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A little over a year ago I was having awful sleep hygiene. From time to time, I still wake up at ~2am and just can't find restfulness again.

I picked up a simple smart watch that tracks sleep (one of the Garmins, as they are one of the few that protect privacy and don't need to connect to the Internet). I slowly and methodically improved my sleep, and I feel like a different person.

I have noticed that if I turn my blue light filter on my screens off, that has a huge impact. Working long days has a huge impact. I take a hell of a lot of magnesium. I need ~20 minutes of outdoor walking a day and I need to eat dinner before 4pm. Lots of other small things that have an impact that I'm probably forgetting.

How many of us are just chronically tired?

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> How many of us are just chronically tired?

That is a tough question. Activity, it seems, has a habit of begetting activity. Such that the answer may not be, "you need better sleeping habits," but it could be more that, "you need better activity habits."

Noticing things is also a dangerous place to be in. A lot of what your body does while asleep is based on expectations as much as it is anything else. Learned expectations, to be specific. Most people know the "you wake up before the alarm goes off" idea. That is strong enough that it will work for changes in the alarm time.

What does that mean? It may be that your body learned a cue to start something for your sleep. So, for you, you now need to turn on your blue light filter; even if that may, in fact, not be actively doing anything.

Some of us just need to be less lonely. When you don't have friends, your body is primed to wake up in the middle of the night to be ready for threats. I've noticed when I have a good social interaction in the day, I sleep much better and for a shorter period, even.

> How many of us are just chronically tired?

Probably a lot of us, especially parents of small children.

I've also been struggling with sleep for the past five or six years, waking up in the middle of the night feeling strangely wired up. With a lot of trial and error I've been improving the quality of my sleep.

Three years ago I went to a sleep clinic because I noticed symptoms of sleep apnea and they were able to confirm it and prescribe a CPAP machine, for which I am grateful, but the overall experience was disappointing. When I explained during the follow up that I still was waking up at night feeling stressed they brushed me off and suggested some herbal remedy. It turns out that the pressure they had prescribed me was laughably off, which I only learned through trial and error for a period of two years until I found what works for me -- almost twice what they prescribed.

You mention some factors that I've also noticed having a big impact, like stress/work, walking outdoors (1hr minimum for me), stretching, foam rolling, early dinners, and only drinking one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Another one that seems to have a weirdly strong impact is what I eat for dinner, with legumes/beans being by far the most beneficial -- maybe something to do with blood glucose during the night?

Doctors will often recommend exercise, but I find that these days even moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle destroys my sleep quality for several days. There's something about it that appears to be too physiologically stressing, even though ten years ago I was a happy as a regular gymgoer.

> moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle destroys my sleep quality for several days.

this is surprising! Not that this would be easy to just do, but have you ever leaned into it for a while (like a month) and seen if that persists? I'm obviously not a doctor or anything -- I just wondered in reading that whether it may possibly be a change shock that would subside after a brief period at a higher activity level, resulting in the best of both worlds.

I did it for a couple of years and it was getting worse. It got better with rest and walking.

> Doctors will often recommend exercise, but I find that these days even moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle destroys my sleep quality for several days. There's something about it that appears to be too physiologically stressing, even though ten years ago I was a happy as a regular gymgoer.

I had something similar like this. I think I was able to fix it. The theory is that your sleep is still poor, even though you sleep through the night. This is causing high cortisol levels during day time and higher resting heart rate. This is elevated further after doing moderate exrercise and takes a long time to get back to normal as your sleep isnt adequate. If your heart rate doesnt go down enough, then your sleep quality gets destroyed.

The solution, for me and I am guessing for you, is this: Stop the cycleing. First fix sleep. Track it using Wellue O2 Ring. If the scores are not good, the reconfigure CPAP - use sleepapnea reddit for inputs. Once sleep is sorted as per O2 Ring, then it might take a few months for you to recover. After that you can restart moderate exercise and things should be fine.

Yeah, I also suspected a vicious cycle of stress/cortisol causing poor sleep, which leads to more cortisol and poor recovery.

It did get better when I stopped cycling, as much as I loved it. I'm now walking instead and feeling much better. I intend to increase volume over time and once my VO2Max is back to my baseline then I may introduce cycling with an eye on going easy and eating enough before/during/after exercise.

Thanks for the advice, it is good to hear that it worked on other people.

The simplest predictor I heard is the lower your resting heart rate, the better you sleep. It is way easier to target that then a jumble of diet, exercise, caffeine, light, etc. Try to lower your resting heart rate as you wind your day up, food and blue light raise it, as well as all the obvious things like playing video games or high dopamine things like TV/Social media.

I've had some periods of "intense work on sleep schedule". A big one was discovering that I was on the higher end of caffeine sensitivity (but I can still sleep if I only drink coffee in the morning).

I have thought that the blue light filter doesn't do so much, with a caveat. The laptop screen is much less bright, so it doesn't bother me. It seems like the blue light of a desk screen has a bigger effect. But I also think it is the brain activity of stimulus seeking on the screen itself that has a big effect on sleep. It's better to turn of screens entirely to wind down, or do something that actually helps you wind down for sleep.

For me, the light doesn't seem to have much effect - but what I do on the computer matters. For example, as much as I liked to watch something in the evening, I now find that if I watch an interesting movie or TV show too late, my mind is still wound up in it when I lie down, and I find it much harder to fall asleep.

Yes. I think that should be the commonly spread advice instead of the blue/red light thing

I still do this sometimes, but I occasionally unintentionally torture myself by programming pretty late and then trying to fall asleep 15m later. I'll sleep, it's not restful at all. There needs to be some period to let brain activity decrease before falling asleep.

> I have noticed that if I turn my blue light filter on my screens off, that has a huge impact.

Just to confirm, because this is a surprising result: disabling the blue light filter on your screens improves your sleep?

Male here. Elimination diet going down to single ingredient foods -> talk therapy -> oxyegen therapy -> steady weekly ketosis -> after a year adding back in low inflammation foods, prioritizing carbs from beans like lentils to help repair the gut and now I can give a motivational speech like Tony Robbins from being at a place of basically suicide/ruminating thoughts that never end and cluster headaches that were growing into a chronic, never going away condition.

Everyone's obviously different and your mileage may vary but at the end of the day you can drastically feel different by heavily modifying your diet and pushing past hunger 1 time/day.

Would you be kind enough to provide a little more detail on the program that worked for you?

A lot of people just have undiagnosed sleep apnea, disrupting their brains sleep cycles. Despite sleeping for hours, they wake up tired and groggy, not refreshed.

I was chronically tired because of sleep apnea. CPAP changed my life.

> How many of us are just chronically tired?

Alertness is also partly a function of resting metabolic rate, which is higher for those who exercise and/or have more muscle tissue.

Early last year, I lost my phone and I intentionally delayed replacing in some kind of smart phone detox. I have never had better sleep than in those two weeks.

What about your diet, specifically sugar and carbohydrates. Personally, I have much, much more energy and stamina when I avoid them.

I averaged ~4 hours of sleep last year based on FitBit’s sleep tracker. I’m a parent too, so mostly that checks out.

Dinner before 4pm, wow. How much time is that before you lie down?

I'm in the midst of a reflux episode so this is definitely something, but 4-5 hours between final meal and bed is a lot of time. Regardless, glad you found something that works and thanks for sharing.

> I slowly and methodically improved my sleep, and I feel like a different person.

How do you do that? The smartwatch may give some info, but what do you do with it that allows falling and staying asleep, while all kinds of random variables may affect the metrics?

Fitbit tracker is how I discovered I am in bad shape when it comes to sleep. My doctor was worried I had dementia due to my cognitive issues and hallucinations in the past few years, and he sent me for neuro-psychiatric testing and to see a neurologist for it. I kept mentioning that my sleep tracker is reporting a lack of quality sleep, especially REM sleep. I said yes I know it's not 100% reliable but it seems worth looking into because on days I get some REM, I feel great. Docs weren't really taking me seriously though.

Thanks to the tracker, I was able to determine that on nights I have just awful sleep, it correlated with my exercise days. Turns out that taking a pre-workout loaded with caffeine at 4PM is a terrible idea because caffeine can have a nearly 12 hour half-life. Oops. Ditched the pre-workout and my sleep improved significantly. No more insomnia and less time waking up in the middle of the night. I still have issues with REM at least half of the week unfortunately.

I finally got referred to a sleep study a few months ago and although it was for existing sleep apnea - which I've already been treating successfully with cpap/autopap for decades - it confirmed that I am indeed not going into REM. So it's not dementia (at least not yet), it's lack of REM sleep. It also revealed that my body is moving a lot during sleep, not good. And for the cherry on top, I recently started exhibiting behavior of REM sleep disorder where I am smacking/punching myself and my partner and yelling out in the middle of the night. Definitely not a good sign, but at least now we know sleep issues are at the heart of it. That Fitbit sleep tracking turned out to be very valuable after all.

For the moving a lot during sleep problem: have you looked into weighted blankets?

Maybe you're just getting your sleep stages confused, but REM sleep, while considered important, is not the vital function of sleep related to memory, dementia, and other health outcomes - from everything I understand, and I work in the sleep/neurotech space.

N3, also known as deep sleep is when the glymphatic system flushes toxins from the brain, consolidates memories, increases HGH secretion, along with other hormonal changes, primes the immune system, drives parasympathetic response, etc etc.

REM sleep is related to emotional processing, and some memory, but I also recently heard a theory that REM may also be necessary to prevent the elasticity of the brain from over-writing the visual system with other inputs, which was an interesting theory, as sight is the only sense which is turned off during sleep.

I quit drinking alcohol and it fixed all of my sleep problems.

I was routinely waking up in the middle of the night and unable to fall back asleep even on days I did not drink. Now I fall back asleep instantly.

I tried eliminating caffeine and practicing mindfulness before cutting out alcohol. I only stopped to be healthier, was pleasantly surprised when all my sleep issues went away. Have resumed my caffeine intake without any problems.

What Garmin model specifically?

yes tired but can't stop.

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