Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

The following is only peripherally related, but would appreciate nuggets of knowledge.

These days stimulants get a lot of press, from adderall to ritalin to modafinil etc., not to mention plain old caffeine. Caffeine, at least, I know work by blocking those receptors that signal the feeling of sleepiness. I am curious to know about the opposite: chemicals, or enzymes if you will, that catalyzes the important reactions that takes place when we sleep. I am sure there will be a lot of benefit to speeding those reactions up. You would be more refreshed for the same amount of sleep, or need less.

Rather than smothering fatigue signals with a stimulant I would like to make my body more efficient at sleeping.

Sure this is a very complicated problem, even cataloging what all those reactions are is a huge task. But would be a rapt audience to anyone who can share any information along these lines.

For me, the 14 minute rule just does not work. Sometimes I wish I had someone to knock me out cold with a baseball bat, or that inner voice that keeps talking and planning and refuses to STFU.

Two things that work for me:

I use L-Theanine[1] capsules in combination with caffeine to sharpen my thinking; it works great, but if taken without caffeine, it can be a bit of a relaxant/depressant, which can make it easier to sleep. The jury's still out on its effects on serotonin, but anecdotally, it seems to help me sleep easier and more deeply.

The second thing is a falling-asleep routine that I think is probably closer to self-hypnosis than simple relaxation. I consciously slow my breathing and hold after each breath in or out for a 3-count. At the same time, I sort of visualize a wave moving slowly down my body from the top of my head, and where ever it touches, I relax those muscles. I'm usually asleep before it hits the legs. If it fails, I restart the exercise, with a 4-count on the breaths, and so on. Most nights, I'm asleep in just a couple of minutes; my wife frequently remarks on how fast I go from alert to dead asleep.

The effort of concentrating on both exercises tends to silence the "inner voice", and consciously relaxing muscles tends to remove blocks to sleeping that I didn't know were there; the nights that you can't sleep, you're probably laying there in bed clenching some set of muscles without realizing it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine

Instead of capsules, you could also go for green tea - the better brands (go at least with proper loose leaves or matcha etc.) have Theanine cranked to 11.

Definitely. I first learned about theanine in the context of green tea. I'm a coffee drinker, though, and wanted the benefits without changing my drink. :)

Yeah, I thought it would be something like that. The other option might be green tea extracts, but I have no experience with these and you may end up with a higher caffeine dose, even though green tea is usually far lower on the caffeine than coffee.

I remember reading about a drug that removes the need for sleep in the first place a while back. Sure sleep would be nice once in a while, but the benefits are pretty obvious.

Here's the wired article: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/sleep_....

Here, this might help. http://www.drinkdreamwater.com/

FWIW, the key, sleep-inducing ingredient is melatonin, which you can pick up at most any drug store for a few bucks. It’s often recommended for people with sleep problems.

Except in the UK where it's prescription-only, and marked with a little "harmful triangle" in the reference guide Doctors use :-/ I ended up getting some from a site called Doctor Fox which claims to be legit NHS.

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