The brain summons deep sleep for healing from life-threatening injury
nature.com
nature.com
In a more mundane context, I've been fortunate to organize my schedule such that I don't use an alarm to get up in the morning. So I can let my body figure out how much sleep I need.
This is why my doctor advised (during a bout of insomnia a few years ago) not to use those "blackout" shades. They completely confuse your brain. My doctor said to sleep with the blinds open so your body can naturally reset its clock with the sunrise and sunset. Thankfully, this was in the Summer in a midwestern state, so I got back on track, but I still had to make some adjustments when daylight savings and Winter started.
Your strategy was the other recommendation my doctor said to use. Anything that allows your body to naturally find its biorhythm is the best.
Context: I struggle with insomnia and use blackout shades.
I’ve found blackout shades useful for when I’m not sleeping a schedule correlated with the sun (eg work at 4 am) or external artificial light (streetlamps).
My diet also changes in the Winter. I cut off caffeine at noon and restrict phone and screen time in favor of physical activities in the later afternoon. It takes about two weeks for my body to adjust fully to the changes, but then its fine throughout Winter. Even when I'm getting less sunlight because the sun is going down sooner.
I never knew how much your diet will affect your sleep and biorhythms until I started making changes. Even small changes can have big effects on your sleep cycles.
Hope that helps.
In Summer I tend to have more carbs and proteins, along with bigger meals for both lunch and dinner since I tend to exercise later outside then during Winter. The extra amounts in both for energy allow me to be active longer before the sun goes down.
In the Winter, I tend to reduce carbs and front load my day with them, so that in effect, by the time the sun goes down, my body is running down on their energy stores for the day. I also tend to reduce proteins and only increase them if I have a heavy day for example if I have both weight training and some higher impact cardio like hockey or indoor rock climbing or snowboarding.
In Winter I tend to have a bigger lunch and smaller dinner which helps to focus in the reduction in energy. Generally by the time 7 or 8pm rolls around, I can feel my body starting to tune down for the day and signals my body is getting ready for sleep. A hot shower usually puts me over the edge. I can get into bed and I'm out cold in a few minutes.
Hope this helps.
From time to time I'm looking into ketogenic diet and find it always inspiring how others manage carb and fat. I try to avoid carbs and if I eat them I always try to get my body moving, be it a light walk (so, not exactly practising full keto..). Main meal for me is dinner... I like how digestion and energy restoration is taking place mainly at night's rest. I don't experience problems falling asleep when giving my body food it needs. I'm usually not bothered by feelings of hunger til late afternoon (intermittent fasting so to speak, fat goes a long way..). Most important habit for good sleep seems to be "lay down, don't touch phone".. Hope this inspires, too :)
(eventual recommendation "the ketogenic bible, wilson/lowery")
"Dang, my alarm woke me up at 8:30am while I was sleeping like a baby because of my blackout shades" doesn't sound like a problem anyone is having.
For waking up you'd need some kind of timed control, either old-school mechanical or maybe a smart relay. I've found that a single well-placed smart bulb programmed to ramp up over the course of 15 minutes works well to wake me up, but I'm pretty sensitive to light during sleep.
I went into a rabbit hole a while back of investigating whether it would be possible to light a room in my house equivalent to the summer sun, so I could avoid SAD during the long nights of the British winter.
Taking that 35,000 lumen light above, even assuming it's lumen rating is accurate, in a 3 by 3 metre room, that's less than 4,000 lux, and that's if it was entirely focused on the floor area. Direct sunlight is 32,000 to 100,0000 lux. The sun is just really bright. Normal indoor home lighting is about 100 lux.
The most efficient LEDs on the market are 200 lm/watt, so a reasonable lower bound for the amount of lighting you'd need for a 3x3 room is 1440 watts to get to the minimum 32k lux, but you'd have to factor in electrical inefficiencies and the directionality too.
All that being said, those corn cob bulbs are fantastic and do make you feel a lot better. Just not quite the same as relaxing on a hammock in the garden, sadly.
My team moved our daily standup later in the day to accommodate my delayed sleep phase and it's been extremely helpful to getting a full night's uninterrupted sleep.
Crepuscular and nocturnal predators require tribes of humans to have some number of members who are tuned to be either awake before sunrise or awake long after sunset. Without people with genes to go bed late and wake up late we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
In modern society the former are lionized and the latter are villified as making bad choices.
Wouldn't a tribe that is able to do as I can have the greatest evolutionary advantage and thus outcompete the tribes requiring specialization like you describe?
I'm sympathetic to your situation -- but with all due respect, this would seem to be a strategy with a vanishingly small likelihood of benefit.
"Trying" to sleep is also doomed to failure, of course.
Personally, what works best for me is modeling solutions to issues in projects (work or otherwise).
I originally tried this, hoping for the benefit of "sleeping on a problem". I don't think it's been particularly successful for that (though it could be subtly so, I guess), but it has about a 90% success rate for inducing sleep within 15 minutes. :)
My solution and yours might be the same thing (distraction from the goal of sleep), but I'd worry about the stimulation of video, the light from the screen, disturbing partners, etc. And also that I might get interested, and stay up for hours instead (this is my failure mode for reading before sleep).
Thinking about projects prevents me from sleeping. It's the surest way to keep me up with my mind racing for a few more hours. If it works for you, great!
The "mode" for watching Netflix for 15 minutes is turn it on, watch for 15 minutes, turn it off. I won't claim it works for everyone, but it does help settle my mind at night.
Good teams make it after everyone would have reasonably absorbed their coffee. But some teams get pushed earlier. Particularly if there are people in EST, CST, and definitely if you've got people in India, where 9 am PST is when you should be reading your kids bedtime stories.
Also, women require more sleep than men on average.
> Women need on average 11 additional minutes of sleep each night.
SO has it reverse, she wakes up at 7-8 am even at the weekend and is unable to get back to sleep.
I'm still a night owl. 12am is the baseline. 1am is not uncommon. 2 or 3am is occasional. I can attend a 9am. I prefer 10 or later. Most of my team does as well, and they all rise earlier than I do.
Basically for status updates, you’d just put it in Slack. We had a bot that prompted us. We did have a weekly meeting, but it was at a reasonable time for everyone.
A team I was on while there had some APAC people, and we even managed to have meetings with them, by scheduling them in afternoon hours for the U.S. Worked out pretty well.
First of all, the standup isn't daily, it's twice a week. People still miss it for reasons (kids, doctors appointments, ...), and it's just... accepted. There's a general culture of trust.
Other than that, Slack threads go on twice as verbose and long as in other places I've worked. There's a general deluge of pull requests going around certain times of the day and they're always reviewed within an acceptable time frame. In between delivering PR's you simply pick up other work, we're all seniors that know how to work independently, I'm not sure if you could achieve the same thing with a bunch of juniors mixed in unless they have the right attitude as well.
Move standup to 10:30am so Todd can sleep in
It's also a handy way to keep raises small. Oh you are being a human and we don't give raises to people who are human. Meets expectations, 2% raise.
sleep in
to sleep until later in the morning than you usually do
But also that is 2:30 p.m. for the other two guys, i.e. prime "still caffeinated and in the zone" time ;)
At one office job, we regularly worked from home around 9-10am and would only commute after the morning rush hour faded away.
like: complain about gunmen, not guns.
methodologies and weapons do not kill people. people kill people.
that said, here's a riddle:
q: what is the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist?
a: you can negotiate with a terroris, but not with a methodologist.
also, what nradov said, here:
How anyone can recover from something as savage as childbirth is beyond me. It is no small miracle that she was able to walk, let alone care for two new babies and herself (with my help, but there's only so much I can do to assist with breastfeeding or healing of major trauma).
At one point I asked all the nurses to leave and not come back for 6 hours in very angry tones.
Serious complications can be quite subtle that unless you answer questions, they may be missed. Having someone come in, listen to your heart and lungs, ask a few questions can't really be replaced with machines.
(It wouldn't even need to know what the odd thing represents; just that it's out-of-expectation enough to require someone to come over and check on you! A bit like asking a family's child to watch grandma while you speak to the mom and dad. All you want the child to do, is to freak out and get your attention if grandma does anything other than what she was already doing!)
Doctors not having to manually probe any signs of heart/lung problems each time they're in the room, would mean that they get either get more time to test each patient for consciousness/lucidity; get time to check on more patients; or (my preferred option) are able to make each check-session shorter and less invasive (no need to sit the patient up to listen to their lungs through their back, for example), and thus less disturbing of a patient's sleep quality (because it's easier to go back to sleep after a short conversation, when you haven't had your blood pressure spike from sitting up.)
The thing people don't seem to understand is the fact doctors also monitor consciousness. Depressed mental state is also a sign of blood loss. The patient's neurolopsychogical state is important information, it has diagnostic and prognostic value.
The most basic way of evaluating a patient's neuropsychological state is to bother them with questions.
It was like they were obsessed with busy work, I couldn’t tell if they didn’t want me there or if this was VIP treatment to them
It was in another country
Hotels also schedule their check-out + check-in times to leave a gap around this period, so that at least some percentage of their suites will be "between guests" each day for a few hours, and thus able to be deep-cleaned. But if that doesn't happen — e.g. if the whole hotel is booked for a convention weekend, and it's the Saturday and nobody's checking out that day — then the cleaning staff that normally does the deep cleans will be hunting around for minor stuff to do so they can look busy.
Plus my boss kept calling me.
Disconnected? Probably. But I think that's intended and part of the current medical model. It's not necessarily a bad thing when focusing on long term positive outcomes in aggregate. But it certainly feels inhumane at times to the individual and their loved ones.
But lack of sleep can impair immunity and disturb blood pressure and heart rhythm. Keeping someone with major trauma under stress (like being constantly awake) can make them more likely to die.
The fact that med school + residency means you basically have to put your life on hold throughout all of your 20s while other people are figuring out the whole “being a young adult in the world” thing leads to very… particular emotional development.
Medical school doesn’t particularly encourage questioning the status quo or established practices.
Some of them can recalibrate after a few years in the real world, but many never really escape that bubble. It’s hard to radically change your outlook on life in your 30s (let alone when you now have to repay huge debt, in the case of many American doctors)
Many of premed kids I knew in undergrad (or the high schoolers aspiring to premed) weren’t motivated by scientific pursuits or an altruistic desires - they just had to be the best. They needed to ace every test (and would argue incessantly with the teachers about it), they had to be in the hardest classes, etc. they became doctors because somebody told them it was hard and well respected.
I imagine that those people become doctors that are disconnected from their patients.
- Rich and respected -> doctor
- Rich but not respected -> lawyer, software
- Not rich but respected -> professor
A lot of people are going to be disappointed. Truth is medicine is a decadent profession, worldwide. In some countries, it's in free fall and accelerating to terminal velocity. In some parts of the world, doctors are hated to the point they routinely suffer physical violence.
The US manages to keep it relevant by restricting supply and maintaining its elite status but I'm not sure doctors are still respected there. Plenty of hackers who think they can do it better than the doctors right here on HN. I'm a programmer myself and I know for a fact a computer could do significant parts of the job. Even psychiatry is in danger due to LLMs.
A computer does a massive part of almost any job today, so I’m not sure what exactly this is trying to say about the profession. Wait until you hear that pilots can’t even fly without an airplane. Total conmen.
> Plenty of hackers who think they can do it better than the doctors right here on HN
Of course they would, it's easy to come up with solutions that are simple and wrong, when one has no point of reference. Hackers understand balancing trade-offs in programming languages or architectures, but can't imagine other fields being nuanced or even more complex. If an LLM cant tell you when to use a monorepo, then it far from telling you when a specific drug dosage is right for a patients set of circumstances.
1. I can use that word, I am one too.
It's hard to describe the effect years of this can have on the mind. Things can get so distorted you feel guilty for eating, for going to the bathroom, sleeping, resting. Normal people things like a weekend or a good night's sleep become luxuries to you. You come home and everyone's already asleep. People start out all starry eyed and thinking about making a successful career out of helping people, but as it nears its end people can't wait to just start making fat stacks already.
It functions as a sociopath breeding ground. Basically weeds out your humanity by punching you until you like it, hammering you until you get good at it so that you fit into the system. Some people just quit when faced with that, others try to take it and end up committing suicide. One of the most haunting stories I've ever heard was about young woman asking her attendings about suicide methods after a patient killed himself. They thought she was an interested student who was trying to learn about stuff so they happily dispensed all the information they knew. She efficiently and painlessly killed herself not even a day later.
People who make it out of this process might enjoy good pay and lifestyle depending on the country and the specialty they chose. It definitely costs them, though.
The power to repair people, fend off suffering and death. That's religion level power. It's bound to warp everything around it like a black hole.
It would take a society of exceptional sanity to handle it right.
When sleep deprived, the brain enters REM sleep even while awake. That's what those hallucinations are.
I have had the misfortune of experiencing this twice in my life so far; the first on a month-long car trip with my buddy and the second while i was the caregiver/caretaker for my Mother. In both cases it was my lack of sleep which made me very difficult to be around.
1) Sleep Deprivation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation
2) Also Related; The medications that change who we are - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-...
So whenever you note that somebody's behaviour has abruptly changed, always ask two questions; a) Are you sleeping well? b) What medications are you taking and what diet are you on?
When someone dies in the hospital what happens in the inquiry? Examine the symptoms of the person who died and how to detect them. Add another check.
If they left someone alone for 2 hours or 4 hours and they passed away during that time, what would the headlines read? "General Healthcare left the patient alone for X hours and didn't even bother to check on their well being."
She's super cute, intelligent and active but also extremely demanding and had a lot of problems with dermatitis, tummy aches, KISS syndrome and other stuff that made her not sleep well and cry a lot (and she's super loud).
It also made me respect single parents 10000 times more than before. I can't imagine handling a situation like that alone.
Fear based decisions don’t always lead to the best outcomes, though I am in no way dismissing the fear :)
Of course it's a trade-off I'd gladly make again but it still sucks that I will never feel as well rested day-to-day as I did before kids.
How odd. Why do hospitals not cluster these interactions together — the "while I've got you here..." experience?
In the case of a pregnancy, I'm assuming these "briefings" are things like trying to teach the new parent things they'll need to know when they go home; or giving them status updates about tests done on their new baby if they're in the NICU, and so forth. These all seem like things that could wait.
Is the point to use the infodumping as an excuse to do the tests?
Honestly, the truth is hospitals are designed to do this. The entire purpose of the place is to have people moved into it so that these constant checks and examinations as well as treatments can be done most efficiently. The idea is to rapidly notice and react to changes in the patient's condition.
In programming terms, the core function of a hospital is to poll and update the patient's state in a loop that runs while consent is given and until cured or dead. The polling frequency is calibrated according to knowledge of the patient's general condition and the specific pathology being treated.
If you know the patient could bleed out and die after some surgical procedure, you want to check periodically that this is not happening. How frequently do you check? Depends on what you predict could happen. If you think the worst that could happen is a small and slow bleeding, then you can check less often. If you think there's risk of major bleeding, then you want to check frequently, possibly even constantly.
As son and father in an end of life situation there was no gap to contemplate or allow us to connect it was drugs injection, food, check if he ate, back again, pick up tray, more drugs, check on his breathing, bathroom break (needed assistance).
Dad was probably OK with it but we never had a chance to just have a moment and possibly say something we never would have. He died at 8:40pm on my birthday of all days as I sat next to him.
We made it clear we wanted to be left alone over night, had reasons for why (neurological issues that are exacerbated by poor sleep) and they largely respected that. Maybe if we didn’t have that excuse it would have been worse. Shit, even the vending machine salads were pretty good. Didn’t love sleeping on a foam bench for 5 days, but we felt quite positive about the delivery center we had our child at in the US.
Even the c-section seemed absolutly brutal, at one point I was convinced one of the surgeons placed his foot on the table for leverage, given how much movement there was to her body.
As if the physical trauma wasn't enough, being in a room with multiple first-time parents struggling to breastfeed as both they and their children cried, then being visited and probed every hour by medical staff with ineffective pain relief, /and/ having work out how to care for your child when the only communication path is basically through an amplitude modulated scream -
Honestly, I've had some low points in my life, I thought I had a high tolerance for physical and emotional pain, but I can only describe what my wife experienced this week as total, crushing anguish.
In this day and age where you have limitless distractions/entertainment we often ignore our "less sexy" biological needs to the detriment of our mind and body. We need to treat Sleep/Nap/Rest as a "job" and not as something extraneous.
Instead of the current practice of arranging our biological needs around our work we should revert back to pre-industrial era practices where our work was arranged around our biological needs and nature's rhythms. A good way to start is to eat only when feeling hungry, nap/sleep when feeling tired/sleepy and in general listen to the body/mind needs irrespective of context.
Work is constantly nudging this balance in the wrong direction, putting us into a vicious cycle of accelerated death and suffering.
I may be making this sound worse than it feels though, probably because I'm writing this in between bouts of high fever. I honestly can't complain all that much from the life I lead but I do wish I could make it work much better around my physiological needs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978488
Unfortunately right now I don't have the time to follow through with most of it. Life happens, and right now it just happens to be happening more or less all at once. Urgency trumps priority.
Furthermore, I'm a night owl. I have at different times in my life tried to change it. I followed all the advice I could find (including a lot of the things you mention). Ultimately, if I have to wake up early in the morning for work, I might end up with a cycle of 8h on the first night, with some luck another 8h, then it goes down to 6-5h, 2h and in some occasions an all nighter to top if off.
My current sleep deprived cycle is one of relatively regular 5-6h per night. It's not very good but mostly because of the time I have to be awake.
If I could wake up at 9:30-10:00 every day, I would be able to sleep those 5-6h per night and be in top shape. I know because I've done it for a few months in the past. I was at top physical and mental shape, consistently.
Waking up at 7:00-8:00, even if I could sustain 7-8h per night, I'd still be sleepy, tired and unfocused for the most part. My brain suffers and so does my body.
At this point I just decided to accept light sleep deprivation vs. the worse alternatives.
I am not sure what you read, but Dr. Satchin Panda's research is not the "same light, eating, and exercise changes, mixed with some night-owl denialism." You can watch his(and other circadian researchers) longer videos on Youtube for more knowledge. Also two books i can recommend are a) The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda and b) When : The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink.
Circadian research is holistic since it studies how our body clocks (there are a set of them) are synchronized with Nature and thus when is the optimum time to do something with maximal benefit. Eg. When is the best time to take medicines for maximal efficacy, When is the best time to do exercise for maximum benefit etc. In the context of this thread, he doesn't talk about morning larks/night owls but merely allowing Natural Sunlight to tune us to its rhythms. So it doesn't matter what time you do get up in the morning (5/8/10AM etc.) but if you go and stand in the sunlight immediately after (or even better take a walk) your body adjusts itself so eventually you do get sleepy with sunset and awake at sunrise (within limits and control of other factors like exposure to other light sources). Similarly Exercise is most efficacious when done after 4PM etc.
Most of these practices are zero-cost and risk-free and easily adjustable to individual variations and much better than popping Melatonin pills etc.
If you want to know the effect of those "fixes" on the wrong person, re-read my big text. I've done it all. The "fix" only makes me sleepy early enough for the first or second night of a roughly weekly cycle. It also means a night with enough hours but not enough quality of sleep.
> Most of these practices are zero-cost and risk-free
They are really not. I went through a lot of issues for trying them. I nearly lost a job once, and I have missed social gatherings as I had to recover sleep in the weekend.
Moreover, where I live now, I don't have the option of morning sunlight for a few months each year as there is none. In fact, there are whole days with so much grey and darkness that my body basically thinks it's always time to sleep so not easily adjustable either.
For example, i list Diet and separately also Gut Health to consider. One of the key neurotransmitters affecting sleep is Serotonin which we now know to be mostly produced in the intestines. The Gut and Enteric Nervous System are known as "The Second Brain" (see book of the same name by Michael Gershon) and can act independently of the central nervous system. So one cause might be your gut is not producing enough Serotonin. On the Diet side Serotonin is made from Tryptophan so another cause might be your diet does not contain enough Tryptophan. For the lack of natural sunlight (SAD is well known) you might want to consider Vitamin-D and Melatonin supplements (but only after consulting with a doctor) and use one of those fancy lamps that mimic sunlight frequency ranges.
As i pointed out, Circadian science is holistic so you need to take various factors into account both individually and in combinations to narrow down the problem. There are various scenarios to try out and see what makes a significant difference. While the science is solid the nuances are very important to consider.
I take vitamin-d and melatonin already, and have messed with lamps, early sun, exercise, and tryptophan (and magnesium, and theanine, and dozens of other stuff). All these things together affect my sleep and wake times by maybe 30 minutes. If you really did know about something I haven't read before dozens of times, then at least you could have written a sentence or two about what it is.
All that you mention in your second para are symptomatic treatments but Circadian Research is big picture systems thinking giving you a framework within which you learn to slot your life/treatments. A medicine taken at the wrong time may lose its efficacy. The references given in my previous comments and other comments linked to from some of those give you the Science. Whether you want to read/study those to get more insight into your condition and perhaps work constructively towards a solution is up to you.
Why?
Why do I have to do all that? Why do I have to go through all this trouble, spend so much time, and energy and money figuring all this out? What happens until I do eventually figure it all out?
Why am I being required to adapt? All I need is to be left alone for maybe another couple hours each morning. That's all.
Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you had to work 1h past your bed time. Would you then be looking for multi-intervention protocols to shift your circadian clock forward so you wouldn't be falling asleep during some of your work hours? Would you happily and willingly spend all this time, energy and cash into adapting yourself to this madness?
Back to the original problem, I don't think any of this will make a difference. Maybe it will marginally improve the quality of my sleep, but at what cost? My genes are what bias my circadian rhythm that way. Will these interventions permanently alter my gene expression so I don't "fall back" into being a night person again? I doubt so. Which means these interventions will need to become a permanent fixture, causing more stress and giving me yet more work and routines to follow.
I really don't see how this can be considered a solution to anything, even if it works - and I honestly cannot see how it would. I would appreciate it if the gaslighting would just stop and we could discuss real ways to deal with the issue - like having more flexible work and life arrangements so different people could exist the way they're meant to.
1) Nobody is forcing you to do anything you don't want to.
2) I was merely sharing some useful Science which IMO has as yet not seen widespread adoption.
3) Our immediate environment will not change to accommodate our specific needs due to economic concerns. Due to globalized nature of work people are working longer hours and all times whether night or day. If my job which i need for survival needs me to stay awake at night i need to find means to adapt myself to it without ruining my Health. Research is showing more and more that Sleep is foundational to everything else and hence i need to treat it seriously and with high priority.
4) You are making a lot of assumptions/conclusions without having looked into the Science which i think is wrong. While DSPD is a thing it is not fully clear whether there is a genetic component to it. Also Epigenetics is a thing.
5) Finally, if the situation were reversed and i were suffering, i would do everything in my power to study as much as possible on available Science, Traditional Methods of healing etc. to come up with some plan to manage it with/without a doctor. You will find accounts in the popular press of people suffering from something which the doctors could not diagnose properly but they never gave up and kept researching by themselves and trying out new things until something worked for them (usually after consulting with a doctor on it).
I find this to be a disturbing way to describe eating
Some people with depression or C/PTSD can sleep 14+ hours a day and not feel rested.
Many people are so dysregulated that "listening to their bodies" and "embracing what is natural" are potentially self-destructive activities.
So, keep your own body's limitations in mind. If you are affected by something that has pushed you off the track, at the very least, be aware of it before you go charging full steam ahead.
What you are pointing out are extreme cases which is generally a small subset. So before jumping to this conclusion one should first setup one's daily life around circadian/natural rhythms and in general establish a healthy relationship between ourselves and the environment we are embedded in. This is fundamental to everything else.
In fact many doctors themselves are now saying that drugs are overprescribed and you don't need them for most (not all) cases. Watch the following documentaries;
1) The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs (Medical Documentary) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ggnhpGvvA
2) The Truth About the Medical Industry | The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs | Part 2 | Documentary Central - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33RuKhr9pag
When it comes to "General Health" (both Mental/Physical) people forget that one can do a lot with what is already known (from empirical practice over generations and modern science) and with the exercise of a little bit of commonsense.
I can easily eat nothing for a day or two, though my longest was 3 days. Working out has been helpful because now I have an intellectual need to ensure I get enough calories and my macros. I can also way overeat if I have things I like available because there’s never really a “stop” signal that’s not being physically full. The only times I experience a “yeah ok I’m good now” is with extremely rich cheesecake sickening me (having still overeaten it) or 70% dark chocolate boring me. The later along with green apples are the only snacks I dare to keep around, because I’m not all that interested in eating them lol.
If I tried to go to bed when I’m tired, I’d end up doing so 2-4 hours later than the previous day, end up being awake at night and sleeping (poorly) during the day until it cycles back around and the insanity repeats all over again. Even if I’m extremely tired for some reason, it still takes at least an hour to actually fall asleep, followed by waking up multiple times during the night to toss and turn. The phenomenon of my head hitting the pillow and the next day showing up happened once when I was traveling, and was wonderful.
I’ve historically been very poor at recognizing when I’m being emotionally affected by things or stressed, which I would describe as feeling more like an android that a human, though that’s improved these past few years.
Listening to my body is still important, but I can’t intuitively just understand what it’s “telling me”, rather I need to track the consequences and intervene.
Incidentally, I am both autistic and spent much of my childhood trying to manage that hazards of my parent’s unstable emotional states rather than my own.
I have wondered, at times, if other people feel like that more often (and some, maybe never!). I’m pretty sure I’d be emperor of the planet if I felt like that even one day a week.
Unfortunately there is a feedback loop there which is consistency that is very hard to maintain to get over the proverbial hump first.
It was fantastic.
We slept well, woke up around 7-8AM well refreshed and energetic, and would have something very light (eg. multigrain congee) to drink. Mom would finish cooking by 8AM and Dad would have a good brunch and leave for work with a light lunch in hand. We would have a good brunch by 10/10:30AM and leave for school with a light lunch in hand. Never felt drowsy/sleepy/tired in school. Return home from school around 5PM, have something light to eat and go out to play with friends until it got dark around 6/6:30PM. Get back home, wash up and do homework until 8/8:30PM (whatever couldn't be finished we did the next day morning). Have dinner, do some more homework (we didn't have TV at that time) and hit the bed around 9:30PM.
IMO, this should be the ideal "work" schedule and i have often thought of adopting it again as my everyday time schedule.
> The findings, published today in Nature, could help to guide care for people after a heart attack,
This is just hilarious. Remember to get enough sleep after a life-threatening heart attack, folks!
But your comment resonates very much with me. I am tired of this capitalist culture that reduces the human essence to value output and shames people for not pretending to be working hard enough. Part of the reason I like working from home is that I can take that fucking 20-minute nap after lunch and be infinitely more productive throughout the rest of the day.
Is it better to prioritize low-impact exercise or sleep after a heart attack? There's plenty of interesting angles to investigate.
Anecdata: I spent a decade as caregiver/caretaker for my late Mother who refused to do any exercises except the absolute necessary ones which a doctor would ask her to do for a specific cause eg. back pain, breathing exercises etc. As soon as that symptom alleviated she would abandon the exercises. So i encouraged her to take long naps whenever she felt sleepy and it helped keep her mental faculties sharp and physically feel spry (within limits of course).
You Asked: Is It Better to Sleep In Or Work Out? - https://time.com/3914773/exercise-sleep-fitness/
Quote: But when pressed to choose one that’s more important, Mah grudgingly decides on sleep. “Sleep is foundational,” she says.
I think there is a huge component of trained helplessness resulting from consumerist culture and social subservience.
Ultimately, individuals are responsible for managing their own health. Thinking it is the doctors job and responsibility to keep them healthy, and not their own is the root of most problems.
A new study isn't going to convince people people to stop being obese, exercise, and take care of themselves. A study that shows that sleeping longer or eating a Mediterranean diet has a 5% improvement in some metric has almost no specificity to you.
Research is important for the 1% of the time your health is already in crisis, When you are picking between medications or interventions after.
Even then, personal data on what works for you should always trump the research, because it is statistical in nature, usually with extremely high variability. If drug A works 51% of the time drug B works 49% of the time, the difference between them is almost meaningless. You want to know which drug your body responds to. In the clinical context, I think people and doctors overvalue how much time and effort to spend figuring out where to start, and undervalue how much effort to spend responding to personal data if it works or not.
Well said! People talk as if all empirical health practices that different cultures all over the world have developed are worthless without "modern research" while the researchers themselves are looking at it for inspiration and study.
A good example are practices from Yoga/Ayurveda/Qigong/Acupuncture etc. Their worldview, model of anatomy/physiology is very different than modern science but many of their techniques (not claiming all) do work even if we don't fully understand how as yet. That is why many Hospitals/Healthcare centers are adopting them for use in a controlled manner today.
You seem to have a wrong idea of "Scientific Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and how policies are actually enacted based on incomplete knowledge/research.
Very True. For example, when i ask people why they need that huge cup of starbucks coffee in the morning i get every excuse but the truth that they have been conditioned by the environment and the body has maladjusted to it so that they are in a downward health spiral.
LOL, that's what everyone riding the "western diet" blood sugar roller coaster is already doing.
If the diet doesn't reflect the environment our biological needs evolved in, acting without self discipline, eating based on how you feel, is a sure path to obesity, diabetes, and NAFLD.
Horrible advice.
If you want a little more detailed overview see my previous comments here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138469
I "feel" like I could go for a bacon cheeseburger basically 24s hours today. I feel like I could eat another right after I finished the first. All of that is emotional.
That is pretty different than symptoms true physical hunger. My stomach starts to grumble after 24 hours without food. After about 48 hours I feel lethargic and cognitively disordered.
I think that a majority of Americans confuse the two because it has been years or even decades since they actually experienced the symptoms of insufficient calorie intake
One day I'm eating only till 4PM and the next one after 4PM and so on.
Already lost 10 pounds in 2 months from being slightly overweight with no additional lifestyle changes and almost effortlessly because it's surprisingly easy to distract myself from eating for few hours.
I think we are tuned to eat when we want but also to the food not being available all the time.
You're effectively saying "It's good advice if I ignore it half the time", with your positive outcome stemming from the time spent ignoring it and not eating altogether.
It's silly and harmful advice. Feelings are inherently irrational, we shouldn't advise people to act on them.
When it comes to diet, what you eat largely governs how it makes you feel. The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being the diet.
I think the essence of this advice is to avoid eating for social, customary or emotional reasons.
So what I wrote basically is totally unrelated because, you can get away with all of that and eat for any stupid reason if you restrict yourself to doing it just half of the time.
> Feelings are inherently irrational, we shouldn't advise people to act on them.
This is silly and wrong. Emotions and Feelings are fundamental to Mental Health and by extension to Physical Health. See the research by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her book How Emotions are Made.
The Mind at Work: Lisa Feldman Barrett on the metabolism of emotion - https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/the-mind-at-wor...
> The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being the diet.
This is silly and puts the cart before the horse. Raw Hunger is the root cause and search for food is the consequence from it. Humans have evolved to eat and digest a wide variety of foods but if you only eat harmful ultra-processed food as a lifestyle choice that's on you and needs to be changed. In addition to a proper diet, one should only eat when feeling raw hunger which can be helped with techniques like Time-Restricted Eating/Intermittent Fasting etc.
Question: do you have any system or hack for keeping track of whether it's a < 4pm or > 4pm day? If you do, please share. I have a habit of mindless eating, and will likely not remember to avoid eating at my prescribed times.
By the way, if you are close to your healthy weight when doing this aim to reduce your weight so that your BMI is between 22.5 and 25. This is the area of lowest mortality. There's no point to go lower.
Once you get there you can either abandon alternating, shorten fasting window or just lessen restrictions on fasting periods like allowing eating certain type of foods, like raw vegetables or fruits or nuts so that your weight is maintained.
> reduce your weight so that your BMI is between 22.5 and 25. This is the area of lowest mortality. There's no point to go lower
Thanks. I doubt I'll have to ever worry about going below 22.5 :-). I'm at 28 right now. Gonna be a huge fight to get to 25.
Good luck to you. I feel like being stubborn about keeping it going and able to distract yourself for few hours when hungry are keys to positive outcomes.
I don’t think so. In my observation a lot of people eat because it is time to eat, or because others are eating, or because they are bored, or because food is at hand.
> acting without self discipline
That is a curious thing to say. Not eating when one is not hungry takes a lot of self discipline. “Eat only when hungry” is a whole bunch of not eating.
Ever since I switched to whole food diet, I don't get nearly as hungry and easily go 12+ hours without food without a thought
I think you're underestimating just how hungry people feel
Possible. Or people have no clue what hunger really is.
But still the advice didn’t say “eat every time you are hungry”. It said “A good way to start is to eat only when feeling hungry.” That is actually a prohibition. The advice is equivalent with: do not eat when you are not hungry.
It also in the very sentence admits that this is not the only rule to be followed. That’s the “A good way to start”. Meaning that there are other things to be aware of. One of them being what you eat as you mention.
With modern medicine people are living longer but their quality of life becomes so bad it is not worth it.
Health IS Wealth!
Before it was all phone calls, in-person interactions, live TV and Radio... Both for work and leisure, now you have more options than ever to take things at your own pace rather than letting external factors dictate how you arrange your time.
I think we hit peak "speed of life" in the late 20th century to be honest, much of this is grass-is-greener thinking, we have made great progress in terms of day-to-day personal freedom.
Life has never really matched this idilic ideal of the village farmer. Things were very rough for most of history, everyone was constantly stressed to keep up with their minimal necessities to live, it was not in any way relaxed. And the industrial revolution hit ~250 years ago, with much more strict schedules and much longer work days. This is not a recent phenomenon in the least.
I have heard this argument many times before but it is mostly not true. Most village farmers do lead a more relaxed and relatively stress-free life. You just need to visit/observe/interact with them to see the difference.
The main reason is the difference between Acute Stress vs. Chronic Stress.
Chronic Stress has what has exploded exponentially in urban areas after the Industrial Revolution and the current IT Industry has made it even worse. There are just too many things to juggle all the time each of which has a deadline with consequences (because process and efficiency) however trivial it might be in the larger scheme of things. The farmer doesn't have that many things to worry over and so only has episodic bursts of Acute Stress over truly consequential things the management of which is easier.
Another related point is that the farmer does live closer and more entwined with Nature than urban folks and this has been shown to be better for psychological health. We are evolved to interact with Nature and not isolate ourselves in a concrete jungle and grey cubicles.
I met my wife about 11 years ago, and she said that I would do a kind of disturbing "stop breathing" thing when I slept pretty shortly after we met, and I didn't think much about it then either.
About a year ago, I decided to see a doctor and it turns out that I have sleep apnea; after a bit of finagling I managed to get a specialized oral appliance, I sleep much better. I don't snore anymore, my blood-oxygen levels stay in the green level, and my wife says my breathing during the night is pretty normal. Now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long to do anything about it.
Pretty much everything in my life got about 10-20% easier after I started getting proper sleep. I think a bit clearer, I process conversations a bit better, I'm able to focus on tasks a little easier. It didn't magically "solve" all my problems, but it did make them a lot easier to work around.
(For an equally useless advice. Why should one follow him? What does he do?)
It was really tough. I was suicidal. My only reprieve from pain was falling asleep.
I saw a neurologist and he told me that two most important things for your brain are:
- consistent sleep schedule
- regular exercise
Once I got those two under control, the headaches finally went away.
1) Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR): Exploring a World Beyond Sleep - https://positivepsychology.com/non-sleep-deep-rest-nsdr/
2) NSDR, Meditation and Breathwork - https://www.hubermanlab.com/topics/nsdr-meditation-and-breat...
3) Neuroscience of Sleep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sleep
TNF-alpha promoting sleep is a surprise but it… makes sense. Somehow.
I wonder what happens in people who are on anti-TNFa. Maybe the antibody doesn't cross the blood brain barrier though.
I tried tossing “tnf-alpha inhibitor insomnia” into Google Scholar. Scanning the results I didn’t feel a “signal” in the papers that TNF-alpha inhibitors cause insomnia—which I wouldn’t expect either due to TNF inhibitor antibody size, right? But! There are tons of very interesting papers in the results behind those keywords. With multiple perspectives. Fruitful combo of keywords, you know?
Google Scholar is unusually non-deterministic in what it returns for a given search. You probably won’t see the same papers as I did but it’s an interesting search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=tnf%2Dalpha%20inhibitor...
This paper stood out a bit:
Inhibition of tumor necrosis factor improves sleep continuity in patients with treatment resistant depression and high inflammation (2015)
Authors, full list as I have it in the buffer: Jeremy F. Weinberger, Charles L. Raison, David B. Rye, Amy R. Montague, Bobbi J. Woolwine, Jennifer C. Felger, Ebrahim Haroon, Andrew H. Miller — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915911...
First thoughts: TNF—alpha signaling becomes unfocused? TNF-alpha release outside the CNS affects receptor sensitivity or other downstream mechanisms that do straddle the blood-brain barrier?
Some beauty might have been gotten left behind on the headline writing table. The body’s response to the mycardial infarction – a cascade of signaling proteins – is beautiful, and the response to that cascade being induction of deep and restful sleep is also quite beautiful.
I have an eager immune system and I’ve known TNF-alpha as a pretty brutal card in the game. There’s beauty in coming to see it as a signal to repair and rest. Not just a “we have a problem” but a “let’s call ancient repair processes in”.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
#1 - For most patients, it ain't merely "tests and procedures" which interfere with sleeping in a hospital at night.
#2 - After a major injury, it ain't just nighttime when you need to sleep. Again, most hospitals seem determined to make that as difficult as they possibly can.
> The study concludes that while individuals may initially sleep more when given extended opportunities—likely to recover from prior sleep deprivation—they do not sustain excessive sleep beyond their physiological needs. Consistently sleeping more than 10 hours may indicate underlying health issues and warrants further investigation.
So more than 10 hours might indicate a problem, not 8-9 hours. Also, it's different if people work out a lot or have a physically demanding job:
> For athletes or individuals with high physical demands, 10 hours of sleep might not indicate an underlying health issue but rather an increased physiological requirement. Research has shown that elite athletes often sleep longer than the general population. (this is not from the paper but from a quick search)
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep/how-much-sleep
Absolutely nothing wrong with sleeping between 8 and 9 hours, you're actually exactly in the healthy range.
I have the same profile : no caffeine or other stimulants, good volume of physical activity; I don't need any reminder to go to bed, I get the obvious the call by being quite tired.
Discussing sleep with people, I found two types that are dominants:
- people who heard "between 7 and 9 hours" and remember "8 hours" (can't say they're wrong here!) - people who heard "between 7 and 9 hours" and remember "the goal is 7 hours", and actually sleep between 5 and 7 hours
https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class/resources/learn-first-...