Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
A big problem for me with iPhones compared to android is that something like flux cannot work on them, so I have to avoid my device late in the evening to not disrupt my sleep.
What app are you using on android?
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.l...
That being said, since I started using redshift, I usually go to sleep at 12 oclock. I used to do late hours before.
I agree that the shift towards red light on your monitor is weird at first but after a short while you get used to it, and your monitor starts to look very weird without it.
If you can get past the goofy look (perhaps a bit more problematic at work than at home), they work great, and obviously they work with any device.
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000USRG90?psc=1&redirect=t...
http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/deedfyOGpiI8a2UWYdSCFLjbX...
In all seriousness, how do they affect colour? If you're working on a front-end web project or design, could these be problematic?
Also, one can easily reduce/remove Blue from any monitor using hardware settings alone.
These apps are also a lot more feature rich than twiddling with display settings - you can customize their aggressiveness, set times, set timed breaks for color-sensitive work, sync to the sunset in your location, etc. You could do this all manually but I doubt anyone actually would.
I have them, and they're amazing. I have pretty cool LED lighting in my apartment and can make my whole living room any color I want at night. If I set in to pure blue and put on the glasses, it's like being in pitch blackness (except a couple of items glow brightly).
It's not like looking at things with an orange tint at all, even though the glasses are obviously orange.
That being said - the benefits I get by using them is amazing. It's weird how much of a difference it can make, I get tired quickly after putting them on in the evening. If I forget to put them on I usually end up staying up too late, getting too little sleep and often ruining the next day. Personally I find it way more effective than flux.
By the way - blue light isn't just a negative thing, but also a huge positive. In the morning I use a Philips goLITE BLU HF3332, and it really improves both my energy and mood quickly after just a few minutes of usage.
Those two simple items, a blue light and a pair of blue-blocking glasses, have improved my life significantly. Try it out (especially the glasses, it's just $9).
This sounds very cool, any chance you could post a picture of your living room with some different colors?
Normally I have it set to a static color or a very slow and smooth fade, not the crazyness seen in the vids.
Here's blue, which is totally dark with the Uvex glasses: https://goo.gl/photos/SCrU1PhbDmCuPi22A
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-5M-5050-Flexibl...
Works great and costs basically nothing.
Usually people praise how "how easy on the eyes" it is etc, but I'm quite happy with white and my eyes are fine.
While tired late at night, I've noticed how much of a pick-me-up it is when playing games such as Skyrim/Fallout 3 (which put effort into a realistic day/night visual cycle) and dawn becomes morning in the game.
It never occurred to me to take advantage of the opposite of that effect.
The most important thing for sleep is your eating habits - if you want to wake up early eat very early dinners. If you want to wake up at 8 am, your last meal of the day should be at 6 pm (14 hours before that).
This works so well, that it overrides the effects of alcohol and caffeine and often even how tired you are. Even if you usually stay up until 3 am you'll get very sleepy at midnight and you'll wake up at 8. If fact even if you are prevented from sleeping until 3, you'll still wake up at 8 after just 5 hours of sleep. Have a full breakfast to avoid sleeping during the day - the next day you'll probably get sleepy at midnight again, even if you have dinner a bit later than 6.
Why does this work? Your 'food clock' will override all the other timers that govern your sleep habits. I cannot find the sources for this, but there are pretty good biological reasons this works. I know that I have used this rule many times for my benefit when working shift work or travelling or even getting back in rhythm after a vacation.
Edit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7414437.stm - I've added this report from the BBC as a source. I've used 14 hours instead of 16 but I find it works about the same for me.
Though personally, I find the biggest difference in being able to sleep comes from avoiding screens and reading a book (or eink) instead.
I believe the issue is the frequency of light -computer screens tend to be on the bluer/whiter end of the spectrum -in fact if you look at apps like f-lux they try and help by changing your screen to be much more red; I'd also say that a monitor/tv is putting out substantially more light than your kindle. I'm also now wondering about the difference between looking directly at a lightsource (or reading from a backlit source) compared to indirect lighting; but once again I have neither the knowledge or references.
edit: (as I can't edit my original comment) I've just realised that I never mentioned suffering with extreme acid reflux so being hungry/empty stomach isn't really an option for me -and certainly stops me sleeping, which might well have a bearing on my anecdotal observations in the OP.
Sadly that's not very compatible with even a 9-5 job + commute, let alone many people's extended days.
Have a full breakfast to avoid sleeping during the day
Those 2 facts seem conflicting to me. In one case food deprivation helps you wake up while the other case it would make you feel asleep?
I don't think it is really food deprivation - any healthy human being should be able to go 16 hours between meals once in a while (assuming regular meals most of the time). When you wake up you do wake up hungry, but you don't feel impaired yet.
Food deprivation may start after that - so you might get lethargic and sleepy because of it.
Eating early will have no measurable impact on the ability to "wind down" and sleep as far as I can see, nor does that link seem to support it?
I can pretty much always sleep (I'm lucky) and I go to bed late (I'm dumb and play too much dota) - so I struggle with the waking up thing. This is despite not really eating in the evenings. Anecdotally I'm just saying I don't think there's one most important thing - just a set of factors and decisions which have an impact.
I long to be able to turn in at 10 pm, but our household has for many years tended toward late dinner times (8:30 or 9 pm). But once it is daylight, I wake up. On weekends I might be able to manage an extra hour or two of interrupted sleep.
Or it could just be that everybody's different.
It's a very common pattern in rural areas to have a quick nap after large meals. It's mostly done because exercise on a full stomach is a bad idea, but it's also done because the heavy meal makes it easier to fall asleep. We're all familiar with the "thanksgiving turkey effect", which has very little to do with tryptophan and lots to do with the large meal.
Personally, I can fall asleep quickly if these conditions are met:
- no caffeine within the last 8-12 hours.
- one hour since last significant blue screen exposure
- my mind is calm
- I'm not over-tired
Large meals do not appear to have any impact on me.
The last two may be the same effect; I find it difficult to calm myself when I'm overtired.
Also given how thin the provided evidence is, I am not sure why this is the top comment.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/meu/solving_sleep_just_...
If the 'food clock' exists, there is a good chance that it works by inhibiting the circadian alertness signal, thus making the body feel more sleepy on net, until the alertness level rises again naturally.
Next challenge : Wake up whenever I feel like. Haven't found the magic button yet. All the fancy alarm clocks, sleep trackers, REM techniques aren't helping.
1. Focusing awareness via meditation techniques is a great sleep aid.
2. When your mind is buzzing, it's because it thinks it needs to work through problems or solidify memories before it shuts down for the night. Sometimes it's right, and rather than fighting that:
a. Give your mind other time to garbage collect than the moments before sleep;
b. Don't feed your mind new problems in the last hour or two before bed.This has always been the key problem, for me and I suspect for many others.
I need to be asleep by midnight or 1am if I want any chance of feeling okay the next day. That means I need to stop working around 10pm or earlier, to give my mind ample time to just fucking let go of whatever I was concentrating on. I can leave the laptop open, browse reddit, follow Twitter links, or watch TV. But the IDE and email have to close.
It sucks, it's hard, but I discovered sleep is pretty damn valuable, and most of the time what I'm working on isn't actually due at 7am the next morning.
B. Stahl & E. Goldstein, A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook
Looking through chdir's comment history, the only reference to a book regarding meditation and stress is Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana.
I'm interested in the book chdir's referring to as well.
2. "Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life" - Thich Nhat Hanh. Also good, but found it a bit repetitive. Maybe because I'd already gone through the first one.
Edit: My advice is to read the book so that you enjoy it. After a little bit of practice, you'll find that when you want to sleep, just meditate a little bit. The mind will feel lighter and you will automatically drift to sleep. Don't force yourself to shut off your mind, let it happen gradually. Observe yourself when you drift away. In short, cherish the process, don't take it as an exercise.
It is the best alarm trick I've used to date and the only one that hasn't worn off after a couple of months. I absolutely hate it in the morning, but it works.
The one danger is getting frustrated and powering off my phone, but I've found even my half asleep self doesn't want to do this. I have backup physical alarm clocks just in case though.
In the end the issue has always been satisfaction. If I feel satisfied at the end of the day, there's no resistance to sleep. If I am "missing" something to satisfy me, I follow that craving and keep myself up far too late. Sometimes that's stimulation, sometimes it's entertainment, sometimes it's relaxation.
Meditation 'cures' the issue for me too, but not really. The issue is that when I am in the state that keeps me from being able to sleep, I tend to put off trying to meditate, in the same way I put off going to bed. It helps, but the root of it is finding balance in my day.
Even through meditation if certain mental needs aren't being met, my mind will get forced off track. Sometimes I need more creative stimulation, sometimes I need to get lost in a good story, sometimes I just need to space out and let some background processes clean up.
My best sleep and wake cycle happened when I had a bit of a mental (hormonal?) boost after my daughter was born. It seems a bit funny, because most people complain about how they lose sleep with the baby needing to be fed etc. But for about 6 months everything just felt right, and at 9 or 10 PM or whatever, going to bed just felt right, like there wasn't anything else in the day that I wished that I could do. I'd wake up after getting enough sleep without an alarm at 6:30 or so, and my daughter was sleeping through the night.
Now that ultimate satisfaction feeling has kind of worn off, my daughter is 2, is pretty demanding of my time, and when I get home from work it's a constant stream of doing things for other people without an opportunity to attend to my own needs. Forcing myself to go to sleep at 9 more than a couple of days in a row becomes impossible just because by that point my body just says "Fuck you, you aren't sleeping, you have things I need you to do. Fun things. Or at least you better start looking for something fun."
And the more tired I am, the harsher that is. In general, my best successes come from getting enough rest in the first place. The more tired I am going into a day, the harder it is to feel satisfied by the end of it, and the harder it is to sleep.
To that end, I nap on the weekend to catch up on sleep. It's part of my schedule to the point that my wife expects it. No matter how rough the week is, by Saturday afternoon I'll probably have caught up.
The other thing I try to do is be cognizant of what I'm craving and feed that need. A lot of sort of wasted time can happen while you're frustrated that you want something but you're not sure what it is, or you avoid it for some reason. Maybe I've had an exhausting but not very mentally stimulating week and I've been playing a lot of video games. I might have previously tried to force myself to not play video games if I felt I was playing them too much, but that would lead to me procrastinating on anything else either, and then ultimately caving when it got late in the evening and playing anyways but playing too late. Now I might recognize that that's the kind of stimulation that I'm missing, and get it out of the way ASAP, which might be enough to let me get to bed a little earlier.
Waking up is easy when you actually sleep as much as your body wants, no alarm needed even. The real problem is getting to bed early enough that you consistently get to sleep as much as your body wants while still feeding those needs. If you have a mentally unsatisfying and draining day, and all you can do after you come home is cook, clean, and go to sleep in order to get enough sleep to get up for work the next day, you're going to find that soon you won't be able to sleep again, because your brain is kicking your ass for not meeting its needs.
Just to add on to what you've said, I find myself holding off sleeping because it means that another work-day is waiting when I wake up.
Meaning, when the time to go to sleep (a good time) rolls around, all I can think of is all the things I haven't done that I should do. And that is stressful, so I end up holding off sleep even more, doing shit to distract myself. Such as Reddit, Quora, or YCombinator.
The things that I feel like I should have done are either personal growth or skill-improvement, or something (like you said) that I wanted to do to meet my own needs.
And it is really frustrating because it makes work a ton harder and it's discouraging, because I know I'm not performing at, or near, 100% like I could be.
I don't know what a good solution is, but it was helpful to read someone else who struggles with the same problem. Thanks for your story.
Cheers.
It took a very long time for it to not work as well as it used to, but that finally happened.
I find that even with poor sleep, you get more REM and more "recharge" with a healthy dose of melatonin. As far as sleep goes, in my mind it's a miracle drug.
Is there a reason for that, is it dangerous longer term? I've been taking 10mg nighlty for a while now compared to your .75mg, a girl I know says her grandmother has been taking it for decades and swears by it, and she's fit as a fiddle.
I started having nightmares/anxiety dreams so I stopped. At first I thought maybe there was something about different formulations (brands) of melatonin but then the 'good' brand also started giving me anxiety dreams. Did they change their formulation to cut costs? Or is it me? I can't be sure.
When I can lay down, regardless of hour of night, with a quiet brain, I fall right asleep.
95% of the time though, my brain won't stop. I stay away from screens after a certain hour, I try not to think about work (not always successful). But still, sometimes my brain just won't quit. It's super frustrating.
Good tv shows also work, because watching tv basically is no challenge but is able to transfer your thoughts from your problems to problems that aren't yours which is less stressful.
Basically, the trick is to concentrate all your attention on one mantra, and then remove the mantra to quiet the thought process. It's a learned skill, so just takes practice.
I used to have trouble falling asleep, to the point where I was concerned enough to go to a doctor about it, but I never followed up after the first visit. Instead I not very intentionally made some adjustments on my own which resolved my situation:
1. No lights/noise. Get rid of all blinky things, particularly blue and green lights. Faint red lights are tolerable. Black electrical tape is a gift, use it! Noisy computer fans are bad! Turn off the computer or move it into a different room.
2. Take better care of yourself! Eat better, get more exercise, and get up at a consistent time every morning. A healthy routine is important.
3. Don't worry about it! If you lay awake all night worrying about the sleep you are "missing" you are only making the problem worse. You don't need to worry about it, you will be fine. We miss sleep ALL THE TIME and are still functional members of society.
Once I stopped worrying, even the rare nights where I can't sleep go faster because I'm not focused on the clock. I use the time to think about more interesting and less worrisome things or get out of bed and do something productive.
Also, as others have said, Flux is great! I also have Twilight on my Android phone! I love them both.
My version of meditation is laying in bed with my eyes closed and actively trying to shut off all thoughts; at first it seems it's not working because I'm suddenly aware of everything around me and I feel more awake. But after 5-10 minutes I no longer see the "noise" with my eyes closed but instead I start seeing images. Once I start seeing images with my eyes closed I know I'll be asleep in a few minutes.
I haven't had to do that in years. I really don't have trouble falling asleep anymore (much to my wife's dismay).
I know what it is in general, but how does it relate to sleep?
That light exposure part is getting a lot of discussion re: computers, phones, TV's, etc., being produced with ever brighter screens. Idea is that staring at a "device" activates the wake-drive and interferes with sleep onset.
Other CBT measures aim to promote relaxation, reduce anxiety and "over-thinking" when it would be counterproductive. Put another way, reducing arousal at night is the goal.
Goes without saying particular approaches will vary with the individual, but these are some of the basics.
F.lux has become an essential tool for me. It changes the color temperature of your monitor, reducing cool/blue light and replacing it with warmer tones, which should helps getting good sleep. It does for me at least. Wish it was available for nom-jailbroken iPads though.
As a sidenote, I did find a lovely PDF a while ago with a bunch of good sleep hygiene tips. As always, it's implementing the suggestions that is difficult, but :) http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/docs/Info-sleep%20hygiene.pd...
I also agree with its hard to do the recommended sometimes :-s. 8 hour work, 2 hour total travel, then i need to code my own project -.-
It is a ~6 week CBT course that teaches you to have good hygiene, while at the same time understand what is preventing you personally from sleeping well, and developing your own routine.
It applies to anyone, not just Huntington's disease patients. The article is a humanised version of an article from a special edition of Experimental Neurology on sleep disorders: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00144886/243/su...
- Windows/Linux: f.lux
- Android: twilight
I can't quite remember what flux was missing that Redshift had. Does flux have an indicator on the notification/indicators area?
Here are some of the tricks I've found work well:
- Low dose melatonin: I've tried higher doses but there's a fair amount of literature out there stating that less is more [0]. My own experiences seem to confirm this, but melatonin definitely affects people differently! I can take it and be able to hop out of bed (morning person), but my gf (who's NOT a morning person) has tried it and ended up feeling even more like a zombie. Melatonin's definitely not for some people.
- f.lux: I've always felt that it gives your screen the quality of the page of a book. It's hard to describe the feeling, but removing the blue light definitely has a relaxing effect. I'm at the point now where if I turn off in the evening (maybe to see a graphic) I'll actually cringe.
- Sleep Cycle app: I started using this app when I read about how timing your wake up based on 90 minute sleep cycles [1] can help you avoid that morning groggy feeling. This was interesting because I'd definitely had those mornings where I got less sleep than usual but still felt awake – I was always curious about the reason. I've used the app for a little over a year and typically wake up before my alarm anyway, but the app seems to be pretty good at determining when I'm in the lightest stage.
- Earplugs: Living in a city that does garbage collection at 3am prompted this one. Earplugs are my go-to sleep hack whenever I'm traveling. I've found they help for general concentration as well.
I'm convinced the above helped me successfully complete my masters degree and also hold down 3 jobs (9-5 and 2 after hours startup roles) since then. It might seem like a lot of lifestyle change, but I did it gradually as I learned more about the science of sleep and also experienced the benefits first hand. They probably won't work for everyone, but they're worth a shot to see if they can help you!
[0] http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2001/melatonin-1017
[1] http://lifehacker.com/remember-the-90-minute-rule-to-ensure-...
The funny thing is that, if I let myself sleep for a few minutes (5-15), then I wake up fresh and ready to be awake a bunch of hours more (and it doesn't prevent me from getting asleep later).
You're essentially taking a nap and waking up before entering deep sleep. This is the refreshing kind of nap. Conversely sleeping just a few minutes more and waking up in the middle of deep sleep would make you feel grumpy and tired. There are some polyphasic sleep techniques that basically exploit this and have sveral short naps of light sleep throughout the 24 day instead of a night's sleep.
#2 reason is probably artificial lighting slash screens.