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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

The mention of deep sleep being necessary to memory formation is especially interesting to me.

I went 5-8 years or so with poor quality sleep. While it is difficult to estimate correctly at home, my Zeo was regularly giving me 15-20m of deep sleep a night and I had a very hard time fixing it. While I performed fine at work, I had a hard time recovering from any sort of physical symptoms (such as tension) and building muscle memory. I certainly felt pretty bad, and it was like things didn't 'stick'.

Nowadays I get 40m on average. Still not great but getting better.

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There was a post here on Hacker News many years ago about a software developer who became a bicycle messenger.

One point from that post related to this discussion:

"Once I became a bike messenger, I slept like a log for 8 hours every night."

In my own life, having worked both manual, physical labor and been a tech worker, I noticed the following:

- When I worked construction, my body would be exhausted but my mind would be very active when I tried to go to sleep.

- In tech work, it's my mind that is exhausted but my body still has energy

- I've also worked jobs that required a high amount of both physical and mental focus and that's when I usually sleep the deepest.

Good old saying - if you work hard manually, rest by doing something mentally challenging, and vice versa. For most of us vice versa applies hard.

I do something every day or evening, even if its just 1.5-2h evening walks. Days I don't do anything are definitely harder to fall asleep, to say the least, and some small achievement is missing.

I take a stimulant for my adhd. If i didn't have physical exhaustion (usually a 10km 2h walk before sleep) I don't think I could sleep at all. It still affects the quality of sleep (not much deep sleep) though.

Now, sleep quality really affects everything. I think in general, mental health/sanity is hardly taken seriously in the tech industry. If I had employees I'd rather they had enough physical activity and sleep over a long and sustainable period than them sleeping under their desk hacking through the night.

I’m the same way when it comes to motor skills. I play electric guitar, and it’s pointless to practice technique if I did not sleep enough the night before - nothing will stick anyway.

May I ask what you did to improve your deep sleep?

Hard to pin it on any one thing unfortunately.

I notice it goes up when I’m doing as much as I can of the following: get 20-30m sunlight, talk with friends in person, avoid alcohol, work out, and be more active in building my life (vs having it built for me). Also, doing necessary emotional work with a counselor. All of those IME reduce my low grade anxiety.

It’s basically all eating your vegetables stuff. Way more impactful than any supplement or protocol.

N=1 and all that. HTH

Not the OP, but first of all you need enough time. If you constantly have only 5-6 hours of sleep per day then there is nothing what would help.

But if you have enough time than you need to try everything, beginning with air quality, noise and light reduction, bedding quality.

One of the first episodes in the huberman podcast, he references a study where insomnia was cured in 100% of study participants by taking them camping for a week. I think sleeping is like weight loss, it's really simple but people don't want to do what's necessary. Non-sedentary lifestyle, eat right, wake up and go to sleep with sun, don't use electronics, etc.

Only candles after dark (I could read comfortably by two beeswax candles, very dim light compared even to most night lights) and no electronics entirely cured my “insomnia” of decades within a couple days. Go figure, hundreds or thousands of candle-power lighting up whole rooms, and entertainment more compelling than a Roman emperor could command on tap, is extremely bad for sleep. What a surprise.

It’s goddamn hard to keep up, though.

Pro tip: use RGB light strips for room lighting and set them to pure red an hour or two before sleep.

I don't have any trouble sleeping, but that's what I do when someone requires me to suddenly disrupt my sleeping schedule so I can get up at some ungodly early hour and it's the only way I can go to sleep sooner than usual and actually fall asleep.

If you really wanted to do it every day it would make far more sense to automate it and make it gradual to simulate a sunset though.

I am not saying this as veiled criticism. I am asking this so I can understand what you said better because my sleep is terrible. When you say no electronics entirely, do you mean after dusk or something? Because obviously you wrote this post.

My solution was similar but less extreme: candles or warm low output LEDs that are not ceiling-mounted.

Electronics are allowed until the last hour before bed, but after 7pm or so only with a blue light filter and minimum brightness, and only with text content, no video or gaming.

The second I break these rules I immediately have trouble falling asleep, like clockwork. Which of course I periodically do for a media or video game dive, then I either accept the crappy sleep or I take a pill.

This sounds less disruptive to try :0

I’m not doing it anymore. Worked great. Kept it up for a few weeks. Early to bed, slept well. I basically hadn’t done that since I was like 8 years old.

Yes, after dusk. Probably would have allowed a couple hours past dusk in Winter (northern hemisphere). Turns out you (nearly everyone, excepting the few who’d have had insomnia even in a Nebraska farmhouse in 1920) get tired fast with low light and no hyper-stimulus. You can still play musical instruments or play cards or read by candle light or a few other things. But that won’t keep you up until 2AM night after night after night (maybe every now and then).

But god, it’s hard to make that work with any amount of a modern life.

Thanks tons for these details. Time for me to give it a shot, esp. if playing instruments doesn’t contribute to the problem.

I dislike how you frame it as a personal failure to do what is necessary. It is a societal failure. People may have strong self-control, and want to have completely more primitive lifestyle which would likely improve their mental state, but escaping the industrial society can be simply out of reach for many people. For example if you're poor and born in a city-state you may never even have the capacity to experience camping.

Individual problems have individual solutions.

I disagree that they are individual problems. This isn’t Sparta. Many of the negative mental health externalities were created either inadvertently or deliberately to maximize shareholder (read: wealthy, mostly older people) money. It’s irresponsible.

And notice I didn’t say value. Profiting off of making another person doesn’t add value. It extracts it from them, like the scream extractor in Monsters Inc.

This kind of thinking is associated with 70s New Leftism and is mostly wrong. You can spot it because it says every problem is caused by "corporations" or "billionaires". I think it's interesting to look at how it's actually different from Marxism, which basically says today's small business owners are the reactionary class, not the big ones.

The reason old people are powerful is 1. they vote in every election 2. they have lots of free time 3. they own land 4. there's a lot of them. They're not called baby boomers for no reason.

I think the main reason you see activists advocate against "corporations" is because the activists want the government to privatize everything in a different way by having nonprofits run it, which are not "corporations" but are usually even more corrupt.

Society is not under your control. Laying the blame at society's feet is a way for those who are suffering to abscond themselves of the burden to change their behaviour.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter who's fault it is, it just matters what you do about it.

Of course, the truth is somewhere in between, but leaning towards "take personal ownership of the problem" is probably a better default setting.

This is giving boomer

> a way for those who are suffering to abscond themselves of the burden to change their behaviour.

Much as you've absconded yourself of the burden of using words correctly.

"Abscond" means "to depart secretly and hide oneself" - it makes little sense in the above context.

Why can't it be both? On the one hand, well intentioned economically mobile people are not practising healthy sleep habits. On the other, our societal structures do not facilitate or encourage healthy sleeping patterns.

The reason to prefer the indivualistic framing is because one has far more control over one's own behaviour.

Being outside for an hour during sunset is the best sleep medicine. Don’t even have to go camping.

Episode 2 was about sleep. But the transcript had no matches for insomnia or camping.[1]

It sounds like a distorted memory of a small study where subjects without sleep disorders slept earlier but not longer or better when camping with natural light and fire only.[2] How long the effect lasted was not studied.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1TxQj9IsQ

[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(13)...

This makes far more sense. A lot of people with insomnia have Sleep Disordered Breathing - sometimes apnea, sometimes UARS which is roughly the same thing except you tend to wake up before oxygen desaturation, resulting in somewhat different symptoms and high false negative diagnostic rates.

> May I ask what you did to improve your deep sleep?

I think Steve Gibson (of the Security Now podcast, and absolutely not a doctor), had a "healthy sleep formula" of taking a time release melatonin and a time-release niacinamide supplement, and he claimed his Zeo would register more deep when he took it. I got the impression he thought his own sleep was poor and was trying to fix it, and just talked about his personal project on his podcast.

I tried it, and anecdotally I did feel like I slept deeper.

My experience with taking things before bed has been negative because you have to take them with liquids, or else they're one of those combo supplements with a bunch of metabolites left over, and either way you end up waking early because you have to pee now.

In my case - I've had sleep problems for a decade - it started to improve once my kids stopped waking me up 3-4 times a night.

It's still not as good as it was before as I've not been able to get sporting properly and, well, they kids do wake us just not every night anymore.

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