When Sleep Leaves You Tired | Hacker News Reader

When Sleep Leaves You Tired

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62 pointstjr24 comments

Not to downplay the severity of people's health problems when it comes to certain sleep conditions, but I've observed a basic principle in life: When you try to work in ways that go against the basic design of your body you have to resort to a lot of complicated things to coddle and cajole your body into going along with it. 300 dollar sleep devices, mattresses, alarm clocks et al.

At the end of the day, I wonder how many sleep issues would go away if we ate correctly, stayed active, turned the lights out at dusk and kept the blinds open for when dawn peeks through the curtains. When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors. Encumbered with our mass of tools, plans, pills and procedures designed to enable us to survive outside the envelope. Necessarily? Sometimes yes. Elegant? Almost never.

"When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors."

Agreed! I try to live this way, but I have one nagging problem...

We weren't meant to sit for 8 to 12 hours per day staring at a little box. All my bad habits flow from this.

I love what I do, but this one item makes me second guess my career choice all the time.

I am in the same boat. There are a few things I try to do to minimize this:

-Walk to work, or if that's not possible drive only partway there then walk.

-Use all of my break times to get up and be active in some capacity (Even if it is just walking to get some water)

-Do my planning 'offline'. In the moments when I'm strategizing and thinking I try to walk around or use pen and paper. Execution has to be in the little box, but the thinking doesn't need to take place staring at the screen.

-I moved my monitors onto a drafting table so I can sit or stand while working depending on what I feel like.

Between walking partway to work, walking at lunch, breaks and walking home it feels a lot less as if I have a desk job, even though I do.

I would be interested to know how you secured your monitors to the drafting table. Do you adjust the tilt, or only move the table up/down?

I couldn't agree with you more - but, the challenging part is, what does it mean to take on a healthy lifestyle for a particular individual, to maximize their sleep health?

I've found not eating a snack at night means that the next morning I have a _very_ difficult time waking up. But, at the same time, eating the wrong type of food (heavy on carbs, too much liquid) means that my sleep health is reduced, though I am able to at least wake up quickly the next morning. A half-cup of caffeinated coffee around 6:00, counter-intuitively, seems to let me transition into a deep sleep a bit better (particularly with a walk at that time) six hours later.

A walk around the neighborhood 3-4 hours before I go to sleep seems to be about perfect for increasing the value of my sleep, but has little value 6-8 hours, and, is counter productive 1-2 hours before.

I think the goal of devices like the "MyZeo" isn't so much to improve the health of your sleep, but to let you know whether the tweaks you are making to your lifestyle, are actually having a positive or negative benefit. Does opening my blinds (and allowing night lights in) improve my wakeup with the morning light but reduce the quality of my sleep? What about adding one of those eye-shades? How about putting on headphones with some nice background noise?

What I like about the MyZeo is I can get some quantitative data and "Hack" my sleep and see the results.

That is a good point. If a natural solution can't be arrived at through intuition then more data may help steer us to the solution. I think your point may be even more accurate today than it would have been years ago since the artificial stuff in our environment tend to mess up our intuition a lot so you can't really rely on just going with what 'feels' right until you retrain your body. For instance artificial sweeteners taste the same as sugar to us so when we want sugar we go for them, but it does little to solve the underlying reason why we craved the sweets in the first place. (Low bloodsugar)

Nice ad.

Go to your doctor, explain your sleep troubles, see if you can get a sleep study. Check with your insurance, they may pay for it (~$1200).

Also, if you opt to see your doctor over the Zeo $400 doctor-mom route, he would be able to prescribe a CPAP device in the event that you have sleep apnea, or controlled medicines such as Provigil that require a bit of extra medical evaluation to get approved.

Also, note that if you are in Ontario (as I know several HN'ers are), OHIP will subsidize up to 750 dollars of your CPAP, if a sleep study yields a prescription.

Yes, if you're tired from a normal amount of sleep or have trouble sleeping, just go do a sleep study. At the very least it will rule out things such as sleep apnea, a lethal condition that you might live your entire life not knowing about.

The headline is deceptive, the point of the article is interrupted and insufficient sleep leaves you tired.

The headline didn't deceive me. The article was up to my expectations from the headline.

The article struck me as a thinly veiled advertisement for the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach. Not much substance.

to be honest, i thought the same. but it does have a lot of interesting facts.

When I saw the headline I thought the article is about the dangers of sleeping too much.

The headline connects an all-too-common observation to expanded awareness and a potential avenue for resolution.

Seems fair to me.

"I’ve always figured out that there 24 hours a day. You sleep six hours and have 18 hours left. Now, I know there are some of you out there that say well, wait a minute, I sleep eight hours or nine hours. Well, then, just sleep faster..."

The Governator (USC '09 Commencement)

I just ordered the Zeo Sleep Coach. Interesting idea. Hoping they wouldn't have gone to market unless they had it working reasonably well. 30 day refund just in case.

It looks as though it just gives you data about sleep phases. How they're going to turn that into helpful advice for improving sleep is a bit of a mystery.

Hi David,

We're excited for you to begin the journey of discovering more about your sleep, and are excited to hear your thoughts.

We spent more than 5 years developing and testing Zeo until our early users (over 150 of them) told us it was ready.

Not sure if you saw, but the uploading your data to an online account is included along with 6 months of sleep coaching via email.

Enjoy! -Derek@Zeo

I'm interested in sleep hacking as well. Please report back here what you think of the device. Thanks!

So now I'll have two devices measuring me every day: the Wii Fit and the Zoo sleep device.

I foresee a niche in getting all this data out of walled gardens and putting it together seamlessly. Google Health would be a good place... except Google has too much data and it needs to see someone else do this first.

Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, from the article, FYI:

http://www.myzeo.com/pages/4_what_is_zeo_.cfm

$399

800 bucks for the two of us... it might still be worth it.

Yes, this point of living a more holistic lifestyle would definitely cut down sleep problems in America. If anyone is familiar with Penn and Teller's show "Bullshit," they spend of their episodes trying to de mystify different sleep remedies and solutions. The go into how the sleep industry (mattresses, pillows, etc.) is a multibillion dollar a year business which attracts many con artists promising you a better sleep than you normally get.

During the show, they had an insomniac test out different mattresses and sleep solutions and they fittingly concluded that it was, well, bullshit. They ended the show by saying that the best way to get a a good nights sleep was to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly. Its funny how living healthy can help with just about an physical or mental problem these days. Too many people are looking for the quick fix but all they really need to do is adjust their poor lifestyle decisions.

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