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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping that someone will ""solve"" poor sleep, in the sense of working out how to determine what's actually causing it. What's the state of the art in affordable home sleep analysis? Smartwatches?

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> ...what's actually causing it.

I'm not sure a smartwatch could do anything with my chronic diagnosis of "Having a toddler kicking my ribs at night."

The good news is that condition usually resolves on its own with time!

Anecdote, but I've found that the less I analyze and try to "mold" my sleeping, the better I sleep. The times I sleep worst is when I'm worried about sleeping too little, so whatever I can do to take my mind off how poor my sleep is, the better rested I feel when I wake up.

Some nights are still horrible though, and it's a hard loop to exit when you lie there at 03:43 in the morning and panicking about getting too little hours this night...

I know that feeling. You're probably onto something. If you worry about something, I think you always make it worse.

There was a point where even other people worried about me sleeping, and that made me worry about my sleep.

Eventually I decided I would go to bed when I was tired and see how it went. Been doing that half my life now. I go to bed when I'm tired (about 12-1am) and I usually wake up at 7AM feeling fine.

Forcing a whole 8 hours often makes me feel worse. YMMV

Yes, I've had terrible sleep most of my life, and a period of good sleep recently. Felt stupid, but I realized during that good period that I just needed to "chill" when going to bed. My brain has a tendency to WANT to focus, and actually slowing down is almost a foreign state at this point, and it's exactly the state you need to get in to naturally fall into sleep.

For me it’s the same. The moment I accept that I’ll be super tired the next day is the moment I finally fall asleep.

Listening to podcasts helps me. It gives my brain something else to focus on, and I drift off much more quickly.

I like listening to podcasts as well, but the ones I like when trying to fall asleep are different than those I listen to recreationally when doing chores. For falling asleep, I need to make sure whatever I listen to is something I'm OK with missing, so call-in shows often are a good fit, as there's infinite content in a call-in type show.

Sleep studies exist, and they're fairly advanced, is my understanding. For most people, though, it'll be possibly difficult lifestyle changes, like reducing light in the room, better bedding, less noise, not sleeping with a partner, winding down before bed without screens (big one), better diet, etc. The solutions are there, they're just unpalatable, like everything else you should do that's good for you.

Sleep studies collect a lot of data, but that may or may not translate into an actual intervention depending on the situation. As I understand it, they're mostly useful for detecting when sleep is disrupted, which can then potentially fit a profile for e.g. sleep apnea or be correlated to some other physiological indicator.

As for lifestyle changes, I'm not an expert in sleep science, but I've tried to read some of the literature to understand what works, since I struggle with sleep quality. As far as I can tell, a lot of the specific suggestions that often get thrown around (even by otherwise reputable sources, sadly) are somewhere between speculative and pseudoscience. There is some evidence that "sleep hygiene" interventions as a whole might have some kind of effect, but the individual components aren't typically tested, the studies usually aren't adequately controlled, and the effect is often exaggerated (e.g. by highlighting questionable measures like "sleep efficiency").

CBT-I has better evidence, although it's also not entirely clear which components are really worth the trouble (the evidence for sleep restriction seems pretty strong; the "CBT" elements less so, but it may be that they help different subpopulations), and clinicians who actually have experience delivering CBT-I are not readily available in many places.

I have followed a distilled version of CBT-i remotely via SleepReset (a HN company), because I discovered CBT-i but it wasn’t indeed readily available in my country and region.

It has helped me tremendously (together with other tooling like sport and meditation).

I suspect it will only be "solved" once the problems of existential angst and ennui are. It's remarkable how powerful our primal emotions can be at overriding even the strongest of drugs.

I've seen DIY gadgets before that cost around the same, seems very interesting. I'm wondering if there is a gap in the market in sleep quality analysis

Electronics and very bright nighttime lighting are a ton of it.

Cutting those out would turn a hell of a lot of “night owls” or people who “can’t sleep” into people who sleep on a normal schedule just fine.

It’s obvious when you consider what all that stuff really means. Obviously it’s hard to sleep when you spend your hours after sunset in hundreds-of-candle-power lighting and have hyper-stimulation of a hundred kinds available at the press of a button.

Of course there’s also apnea and kids and such, but that’s a large proportion of the problem, overall.

Color temperature is more of a factor than brightness. Blue/white light disrupts Melatonin production. Changing your lightbulbs to be below 2700K (more of a yellow light or even red light) won't disrupt Melatonin.

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