Sleep Debt
howsleepworks.com
howsleepworks.com
I feel I still have a ton of sleep debt from my two children. Prior to having kids I never felt tired and could have really long deep sleeps. My wife then had our first and then second daughter and its not to often I have had a night of sleep without someone waking up the family at 3am in the night. They are getting better now (3 & 7 years old), but my sleep is not recovering with them maturing in their own ability to sleep all night.
I often joke to my wife I would like to be hospitalised for two weeks and put on a large dosage of Morphine coupled with a food drip and just crash for two weeks.
I do need to get on top of this though, as it really can interfere with my work (programmer). I feel tired a lot. I work from home, and I quite often pull out the futon in my home office and crash for 30 minutes in the afternoon.
it doesn't have to be heavy exercise every day. i try and hit 10000 steps on non-sports days, even if it's just from strolling around in the evening. i also got a standing desk, which i enjoy because it makes me feel physically as tired as i feel mentally after a long day at work. but i think the little things can add up quickly.
Just a brisk 30 mins walk will be fine. Have food 3-4 hrs before sleep. Don't overdo the water, but you should be hydrated. My bedroom is near a street light, so, I started to close the curtain & put sheet over it just to ensure the room is very dark.
All these helped me to get over my sleep issues.
Several other factors are in play, and the hormones in your body are controlled by several glands and linked in a complex system of signals. Rarely does only one thing contribute to symptoms.
Anyway, just a thought. In the middle of winter I also find I sometimes settle in to falling asleep around 9, waking for 2 or so hours around 2 AM, and then sleeping again from 4-7 or 8 AM. Not everyone has that luxury, though.
I think there's something here, but I haven't figured out what or how to fix it.
Things I've found that have helped:
A thorough eyemask and good earplugs reduce the awakenings and help me sleep in a bit longer.
An air conditioner that runs into the morning to keep it cool - I think the air temperature warming after the sun comes up starts to trigger wakefulness?
Cutting out sugar and caffeine after 6pm, which helps getting to sleep a little.
It's a possible project, but you would need to not only have something that opened and closed, you would need a fan system to drive the air, and you would need to have it be thermally insulated when closed, and unless you have a very conservative cooling algorithm you would probably want a heating system to deal with the room getting too cold because the room itself is not thermally sealed.
It ends up being a DIY air conditioner/heater, which I'd rather just buy.
If the goal is just to maintain a temperature I don't think you need to go to most of the lengths you mentioned. You have a window that is currently adequately insulated when shut. This is intended for maintenance so no need for a fan to speed things up. However the room is getting too hot now will suffice to heat it back up if needed, but again being slow means it shouldn't overshoot badly either.
It still may not be worth your time, but if just cracking a window would be sufficient cooling for most of the year it could be.
You need blackout curtains. We all do. They are the best sleep aid ever.
Since melatonin is a hormone, it's best to avoid taking it for too long or you can get adaptive / rebound effects (i.e., it stops working then you get withdrawal when you stop taking it, making things worse). It's recommended to take for a week or two, then stop and hope it's caused your circadian rhythm to reset (there is some evidence that it can do this). It's often recommended for jet lag and not so much for chronic sleep disorders, for this reason.
More info: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/melatonin-and-sleep
Melatonin is also most effective at smaller doses, conterintuitively; try 300mcg instead of the more common 3-5mg doses. Sorry for no source on this, Googling around will help.
This is not necessarily true. The effects of exogenous melatonin ingestion vary from individual to individual; quantity and quality of the supplement are but two variables, and they do not affect everyone the same way; in fact, they are unlikely to maintain a given measure of "effectiveness" in a single individual over time
There are many factors to take into account when it comes to sleep quality and duration; melatonin, as an exceptionally powerful hormone and powerful antioxidant, is something endogeneous. Tinkering with endogeneous hormones while we stil make them is risky. Tinkering with those that are essential to daily life and well-being is not necessarily foolish, but it should be approached with caution and respect.
Take a cycle of anabolic steroids for periods during which one is exhausted or overworked; it might work in the short term (if you are male, in good health, and exercise, it probably will), to better increase ability and recovery. However, there is always a risk of forever damaging one's ability to produce those compounds internally. This doesn't happen as often as one might think, because it is understood (both in the performance-enhancement world and the post-35 male world, that there might not be a return ticket - and there are now proven methods for preventing shutdown. Athletic medicine and its human test subjects in the highly networked world of steroid use have understood this for some time, and have made it much safer to take a cycle of testosterone and come back to baseline post-cycle; they understand the risks and are willing to take them. TRT patients are ok with the trade-off of meds-for-life in order to feel OK again.
I think one would be wise to, at the very least, approach melatonin with caution and know how limited our understanding of hormonal feedback loops, up/down-regulation, cascades and downstream effects... SNP mutations... before taking melatonin. Better to take Zyrem. If you don't know what it is, google it for laughs. You'll never get a prescription; however it is one of the best, simplest sleep medications around. It has the advantage of being simple in a pharmacokinetic and MOA sense, along the lines of z-drugs or *azepams, without most of their most severe drawbacks. Excepting cost of buying it pharma-regulated, the unlikelihood of ever getting a prescription in the first place, and the fact that some people enjoy it to the point of habituation and dependence. The same cannot be said for melatonin, but why go for a master hormone?
My sleep sucks, but I've improved it to the extent I care by incremental lifestyle changes. I'm back in school now, and I'm all over the place. Sleep when I can. Stay up until I know, absolutely know that I have done damage to my next-day performance. I don't know how else to get the work done, except cheat. Maybe that's the ticket? It seems like it is more or less accepted, if not spoken of.
Oh, I take melatonin sometimes. I take it for it's antioxidant properties. Usually I take other things to clean up my oxidative damage, and have a lot of green tea, but a heavy dose (much more than recommended), every once in a while, seems to do me a world of good. I started taking melatonin off and on when I was sixteen, so I am fairly certain I've done whatever damage there is to do. I feel like crap when I take it regularly, however. Dark room, quiet, no screens, calm evenings, and if at all possible, waking up with the sun - for those in urban areas, this is not natural, or wasn't for me - but if you ge a week outside of civilization, without electronics - see what happens. I can't live like that all the time, but I sure want to.
I'm procrastinating, and sleepy. Oh, parent was right about the prevailing wisdom, whatever that means, about melatonin dosage. Currently. And I'm not citing either, because I'm not a professional, just an experienced layperson.
Also, see if you can figure out what your sleep cycle length is. For most of us it's somewhere around 90 minutes, roughly. It's easiest to wake up between sleep cycles rather than in the middle of one because we sleep most lightly at the beginning and end of a cycle. You can feel refreshed and alert waking after a while number of cycles even if you still need more rest. Whereas waking mid-cycle feels miserable and groggy even if you technically got more sleep.
Once you figure out your sleep cycle length and how long it takes you to fall asleep (8 hours is 5 90-minute cycles plus 30 min to fall asleep), you can work out how long you need to stay in bed to catch up on sleep. Adding a fractional number of cycles won't help much, and you'll feel groggy again upon waking. Adding a whole number of cycles will help you catch up and feel rested.
Since you're married, can you and your spouse take turns crashing at 6pm for a couple weeks to catch up? It might also help to sleep in separate beds when you're extra tired - sharing a bed with someone whose sleep cycles aren't perfectly aligned with yours can interfere with sleep. Other tricks can help with that too - such as getting separate blankets.
That might not be that unnatural as sleeping for 8 hours straight:
[1] Obligatory Australia joke: Maybe it's because they have night and day swapped? Oh wait, that was summer and winter.