Choosing the right sleep schedule to maximize time and keep you healthy | Hacker News Reader

Choosing the right sleep schedule to maximize time and keep you healthy

lemikegao.com

69 pointsga0bi28 comments

My child wakes me up every 90 minutes to 2 hours, and I sleep cumulative 5 hours per day. I find this awful sleep regimen affecting my health in many ways:

1. My memory is shoddy at best. It's bad enough that Google and Wikipedia have made my mind lazy, but with lack of sleep, it's worse. For some reason, pronouns (names, places, and co-workers) are very difficult to remember.

2. I eat a poor diet. Since I wake up at odd hours of the night, I eat more convenience foods to fill up my wrenched stomach.

3. I like to exercise, but it's damn hard to do on such little sleep.

4. I love my wife dearly, but spousal bickering is the worst at 4am.

Based on my personal research, I recommend the author considers alternatives to cutting sleep.

As an aside, I live in Minnesota, where it dark for extended periods of time during the winter. Vitamin D deficiency and seasonal affective disorder are REAL. I do not look forward to combined SAD and lack of sleep this winter.

> "but now that i'm currently uninsured (i may do a follow-up post on finding cheap health insurance packages), i'm beginning to care more about my physical and mental health."

This one really scared me. The author wants to work on his health for money reasons? I know that money is virtue in California, but isn't this taking it a little to extremes?

I find the idea to screw up your health because you're "insured anyway", well, disturbing. Not sure I'd take sleeping advice from someone with this attitude.

Even though you probably take reasonable precautions to avoid germs anyway, you'd be much more careful if it cost $5000 to treat a cold.

I find the idea to screw up your health because you're "insured anyway", well, disturbing.

Which is not at all what he's saying.

"The author wants to work on his health for money reasons?"

Why should that surprise you? If you're uninsured, you'll pay a small fortune for any medical expenses you might incur. (Hell, you'll likely pay a small fortune even if you are insured).

Hence, someone who's uninsured should take a pretty keen interest in maintaining and improving his health. I mean, obviously we all should. But for the uninsured, a health problem is also a potentially catastrophic financial problem.

"I find the idea to screw up your health because you're "insured anyway", well, disturbing"

I think that's a misinterpretation of the article.

Most people I've known prefer good health because it feels good and wouldn't need to cite lack of insurance, dishonest insurer, etc. as reasons to maintain it.

I think that's a misinterpretation of the article.

Or simple contraposition :-P

Ideally, yes, you shouldn't need the specter of something like lack of insurance to motivate you to pursue a healthy lifestyle. That said, nobody's perfect. It's still a valid reason, even if it shouldn't be a primary reason.

Or simple contraposition :-P

Please correct me if I am wrong, but if the relevant part of the article is "I do not have insurance, so it is important that I maintain my health", then the contraposition would be "It is not important that I maintain my health, so it follows that I have insurance." What you are suggesting as the contraposition is "I have insurance, so it is not important that I maintain my health", which is the inverse of the statement (and equivalent to the converse "If it is important that I maintain my health, then I do not have insurance."

"a health problem is also a potentially catastrophic financial problem", which is why this guy should probably stop focusing on his sleep schedule and do everything he can to get some coverage (probably easier said than done; I've never been in this position). A perfect sleep schedule won't help much if he steps out of his apartment and gets hit by a car.

I really liked this overview!

For the academic inclined, there is some awesome body of work done by the Affective Computing group at Media Lab: http://affect.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=3162

As for myself, one of the next gadgets on my buying list is the zeo personal sleep coach (AFAIK there are no affordable consumer-level competitors at the moment): http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/

Would love to hear from people with hands on experience with it.

> Would love to hear from people with hands on experience with it.

I suppose I could promote myself since you asked for it: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo

I would recommend the sleeptracker watch.

>"definitely do not take hormonal supplements just to fall asleep."

I'm going to partially disagree with the author here.

I take 3-5mg of oral melatonin every night, and have for years. My basic research, which includes talking to my and my girlfriend's physician, has concluded that there's no harm in taking it as a supplement. Unlike pharmaceuticals, melatonin doesn't knock you out, it creates a very natural sensation of, well, being sleepy. But you can take it in the middle of the day and not have it affect you at all with respect to drowsiness (though I wouldn't recommend warping your hormone pattern like that).

Read up on using it as a supplement. It has long list of benefits/possible benefits, and very few possible side effects. Oh, and it will help you fall asleep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin

3-5mg of melatonin will have the opposite effect on me and prevent me from falling asleep.

The effective range for me is less-than 0.5mg, anything over that and receptor cross-over happens.

The main problems I have with it is that: 1) it makes me useless the next day (lack of motivation) and 2) I can only take it for a couple of days otherwise, even with the low dosage, it ends up having the opposite effect on me (just can't fall asleep that 3rd day on).

i also want to note that the statement you quoted (and the entire article) should not be used as a guide for those diagnosed with sleeping disorders. in their case, they may be required to take melatonin to fall asleep.

i also recommend getting diagnosed by your physician before taking melatonin supplements; it works differently for everyone.

Off topic, I know..but the lack of capital letters is both annoying and lame.

interesting, I didn't even notice the lack of capital letters until I read your comment.

I don't think your comment was off topic. The no capitalization thing was annoying and I didn't finish reading the post. His readership demographic must be the 25 and under crowd...

I am under 25 and usually apathetic to the occasional grammatical error, but using literally no capitalization really turned me off and I did not finish reading what he had to say.

I suppose I can start capitalizing my "i's" :). regardless, thanks for the feedback.

Same here. I found it thoroughly annoying and stopped reading after a couple of paragraphs.

For those of you who have a hard time getting up after long hours, I've learned that though alarms that cause me to panic do successfully wake me up, majority of the time I snooze it and go back to sleep or because it interrupted my REM, I end up having a groggy day. I suggest one of those gradual alarms that build up, really great results in how I feel throughout the day regardless of sleep hours.

Also from personal experience, sleeping more than 9 hours really can have adverse effects to your day short term as well as your body long term.

> assuming that you will still have a balanced social life, i have not found any conclusive research that proves it is harmful to sleep at an irregular hour.

Well, depending on what you mean by that. For example, go to sleep with the sun shining on you, and I guarantee you you will have worse sleep from lack of melatonin secretion!

In a related point, while researching links between melatonin & depression for http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#fn5 I noticed that Lewy et al 2006's SAD sufferers had normal total amounts of sleep, but they all seem to suffer delays or advances in their sleep schedule compared to normal people, which is suggestive...

you're correct; if you go to bed with the sun shining on you, not only will you have uncomfortable sleep, you will also have an extremely weak immune system and will be more prone to sickness (due to the lack of melatonin). further points are discussed in the bullet lists.

the best environment to sleep in would be a dim/dark room. personally, I'm sleeping in the living room, so I make sure that the blinds are properly blocking potential sunlight to ensure uninterrupted sleep.

> be exposed to the sun: only reliable way to generate vitamin D in your body (helps bone mineralization)

I think sunlight exposure may be important for a healthy mental state as well. A few years ago I adopted a schedule of sleeping around 10AM and waking up around 6PM. I maintained a reasonable level of sun exposure in the morning, but I would usually wake up shortly after sunset leaving me without sun for the first half of my day. I found that after a few days of this I would wake up every day disappointed that I'd woken up in darkness again. Around this same time period I had no problems waking up at 3PM every day, even though I didn't always go outside while it was still light.

I personally have found, research or no, that shifting my sleep schedule later has deleterious effects on my state of being the following day. I do not sleep less time (I wake later- my internal clock is very reliable about extracting 8:30-9:00hrs of sleep when alarm clocks don't intervene). This holds whether or not I am keeping a regular sleep schedule, have curtains, when I last ate food, etc.

I find I am most effective when I begin sleep at ~11PM.

When ever I am "in the zone", I keep working.

I have a siesta + short sleep routine:

My long sleep session is usually crashing soon after I get home. On top of that, I get 2-3 hours either between classes or right before my first class.

What an awesome article. Interesting about not sleeping more than 2 times in a day and which hormones are stimulated how and why.

hmm, very interesting thoughts - definitely good to keep in mind as i know we're all workaholics

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