Sleepless in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Sleepless in Silicon Valley

economist.com

157 pointslxm118 comments

Another view on the Oura thing: https://www.medpagetoday.com/practicemanagement/informationt...

It's rather skeptical. Choice quote:

[...] The SRI researchers studied 41 healthy adolescents and young adults (average age 17). Sleep data were recorded using the Oura ring and standard PSG on a single laboratory overnight. Metrics were compared using Bland-Altman plots and epoch-by-epoch analysis.

The ring accurately detected "light" and "deep" sleep in 65% and 51% of the sleep epochs, respectively. It also accurately detected 61% of REM sleep epochs, with an overall overestimation of PSG REM sleep (by about 17 min). When the ring misclassified PSG REM sleep, the algorithm usually classified the epoch as "light sleep" (76%).

These data suggest that the Oura Ring is virtually useless in telling you if you are in REM sleep versus deep or light sleep. [...]

I have a cheap Mi Band 2 and I'm impressed with how well it measures when I'm sleeping and when I'm awake. I don't know how good it is to measure deep sleep. I does not pretend to measure REM.

Are there any weareable device that measures it well?

I use an Apple Watch and an app called Pillow and it does a plausible job of guessing when I went to sleep and when I woke up. It also identifies light/deep sleep and REM, but I have no way of telling how accurate. It seems to detect awake periods at night as well as I can remember them.

But ... I kinda assume it's a crapshoot and I use it more as a novelty and an estimate of total sleep than any kind of accurate representation of sleep cycles.

It doesn't matter so much how accurate it is, as long as it's consistently inaccurate.

I don't care if my scale at home is perfectly accurate. I care about knowing that my weight is going up/down.

At 50-65% accuracy rates it’s pretty useless even for binary decision making (better/worse).

I care if my scale at home is accurate. I don't want to know if my weight is going up or down, I want to know what I currently weigh so I can decide what I need to do about it.

Cant you just use the mirror for that?

Hard to use a mirror in your sleep.

Uhh what? They were talking about weight

It's also difficult to weigh yourself with a mirror.

Your mirror’s hard? Let me take a rain check on that, mine’s sleeping.

Your example seems to disagree with your premise. If someone tells me I weigh "9239" this means nothing to me, unless in context of whether it's going up or down, and how it is related to others of my height (and age and gender, perhaps).

I don't care that I weigh some multiple of an SI unit, or some fraction of a car. I care about my weight relative to others and my history.

If you care about your weight relative to others, then it has to be accurate, no? Because how would you compare your weight unless you had a bunch of people using your scale.

True, but given that it's more difficult to change your weight than it is to find someone of a different weight, I'd rather live my whole life with a scale that might be reading (say) 5lbs high or low, rather than a scale that fluctuates between 5lbs high or low from measurement to measurement.

Sure. Weight relative to 1 lb or 1kg is essentially the definition of “absolute weight.”

No, it does not. Say I'm 6' tall. "Normal" BMI is between 18.5 and 25, which translates to between 136.4 lbs - 184.3 lbs. Telling me my weight is going up or down tells me nothing about whether I fall into this healthy range. And, depending where I fall (below, within, or above the range), the actions I would wish to take differ. It's that simple.

What instrument do you have that measures your "weight relative to others and your history"? Don't you only want to measure it relative to other healthy individuals? And, if you are particularly underweight or overweight, wouldn't you want to know when you're in the normal range? An instrument that only tells you what direction the change is doesn't tell you any of that.

But weight by itself (and BMI) are fairly crude measures. You could be 6' tall, be a muscular 210 lbs with a body fat of 10% and be classed as obese. The next level of the "onion" is body composition (fancy scales do this, but not that well). Then you're getting dexa scans....and there are probably other levels after that. I think I'd rather know if my weight and body fat % are going up or down, rather than their absolute value.

Le sigh. I should have known someone would throw that particular nitpick.

That’s an edge case. People who fall in that category already know that. And they’re very interested in their accurate, absolute weight.

Besides, BMI is just a convenient way of quantifying what a “healthy weight range” is. I could have used any range and said I was interested in weighing between X and Y.

I am kind of in that category...and I'm interested in relative fluctuations in body fat % even though I don't give much credence to the absolute accuracy of the body fat measure.

How would you even know if it is consistently inaccurate? The variability in biological signals might be so high day to day that it could be highly correlated but with frequent pathological cases that make the data useless.

I was using a Fitbit Charge (the one before the just released one). One night I was awake looking at my phone from 1-3am and it said I was asleep. Took it off and put it into a drawer right then.

I just got the Charge 3 and I must toss and turn like crazy because it sometimes doesn't even register my sleep. I didn't expect it to be the most accurate sleep tracker, so I am not super upset. It still gives me some level of insight into my sleep, which is better than nothing.

>I didn't expect it to be the most accurate sleep tracker

I work for Fitbit. I don't speak for Fitbit, but in my opinion you should expect it to be the most accurate sleep tracker, and if it isn't you should contact customer service.

Maybe I will then. I just assume that the technology to accurately determine REM vs Deep or Light sleep is not really available, so I can't fault Fitbit or any manufacturer for not having perfect sleep trackers. But, the marketing material does claim it's very accurate, so I should probably get more out of it since that's what I was sold.

Thanks for the advice.

On the contrary, my Charge 2 is generally pretty accurate in terms of when I'm asleep vs awake.

I've got a Charge 3, the one with the oxygen sensor, and I've also seen it think I was asleep when I wasn't. On the other hand, it seems weirdly reliable at telling if I'm in REM sleep or not. Whenever I wake up directly from what it says was REM sleep I remember my dreams but not otherwise.

Matthew Walker, probably the best known sleep scientist, has been critical of Oura and pretty much all the sleep trackers for sleep phase data. Unsurprisingly, it's difficult to guess at brain EM wave patterns from a band on the finger, wrist, etc.

I'm 6 months on Oura, and I don't think it's actually that consistent, i.e. I don't think you can say "Oura shows 50% more deep sleep today, so even if the base mumber is wrong, I must have gotten 50% more deep sleep". I wear a fitbit to cross validate each night, and the readings on both often contradict each other seemingly arbitrarily, night to night.

Overall I've found they're great for tracking overall sleep time (HRV, heart rate, temp too) but I don't read too much into the actual sleep phase data. (Day-to-day self asessment of cognitive performance is probably the best proxy.)

> Day-to-day self asessment of cognitive performance is probably the best proxy.

How do you do that?

Measure it using a series of cognitive performance tests. You could even just grade your own experience day to day - assuming you feel everything is a little worse when you sleep poorly (a sensible assumption), you will probably get representative data.

Tbh the oura ring has been a game changer for a data nerd like me. I can easily see how some exercise in the day actually impacts my HRV[1] and then the quality of my sleep. Had a heavy night of drinking? Watch what the oura ring reports not just on the same night but even the next night :) Basically if you're thinking of starting your own "protocol" for sleep and would like to A/B test what works and what seems like superfluous ceremony, the oura ring is a cost-effective way to measure the effectiveness of said protocol.

I think the protocol described in the article isn't anything terribly new. Most folks on HN know that blue light actually messes with sleep so if you're planning on using a screen until right before you goto bed it's a great idea to use the blue-light canceling computer glasses. Mindfulness meditation is generally a great practice to calm oneself and be reflective. I don't personally sleep at 8:45pm (rather, 11:45pm) but I do have my meal a few hours before I goto bed. I also don't drink much water closer to bedtime so I'm not rudely awakened in the middle of the night to urinate. I live in a place where the black-out blinds aren't a necessity. I've never messed with deep sound waves.

Of course, some folks will exclaim "Well I don't need a device to give me a report card on how well it thinks I slept!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://ouraring.com/heart-rate-variability-basics/

I have trouble justifying spending 314 euros on a sleep-tracking ring.

it depends. do you have 314 in disposable income? is health really important for you?

Yeah, I probably have the cash. But it's just for tracking sleep. I know that I sleep like shit. I go to bed at 0030 and wake up at 0700. Don't really know what difference the ring would make here.

No idea what the ring would tell me what I don't really know and how in the world I would turn the data into something usable.

What's the next thing you'll try to improve your sleep?

It seems that getting more than 4 hours of it would be a good start.

so there are several levels to "improving your sleep". I agree that if you sleep like shit and only get 4 hours per night you don't need the ring. you need to get more sleep.

but for some people that actually sleep well and want to tweak the quality of their sleep it can be valuable. let me give a few example of such tweaks: altering the time you go to bed, altering the surface you sleep on, reducing the amount of blue light you get, playing with the temperature in the room, not using screens X hours before going to bed, not eating X hours before going to bed. I could go on. The point I'm trying to make is that if you already get enough sleep (or you think you get enough sleep) the ring might help you. yes - the price is ridiculous. but it's not about the price, it's about improving a [very] important aspect of your life.

If you want to be scared shitless into paying attention to your sleep I recommend: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. Everything from cognitive abilities, fertility, risk of cancer and other diseases can be influenced by poor quality sleep. Sleep, along with eating properly and exercise is a pillar for a good quality life. I believe it's worth making it a priority.

Said it better than I could.

My problem is when this company fizzles out in 2 years and stops servicing or supporting their product.

If Apple make made something like this, I may bite.

They do, it's called the Apple Watch. I find if I charge it in the morning and night while I'm brushing my teeth, the battery lasts all day. And there's a few apps that do good sleep reporting. I like AutoSleep and SleepWatch

But you have to have an iPhone to use it.

If it's important to him he might ask his doctor or head to Cochrane Collab?

Why use this over an apple watch or fitbit?

Does the Apple Watch do sleep tracking out of the box now? I was one of the 5 people who bought a Microsoft Band, and I really enjoyed the sleep tracking features. I still haven't pulled the trigger on an Apple Watch since switching to and iPhone because it (used to?) lack sleep tracking as a feature.

No. It still is intended to charge overnight. Apple store sells other sleep tracking products at this time.

It charges fast enough that you can wear it almost 24/7 if you plan ahead and charge for a bit in the morning and at night

https://david-smith.org/blog/2015/09/21/how-to-wear-your-app...

There are sleep tracking apps that integrate with the health app, but I tried two of them (sleep++ and pillow) and I found them to be very inaccurate.

It does, I like AutoSleep and SleepWatch to track my sleep, and as a fellow poster added, you can get by with just a few minutes of charging in the morning and night

Or a use Garmin watch, and get even more metrics. It's like strapping the elastic stack to your body.

Yeah, I used to have a Hello Sense. I've been using Apple Watches for years, but I never wanted to install a 3rd party app for sleep tracking, nor have to charge during the day instead of at night.

Now I just wear a Garmin Forerunner 945. It seems like it must be more accurate than this Oura thing, though i know almost nothing about it.

I have both. Dislike wearing Apple Watch in the bed since it turns on randomly and it's bulky. The Oura doesn't feel much larger than a wedding band and it's lighter.

Turn on theater mode and the display only activates when you press the crown. The battery also lasts longer!

For myself, it comes down to form factor. I don't like wearing watches, but I am OK with wearing rings.

Did you really need a $300 device to tell you that a night of drinking will undermine your sleep?

I didn't need one to know that, but I was surprised by how little drinking would change my resting heart rate (even two beers at dinner might keep my heart rate elevated for half of the night) and by how much/how long heavy drinking can affect RHR/HRV - a heavy night might affect RHR for 2-3 days...

Measurements are a great motivator! When I was starting an exercise regime being able to track my progress with a WiFi scale was a huge help. Losing one or two pounds didn’t make a huge visual difference, but damned if I wanted to keep driving that line down.

I don't think the product is targeted at people questioning the health effects of their heavy drinking, but rather at people questioning the effects of endurance training, long commutes, or other habits that may be inadvertently causing them long-term harm.

Cool! I have a Whoop. I purchased it before they started the subscription model. https://www.whoop.com/the-locker/team-thrive-average-hrv-on-...

The Whoop might be great, but I just can't get behind any product that used those obnoxious ads (I saw it on Instagram) that hype the product without telling you what it is. Clickbait advertising doesn't work on me, I guess. I might be interested, if they explained it.

The stats imply that it's very inaccurate in tracking sleep phases - you probably know better yourself the day after.

My sleep tracking now consists of putting my APAP on to counteract my sleep apnea, falling asleep within seconds because I'm like Pavlov's sleeping baby dog because of the machine, and then waking up and seeing what the machine says re: how long it has been pushing air in my nose.

It works surprisingly well, actually. If I only got 6.5 hours of APAP last night, then I will pretty reliably go to bed a little earlier tonight.

My takeaway from this is that someone should make a fake CPAP face mask for people who don't need a CPAP that tells you how long you've been wearing it. I'm 100% convinced that the mask itself is what makes me fall asleep so fast. Once the mask is on, my brain knows it's time for sleep and complies. I guess I don't know if that's the same for all APAP/CPAP/Bi-PAP users though.

As Pavlov would tell you, it doesn't need to be a mask. It can be anything. So for the mass market, perhaps a bell would be a better choice.

The one I recommend is automated light.

A while back I built something to mimic a day-night cycle: https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

My original goal was to counteract the darkness of winter, which impacts my mood and productivity. But the thing I like best about it is that the lights dim in the evening, so I actually go to bed at a reasonable hour. Whereas with manual lighting, I can easily leave the lights on while doing something, not notice the hour, and throw off my sleep cycle.

Sleep researchers and doctors claim that your bed itself should be the bell. It will be easiest for you to fall asleep if you don't spend any time in your bed unless you are actively trying to fall asleep. No reading a book before you sleep, no checking your email in the morning, etc.

They prioritize it to the point that, if you are lying in bed trying to sleep at night for more than 20 minutes, you should get up and spend some time relaxing somewhere else.

I have been told this before, though the person I heard it from said sleep and sex, not just sleep. :)

Hahah good point, my doctor obviously thinks very poorly of me.

I'm curious - How do stomach sleepers adjust to these masks? Or does sleep apnea only affect back sleepers? It would be impossible for me to sleep wearing a mask.

There are masks and pillows specifically designed for stomach sleepers. But stomach sleeping is somewhat uncommon, and plenty of people who sleep in more conventional positions can't adapt to sleeping with a CPAP, so you probably just have to find out yourself.

FWIW, I have sleep apnea and I'm a strict side sleeper. I also had a real tough time getting used to sleeping with something attached to my face. Sometimes I still take it off if I'm awake too long during the 2-4am time period, but most nights I sleep through without even noticing. I use a nasal mask, though, I absolutely have not ever been able to tolerate a full face mask.

Definitely doesn't only affect back sleepers. I sleep almost exclusively on my side. There are some very small masks including a type that only has two tiny "pillows" (as I understand they are called) that rest right up on/in your nostrils. Mine basically only covers my nose and has the hose on the top of my head so I can turn from side to side. I'm not sure that would be good enough for a stomach sleeper, but it might. I can see how being a stomach sleeper could make wearing a respiratory mask difficult, for sure.

I was a stomach sleeper before getting a CPAP. In retrospect, I was a stomach sleeper because my body figured out it made breathing easier. Rarely find myself sleeping on my stomach any more.

Would it be dangerous if the machine fails during sleep? Ie block breathing

No, the hose and mask have vents to allow some input. And even when it is off, you can draw air through the hose, there's just no positive pressure.

It's not comfortable, but it's not dangerous.

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is an excellent book for those interested in what science has to say about sleep (disclaimer: it's excessively good for you)

Sometimes I wonder if Mr. Walker is paying people at HN to talk about his book :). Comes up more often than I'd expect.

Yeah the HN marketing worked on me and I almost never by non-fiction books.

He should write me a check, I’ve recommended that book on HN and offline to at least 5 new readers.

Sleep is very important in all sorts of ways but Professor Walker was throwing everything at the wall in an effort to convince the reader to get better sleep at times. One chapter talking about how people who get less sleep will naturally want to eat more. Another chapter telling how rats with given constant diets and restricted sleep eventually starve to death. I do trust all his citations to be accurate but I'm also sure that if there was some way in which less sleep was good for you he wouldn't mention it.

But it was a very valuable book in terms of explaining just what sleep does for you.

it's good for you as in it will scare the shit out of you and make you pay attention to your sleep. the examples can be a little exaggerated and one has to wonder how anyone that does not get enough sleep is still alive - but yeah. if you haven't already, read the book

My hack is just fall asleep when putting the kids to sleep and wake up whenever I feel like. If I've been pushing hard, sometimes I'll take all 10 hours, other nights I'm up at 4am ready to work.

I wish my two year old would sleep 10 hours a night.

Hey, someone else who does the same thing as me! Yay! As soon as my wife and I put the kids down, we head to bed ourselves. Then I wakeup whenever, which frequently translates to 4-5am but like you, sometimes lasts until the kiddos wake up.

We're lucky that both of our kids have always been great sleepers, aside from occasional attempts to get up in the middle of the night and come sleep with mom & dad.

https://outline.com/E7sbMG

Hmm another sleep article.

I'll share what I do. After being in the Army for a while, and waking up at 430 and going to bed at close to midnight for a long time during the week (there's no real "sleep schedule" overseas though) I've been working on tuning my sleep cycle for the seasons to great success. Over the last year I've been slightly altering my alarm each night based on when sunrise is (plus going to bed earlier/later as the days lengthen/shorten), and it's significantly improved how quickly I fall asleep, how easily I get out of bed in the morning, and how rested I feel. I'm not a huge "fitness tracker" guy (still analog in that regard, with a notebook for workouts instead of some app or a spreadsheet). No idea if there's any science behind any of what I'm doing and frankly I don't care. It works great for me.

Can you add more details on how you handle seasons? This is something I've been wondering about. Do you shorten/lengthen your sleep? Or just shift it to always wake up at sunrise? I think shifting seasons might be one "natural" thing which our biology is not "naturally" attuned to, and a fixed-length day would probably be better (maybe we'll have it in the future on a space colony, by I digress).

I think it's as simple as I sleep more in the winter and less in the summer and about the same between spring and fall. Not anything crazy. It's probably an average of ~7 hours in the summers and 8+ in the winter. I live in a high latitude city and last year I figured I'd just try it, given how much more light we get in the summer. Work is a little hard to accommodate in the winter sometimes, but otherwise I think I'll probably do this for the rest of my life.

Can you detail it more? Sounds like I'd benefit from this way of sleeping.

I should really just build an alarm app for this.

Basically I just look up when sunrise is the night before, and move my alarm back 1-2 minutes for it. In the summer I'll go to bed a few minutes later each night until the solstice, then reverse. All I'm doing is chasing the sunrise and sunset (with an offset for sunset).

I'm like you.

It's great, but here in the summer, sunrise is at 4:15. It's a tad early to get up. I do feel good in winter though waking up with the sunrise.

I think Apple's bed time is a pretty good tool for this.

I use a Samsung smartwatch that came with my Samsung S9 as a package deal.

The sleep tracker has been useful to me in tracking my quantity/quality and average sleep.

I still get to spend a few weeks a year a few times a year assessing human performance.

Sleep is absolutely critical to human physical, mental, emotional, and social performance.

And as the parent of adolescent children who are technology driven, monitoring their "digital nutrition", mixing in other activities, ensuring they are well fed/hydrated, and compelling good sleep hygiene is absolutely essential to their development as adolescents towards adulthood.

It's quite shocking to observe how common it is for both adults and children to be seen suffering from poor sleep hygiene.

sleep, healthy eating, and exercise are fundamental to living a long and fulfilling life. I think it's great that people are trying to determine in a quantitative way when we've "slept good." I sure as hell can use a device that can tell me if I've slept well, so i can try to establish a pattern between how i feel the next day and what these devices tell me as to how i slept.

What would you do with that data, that you cannot do with a simple journal you'd fill out each morning?

Re/ oura rings... anyone else paranoid of a private company having access to intensely personal data?

If I were an insurance company I'd be lobbying the shit out of these guys to see how much they'd charge me to get my hands on it.

(and yeah, I read Oura's privacy agreement already... was less than impressed)

Of course, but this is just another in a long train of abuse-potential. The technology isn't the choke point for protecting our rights, and individual consumer choices will never be revolutionary enough to alter the terms of consumption.

FYI, here is their privacy policy - https://ouraring.com/privacy-policy-device-and-application/

And an article they wrote regarding the impact of GDPR - https://help.ouraring.com/oura-account-and-privacy/ouras-pri...

Would you trust Oura more or less than Fitbit or other, similar vendors?

Polysomnography seems like an area in desperate need of innovation to improve efficiency and lower cost. It is far too expensive for the entire undiagnosed sleep-deprived population to have a single sleep study let alone for those already diagnosed to have more frequent observation.

I recently went through a sleep study, and the doctor was openly aggravated by how current trends and devices focus on "deep sleep", when it's actually "light sleep" that we need to regain our mental focus.

Really? Care to elaborate?

REM is "light sleep", one 3 hour-ish sleep cycle is "NREM stage I -> NREM stage II -> NREM stage III -> REM" where REM is considered "pretty close to awake" and NREM stage numbers are "progressively deeper". Deeper basically means lower body temperature, less movement, and slower breathing.

This is on the basis of clustering/pattern matching body movement, body temperature, and some brain wave/MRI crap.

VERY broadly speaking, "deep" NREM stages are important for "body health" while REM is important for maintenence of memories and "mental health".

As with anything in neurobiology, it's "emerging evidence suggests that..." and nobody really knows what's going on. Except all evidence suggests sleeping less is bad for pretty much everything.

The dynamics of sleep state transitions are also pretty meaningful, e.g. time it takes to move from one stage to the next, whether there's "backwards" transitions, etc. For example, sleep deprivation lengthens deep NREM time, lowers latency from wake -> NREM I, and shortens the entire sleep cycle.

huh, that is fascinating to hear. Will definitely be keeping an eye on this space, thanks for the info.

I've found the app recommended by wirecutter

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-sleep-tracking-app/

Quite accurate, at least for time to sleep, and time asleep. I think the REM, NREM etc is mostly noise, if you are getting 8+ hours a night every night (super hard to do!) the quality of sleep should be fine.

The best thing is to set a "go to bed" alarm, for night owls like me its so easy to say you go to bed "around 10" when in fact it can be much later.

This is a great example of how quantitative facts decide over the qualitative evaluation of all things in Silicon Valley - including deeply personal matters like sleep and even relationships. I've been living in Silicon Valley for a while now and I can't believe my eyes and ears sometimes!

> Techies obsess about OKRs (objectives and key results), KPIs (key performance indicators).

What an over-generalization.

This article is published by an entity/author obsessing over SEO, CTR, CPM, CPI (basically ad $$$)

So why aren't we just using Sleep As Android like normal people, and not using some weird devices to track it? Absolutely don't understand the fetish of expensive devices just to track sleep, and I'm the one here with the non-24hr circadian rhythm.

Not everyone has an Android phone and some people don't like keeping their phones right next to their bed.

I have a fitbit charge 2 and that thing does more than just track sleep - heart rate, VO2 max, steps, connected GPS for running. So the expensive device is not a bad investment IMO.

In New Zealand, electric blankets are very common because (for the most part) we're too poor to live in insulated houses. It's hilarious that they've been re-discovered as a sleep hack for hyper-wealthy californians.

Yours are probably just heating. Theirs are cooling

though this article is basically an ad for the oura ring, i do think sleep hygiene is an interesting topic and worthy of conversation. Would love to hear what the HN crowd thinks.

Apart from being a snarky article, the author does not propose any actual solutions. So what if a few folks try to hack sleep? Whatever floats their respective boats....

> It is hardly surprising that techies are not getting enough sleep, given the industry’s culture of long hours, and the widespread notion that for a true entrepreneur, everything else in life is secondary to succeeding at work.

This article was very snarky, even for the economist. It seems distinctly below their usual standard of quality with broad generalisations such as the above, seemingly contradicted by an anecdote about Bryan Johnson and others' bizarre sleep practices.

For me this article would have been a lot better if it focused on the sleep tech industry, and applied a more measured and evidence-based approach to its silicon valley criticisms, some of which certainly are relevant and worthy of discussion.

Here: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/public/sleep/healthy_sle...

I'd also recommend earplugs and a good blackout curtain.

I have a question for those far more into sleep hygiene than I am: is it possible to get blue light-blocking prescription lenses for normal glasses?

Yes. Every lenses has this option by now.

> radiation-blocking Faraday tents

Is there any research that indicates this would be beneficial in any way?

Paywalled, but based on the free paragraphs, I was kinda surprised that it didn't talk about the other factors that may affect sleep.

Currently reading 'Why we sleep' which is a fascinating book about the importance/history/evolution of sleep across species and time. (Highly recommend it -- definitely regretting all the sleepless/low sleep nights)

At a high level, my understanding is that the duration/quality of sleep depends on physiological, mental and environmental conditions.

It sounds like the focus of the article was on environmental (I would definitely love to sleep with zero light/sound).

Similarly, the 5-10 mins meditation may help, but if you're stressed out or have something on your mind, that can still keep you awake or wake you up.

You can make sure not to eat/drink anything by that time (6pm) but effects of caffeine/other foods you might have eaten earlier can impact your sleep quality.

Finally, the right physiological/chemical changes need to occur (melatonin/REM cycles/tired from physically exhausting activities) for you to actually be sleepy. Most people can't just sleep on command, although, you might be able to build/force the habit.

>(I would definitely love to sleep with zero light/sound).

You might not actually like it. Try a sensory deprivation tank and see how that works for you.

To reduce the noise you can always reach for quality earplugs, a sleeping mask, and blackout curtains.

Now I want to get an Oura! Are ads getting smarter?

The accuracy of estimating sleep stages using heart rate and movement metrics is an interesting, and tenuous, subject. WRT to Fitbit and Oura the TLDR is that Fitbit and Oura aren’t accurate for slow wave (Deep Sleep) or REM. However, Fitbit is better at REM detection [1][2] than Oura.

While sleep staging can be useful for identifying case sleep disorders, we know that the brain self-optimizes the stages of sleep you go through.

So, what’s far more important than worrying about your rem or deep is optimizing getting time in any stage of sleep. Each stage is critical in a different way.

If you care about improving your performance the measures you should care about—backed by strong scientific consensus and a plurality of randomized evidence—are sleep debt and where you are in your circadian rhythm. Sleep scientists call this the two factor model

This reality drove us to create a sleep improvement app, called Rise ([https://www.risescience.com](https://www.risescience.com/)). We started both our research and company initially for elite athletes. We tell them what to do to improve their sleep tonight based on science. It's currently being used by both professional and collegiate teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and NCAAF.

We've been taking what we've learned from athletes and adapting for us regular folk.

If you're interested in joining our beta, sign up here: [http://bit.ly/hacker-friends](http://bit.ly/hacker-friends)

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28323455](https://www.nc...

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29235907](https://www.nc...

Bet they'll have us walking on our hands before the century is over.

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