have to take another walk :) So I'm not sure how often I will do that. I'm pretty convinced already that walking more is a good thing.
I'm in a hurry right now, but I will probably write a full blog post about the steps-sleep relationship with p values and everything some time next year.
You aren't sleeping less because you need less. You have lost the ability to stay asleep for a healthy amount of time.
It took a lot of effort to reset my body to obtain a more healthy amount of sleep. I think I went about a month with 1-3 hours per night. The initial cause was "sleep regression in twins", but that was only for 2 weeks. The next 2 weeks was how long it took me to get my body to sleep more than a couple hours per night.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...
It’s mostly a fairly simple scheduling problem, plus having one adult sleeping somewhere they can’t hear the baby during each “shift” (loud fans help). Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby also lets you slooowwwly stretch your response times longer, which is a nice smooth way work toward the glorious 1-feeding-per-night and finally no-night-feedings period (babies wake up and cry even when not hungry—past the earliest weeks, immediate feeding may not be necessary, and if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer)
All bets off if you have a kid who’s ill, but for most babies, it’s entirely achievable.
Wouldn't it be easier to have a soundproofed room for either the parents or the baby?
Your key assumption is "not badly space-constrained" is plausible, but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
> if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer
Your observations would be in favor of soundproofing where delaying intervention would be a feature, not a bug.
> but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
For parents with 9-5 sorts of jobs, it works fine. You don’t even need “sleep-per-parent x2” amounts of contiguous time available, because there’ll be a gap of usually a hour or three between the last time the kid wakes up for first-parent and the first time they wake up for second-parent, and it’s not like you can’t get any sleep while “on duty”. We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent in the very worst weeks for each kid, and more than that for total sleep, with a sleep window (for us, the parents) of about 10 hours. Not sure what you mean. Yeah inconsistent shift work or something could mess it up, but that messes up everything.
I'm basically non functional at less than 7h of uninterrupted sleep per night.
> We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent
It may not be enough
> What’s with the soundproofing thing?
Soundproof the room where either the parents or the baby are would be more reliable to control the noise level by preventing it from reaching out instead of adding more.
It could also be converted later into a music room
What we did was just one of us would sleep in another room with the monitor, and the other in our normal bedroom. Fan and door closed was all the soundproofing we needed in the normal bedroom. But that’s why having little space might make it a lot tougher—ours relied on having three rooms, two of which with sleeping-places for adults.
And Ok we probably weren’t averaging 7 hours uninterrupted until about 6-8 weeks, but total sleep was consistently over 7, and uninterrupted of 6ish is a lot better than what many parents report (the ones where both get up for every feeding… I’ll never understand those folks)
[edit] my overall point is that with just a little thought applied to the problem, and possibly some resources but likely not that much if you already live in a house instead of a small apartment, you’re not guaranteed impossibly-short sounding amounts of sleep just because you have an infant.
Oh I absolutely agree, I just wanted to understand the problem better and see if there was something I had missed!
and "Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby" made things worse
our experience was a not great to begin with, but the sleep deprivation only lasted around 6-10months per child and for the benefits it gave - I would definately do it again
to all the potential parents out there, please do your own research and try not to fall in the trap of the victorian mindset - which on the whole (massively over simplifying it) seems to suggest actions to make your life easier at the expense of the baby.
[edit] and actually the whole rest of this holds without capping it with that action, it just means you’ll need to keep up the shift thing for 6-12 months instead of 3, and—from what I’ve seen—deal with a couple nights a week of your kid waking up in the middle of the night the whole rest of their early childhood. The shift-sleeping strategy has no bearing on that, but does get you a couple REM cycles a night, even in the worst of it.
(But yes, worth it).
Oh, to be young again and when you can fall asleep without a busy mind keeping you awake.
Back then, I was practically always dead asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow and a snooze was always within easy reach no matter when I tried (wasn’t uncommon to have a 1-2 hour nap after coming home from school). Flash forward 16 years to today and getting to sleep isn’t too much of a problem but it’s much more common to have trouble with getting my head stopped long enough to drift off, especially nights when I don’t make a point of doing almost nothing for 2-3 hours prior to wind down.
But also, as I get older I worry less about my own mortality - me, you, everyone we both know - all going to die, and worrying about it isn't going to change that.
Podcasts do sometimes work for me and I have some sleep meditation (yoga nidra) stuff I listen to as well. Combined with the odd supplement or medication, I can usually get some sleep but I’ve yet to find a silver bullet.
My mind would wander, I would worry about things, it was a nightmare.
Eventually I had to relearn how to fall asleep. I am now much older and I won’t say my sleep is perfect, but I can easily fall asleep within minutes. I had to rewire myself to empty my mind of every external real life related thought. What works for me is to build an imaginary world and dive into it. Eventually that world disappears and I fall asleep.
I know there are other techniques but this works for me.
When I was in my mid 30s, I suddenly had extreme memory issues. For example, at dinner time, I had no memory of what I ate for lunch or even if I had lunch at all. I could remember people that I knew, but I could not remember if I talked with them earlier in the day. It was all very scary.
After various neurological tests showed nothing unusual, my doctor thought we should look into sleep issues. It turned out I suffer from something called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome - whereas the average person has a natural bedtime that is ~24 hours after they last went to sleep, mine was significantly longer than 24 hours.
My doctor concluded that this was the source of my memory issues. That confused me a bit, as I experienced trouble sleeping my entire life prior to this diagnosis. She explained that the consequences of inadequate sleep worsen as we age.
It was inconvenient for work and social things, but I was able to start living longer days (i.e., don't go to bed until I'm sleepy). Within a week, the recall issues I'd had were a memory (see what I did there?). I was also able to fall asleep much more quickly than I had before, and sleep duration didn't have the wild swings I'd experienced all my life.
I'm facing a similar battle right now, I've always been a "night person" and on a roughly 28h day, for the past year I've been (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to force myself into a morning person and 24h day. It's kinda worked, though I get btw 3-6h of sleep, which isn't enough.
Having a time period to wake up makes it more likely I fall asleep in a predictable time period. Going to sleep at X to wake up at Y is all fail for me.
I also tried other methods, like reading a book before sleep, the 4-7-8 breathing pattern, and the white noise generator, but to me they are just distractions.
I donno, it hasn't been a big deal. I've worked for startups and also doing consulting work the past 20 years, I always mentioned my weird schedule when interviewing, maybe it's tech, maybe just my bubble, but it's fine. During that time I didn't tend to schedule many appointments.
Now I'm doing a different thing, trying to see if I can actually adapt to be on a 24h schedule and be a "morning person" and all that.
I was feeling motivated last night at 1am, and it took every inch of my body to NOT whip out VS Code.
Still couldn't sleep until 4am. Woke up today at 1pm.
--
I used to think that growing up would mean that I could go to sleep whenever I wanted, and do what I want.
Turns out that growing up means you learn that you shouldn't do those things.
But why? My mornings are usually clear of meetings, and I could just work PST hours from the east coast, and it would be fine.
Turned out that working every evening is not good for your social life, and having a social life is something I try to prioritise more than hacking all day all night.
I'm not sure why though.
I also started to excercise more for over a year now, wear a sleep mask and changed my diet to focus more on the wellbeing of my gut bacteria.
I firmly believe that most problems people have with sleep also depend on modern "way of living", that is highly Artificial.
For example, lots of people have Apnea, and Apnea is highly correlated with being obese, and being obese is normal in the Western world, but it was not 100 years ago.
So it is not about being older but about being overweight, something that depends on eating healthy and exercising, that most people do not do.
Another important factor is artificial lighting, again a 100 years old thing, people that have used candles know how dim they are, and people using screens in the bedroom until late, specially social media.
Social Media is addictive, but you don't need to use it, people can stop using it, but they just don't want to.
Also living in the city is noisy, expensive and stressful. Most people are worried about lots of things, and that makes them sleep badly.
"There is only one formula for healthy and refreshing sleep: Go to sleep only when you are very tired. Not earlier. Not later. Wake up naturally without an alarm clock."
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_sleep
Then kids + career = 10pm-5am sleep schedule and pretty much feel tired (struggling-to-function tired) 24/7.
I think the worst aspect of it nowadays is that the cycle seems difficult to break. Thanks to this conversational reminder, I'll try to hit the hay when the body seeks it, no matter how early. Waking up is not a problem. It's the falling asleep part that has caused me to gray severely in the past 3 years, through and post pandemic.
It came on so quickly and strongly, I still feel robbed.
It's ultimately a synonym for worry - and whatever it entails.
As for literally dying my hair, I did once a while ago. Never again. It felt awkward, impersonal, awkward (x2), fraudulent, and so on. It's good to feel comfotable in one one's skin, even while it whithers.
The kids would go to bed around 2am and wake up around 11am. My wife and I would go to bed around 3-4am and wake up at 11am. It was fantastic.
Sadly modern life doesn't allow for that, as we have to take them to school at a set time and I have to meet with other people now.
Some days I wake up late and miss a portion of the work day but I'm able to work later and have a fresh mind for the entirety of my work time. With this routine I've found I'm managing to accomplish way more than I did in a previously more rigid environment.
Currently I'm an IC so it's easier to have this kind of schedule. At past jobs when I was in more of a managerial role so this wouldn't have been as easy due to the amount of meetings with various partners and employees.
This experience has been so positive it's made it so that I'm now pursuing a job/career where I can maintain this lifestyle. I loathe wasting time sitting around because I'm tired.
I mean, my post above is pretty much all there is. We basically lived on that schedule until my daughter started online kindergarten. Then we made her roll out of bed at 8:38 to be online by 8:40.
When did the sun set where you lived during that time? I suppose that was a big influence on sleep times?
We live in the Bay Area, so the sun was setting around 8pm since it was spring/summer. Our whole family are night owls, but regular society just isn't designed for that.
Of course now that they have regular school they have a regular bedtime that still gets them 9+ hours sleep (actually closer to 10 hours), but they are still groggy and slow in the morning because it is not when their body wants to be awake.
As an additional plus, if you are in the United States, sleep disorders qualify as disabilities, which means employers are generally required to make reasonable accommodations, including later working hours. I find that tech companies are generally fine with varying hours anyway, but it's a nice tool to keep in your back pocket in case you have a manager that insists on 9am meetings.
I wonder where and how to get this diagnosed though.
The sleep formula article said “truly sleepy” which, to me, is significantly different from “very tired”.
I did that for years when I was younger. For me that meant a longer-than-24-hour day which quickly led to being completely nocturnal. Those were dark days, literally and figuratively. I can distinctly remember my first "day" without daylight. It wasn't a nice feeling. I would usually try to correct it when that happened which was like having a 12 hour jet lag.
Yes, it causes issues within our society. That's the only thing keeping me from it and I bemoan this on a daily basis. If we were more flexible I could thrive.
I wake up with the alarm only if I go to bed too late, otherwise I assume I have to sleep for 10 hours, go to bed and my body naturally wakes up between 830 and 930 hours of sleep. Very resting. Also if I gwt 2 days of 9 hours, the next day usually I end up sleeping 8 and still feel rested, so it seems the body naturally adjusts
Hardware designers reading this: add darker brightness settings FFS.
But I agree with your overall point. It shouldn’t be hidden under accessibility, and more devices should have lower brightness settings.
There are also a lot of other causes of sleep apnea, physiology being a big one, also obstructions in the nasal canal.
I have sleep apnea and am one of the most fit people I know. When I was in the military, I encouraged many of my friends who sleep poorly to get a sleep test and many of them - fit and young - were surprised to learn they also had it. I would not be surprised if some significant portion of the population has it and is just unaware. At anything short of severe levels, many people would never even suspect they have it.
This means an extra $1-2 thousand per month for life in most cases. So there is this natural experiment where we have a population with a very high incentive to get tested compared to the baseline population.
Because the toll that way of life takes on your body is at least a magnitude more than most civilians realize.
Years of little sleep in poor condition while under constant low level stress, being in unfamiliar conditions where you never quite feel safe sleeping, constant interruptions because the military activities don't stop while YOU sleep, poor temperature control (hot or cold), poor hygiene availability, poor sleeping surfaces, odd work schedules, short sleeping schedules...
Those are just the factors that you deal with for decades that relate to sleep. I wasn't a grunt; I did do a lot of move fast and don't break things or people die stuff (Nuclear Power, SAR Aviation, Amphibious Operations) and that was just how life was.
We had a few overweight people, but they were the exception. Those of us who were more senior were just all broken in so many ways. I don't THINK I have sleep apnea, but I do have trouble sleeping from the pain I'm in every night from a back injury and multiple autoimmune issues that cause flareups and pain.
The cost on those that serve is absolutely astounding. I don't recommend service to anyone.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.hyp.00001016...
This isn't as earth shaking as you imagine. The minimum AHI for diagnosis (in the US) IS 5. 20ahi (meaning you stop breathing 20 times per hour on average), is pretty mild. Some people have ahi over 100. Meaning a 26% decrease isn't actually doing much for you.
What I can tell you is that I know several people who seem to have sleep apnea, complaining about the symptoms, who were told by their PCP that they don't need a sleep study because they weren't fat. When your partner complains about you choking in your sleep all night, you probably should a get it checked out regardless of your BMI. I honestly believe that doing a sleep study once every couple of years should be considered routine for everyone. We check our eyes, blood pressure, testicles, skin... Why not check for sleep quality prophylactically?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the OP using the condition as proof of societal causes of sleep issues is way off the mark. Skinny people can experience it. Children experience it. Bodybuilders are quite prone to it. As tissues loosen and sag with age across the body, old people are prone to it.
Sleep apnea is not because you have fat in your neck obstructing your airway but your tongue relaxing at night and the area below the uvula falling backwards then obstructing your airway.
This is because it reduces her baseline pain to a point where she can rest.
Why don't we characterize it as "challenging" them?
What we need to stop doing is making arguments that something being an opinion means it shouldn't be pushed back on.
It's one thing if someone says I like broccoli better than pizza, it's another when someone makes a statement that is not about their own preferences. Many of those opinions are bad and should be challenged.
They didn't push back on the _opinion_, they pushed back on _expressing an opinion_:
¨Respectfully, "I firmly believe" followed by an assertion from a non expert passing as "facts" is a pox on our modern society.¨
Nothing in there is "challenging" the opinion or "pushing back" on the opinion -- it's criticizing _expressing an opinion_.
The poster reacted to an opinion negatively and pointed out that people need to stop that behavior.
Can you imagine if someone said "raping children should be ok" and someone else tried to argue that saying people should stop raping children means they attacked the person and not the opinion?
right, they challenged the opinion, stop with the wordplay.
Consider: “I firmly believe that fire is hot”. Sounds a bit odd, no?
If you can’t sleep and you have ten things you’re worrying about then it’s probably more psychological and you might have to get that sorted before expecting night bliss.
Have been amazed the number of people who complain about sleep and have all sorts of drama going on. People have this sense that the act of laying down and closing your eyes = sleep mode.
I now work hard on meditation-style “make your mind blank” effort at sleep time. Any worry I have, it can be handled tomorrow. (But I have to in good faith have a plan to address it in the morning.) This has made it much easier to fall asleep.
[1] - https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
EDIT:
>Melatonin levels peek in the middle of the day and are lowest around midnight.
Isn't that the opposite of how melatonin works?
According to the blog post, the treatment for some sleep disorders is to take a dose of melatonin during the day, which moves your natural melatonin production earlier for unclear reasons. Maybe there's confusion between when you take the melatonin and when melatonin is naturally highest?
> A substantial number of studies have shown that, within this rhythmic profile, the onset of melatonin secretion under dim light conditions (the dim light melatonin onset or DLMO) is the single most accurate marker for assessing the circadian pacemaker. Additionally, melatonin onset has been used clinically to evaluate problems related to the onset or offset of sleep. DLMO is useful for determining whether an individual is entrained (synchronized) to a 24-h light/dark (LD) cycle or is in a free-running state. DLMO is also useful for assessing phase delays or advances of rhythms in entrained individuals. Additionally, it has become an important tool for psychiatric diagnosis, its use being recommended for phase typing in patients suffering from sleep and mood disorders. More recently, DLMO has also been used to assess the chronobiological features of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). DLMO marker is also useful for identifying optimal application times for therapies such as bright light or exogenous melatonin treatment. [1]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16884842/
I found children were set up to fail so spectacularly when it comes to sleep that I wonder why it would become more elusive with age.
When someone jumps into a discussion and reframes a well known concept in a way that's intended to make people angry so that they can further a point of view that is orthogonal (x) to the current discussion, I always wonder, why?
Has life taught you that this is a useful way to further a discussion?
Do people respond well to it?
Or do you just like strong reactions to what you say and you have found that stating things in a way designed to elicit anger is a good way to get those?
(x) This article is about sleep patterns in adults over 60 versus younger adults, not sleep deprivation in children and teens who are forced to get up early for school. Your point is not totally unrelated, it's worth discussing, and it's also orthogonal to the actual discussion here. So again, why did you feel the need to jump in and try to make people angry about it?
The way I read these types of comments is trying to reframe typical human actions in an "impartial " light. Everybody knows kids should go yk school, if someone dared to say otherwise people would jump to "cancel" them because "think of the children". So trying to put the argument in a different light to avoid the knee-jerk reactions helps drive conversation.
I hate that English is not my first language, so my argument here surely reads somewhat funky.
I waited way too long to do mine and learned so much afterwards.
In my case, while I don't have apnea (many MANY people do, and not just fat people!), I learned that I have a deviated septum that causes airflow problems primarily during sleep, especially in our dusty ass house. (I have since installed air purifiers.)
My daily sleep quality improved considerably after using breathe right strips, Flonase and melatonin, all at the direction of my ENT. I still have episodes of maintenance insomnia (waking up at night), but they've gone way down.
I also didn't know that taking melatonin 1.5-3hr before bed and Flonase 30m before falling asleep can greatly help induce sleep quickly. Melatonin is also non-habit-forming and is produced naturally by the body, so taking SMALL amounts of it daily is completely fine. (small = 1.5-3mg)
There's other stuff that can affect sleep quality for sure (staying in bed when you can't fall back asleep; inconsistent sleep/wake times; doing things other than sleeping or aggressive snuggling), but getting a sleep study done and ruling out physical reasons is so, so, so important.
GET A SLEEP STUDY DONE!
(Also, if you're struggling with insomnia, look into CBT-I. It's hard work, but your sleep will improve demonstrably if you stick to the program. But not before getting your sleep study done!)
She said, “I can tell you right now that it’ll say you have sleep apnea; that’s all they ever say.”
Yes, I found a new doctor but with so many people being diagnosed with it, I do sometimes wonder.
Also a CPAP doesn't increase the amount of oxygen. It just increases the air pressure a bit to keep the airways from collapsing.
There is not an oxygen supply problem in a room even if it isn’t actively being ventilated. If there was, you’d have bigger problems. Also plenty of people do have some form of ventilation or air circulation in their homes.
Unless you’re sleeping in a tiny cramped space that is almost fully sealed, this is not an issue.
I remember my granddad having the complete reverse; he slept well when younger (during WOII, which I would think is an actual existential threat vs monetary one) and when he was 50, he would take heavy sleeping pills and then even only get 4 hours or so.
Mandatory:
- separate duvets for me & my partner, so we don't wake each other up by turning
- no screentime for ~1 hr before falling asleep
- going to bed and read a book for that ~1 hr. When I get sleepy I sleep
- bedroom as dark as possible
- physical activity of any kind
Less important:
- no caffeine in the ~8 hrs before falling asleep
- glass of warm milk before going to bed
Does the first person to get tired sleep with the room lit enough for the other to keep reading?
Probably because we're all dying.