Well that sucks, given I have a gene variant related to delayed sleep according to 23andme.
Last year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.
My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.
The article never says anything about causation. It says sleep regularity is a predictor of mortality. That means if you find someone who already has poor sleep regularity they're more likely to die sooner, not that if you force someone into a bad sleep schedule they will become more likely to die sooner.
Most things have second order effects, having a consistent sleep schedule may allow more healthier second order effects based on a more regular sleep pattern than duration. Duration also doesn't mean quality either.
As always with a lot of these: it's not saying causation.
You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.
Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.
Keyword: "associated"
EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.
Well in another example, I might put my arm out of the window and feel the wind moving fast on my arm and wrongly assume my car is going fast when it is simply windy and I am stationary.
I wonder how much of this is driven by confounding variables they haven't accounted for.
They do factor in shift work as a categorical variable, and employment status as a categorical variable not taking into account occupation. But probably occupation (not a variable here) interacts with sleep status. Any job that involves a lot of flying (pilot, crew, people travelling for business) get more cosmic radiation exposure, for example, and potentially more sleep disruption. Certain operations and manufacturing jobs correlated with exposure to carcinogens also likely correlate with less regular sleep, possibly in a way that isn't corrected for by the limited shift work categories.
I thought the same. If your life is so in order that you routinely sleep on the same interval, perhaps your life is not as stressful as others who sleep more chaotically
usually these studies are done across a very narrow sample of Earth's population. often from similar region or country etc. Which dont get me wrong, is a lot of stuff to process for such a study, but the number is statistically insignificant. many more similar studies would need to show identical results.
this one selected about 100k people from a dataset of around 500k. All from one country/region (UK)
furthermore they dont measure sleep but they estimate if someone was maybe asleep based data from an accelerometer. so they cannot measure what sleep state someone acheived or if they were actually really sleep or just u know staring at the ceiling in an existential crisis....
The confounding variable I think is most important is that many people have an internal clock that is shifted or lengthened relative to other people in the same house.
If others in the house prefer to sleep from 10-6 and you prefer to sleep from 12-6, but others start making noise a 6, your sleep quality in the last two hours is destroyed. Then over time, it just results in poor sleep regularity, as you cycle between exhaustion and trying to sleep according to your internal clock.
If you did read the paper, you'd have noticed that people who slept more regularly in this research were also wealthier, and more physically active. They did say they adjusted for these variables, but who knows. Maybe they didn't adjust them enough, maybe there are more covariates they didn't consider.
Yeah, this type of observational data often falls over when you dig into the details. And yes, they say they adjusted for a number of variables, but even if hypothetically they perfectly adjusted for all possible confounding variables (highly unlikely IMO), it's possible that the causation simply runs in the other direction: poorer quality sleep and variable sleep cycles could just be a symptom of illness or being generally unhealthy, not the root underlying cause.
As my diabetes has progressed, I find myself sleeping more odd hours (it can be hard to fight off the tiredness that comes after a meal), and I can be frequently woken up my extreme lows where my body is screaming for carbs.
I kinda realize that the most important factor for personal success (whatever kind of success you want) is mental stability.
Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.
This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.
This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.
> Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine.
Not sure about that, what I'm sure is that J.C. did it and he obviously regrets this, so maybe people with strong ideas should take notes from someone that knows better. Maybe their ideas work not because but despite grinding people down.
I would also argue for regular exercise as a fundamental of a stable mind. I've always been an anxious person, but since I started running 3-4 days a week consistently, my baseline neuroticism has significantly dropped.
struggled and still struggle with a lot of health problems and lack of motivation. too much data, too little time. really hard to manage. been building something to help with all of this and it's been working pretty well for me, curious if you're interested in checking it out? nbd if not. biggest advice I have is get some social accountability
This makes sense to me as a correlation. Mental health disorders alone seem like they’d contribute significantly.
ADHD, for example, is correlated with both sleep cycle issues and worse outcomes in life (including higher rates of crime and participation in risky activities).
Sleep apnea symptoms are initially similar to ADHD. Apparently a ton of kids gets mis-diagnosed with ADHD while they are slowly suffocating because they have UARS. Stimulants mask it.
Having just spent a few months reading circadian entrainment papers for a circadian rhythm app I just finished,[1] I wonder if this effect might be about circadian amplitude[2] (rather than phase, which has gotten more attention).
I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.
The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.
The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
Magnesium is a great supplement in general. You can definitely have too much in your system and that is undesirable, but a bit before bed time along with 1-3mcg of melatonin work well for me. It is nice after workouts. I use magnesium glycinate in powder form, which is more bioavailable than some forms as well.
I also find sauna before bed is good. I have a bed chiller so I can crank up the sauna before bed and not sweat a lot. Generally if I sauna and take the aforementioned supplements I sleep well. Exercise also seems to help me out a lot. If I exercise during the day, and a 4-5 times that week in general, I tend to sleep well.
> One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone.
> Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as ‘Nature intends’ and as humans have usually slept through history, but rather in a single 7–9 hour long block.
> [...]
> Finally, there are multiple lines of research suggesting chronic sleep deprivation is prevalent among young adults (including historical comparisons). It is striking that unemployed adults sleep a full hour longer than the employed , and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.
>and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.
I’ve been on a few multi-year camping trips, and it never stops amazing me that I feel like a different person after six months or so of sleeping with the sun. 10+ hours of sleep for many months is incredible.
For me glycine helps amazingly. It's an amino acid that the brain needs during sleep. I take about 5 grams in water about an hour before I go to sleep. I'm not sure how much the glycinate in magnesium glycinate has the same effect.
Oddly, it has the opposite effect as sleeping pills on me, it doesn't make me sleep more but I'm more rested when I wake up. It even happened a few times that I only slept 5 hours but still could focus well at work and bike intensively for an hour in the evening, without glycine that was impossible.
At 20 euro/kg I think I'll take it for the rest of my life, and it probably will add a few years to my life.
I'm inclined to agree. I and my partner have tried various forms/brands of Mg, around 5 of them, and they have had zero effect on sleep. I have to wonder if all positive experiences here are either placebo or shills. Similar goes for the several supplements out there.
> Magnesium supplementation solved my sleep issues.
Which type, if you don't mind my asking? And how long did it take before you felt the benefits? I took it for a month once (forget which type) an hour before bed and nothing changed.
> As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
Stress pays my mortgage unfortunately, and I don’t have a way to make money otherwise because all the jobs in my profession of over a decade are stressful.
I can also vouch for magnesium and the l-threonate variant. I take both before bed along with glycine powder, phosphatidyl-serine, l-theanine, l-tryptophan, ashwagandha, and saffron. No melatonin, no sleeping pills. Finally getting decent sleep for over a year now.
> A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
The study that made this claim was performed by the person who patented magnesium L-threonate and sells it at a high price. They go after any company that tries to sell cheap generic versions. The study was in mice and only showed small increases.
Magnesium L-threonate doesn’t get absorbed into your body and go into your brain as a lot of the supplement podcasts and social media posts have been implying. Magnesium supplements like this dissociate into their components in your digestive tract. Magnesium and threonate get absorbed separately. So if magnesium L-threonate has some special properties, it would be because threonate does something to improve absorption or maybe has other effects in the body, but that’s a big if. Remember that the person claiming it works better has been making a lot of money off of that one study.
If you have the cash and don’t mind paying the price then there’s no reason to switch. Many people find that magnesium glycinate, which is cheap, works just as well if not better. Glycine supplementation has been found independently to improve sleep, so taking a magnesium supplement that dissociates into magnesium and glycinate might be helpful in its own way.
Magnesium builds up in the body. Some people are deficient and get strong effects from initially correcting the deficiency. Take high doses for too long and you can start accumulating enough to get into excessive magnesium range, which brings problems. That was previously a rare observation but it’s occurring more as people get into magnesium supplements from podcasts that encourage constant high dose protocols and repeat claims that everyone is severely deficient. Keep the dose moderate.
> And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
“Sleeping pills” could mean a lot of things. Few doctors will put a patient on long-term hypnotics with high dependence liability like Ambien in the 2020s. Most doctors are hesitant to prescribe them at all in the current environment, and when they do it’s short term. I would be very surprised if you went to multiple doctors who offered to prescribe you something like that as a new patient without a complicated history. Even the people with significant long term insomnia complain about how hard it is to get doctors to prescribe those.
What they usually recommend is weaker medications with somnolence as a side effect, but the effect is weaker and doesn’t target pathways prone to addiction. Trazodone, doxepin, and a few others are common. These are not in the same category as what people think of as “sleeping pills” like Ambien that have higher dependence and addiction liability. They should not be dismissed together as one big category of drugs that are all bad for you.
I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.
I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.
Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.
But how come you have magnesium deficiency in the first place, what are you not eating? People who need magnesium supplements still absorb magnesium, so the problem isn't absorption must be consumption.
Fresh fruit and veg, nuts, and other fresh things. Thing is, modern farming and distribution practices have negatively affected the magnesium content. Drinking water also used to naturally contain more minerals but in many places is removed to cause less issues with plumbing and because “hard water” also makes it harder for soap to lather.
Absorption also depends on vitamin D, so if you’re low in D, you won’t absorb as much magnesium.
I have also read that magnesium is required by the body to make GABA and melatonin; supplements other commenters are mentioning.
Doctors simply don’t treat things well that are not classified as a particular disease. If you want to get stronger or more fit, you may well be better off asking your local bro than your PCP.
Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.
Doctors generally aren't trained in systemic level thinking, probably because given how complex the body is any such broad connections can only be "intuitive" rather than rigorous, more an art than a science.
This is probably the only reason why "naturopaths" and other "holistic" doctors are still in business, because they'll actually bother to consider a broader picture of a symptom as hinting at some structural imbalance rather than solely treating the symptom as a localized issue to resolve.
Speaking of which, I think it's a great idea for everyone to get their vitamin levels checked. Your doctor is unlikely to order such a blood test unless you are in an extreme situation, but it's cheap (around $100) to get a pretty extensive panel done.
I did it recently and found out basically all my b vitamins were in the toilet along with my vitamin D level. I started taking a b complex vitamin and D3 supplement and found immediate improvements to brain fog and exhaustion.
I find magnesium great - but I also like 5-HTP which I find also helps me sleep if I take it with a little food about 30 mins before bed. I find I feel a lot calmer when taking it - and it helps my ADHD - though I don't take it for too long, as I never like to take anything for too long.
> As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
I'm skeptical that avoidance of "relying on the quick fixes" generalizes to software developers as a whole :)
Retired software developer and my wife suggested the same and it worked. As a veteran I also believe it mostly fixed my sleep apnea episodes that I never sought formal diagnosis for before. We also do 5 mg melatonin now which helps. The magnesium oxide at bedtime is great though.
I’ve read so much on magnesium and believe in the benefits of supplementation, but when I try it (regardless of type) I end up feeling devoid of energy and borderline depressed for three days after.
FYI here. I and my partner have tried various forms/brands of Mg, around 5 of them, and they have had zero effect on sleep. I have to wonder if all positive experiences here are either placebo or shills. Similar goes for the several supplements out there.
FYI here. I and my partner have tried various forms/brands of Mg, around 5 of them, and they have had zero effect on sleep. I have to wonder if all positive experiences here are either placebo or shills. Similar goes for the several supplements out there.
I have severe sleep issues and have tried a bunch of sleep related supplements and medications. Although I do not have a dietary deficiency Magnesium might be the single most effective for me at keeping me asleep, although it does nothing to help me get to sleep and unfortunately the most effective dose taking magnesium alone is around 500mg which is enough to make me even more tired than usual the next day (so not really a good option on its own for me). I have found a combination of 250mg magnesium (carbonate or extended release oxide + citrate, which seem to work equivalently in my limited testing other than that the scoop I have for the carbonate powder is for 350mg so I might take somewhat more in that form) and 2.5mg baclofen to work better than either at higher doses alone (baclofen in higher amounts quickly stops working when taking it multiple days). Unfortunately sleep issues of any severity are often fairly random so it takes quite a while to have any confidence that something is actually helping even if it seems to at first; magnesium is one of the very few that seem to help me.
I have recently been taking those with .3mg DR melatonin and 8-9mg diphenhydramine and it still has some effect the next day but much less than the higer doses of magnesium. The diphenhydramine is for my Non-24 and does not help me sleep but can improve my functioning some the next day when part of my body wants to be sleeping during the day (unfortunately like many things it seems to quickly lose effectiveness so I am going to try taking it less often). My thinking is that for long term use for sleep it is imporant that the medication or supplement be cleared from the body quickly, though too early and it may be hard to stay asleep.
Sleep doctors have told me that waking up at the same time every day is most important. It doesn't look like the paper tried to differentiate between irregularity waking up and irregularity going to sleep but I suspect trying to wake up as close to the same time every day as you can reasonable manage is the best thing most people can do to improve their sleep quality (getting to sleep earlier some days if needed). My sense is that the most obvious part of what we consider to be sleep quality is actually waking up quality. Sleep deprivation affects memory in subtle and eventually not so subtle ways but not feeling awake seems in my experience to be based on how waking up happens and sleeping less when relatively well rested often has a positive effect on feeling awake (at least for a while, getting tired early is another effect of not sleeping enough). There is a particular thing that I notice maybe a couple of times a year that feels like rapidly cycling between being asleep and awake multiple times when I am waking up and I always feel much more awake the day it happens.
> As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
Your body isn't a piece of software.
It can get easily get stuck in conditions that we aren't used to happening in computers. Eg, some injury causes inflammation and pain in a different part of your body, and even after the initial injury heals itself, the inflammation and pain in another part of your body continues of its own accord, and a "quick fix" of some NSAIDs can cure it within hours.
I'm glad you are feeling better, but reading all that great stuff about magnesium could have primed you to think that supplementing it would work, therefore it worked. The placebo (and nocebo) effects are very powerful.
Magnesium also solved my restless leg syndrome at night. I take magnesium glycinate. I bought the powder and sprinkle some on my nighttime ice cream sundae a few hours before bed.
Magnesium absolutely helps, and with our modern farmed diet, most people are deficient. It it part of over 300 chemical reactions in the body.
I've also been seeing a lot of comments about melatonin. For those taking it, as long as you aren't on an SSRI or other seratonin regulator, take 500mg (up to 2g) of L-Tryptophan. It's one of 9 essential amino acids (of like 22) that we only get from food, and is the basis of seratonin. The chemical process in the body is Tryptophan -> 5HTP -> Seratonin -> Melatonin. Again, because of our modern diet, we don't get enough of these essential amino acids. Many people with mild anxiety have gotten off anti-anxiety meds by switching to just taking tryptophan. Anyway, it's helped me, but it gets a bad rap because "tryptophan makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving". Actually, no it doesn't, it's the amount of food you eat, honestly.
Magnesium, melatonin and none of the other supplements really worked for me.
I microdose with an specific drug and it did help improve my sleep. I know it's not placebo because sometimes I forget to take it and it coincides in the sleep log with worse sleep.
Anyway this drug isn't a panacea but a paliative while a treat the root cause. In my case it is a stress-related disorder and the real treatment isn't quick and easy, it requires life changes.
Do you take magnesium specifically at night, or does it not matter when you take it? I'm not sure if it's something your body stores for use when it needs it or if it just throws away what it doesn't need or use.
My problem is that I'm always sleepy throughout the day and when I have to go to bed at nigh, then I feel so active and energetic, as if my body tries its best to avoid sleeping.
I'm really pissed that I went through 6 cloudflare captcha loops with no result. I swear they're guarding this website from VPN users as if it's the fort knox.
What's missing is how much ability you have to sleep, rather than some sort of sometimes controllable factor like schedule. In my case, my brain wakes me up with anxiety one hour or more before the alarm rings (I never check time, I'm guessing). My room is always cold and relatively dark - not photo development dark, but not far.
The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.
I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.
This sounds similar to me. I get cortisol spikes throughout the day and that can interfere with my sleep.
Conventional recommendation is to go see a talk therapist, but I have never really bought into it. Other thing I have seen recommended is LSD/DMT which I would have tried by now if I wasn’t married, it seems like too bug of a risk that LSD/DMT will alter my psyche in such a way that ruins my marriage which is not fair to my partner.
Best I have found is detaching from society, back country camping, no technology. But I don’t want to become a hermit in the woods to just be able to sleep regularly.
I do bi/tri phase sleep, 6 hours at night, and 1-2 naps a day (I work remotely so allows me to nap when I want) This is the best, sleep when you need to you body knows best.
Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am? No they slept when they wanted.
I have epilpsy, with an implanted device that both acts like a pacemaker and records my brainwaves.
Basically my doctor's biggest concern right now is making sure I don't die in my sleep because of something the device records that I and my wife never even know happened. Its a point of debate right now how much to disrupt my life with side-effects to do that.
I read the abstract, pretty interesting. I did a word search for "wake" looking for if they talked at all about early waking times being correlated with overall regularity, as that has been my personal experience. Unfortunately they didn't talk about it, or if they did I couldn't find it.
The only thing that has worked for me to keep my sleep regular is to go outside first thing in the morning and sit for 15-20 minutes. Rain or shine. Even if it's cold or cloudy.
This has been game changing and keeps me on a regular sleep routine.
111 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadLast year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.
My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.
Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
At least they aren’t shift workers
Most things have second order effects, having a consistent sleep schedule may allow more healthier second order effects based on a more regular sleep pattern than duration. Duration also doesn't mean quality either.
You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.
Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.
Keyword: "associated"
EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.
Technically the book would add drag and the car would slow down but likely imperceptibly to a mere mortal
They do factor in shift work as a categorical variable, and employment status as a categorical variable not taking into account occupation. But probably occupation (not a variable here) interacts with sleep status. Any job that involves a lot of flying (pilot, crew, people travelling for business) get more cosmic radiation exposure, for example, and potentially more sleep disruption. Certain operations and manufacturing jobs correlated with exposure to carcinogens also likely correlate with less regular sleep, possibly in a way that isn't corrected for by the limited shift work categories.
this one selected about 100k people from a dataset of around 500k. All from one country/region (UK)
furthermore they dont measure sleep but they estimate if someone was maybe asleep based data from an accelerometer. so they cannot measure what sleep state someone acheived or if they were actually really sleep or just u know staring at the ceiling in an existential crisis....
If others in the house prefer to sleep from 10-6 and you prefer to sleep from 12-6, but others start making noise a 6, your sleep quality in the last two hours is destroyed. Then over time, it just results in poor sleep regularity, as you cycle between exhaustion and trying to sleep according to your internal clock.
like "garbage collection"
ie. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651462/
Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.
This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.
This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.
> https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
That's because he was the one burning people out while he was there living out his hobbies.
The deep post-exercise sleep doesn't hurt.
But again, maybe it helps more than I thought, because I haven't done any A/B test on myself -- I'm kinda getting used to exercise now.
ADHD, for example, is correlated with both sleep cycle issues and worse outcomes in life (including higher rates of crime and participation in risky activities).
[1] https://www.impulsearc.com/wavelength/
[2] e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41540-023-00300-w
I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.
The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.
The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
I also find sauna before bed is good. I have a bed chiller so I can crank up the sauna before bed and not sweat a lot. Generally if I sauna and take the aforementioned supplements I sleep well. Exercise also seems to help me out a lot. If I exercise during the day, and a 4-5 times that week in general, I tend to sleep well.
I found gwern's take on Melatonin interesting: https://gwern.net/melatonin
A small excerpt:
> One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone.
> Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as ‘Nature intends’ and as humans have usually slept through history, but rather in a single 7–9 hour long block.
> [...]
> Finally, there are multiple lines of research suggesting chronic sleep deprivation is prevalent among young adults (including historical comparisons). It is striking that unemployed adults sleep a full hour longer than the employed , and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.
I’ve been on a few multi-year camping trips, and it never stops amazing me that I feel like a different person after six months or so of sleeping with the sun. 10+ hours of sleep for many months is incredible.
Oddly, it has the opposite effect as sleeping pills on me, it doesn't make me sleep more but I'm more rested when I wake up. It even happened a few times that I only slept 5 hours but still could focus well at work and bike intensively for an hour in the evening, without glycine that was impossible.
At 20 euro/kg I think I'll take it for the rest of my life, and it probably will add a few years to my life.
For me, avoiding high histamine foods as well as histamine liberators had helped tremendously.
The theory:
Anti-histamines like Benadryl make you sleepy by blocking histamine.
Well, instead of blocking the histamine, get rid of it in the first place by avoiding histamine foods (for example aged or preserved meats).
Which type, if you don't mind my asking? And how long did it take before you felt the benefits? I took it for a month once (forget which type) an hour before bed and nothing changed.
Bro Science, HN Edition in one sentence. Nice.
I don't know what the hell I was taking too much of, but I didn't have a good way to test it. I wish the body had some indicators.
The study that made this claim was performed by the person who patented magnesium L-threonate and sells it at a high price. They go after any company that tries to sell cheap generic versions. The study was in mice and only showed small increases.
Magnesium L-threonate doesn’t get absorbed into your body and go into your brain as a lot of the supplement podcasts and social media posts have been implying. Magnesium supplements like this dissociate into their components in your digestive tract. Magnesium and threonate get absorbed separately. So if magnesium L-threonate has some special properties, it would be because threonate does something to improve absorption or maybe has other effects in the body, but that’s a big if. Remember that the person claiming it works better has been making a lot of money off of that one study.
If you have the cash and don’t mind paying the price then there’s no reason to switch. Many people find that magnesium glycinate, which is cheap, works just as well if not better. Glycine supplementation has been found independently to improve sleep, so taking a magnesium supplement that dissociates into magnesium and glycinate might be helpful in its own way.
Magnesium builds up in the body. Some people are deficient and get strong effects from initially correcting the deficiency. Take high doses for too long and you can start accumulating enough to get into excessive magnesium range, which brings problems. That was previously a rare observation but it’s occurring more as people get into magnesium supplements from podcasts that encourage constant high dose protocols and repeat claims that everyone is severely deficient. Keep the dose moderate.
> And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
“Sleeping pills” could mean a lot of things. Few doctors will put a patient on long-term hypnotics with high dependence liability like Ambien in the 2020s. Most doctors are hesitant to prescribe them at all in the current environment, and when they do it’s short term. I would be very surprised if you went to multiple doctors who offered to prescribe you something like that as a new patient without a complicated history. Even the people with significant long term insomnia complain about how hard it is to get doctors to prescribe those.
What they usually recommend is weaker medications with somnolence as a side effect, but the effect is weaker and doesn’t target pathways prone to addiction. Trazodone, doxepin, and a few others are common. These are not in the same category as what people think of as “sleeping pills” like Ambien that have higher dependence and addiction liability. They should not be dismissed together as one big category of drugs that are all bad for you.
I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.
I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.
Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.
As a software developer, I am a much better doctor than actual trained doctors, and am definitely immune to any placebo effects.
Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.
This is probably the only reason why "naturopaths" and other "holistic" doctors are still in business, because they'll actually bother to consider a broader picture of a symptom as hinting at some structural imbalance rather than solely treating the symptom as a localized issue to resolve.
Or is there a "maximum low level deficit" which you will never leave with just eating the right stuff?
(Like VitamineD deficit - it can get so low, that you cant fix it by "just going more into the sun")
I did it recently and found out basically all my b vitamins were in the toilet along with my vitamin D level. I started taking a b complex vitamin and D3 supplement and found immediate improvements to brain fog and exhaustion.
I'm skeptical that avoidance of "relying on the quick fixes" generalizes to software developers as a whole :)
I have recently been taking those with .3mg DR melatonin and 8-9mg diphenhydramine and it still has some effect the next day but much less than the higer doses of magnesium. The diphenhydramine is for my Non-24 and does not help me sleep but can improve my functioning some the next day when part of my body wants to be sleeping during the day (unfortunately like many things it seems to quickly lose effectiveness so I am going to try taking it less often). My thinking is that for long term use for sleep it is imporant that the medication or supplement be cleared from the body quickly, though too early and it may be hard to stay asleep.
Sleep doctors have told me that waking up at the same time every day is most important. It doesn't look like the paper tried to differentiate between irregularity waking up and irregularity going to sleep but I suspect trying to wake up as close to the same time every day as you can reasonable manage is the best thing most people can do to improve their sleep quality (getting to sleep earlier some days if needed). My sense is that the most obvious part of what we consider to be sleep quality is actually waking up quality. Sleep deprivation affects memory in subtle and eventually not so subtle ways but not feeling awake seems in my experience to be based on how waking up happens and sleeping less when relatively well rested often has a positive effect on feeling awake (at least for a while, getting tired early is another effect of not sleeping enough). There is a particular thing that I notice maybe a couple of times a year that feels like rapidly cycling between being asleep and awake multiple times when I am waking up and I always feel much more awake the day it happens.
Your body isn't a piece of software.
It can get easily get stuck in conditions that we aren't used to happening in computers. Eg, some injury causes inflammation and pain in a different part of your body, and even after the initial injury heals itself, the inflammation and pain in another part of your body continues of its own accord, and a "quick fix" of some NSAIDs can cure it within hours.
I'm glad you are feeling better, but reading all that great stuff about magnesium could have primed you to think that supplementing it would work, therefore it worked. The placebo (and nocebo) effects are very powerful.
I've also been seeing a lot of comments about melatonin. For those taking it, as long as you aren't on an SSRI or other seratonin regulator, take 500mg (up to 2g) of L-Tryptophan. It's one of 9 essential amino acids (of like 22) that we only get from food, and is the basis of seratonin. The chemical process in the body is Tryptophan -> 5HTP -> Seratonin -> Melatonin. Again, because of our modern diet, we don't get enough of these essential amino acids. Many people with mild anxiety have gotten off anti-anxiety meds by switching to just taking tryptophan. Anyway, it's helped me, but it gets a bad rap because "tryptophan makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving". Actually, no it doesn't, it's the amount of food you eat, honestly.
I microdose with an specific drug and it did help improve my sleep. I know it's not placebo because sometimes I forget to take it and it coincides in the sleep log with worse sleep.
Anyway this drug isn't a panacea but a paliative while a treat the root cause. In my case it is a stress-related disorder and the real treatment isn't quick and easy, it requires life changes.
My man has written too many JIRA story descriptions
The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.
I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.
Conventional recommendation is to go see a talk therapist, but I have never really bought into it. Other thing I have seen recommended is LSD/DMT which I would have tried by now if I wasn’t married, it seems like too bug of a risk that LSD/DMT will alter my psyche in such a way that ruins my marriage which is not fair to my partner.
Best I have found is detaching from society, back country camping, no technology. But I don’t want to become a hermit in the woods to just be able to sleep regularly.
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022151
Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am? No they slept when they wanted.
I get the study design is not causal and all, but this R^2 looks very underfit for a study that claims a stronger predictor?
Basically my doctor's biggest concern right now is making sure I don't die in my sleep because of something the device records that I and my wife never even know happened. Its a point of debate right now how much to disrupt my life with side-effects to do that.
This has been game changing and keeps me on a regular sleep routine.