Get better sleep – Anecdata and sleep tech
adithyabalaji.com
adithyabalaji.com
Also, try a sleep study! Sleep apnea is not just something that affects people that are overweight - I had it for nearly all my life, turns out, as do my siblings. It isn't a magic cure but my sleeping is probably 3x better with a cpap.
If you've shifted your circadian rhythm, your core temperature falls later. What may happen then is you'll get hotter in bed as you're expelling more heat in it, and if the material is not particularly breathable it won't be as easy for you to cool down. Anyway, avoiding a shift and keeping a robust circadian rhythm really helps with onset and overall sleep quality. To this end, a consistent waking time, limited total time in bed, and sufficient exposure to sunlight after waking helps.
The author is using sleep cycle on his phone, which is not a good method of tracking sleep cycles. He says "their ability to wake me in “non-deep” sleep pretty spot on" - you're not in deep sleep in the morning anyway, or very unlikely. So any "app" has a good chance of waking you from REM or N1/2.
We've been building a headband which monitors your sleep state, and uses sound to improve your sleep performance. Literally, improving the neurological function of your brain while you sleep.
I used one of our early prototypes to win the Sleep World Championships (https://soundmind.co/blog/neurohacking-the-world-sleep-champ...).
We're currently working on improving the fit and comfort before finalizing industrial design. You can find out more, and join the waitlist at https://soundmind.co
Please make sure the headband can stay on your head through the night. I have a chinstrap headband that I ordered on Amazon that falls off every single night, making it unusable.
What did you buy it for? What is it's purpose?
If you're having trouble with a headband that is strapped to your head over your chin, I'm slightly terrified about what you are doing in bed. But if you can show me what doesn't work, it might help.
We're testing in real-world situations, with multiple users, so we should have something that works for most people.
I've had chronic insomnia for two years and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. If your sleep is good enough, leave it alone.
If you don’t have restful sleep and don’t have apnea, and you have already tried the basics like melatonin, not using electronics before bed etc, you have few choice but to accept it or try to find your own answers.
Matthew Walker's book is the one I'd go to.
Always find it weird how blog oriented a lot of information has become.
If you want to know something... why not find the best researcher in the field and get their book.
Blogs are immediate and "free". Books take time and cost money.
Think CliffsNotes (or some other equivalent) study guides. Why read the whole text and learn all the nuance and details, when you can just get straight to a particular hearline narrative
Personal anecdote here. I've read his book. It's good, it's interesting, and it made me realise how much more I should try to get more and better sleep. I'm a night person. For months I tried each and every technique out there to move my sleep schedule back since I have to wake up in the morning against my natural rhythm.
I started panicking and I went from 4-6h sleep per night + 8-10h on weekends to 2-4h during the week and about 6h on weekends. My whole life took a turn for the worst until I made the decision to stop the madness and go back to my previous, insufficient, sleep schedule.
This is not ideal by a long shot. I'm permanently sleep deprived, but at least not to the point where I can't even function.
Shouldn't you just have a fixed, later bedtime. To maximize REM sleep etc?
I still don't buy this as an idea, an unchangeable genetic (?) marker that defines "night person" or "morning person". I think we make choices and habits, and these are really just a part of personality.
In a lot of ways an early bedtime, or an average bedtime, is preferable to staying up to the wee hours, but given the context I couldn't see the benefits until I had experienced it myself for a few months. So in my opinion, if there is some kind of genetic marker for chronatype, it's either not very influential, only expressed in a subset of the populace or largely BS.
On Peter Attia's podcast, he address a bunch of the criticism as well. The second edition of the book has been updated to correct errors.
The same idea would hold for those trying to lose weight. It's all CICO. But would you suggest someone not count calories for fear that this may raise anxiety? Or would you instead propose emotional/anxiety management strategies while pursuing this?
This is why CBT-i is so effective for alleviating insomnia. The primary component is CBT, which is meant to curb anxiety, not unlike the sort that can manifest itself when applying interventions.
That's not to say all so-called "sleep hygiene" is necessarily helpful. There's no universal standard for it and there's no evidence that tracking on a watch or whatever can improve sleep. But obviously some things do help.
This comment got a lot of attention but the fact is that there are almost infinite causes for poor sleep. Many of us would do very well to critically investigate those causes and work to address them if necessary or desired, just like troubleshooting any other kind of problem.
Equally, noticed changes in flight paths by local airport are seeing some flights use the flight corridor (flying over the country so not originating or departing) at night that also cause resonance in the building.
For my part, I've got insulation, added sound dampening to curtail resonance and some frequencies and sound proofing to best I can. Though low frequency noise is hard to cut out beyond source due to the wavelength and a 100mhz low frequency noise you feel( well I do) and that's a 4 meter long soundwave. So hard to block fully, hence rubber dampening strips to curtail harmonic resonance with the building and in this case, my bedroom which is 4 meters in length.
Sleep is totally very important for physical and mental health and as somebody who is autistic spectrum, it is key to have a routine with sleep playing a huge factor in this.
But I highly recommend recording you night and playing it back and analyzing it with something that you can do spectrum analysis. As seeing a noise trigger you into breathing difficulties, or heart palpitations, or snoring is not good for ones health and being able to identify the issues and address them goes a huge way. Not all issues you can address thru the process's at hand afforded you, but many can and proof is a great asset in progressing that. Not sure if phone best tool to do that as not had great luck myself with those for tracking noise issues, unless blatantly continuous and loud due to microphone's and noise cancelation in such devices as well as varying quality of devices. Equally recording low frequency sounds is not the easiest and in my case, a field recorder inside a box has done the trick nicely, though it is an area of experimentation/learning for myself and still something that may be a better solution. But for me as I had a field recorder, a large cardboard box was a nice cheap modification that did the trick good enough.
Sleep is a fundamental need for everyone. For me, it’s migraines that I could say I need to focus on sleep to ameliorate. For you, it’s “the spectrum”. It’s really just being a living being that makes sleep fundamental.
They really seem to help.
I plan to have another pair of customs made and possibly see if I can get some custom ones for AirPod Pro tips. Running in the third world can be a kind of hell with the honking, construction, and fireworks.
By custom I mean lab made.
Not going to detail my life's story here but if you live/sleep with a partner who tosses and turns all night and believe that their movement and getting out of bed is bothering you, run an experiment and sleep in a separate bed for a week. If your sleep quality improves, consider upgrading your bed to separate memory foam mattresses, or have a spare bed you can crash in for nights when you REALLY need to sleep. If your SO loves you, they will understand.
White noise. We used to run a box fan all night just for the noise but it turns out that those things use a tremendous amount of electricity. We switched to white noise machines which generate pretty much the same sound but use almost no electricity in comparison. The white noise machines are better than a smartphone because they have bigger speakers that can generate the mid-to-low range noise that phones cannot. Years ago we bought the "Lectrofan" machines on Amazon but those are now crazy expensive. (We paid like $15 back in the day, now they are $43-$50.) Your average HNer could probably rig up something just as effective with an old ipod and set of computer desktop speakers for free.
Earplugs, if you can stand them. I like the Howard Leight MAX earplugs. I buy them in bulk and stash them everywhere around the house, garage, and in my car. For sleeping, I reuse one pair for up to a week.
tried, waxes out my ears and more so - don't work against low frequencies due to wavelength and being hyper sensitive, I kinda feel it a bit more than most.
As another commentator mentioned - Deep Sleep and more so a build up of disturbances of that, stack the issue. Things like stress build up then as well, so all a vicious spiral sometimes as stress don't help at all.
But it's getting better and working on a move to some place more suitable as well as making best of what I can and identify, dampen/block best I can.
Do you mean choking, as in gasping for air? This is a sign of potential obstructive sleep apnea, and it feels that solving the external issues is a (complicated) bandaid for something you might want to have a doctor check through a sleep study. (If you haven’t done so already.)
If you had more deep sleep, all these noises wouldn't be bothering you so much. IANAD, etc.
Yes and would lean towards apnea, though when it is triggered and identified as triggered by sudden loud noises in the night. The worry of it being addressed as a symptom and not the cause is an easy avenue to slip down with doctors. No instances of it without such prior sudden loud thud sound. Things that go bang in the night, well they ain't ghosts in this case.
But making progress, and yes quality sleep and with that as you say getting enough deep sleep is important and is certainly a factor in many aspects, though not a case of it prevents it, though may make me more able to endure the level perhaps.
Sleep is too important
After seeing what is correlated and not, I have had an extreme increase in sleep quality. Notably, melatonin doesn’t do much for me (I thought it did), working out less than 45 mins doesn’t have much correlation, lots of alcohol is inversely correlated with sleep (a surprise for me, always felt like it put me to sleep faster, which it seems to but st lower efficiency and quality). Plane travel kills my sleep, as does not sleeping in my own bed (hotels).
Overall, and anecdotally, highly recommend the approach of tracking things. Also highly recommend a WHOOP[1] activity monitor device, which is free itself (but data subscription). One particularly interesting thing is it doesn’t take into account weather, though it seems like that could be low correlation since I sleep in climate controlled environment.
Interestingly, more anecdata, a friend found out they had Covid before they were able to test positive based on whoop data changing. I realize I may sound like an advertisement, but I have zero affiliation, just very satisfied.
Most of the apps that supposedly track sleep cycles do so in very lackadaisical fashion. They measure small variations in heart rate to determine the sleep stage you’re on, but I’m the ultimate edge case and they all ways fall short. Even medical grade sleep monitors stuff ends up not working right because half the time it thinks I’ve gone into cardiac arrest because my heart rate falls so low (The random 3 hour block of time in the night being reported as “deceased” was a little jarring).
Sleep comes (perhaps too) easy to me, but my partner is not so lucky. She used to obsess over the sleep tracking stuff until the Apple Watch where it just measures time asleep, a way more measurable and meaningful metric. I mean, what are you going to do with the knowledge of being in deep sleep from 1:28am until 2:09am? Nothing. You cannot control it or will it to be better, practicing good sleep hygiene by going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time is way more important than knowing the stage of sleep you’re in at any given part of the night. The most rested I feel is when I have a consistent sleep routine, and contemporary medical advice supports this.
Ditch the sleep apps that track your sleep, it’s just another thing to worry a about.
You certainly can. For example, drinking a single beer before going to sleep correlates not with shorter sleep, but much less deep sleep in my case. Just measuring the time asleep would tell me drinking doesn’t affect my sleep at all, which is not true.
It's not the most scientific and precise measurement, but from my experience is seems to correlate pretty well with actual 'feeling energized and well' or 'feeling tired and out of energy'.
One of the most interesting information I got from it was how drinking alcohol affects my sleep : on a typical day, I go from 100 to 25, and then a night of sleep gets me back to 100. If I drink even moderately, a night of sleep gets me back to 50 max, and sometimes can even pin down my body battery levels for a few days if it's a long drinking night.
When I sleep best are the nights I forget to be concerned about it. Typically once something important comes up (job interview, date, etc.) I remember what a problem inability to sleep has been for me in the past, how it could ruin it all—then it might be another month or two where I'm unable to "forget," lay awake for hours concerned about being unable to sleep.
My intuition around tracking is that anything big enough to make a real impact you'd already be aware of. The further micro-optimizing feels good mostly 'cause you've opted into thinking in a framework of sleep optimization so it's goal accomplishment in that context, but probably not a big improvement strictly on a physiological basis.
(Or maybe I'm completely wrong and just grumpy I can't find a good solution to my sleep issues :)
We’re built to move and are surprised that sitting in a chair all day leaves us feeling restless and on edge. Kinda silly when you think about it.
When I get enough exercise, sleep is easy. You close your eyes, are bored for 5 minutes, and then you’re asleep.
Without daily exercise? Forget about it. Tossing and turning, tapping my feet all night, can’t get settled, every little thing an annoyance.
Most of my experience with this has been relatively high intensity over ~1.5hrs though, not full days of physical activity (like I had with jobs in the past, landscaping or stocking groceries etc.)—but I don't have that much time to dedicate to it with the desk work I'm doing now.
I should definitely give this a try. I do long walks and strength training, but have been missing cardio. Thanks for the tip.
I'd always poo-poohed counseling, but finding a good counselor who could offer more than a sympathetic ear was key. There are definitely great counselors, and a PhD isn't required, but I would recommend seeking out a psychologist. Especially if you are motivated and want to be involved with your therapy, a psychologist has the training and background to be exceedingly helpful. Note that this will cost more, but in my experience it is worth it.
Also note that you don't need to be crazy or suffering from any mental disorder for them to be helpful. Think of it as the same as employing a business strategy consultant. They are there to help you develop more beneficial strategies for thinking and reacting to your daily life, and sleep is just one factor. It sounds trite, but developing different ways of thinking and reacting to problems is huge. Unfortunately, there aren't one-size solutions, so what worked for me likely isn't helpful advice. But for the average reader of this site, seeking out a psychologist vs a regular counselor is money well spent.
I enlisted the help of a psychologist advertising quick symptom-relief with his published set of CBT tools without first needing a protracted psychological deep dive. Avoiding imminent, life-altering consequences required fast results. I reckoned we could address less cut-and-dried matters down the line and gave it a shot. The tools worked, but I needed more connection. Our session began by quantifying the efficacy of parts of an exercise with 1-10 scales and a/b comparisons, and ended with him walking me through a tweaked version of an exercise and emailing me a copy in a word document. Exchanges not directly advancing that process frustrated him. A two-sentence response to “how are you doing?” felt inappropriate, like explaining the impact of unreliable transportation on your life to a busy auto mechanic expecting terse, actionable bullet points. He’d almost certainly have preferred a 1-10 answer. He was pretty upfront about it when we started, but I expected less of a departure.
That said, he’d have been perfect for my father— a lovely and very type-A retired engineer. At my mom’s behest, he gave therapy a shot with a trusted family counselor they’d previously used for family therapy. He truly gave it his type-A best, but couldn’t open up. The counselor essentially said that so many years of psychological self-policing rendered talk therapy too difficult to pursue barring a mental health crisis.
Thank you!
The most comfortable method I found is simply manual button pushing. I track my phone usage, and log time between screen-on time (+-10m to account for time to actually fall asleep). When I can't sleep for longer times, or get up for toilet, I quickly press the power button (phone lights up for a few sec accounting to screen time). I know this probably just _feels_ more precise and needs to have a phone around (generally not that good for sleep), but it still seems to be closer to what I experienced. It baffles me that all the gyro/heartrate based smartwatch platforms don't account for screen time this way.
It does still suffer from confusing idleness with sleep at times though.
Anecdotally I've noticed that when I smoke weed I don't remember what I dreamt, every single time. I suspect it alters my sleep cycle in some way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mHPt14meJo&t=393s&ab_channe...
I'm not affiliated with him, nor with apple.
Add to your mix air quality. I found when the air has more oxygen - less build up of co2 we sleep better. We have an awair air quality sensor.
I wonder if silence produces anxiety and poor sleep…a spring without babies should be a trigger for the tribe to take some sort of action.
No one makes or would want a device that mimics the noises we're trying to drown out to sleep.
You’d perceive it differently.
What helped me snap out of it was having a sleep dairy. Everyday for a month or so I would write down the qualitative experience of my sleep and soon realized that sometimes I might not sleep that good but most of the times I did. So now when I wake up in the middle of the night I just enjoy lying in bed awake resting knowing that it is not all bad.
Also, taking 100mg of 5HTP before going to bed transforms my (now) good sleep into pretty damn good sleep.
Nothing is more relaxing for me.
Events that should trigger you getting a sleep study: long pauses between breaths. Snoring. Gasping. Touching your face with your hands while asleep.
The problem with most of what I read here is that you're (which is what I did too) using anecdotal reports to experiment on yourself to come up with something that you feel works for you.
I eventually stumbled on a podcast by Andrew Huberman (Neuroscientist/ophthalmology at Stanford) where he shares details of their research. Just a couple of items from my notes (and there are much more)
- The quality of light during sunrise, as perceived through your eyes, sets off a "count down timer" of sorts in your brain
- The quality of light during sunset, reduces the sensitivity to light you encounter after sunset
- Your eye's structure is such that light coming from above enters the eye different from light coming from below.
- - Which is why in the morning you want to go outside to allow the sun light from above to enter, and,
- - in the evening to switch off the ceiling lights and instead use lamps that are set low.
- The old story about "don't use screens and bright lights in the evening" is true to some extent, but there is more to this
- - Candle light ; I've decided to go to the extreme, and switch to candle light at 9pm, set at desk or floor height
- - - I use this time to perform activities that dont require a lot of light (tidying, dishes, clothes, etc)
- circadian rhythms are key
- - when you eat and exercise is a way to set your clock
...
I'd suggest you start at ep1 as it sets you up with some understanding of how your brain works, ep2 & 3 is all about sleep ep 4 - goes into finding your temp minimum, jetlag, sleeplessness
I'm sure beyond ep4 [4] the topic of sleep will come up again, as it is the #1 thing that determines the quality of everything else in your life.
[1] Podcast https://hubermanlab.com/category/podcast-episodes/
[2] Notes https://podcastnotes.org/category/huberman-lab/
[3] Transcripts https://github.com/lord-denning/Huberman-Lab-Podcast-Transcripts
[4] Search 'sleep' https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=sleep+site%3Ahubermanlab.com%2FOf course that you may not have the same problem we do but we have a 14 pound maine coon that walks all over us when we sleep at random hours of the night. That part doesn't help.
I don't follow any sort of meditation practice, but having 10-15 minutes of just staring out at the sky helps tremendously. Honestly, staring at a wall would be about as helpful, it's mostly just about having the first bit of your day being calm and unstressful.
If I pick up my phone, first thing I see is email and slack notifications about what emergencies are happening, and that's not what I want to deal with when I've been awake for 5 minutes. Those things can wait, spending enough time to get slightly bored in the morning seems to be a better use of that time. I moved my alarm up 1/2 hour, and I feel less tired simply for being less rushed in the morning. Having to rush out the door and do things just makes me crabby all day. So simple suggestion, just try to allot a few minutes of calm at the start of the day.
I'm not a parent, but the parents I've suggested this too seemed to appreciate it even more, since early morning was their only truly calm time.
There's a youtuber who compares all wearables for accuracy with actual sleep measuring equipment and Fitbit charge 5 is (surprisngly) the most accurate. Here's a link to his graph of all devices charted on accuracy: https://youtu.be/6oNGpQZakxU?t=237
tl;dr - My Charge's data was questionable at times and completely inaccurate compared to a medical grade device. In the end, all the data tracking just gave me anxiety.
For me, these devices are good to spot trends over time, (eg "how has my resting heartrate improved after 4 weeks of being more physically active?") rather than comparing my data to someone else's.
I’ve got cameras, motion sensors temp sensor co2 sensor and an array microphone so tempted to try
No good way of measuring REM though
I suffer from two things: being able to fall asleep and waking up after 4 hours.
Here's what I currently do/use/what works:
1. Airpods Max for suppressing noise in my room [1]. Plane flying by? I didn't hear it. The soft white noise is also nice. Playing music at night can sometimes regulate my mood. I don't sleep with it every night, only when I notice things in my room are too loud.
2. 0.3mg melatonin (taken 1 hour before sleep).
3. 10mg CBD (taken 1 hour before sleep).
4. A girlfriend to hug with during the night.
5. Meditation: in most cases this doesn't work at all, but around 10 to 20% of the time it knocks me out cold and then it's all I need.
6. Blue light blocking glasses (Flux for real life :) ).
7. A cold-ish room.
8. A heavy weighted blanket. This is especially helpful when I really feel like turning all the time, the heavy weight tires me out physically.
9. A sleeping mask.
These 9 things completely solve for being able to fall asleep. I don't have issues with it. They partially solve for being able to stay asleep. I sometimes still wake up. However, I have a higher likelihood to fall back asleep because the CBD + melatonin make me feel a bit woozy. Moreover, my girlfriend (if she's around), meditation, my heavy weighted blanket and chill music with Spotify + Airpods Max can all play their part.
[1] I have tinnitus so I need something over my ear as earplugs will amplify my tinnitus. Because of this, I need the best noise cancellation for headphones, and in my testing the Airpods Max won hands down. Moreover, it was the only white noise I could tolerate. I've tested Sony and Bose as well. Their white noise sound is too loud for me to be able to comfortably fall asleep. The white noise of the Airpods Max lowers my tinnitus a bit, but in return I hear white noise, which to me feels like a different tinnitus, albeit a bit nicer. I do suffer a bit in comfort and need to fix that with extra pillows which makes my position in bed a bit weird. If anyone has alternatives for this tip / setup (e.g. something else than the Airpods Max?), I'm curious :)