Don't do this! Sleep tracking/optimisation and generally obsessing over sleep can trigger insomnia for a lot of 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.
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.
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.
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.