Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.
During a very difficult time in my life recently, I found it impossible to sleep. I would have stress nightmares and even when i did fall asleep, I would soon wake myself up with specific scenarios my mind was trying to work out.
I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation.
I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep.
Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again.
This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists.
My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills.
I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds.
Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience.
I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping.
Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.
I am a little surprised that so many responses suggested optimization to your technique but not how to solve the problem at root.
I am neither a shrink nor your shrink but I think it's probably safe to say that whatever is affecting your sleep is probably affecting other parts of your life too, and while you mentioned a very difficult time - our bodies and brains don't by default react in most helpful says (eg - keeping you up with nightmares isn't helping anything)
In my experience what helps is a real way to "look within" to understand what's really going on. Ideally, this is done with the help of a real psychiatrist - someone willing to do real deep work of therapy and analysis, not just boredly write a prescription.
The other thing is developing self insight techniques yourself. For me, a diligent yoga practice and yoga study into the meditative aspects has been immensely helpful. But even on the purely physical practice level, learning to "look within" to understand why a pose is hard or painful teaches you the same process that I am talking about.
This all may sound wishy washy but if you are a software person you can relate to this - it's often easy to fix problems once you understand them. It's impossible to fix problems until you do, at best you can manage symptoms.
I specifically did not want to describe my specific crisis because I didn't want to distract from the conversation of my solution to the sleep-impacting aspect of the stress.
We are also dealing with the source of my/our stress, and it should be resolved one way or another in the next few months. It's a 24x7 crisis for us that's complex and we're all working on it. This isn't routine work stress.
The very best way of dealing with stress isn't internal, it is making the source of stress go away.
Unless the internal changes fundamentally change how you view the world ( i.e. the source of stress no longer causes stress, which is the kind of change you'll very rarely see in adults ) it will only be a paliative measure.
Being better able to cope with crap is useful, but I don't think it can be considered solving the root of the problem ( due to lack of neuroplasticity in adults ).
I couldn't disagree with you more, fortunately. You can never remove all stressors but you have way more control over your reaction than you think.
One example - people's natural emotional reaction to work deadlines is something like "I'll die if I don't make it" which is almost never literally true, but your body and mind torment you as if it was. Everyone can learn to reframe it to something more healthy like "I am a hard-working processional and I am driving myself to achieve this deadline as a matter of achievement and pride". Then you can engage with it fully and then still go to sleep at night.
Here's the key thing: whether you are able to change how you react depends on whether you try, and whether you try depends on whether you believe that you can. So at the start, you must believe that introspection will empower you to make changes, or you are doomed to be stuck forever.
The pit that many people fall into is that they take themselves very seriously and believe that how they feel about something is an objective representation of the severity of that thing. My example with deadlines above is one example. Another simple one is social anxiety. Someone can really believe and feel that "if I go to drinks with coworkers, they will judge and laugh at me and I will make an ass out of myself somehow" - that feels super real to them but objectively it's not real at all. So they spend hours of torment and lots of sleepless nights fearing and dreading and avoiding something that objectively is nothing. If they can reframe it (over the course of years, with a lot of help and work) the whole thing reduces to "it's just drinks who cares.". Same situation, but the person turner a stressor into a neutral or maybe even positive.
Don't be stuck where you are, and don't think you can't change or feel differently unless the world does. And then expect the change to be hard work but worth it.
When someone says they are under a lot of stress, I take it as they work 70 hours weeks, or they found out they'll be a cripple or people they love are dying, or the chance that you'll be stabbed when going to work is quite high.
Never crossed my mind that enough people are under heavy stress by the examples you gave.
I had similar issues, and tried to solve them with a similar method. I fell asleep to an audiobook about the roman empire many nights. I finally realized that the reason I was having trouble falling to sleep, and trouble getting back to sleep after a noise, etc.
I turns out that the only time when I was not doing something that occupied my mind was when I was trying to sleep. Eg, I'm either working, consuming media such as Netflix or podcasts, talking with people, etc. I'd even listen to podcasts while taking walks. So when trying to sleep, I'd be stressing out over my problems, and trying to work through them.
For me the solution was to find a better time to remove distractions and think about my problems. Eg, taking walks without podcasts, driving without the radio on.
Putting on my armchair psychologist/anthropologist/whatever hat, I find the fact that you can sleep better with people speaking around you very interesting. I wonder if we are built to feel comfortable when we can hear people whom we trust (your background conversations in this case) speaking as we sleep? Means someone else we trust is awake and can be observant of dangers while we nod off.
I have struggled with sleep at night for at least 15 years now. I get very sleepy in food courts (general hubbub in a safe feeling surrounding) and as a child who hated cricket I dozed off on the couch more than once when it was on. There's something calming about a low level of crowd noise.
For anyone who is suffering from this, or on some days finds it hard to sleep I recommend Science and Futurism With Isaac Arthur podcast.
It has "Narration Only" versions of all episodes and it is very interesting, so if you can't sleep you can listen to it but it will not have harsh noises.
Also Philosophize This has the same properties (very old episodes have some loud music).
+1 to Isaac Arthur videos as lullabies. The only thing I regret is that then I also need to rewind each episode multiple times because I'm genuinely interested in what's said.
Recently I've also started to listen to luetin09's Warhammer 40k lore videos. They are in similar vein that they could also be podcasts. Skeptoid is another one I've used.
Take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but I feel intentions(not to be confused with intentionality) help a lot here. They play a distinctive role in the etiology of attention(and the subsequent process of resilience building), one of the fundamental aspect of dealing with psychological issues. For eg, Whenever you become aware of these nightmares, try to observe the casual chain, eventually your mind will be inured to these episodes and will become much better at threat detection. Something like a mindfulness(Vipassana) retreat can help with this a lot.
My experience has been that most of the psychological issues can be resolved to a great extent by employing the "redundancy of potential command a.k.a Self-Organization"(See McCulloch). Meditation does this by asking you to bring back the wandering mind again and again. But you can also do this voluntarily by repeatedly observing the stress inducing conditions such as nightmare(in your case), which can help your brain better adjust and detect patterns.
What do you mean by we know the source? At best, you can track the functional(mri) and structural(pet) aspects your brain if you take the neuroscience route, and the behavioural(cbt) aspect when you take the route of psychology. It seems to me that the unique experience i.e., the unwelt is out of reach without some form of mindful confrontation/adaptation.
In "The Body Keeps the Score", Bessel van der Kolk discusses the effects of psychological trauma and how important it is for people to process traumas via dreams which essentially remove the emotional component but leave the learning. When, say, veterans wake up from nightmarish dreams of a trauma, they don't complete processing it. Then they keep waking up from the same extreme nightmares stuck with that trauma unprocessed. He found a medication that helped veterans stay asleep through the entire nightmare, and within weeks the veterans moved past their traumatic dreams. There may also be non-medical interventions to help get past that trauma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score
Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...
"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).
I use a similar approach, but instead of TV, I use the build-in text to speech tool of Mac OS X (you can set up a keyboard shortcut[1] and then select any text and computer will read to you). I choose usually a longish-article, or sometimes a HN comments thread, and then a few minutes in I've dozed off.
It's a little tricky to choose the right length (i.e. not being awake enough to notice when it ends, but also not too long so it reads to me for hours).
I'm not sure if this is healthy... It works for me as a source of entertainment, but I can fall asleep without this too. I've heard that bringing a computer into the bedroom is definitely something not recommended for anyone seeking work-life balance.
That's interesting, I do 4-7-8 box breathing when I can't sleep due to anxiety. And its pretty much impossible for me to fall asleep when there is any kind of audio/visual stimulus in my environment. I need darkness and silence. Heck I can't even fall asleep if my S.O. or even my pet is touching me.
Listening to the right human speech creates an INCREDIBLE relaxation response for me. I have never felt so deeply relaxed as when listening to the right speech.
I have tried several sleep aids in heavy dosages, meditation, breathing exercises, visualization/journey exercises and pre-recorded journeys ... but none create such a powerful relaxation response.
Weird, I know! It took me a while to notice how deep and regular my breathing was without effort, and how a deep calm always settled over me when I fell asleep listening to audio such as from The West Wing. Eventually I bought a sleep mask with built-in wireless earbuds, and began experimenting with different kinds of human speech as background for sleep.
Just as @koheripbal discovered, I found the selection of just the right audio is important.
I had a critical acute stressor a few years ago, I wont describe the situation, but the symptoms were:
- panic attacks
- waking up into a panic attack; imagine sleeping, then waking hyperventilating, shivering, and for lack of a better word "freaking out"
- sleep disturbances
- periodic severe emotional disturbance
- inability to remove the stressors, and critically, I had to increase the stressors involved as it was time critical
I was able to take two weeks off from work, and I took escitalopram.
I didn't find escitalopram to be ... a game changer, but it did allow me to "decide" how I was going to feel, and if I felt I was going to have a panic attack, I could head that off through feedback and self aware thinking.
This very difficult time in your life you appear to have in common with your collegues if I’m reading you right. Can you elaborate a little bit on your work and maybe other novel coping strategies you and your collegues evaluated?
Sounds similar to why many watch these types of videos: [0]
I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1]
As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR
This is very interesting, this is the easiest way to fall asleep for me - reading a book or watching/listening to a comedy series. For some reason my brain prefers it to a dark & quiet room.
When I get to sleep with sound in the background it usually gets incorporated in my dreams. Recently fell asleep while listening to a podcast about file systems and in my dreams all my family members were talking about files systems and B-trees. Didn't feel well rested in the morning. But something like white-noise or different nature sounds could be much better. There are apps that play different droning sounds like train or plain noises, forest sounds, seaside waves etc.
In my case, non-speech background sounds allow me to dream - which wakes me up because the crisis I'm currently going through changes these dreams into nightmares.
The key for me is that the background sound must contain speech. Podcasts don't work either because their is no visual component. I need to be able to imagine the visual, even if I'm not watching it. Somehow, that's important. Maybe it stimulates that part of my brain to prevent it from creating visual dreams. I suppose there's a general rule in the brain that when you're listening and watching something, that part of your brain goes into input-mode rather than compute-mode.
There are two important takeaways here.
1. I've (for myself) obviated the need for sleeping pills (the solution my colleagues have taken).
2. There are seemingly no ill effects to preventing my brain from dreaming naturally for over six months.
If you really think about that 2nd point, this means that it would be possible to create sleep specific programming. One could use it to incorporate messages to ones self.
Many in this sub-thread are thinking they can use it to learn new things - typical HN! ...but since novel content wakes your mind, I think it would be more valuable to program motivational content. Content that reinforces your core principles and might help you focus yourself in the subsequent day. It might even be possible to have a small portfolio of programming if you're expecting/planning a different type of day.
Obviously, I'm going through a temporary crisis, so I cannot pursue this, but someone should.
Interesting. On a tangent, when I was a teenager I would sometimes fall asleep on the couch with the TV on. Mostly because I don't like falling asleep in the dark, esp. when alone. I would set a timer on the TV so it doesn't run all night but inevitably the TV shutting off would wake me up. More recently I would put on a documentary on YouTube, and I would queue a few different ones so I get into deep sleep before they end, otherwise it would wake me up.
My wife has tried very similar things for years: having an Alexa Echo (or similar) play rainstorm sounds all night seems to work fantastically for all here.
I've found a similar solution to my sleep problems.
I used to fall asleep listening to audio books. I eventually found audio books that are barely interesting, with certain narration styles to put me to sleep faster.
I now have a series of audio books, mostly gumshoe detective novels, that I use to sleep on nights when I'm dealing with stress. I set the sleep timer for 6 hours, and invariably get a good night of sleep.
I know several people who can’t sleep well without a tv playing, usually a playlist of old movies they have seen 10 times. It works for them. I’m up to 430am every night since about 8 months ago and it makes me wonder if I should try it.
I wonder if taking melatonin supplements for a week or two could resolve your issue. A very small dose (0.3 mg) of melatonin is usually sufficient to restore nighttime plasma melatonin levels to those characteristic of young people.
Having suffered recently from randomly waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get to sleep again I found 2mg time release melatonin the way to go. If you do wake up it's much much easier to fall back to sleep again.
Two things that work great with me: smoking weed & wearing a sleeping mask (a bit of light can really fuck w/ my sleep and for some reasons no US apartments seems to have real blinds).
Weed is a fairly heavy-handed solution IMO. It’s likely to help with insomnia, but also to have significant side effects. Many people enjoy some of the side effects, which is great. But many do not, which makes it hard to recommend generally for insomnia.
I usually just smoke one puff and it doesn’t have strong effects. I’m sure this would be more effective in general compared to pills, so I don’t agree that we should dismiss this advice based on “oh it’s drugs”.
Oh for sure, compared to pills (even OTC stuff with significant hangover effects like Benadryl or Nyquil), it absolutely deserves serious consideration. I would recommend trying melatonin, chamomile tea, and simple mental exercises (eg. counting from 1 to infinity) first though.
A possible explanation is that when you are “watching tv” you’re not obligated to do anything else, hence you loosen up and stop thinking about those other things. A safe space of sorts.
I have used a similar coping strategy in stressful times. Put a YouTube video on that’s “the right amount of boring” in my headphones and just let the auto play play me out.
Reminds of days when I could only sleep with the Air crash investigations show running in the background. It was something about the narrator’s voice that put me to sleep.
> revenge bedtime procrastination: a phenomenon in which people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
For me, it started as more of a reverse-Christmas situation - if I go to sleep, the next thing I know I'll be having to got to work and I really don't want that!
Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.
I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived.
This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.
I worked very closely with somebody when we were both about 10 years out of college. Unlike you and I, she still believed that “cramming” by staying up late to meet a deadline was a worthwhile strategy. I shared my reasoning with her, and nudged her over time, calling attention to the concrete detrimental impact of pursuing short term goals at the expense of intermediate term capacity and personal well-being, but she wouldn’t budge. This is a very smart person who ostensibly shared similar educational and professional experience to myself, that simply reached a very different conclusion. She ended up modifying her behavior only after going through a painful and damaging burnout.
How does a person go through university and not learn this lesson? Should we teach them the better way? How?
Edit: I remembered a potential clue- my coworker was able to transition from work to sleep rather easily, where I require a substantial wind-down period. Perhaps this shifted the equation.
In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch.
Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work.
And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
Do we just live in the different real worlds? Because in my real world, deadlines are almost always arbitrary and fungible so long as the right kind of communication is made -- the only times I've seen that not be the case for me/folks in my network is 1) when they're working on something that's actually time critical (rare but does happen) and 2) when they're working in a dysfunctional, top-down environment (far more common).
I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea that you might lose a client by missing a deadline by 2-3 weeks (rather than not selling them well enough). Is this a hypothetical situation you're talking about? Sometimes, 2-3 weeks is as fast as they'll get back to you with a single hop of communication. The other example of engineers get down-evaluated for ending up jumping on the grenade of a task that gets significantly longer (sometimes by months)
-- I do see that happen from time to time but whether the manager down-evaluates is often inversely correlated with that manager/management chain's capability. The good managers understand that scope creep and an unforeseen gotchas happen; they don't want to take those instances as failures but rather .
> When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
Why? That sounds like unproductive, unhealthy self-martyrship. It's the complete opposite of how a competent professional works through things. Do you simply like to suffer? There's a reason people don't work like that in the "real world" and it's because there are actual real dollars on the line and competent organizations understand that such behavior purely results in expensive unforced errors.
Would you see my sibling comment? What about your experience do you think caused to conclude that losing sleep is justified to meet a deadline, when others have reached the opposite conclusion?
The thing is, that when you have a high level of stress, you will find it hard to sleep well.
"Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep"
So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.
I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.
The other thing is that if you’re not an individual contributor, trust your people and let go of things.
I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory.
Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.
You're leaving out nutritional deficiencies. Specifically, magnesium, for which most are deficient.
When you increase your levels of magnesium, suddenly it's easier to be present, meditate, mental endurance increases, you can endure much more mental stress.
If you're deficient, it can lead to a bad, downward spiral.
Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited
"The idea of a bidirectional relationship between magnesium and stress was first introduced by Galland and Seelig, in the early 1990s [9,10] and then referred to as the vicious circle. This vicious circle implies that stress can increase magnesium loss, causing a deficiency; in turn, magnesium deficiency can enhance the body’s susceptibility to stress"
...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.
I had great success picking up a consistent meditation habit with the greasing the groove-approach[1].. in essence, every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. It usually results to 3-5 sessions per day. It's such a great mental reset, and I haven't since experienced the kind of complete depletion that you get from pushing yourself hard through the day.
I bet some Zen master would reprimand me for this being the wrong approach, but I found it quite difficult to get into the habit of doing, say, a single 30-60 minute session per day. Now I can consistently drop into the meditation session with no urge for procrastination and have also successfully experimented with longer ones.
[1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
> … every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session.
Hey, that's what I do too! I've never read anything meditation-related and consequently do not know any of those approaches but I once realized that lying in bed/on the couch/on the floor for a few minutes while freeing my head of all thoughts really helps with mental fog (I have ADHD and fog tends to build up even with meds). I tend to jokingly refer to the process as 'clearing my cache'.
Highly doubt any Zen master would reprimand you.
Any habit you want to keep needs to be sustainable, if it doesn't fit the way your life works, you probably won't keep it.
They would however most likely encourage you to challenge yourself from time to time when possible to see if you can get comfortable doing a longer session once in a while.
> [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
Happy to see this concept references here!! I've started thinking about a lot more things in my life in terms of greasing the groove, IE: how can I make the healthy things convenient and the unhealthy things inconvenient? I want to be lazy with my willpower when I can.
It's a very powerful concept, since it teaches you to become very comfortable with starting things.
I often employ it in work too, picking one of the most minor thing I have on the to-do while having morning coffee and three hours later realize I have been grinding away non-stop.
Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. Heart rate variability at rest is one of the best indicators of stress and these devices are pretty good at estimating sleep duration and sleep cycles.
Regulators need to recognize that continuous tracking devices are a new tool for establishing a health baseline and they should not be expected to match the performance of single-test medical devices. Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit need to build standards to share this baseline data with medical professionals and offer analytics to determine when changes occur.
Questionnaire based medicine seems backwards given the digital tools available.
There's a DIY-ish service that can be self hosted (not sure if it's still maintained) that tracks all kinds of data in a way that you can share with a physician. It's called Fluxtream, and might take a few extra keywords to find. Written in Java+Spring. I haven't used it myself.
Putting more and more of our data, especially health data, in the hands of others is the wrong direction to be moving IMO.
I will say that learning about and monitoring my HRV after getting a smart watch has been useful to monitor stress and trends. Like with anything though, I've had to try and not self-induce more stress watching this number continuously ha.
> Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors.
I don't know how representative you folks are. I know a few people who invest time, money, and effort into tracking and measuring every aspect of their health. It looks like neuroticism to me. Especially when they look for explainations of every blip on every chart.
On the other hand, its incredibly useful to establish what is a healthy baseline for your own body, so that when you do get a disease it is easier to compare your results.
You're not wrong, but my point is that folks who are interested in knowing every little detail; who have the time, energy, and funds to invest into tracking these statistics; will provide a very biased dataset. That isn't necessarily a good baseline for everybody else.
I wake up after about 4.5 hours of sleep "no matter what". Bedtime of 10pm or 2am, exercise or no, light exposure or no, late eating or no - always the same result. Then I'm awake for a few hours, then get my "second sleep" of 1 to 2 hours. I've been going like this for a decade without daytime sleepiness (a few oz of coffee and I'm charged up for the day), but these kinds of articles really worry me.
I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?
Dude, this is exactly me. Same age. 4.5 hours. Read for a while. 1-2 hours more.
Just this morning, I think I finally diagnosed my central sleep apnea. I was laying there and just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing. My diary has notes about this happening all the way back to last March. This happened to me after my first sleep.
To add to that, I've become hyper-sensitive to caffeine. It causes palpitations (started in late 2019).
I don't snore, but I have been using Breathe Right strips to make sure I have adequate air flow, and so I'm really sure I don't snore. Curiously, I haven't used them for a couple of weeks (long story).
EDIT: if you want to contact me, my info is in my profile
>just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing.
Uncanny. Me too. Also tried every airflow device I could find (breathe right, nose baffles, chin strap, and many more) to no avail.
CPAP was a total fail because if the pressure is turned up high enough to defeat my resistance, it just fills my stomach with air (called aerophagia, a common CPAP problem). I'm starting to think the only solution is one of those implanted breathing pacemakers but that freaks me out.
Btw, I also had palpitations! I'd wake up with them really bad, probably from not breathing. Going off caffeine doesn't help though. A beta-blocker (6 years now) works wonders. HOWEVER! I just saw a study yesterday that people can have insomnia from beta blockers, and that 2.5mg melatonin helps counteract it. Round and round!
If you're overweight at all, even by a little, losing that weight that greatly impact your sleep and health overall. Also if you eat any inflammatory foods - sugar, carbohydrates, dairy, etc - then that inflammation can cause issues with sleep, especially for brain related inflammation, sleep time when brain channels are meant to open up to clear waste; inflammation is linked to Alzheimer's now because of this process.
Interesting. I've been interested in anti-inflammation unrelated to the sleep stuff. Sad if there's not much to it, since it seemed like a hopeful no-drugs way of improving health.
I think there is still quite a bit to diet - especially in relation to gut bacteria. There are plenty of studies showing Mediterranean diets improving gut bacteria diversity and also people on it tending to be more likely to have better sleep, so I think it might be more to do with the gut bacteria that than the specific ‘anti-inflammatory’ properties of foods (which probably aren’t much of an issue unless you are specifically trying to help manage something like an existing autoimmune disease).
A book I just read (Fast Asleep by Michael Mosely) recommended that kind of diet, but said apparently some studies showed that being even a bit overweight can reduce or even eliminate the improvement, so that is one thing to tackle first if that’s an issue. Other ones were a big emphasis on managing stress, and suggestion to try intermittent fasting (even just limiting all eating to 12 hours apparently can help, but some people limit all food to 8 hours and then fast for 16).
Trying to ensure that you get a bit of outdoor light exposure, and as early as possible is apparently good too, and I think it’s helping me. I just wake up and sit by the window for 20 minutes.
I’m also interested in trying doing a 72 hour fast (just drinking plenty of water taking a bit of electrolyte supplement) three or four times a year which apparently is good for gut bacteria, immune moderation etc. but people should have a chat to a doctor about doing it safely. I’m specifically interested in autoimmune disease because I have psoriatic arthritis, which is almost 100% managed by immunosuppressant but I’m interested in seeing if I can reduce my dose (working with the rheumatologist, not by myself!) but I’ve always been terrible at sleep and am trying to improve that as well (since that can help manage my condition too).
Thanks for the reply! I know I'm not hydrating enough, getting enough sun early, or exercising, so I'm going to give those a go! I've only ever half-assed the intermittent fasting thing, so maybe I'll give that a real try too.
I think my gut bacteria is pretty good. I'm a nut for fermented stuff, make my own yoghurt, kimchi, saurkraut, kombucha - and eat it all the time. It has been really fantastic for digestion, which had been a problem (pain, irregularity) and now is great. Since starting yoghurt every single day I have a freakin' Iron Stomach. I have zero autoimmunity issues fortunately (knock on wood).
Most food research science done to date is pretty shaky - I base it based on info shared by specific professionals, my own anecdotal experience, as well as others'.
Skinny guy, no obvious source of airway obstruction. Maybe that's why the cpap doesn't work. I think I literally hold my breath (some variant of so-called "central" apnea?) and foil the cpap that way.
I'll consider the inflammation stuff. I've been trying to cut out down on sugar anyway.
It's literally at 3oz a day though, so "cutting" would effectively be zero. Maybe I could try decaf since I seem to need a bit of coffee for, ahem, regularity.
Anecdata: I cut out all caffeine during quarantine and I've never slept better. But I was drinking ~12oz a day prior to that. And I also cut out all the other drugs in my life too. And the commute due to WFH. Honestly, trying to say it was one thing that made my sleep better isn't really possible, it's all entangled. But the SO says that caffeine was the major culprit.
Thank you so much for sharing, this is a really insightful article!
By the way, a friend of mine is doing a Master's thesis in work psychology at the University of Turin on this subject.
I am a bit ignorant about this topic since I have a business background + work in tech-startups. But I am genuinely passionate about this kind of thing.
The gist of the thesis is that all these dynamic and interdependent aspects (e.g. lack of sleep, stress, social pressures, even for athletes before, after and during a race, even if we think about the influence on self-perception in relation to other people and related expectations on personal performance) can lead to somatization which can come in the form of concussion, but also to burnout or multiple injuries (as my friend is researching on the thesis) and as it happened to me too, in my life.
Practicing yoga or simply going for a walk daily, helped me a lot along that path... and helped many friends of mine as well. But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect".
All of these are very interesting talking points and the inherent dynamics behind vicious cycles (echoing @raghuveerdotnet's comment) is still not crystal clear and needs further research and experimentation.
> But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect".
What would a placebo effect even be when talking about lack of sleep, stress, etc.?
In medicine the size of the placebo effect seems to depend on the procedure. A placebo surgery is more effective than a placebo injection, which is more effective than a placebo pill. So if you want to test if an injection is better than a placebo you compare it to a placebo injection like saline water, something where there's no way it can have a medical effect beyond the psychological effect. But that would mean that to evaluate meditation you would have to compare it to some kind of fake meditation, maybe breathing exercises that have no viable way to be effective beyond the placebo effect. But we don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to come up with such a thing.
Sleep seems so essential to our lives and yet we understand very little. I had two car accidents due to lack of sleep the night before. Whenever I don't get my sleep I can't focus, my recollection is poor and I have trouble doing basic stuff. You can find texts online about people literally dying from chronic insomnia. I always wonder how some people can function well with little sleep and almost everybody seems to do better than me. And I'm convinced that lack of sleep accumulates because I can sleep till noon if I have no obligations that day.
For my schizophrenic sibling one of the most troubling aspects of his condition is bad irregular sleep. Sometimes he can't sleep all night and then he sleeps the whole next day. But it's never enough sleep, nothing but constant drowsiness and lack of energy. Psychosis sure does resemble dreaming while awake, you accept weird ideas, things just happen etc, same as in a dream. And once medication kicks in, seems like slowly waking up and dream fades out.
Somehow it's all connected and whoever figures out the puzzle of sleep will make the world a much happier place.
I remember reading the results of a study a few years ago that said people in poverty suffered something like a drop in cognitive ability. I wonder if the effect reported here is related.
Whenever I'm showing symptoms of sleep deprivation my SO, who at a certain point in her life spent a few weeks helping a young man regain basic communication skills after a stroke, asks me if I'm having one at the moment.
One sign, which I observed in a few other sleep-deprived people as well, is the inability to form a coherent sentence - or even say a single word sometimes.
I’ll never be sure, but I may have had this to a high degree. I got hit on the ehad by a frisbee two years back, was diagnosed with a concussion, and had post concussive symptoms for about nine months until I found a therapist who did vestibular and visual rehab.
Funny thing was, I had some of the symptoms to a lesser degree before the blow. So was it brain damage, or did the blow merely worsen my visual and vestibular systems and cause more fatigue? I’ll never know.
But a key thing is that in the two years prior to the blow I had some burnout, seasonal cashflow issues in my business (thankfully resolved), and worse sleep. I fixed those and I have my old energy back. But for months leading up to the blow I hardly felt able to go to the gym, and old tasks felt tiring. Fatigue, some headaches, etc
I used to have really bad insomnia in my early 20s, and throughout my 20s I have always been that guy who could push off sleeping for long periods of time, and it was something I was bizarrely proud of.
In the last couple years I’ve come to realize how idiotic that position is; just because I don’t immediately collapse from exhaustion every time I get insufficient sleep doesn’t mean that my body doesn’t need it, and that it won’t have long term effects if I push it off too much.
For the last couple years, and even more since COVID, I’ve been making a point of getting regular exercise, and trying to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night (usually 8 or 9). I feel healthier, and I do think it has helped a lot with my depression.
The thing about stress is that it can creep up on you. It’s easy to develop resilience debt. Tracking things like HRV, heart rate at sleep, respiratory rate and heart rate at rest help identify early warning signs of stress before they manifest into actual stress. Exercising regularly and eating right helps of course but most people don’t actually know what a good exercise should feel or what reaction a meal has in their body.
Personal anecdote, when I’m getting more stressed I start getting a heart spike at sleep. I’ve tried ignoring it and it turns into anxiousness and stress.
"Symptoms range from persistent headaches, dizziness and fatigue to anxiety, insomnia and loss of concentration and memory"
These are the symptoms one would experience after anything happened to them that involved their brain, be it a little lost sleep or getting knocked out by a 300 lbs linebacker.
Given this, the headline seems a little exaggerative and reductive to the point of being meaningless. I mean, spinning around in an office chair a dozen times will cause a few of these symptoms, but that's not anywhere near the level of harm caused by getting concussed.
In the last two years I had my first child, finished a PhD, moved across the country away from all family, Moved again and changed jobs to a much more stressful, demanding, and higher paying job during the pandemic, bought a house in a high income area, lost two grandmothers, and had a second child. In approximately that order. The amount of insomnia I’ve been battling from all this has made it rather disconcerting to read about all the damage it does.
Working from home, needing to log in to work with 2FA, if I'm very tired, I find it difficult to keep the 6 pseudorandom digits in memory simultaneously for long enough to log in.
Also, I should learn to touch-type the digits. It's funny that I've been touch-typing Dvorak for 20 years, but still haven't picked up the digits.
Finding a way to get better sleep is, of course, the proper answer to this problem, however there are mant situations where better sleep is elusive, so...
As a former sender of six digit codes, I worked hard to make them visually (and auditorially) appear to be two three digit codes; we thought that would make it easier for people to process. If you make a habit of processing the codes as two three digit codes, it might help when you're over tired.
Number pads are a bit out of fashion, but they are awesome for touch-typing digits.
That being said, if you can't remember 6 digits, just imagine how the rest of your work suffers at that point. Everyone is better served by you taking a nap first
I once had a seizure because of sleep deprivation. I try to keep a better hold of it now - if nothing else, I want to be allowed to keep on driving - but I'm far from comfortable telling my employer I'll be late because I want to sleep in.
Sorry to hear you're suffering through this experience. I can emperically recommend Moana (the pixar movie) for perfect familiar background noise - it was my go-to on red-eye flights for a long time.
Thanks for this, I learned the word Hypnagogia from the discussion. Now I know what to say without sounding as crazy when I mention seeing things to a doctor next time. For some reason it's always spiders.
One challenge I've found is it gets harder to sleep long as you get older. That coupled with knowledge work stress staring at a screen all day makes things doubly hard.
I have anxiety / stress / depression issues and when it gets really bad I toss and turn all night, unable to sleep. By day 3 all of my muscles and joints ache terribly. During sleep your body is clearing itself of waste and healing. So not only are you a miserable zombie, your body itself is falling apart! I have enormous empathy for anyone who suffers from mental health issues.
I take Lexapro daily, have a low-dose benzo for situational anxiety that I try never to take except it true emergencies, practice mindfulness / meditation, see a therapist off and on. You get better at managing it but it's a problem that never truly goes away.
I experienced similar things and eventually I concluded they were due to lack of sleep and taking "being active/productive" too seriuosly. If you work a lot I recommend trying to get more vegetative time. Lots of guilty pleasure meals (sugar can be helpful here), take work less seriously and get a lot of relaxation/rest or doing only activities you enjoy. Got rid of the symptoms and SSRIs that way.
Anyone have tips for managing sleep in the winter months? It seems like I can stay up forever (until 02-04) and don't get so tired. I need to be in bed by 23 actually.
* have an early dinner. I eat at 4 or 5 pm. This is extreme, but earlier will probably help if possible. No snacks after dinner
* Get light exposure as early as possible after waking. A morning walk is good
* Exercise close to waking. In practice I do a 7 min workout, eat and walk
* blue light blocking glasses help
* A sleep mask can help. I use a manta mask + their glasses. I don’t actually sleep with the mask as I side sleep, but I wear it for 10 min or so while laying in bed and I fall asleep, then shift to my side to continue. (For whatever reason I can’t sleep on my back)
* Fewer household lights in evening. Lamps are good.
* Decide to get ready for bed even if you’re not sleepy. If you start a wind down routine by dimming lights, brushing teeth, reading, whatever you do before bed, you’ll start to get sleepier. It sounds dumb, but if you are, say, staring at your phone for three hours waiting to get tired you won’t get tired.
* Keep a log. You may identify changes or factors specific to you that help improve things
> Decide to get ready for bed even if you’re not sleepy.
Thank you for reminding me of this.
Two years ago I had a sleeping revolution and I had success with a barrage of efforts I did, most notably giving up caffeine and having this routine, and ensuring 100% darkness. But I have to recognize that I lost the routine now.
Oh I forgot, I stopped caffeine too. That helped I think, I just drink decaf now.
But yeah simply deciding to start each night is the stupidest yet most effective thing. I think it’s easy to forget this as sleep sort of feels like a non activity vs. say working out or reading etc where deciding to do the thing is obviously the first step.
- Do not eat or drink anything but water at least 3 hours before when you are going to bed.
- Do not have screens in the bedroom.
- No screens 1 hour before before bed.
(That last one I utterly fail at, but I am mainly doing textual things not from an attention-economy leach on the screen so, and it works out. Either the other 3 is enough or that screen time is sufficiently less stimulating.)
> Excercise is maybe the most important, but it's hard when it's cold outside (and gyms are shut) :
Good quality sports cloth are not that expensive anymore and make winter outside exercising possible and pleasant. Really, buy merino shirt and sport pants.
The other option is fast wall outside, but that have to be longer to amount to exercise.
Third option is to have a look at bodyweight exercising. Most of it you can do at home with zero equipment and don't require much space. Some of it requires stomping, so you may have to skip those is someone lives under you.
I found that (for me) the key to making a habit out of some things is to eliminate as much friction as possible in just getting started. If I were you, I'd look at the simplest things like "7 minute workout" to just get started with something easy enough to fit into my routine and once it becomes a habit, one could consider making it more intense. There are interesting challenges like the "100 pushups" or "200 squats" challenge for which you only need a bit of free space on the floor.
I got plenty of help from a wake-up light, set up so that it reaches full brightness by the time the alarm sounds. I didn't want an extra gadget in the bedroom so I just replaced all the lights in the bedroom with Hue bulbs.
For me, colder room makes me more sleepy. So take down heater in the evening and then more for sleep. Open window to get cold fresh air into room before sleeping and if you can, have it little open whole night.
There's lots of good tips in replies, but some things that work for me that I didn't see mentioned.
Avoid caffeine. If not entirely, at least don't have any after noon. Everytime I have a really hard time falling asleep it'a because I had a (delicious) coffee or cola after lunch. Enough times that I've almost learned my lesson. ;)
Go to bed quickly if you're feeling drowsy in the evening, even if it's before your preferred time. I often feel sleepy just before 21; and if I get into bed then, I usually sleep through the night and wakeup rested; but if I push through it, for whatever reason, I'm no longer drowsy in 30 minutes, and I will have a hard time sleeping until much later.
This mirrors what I experienced when I went through a severe burnout 2 years ago. I had some health issues like sleep apnea and digestive problems converge before I knew about them, so even though I was working out heavily 5 times per week, I was fat and unhealthy and had lost my resilience.
My work put us on call at night 1 week out of 3 to monitor an ailing server and my productivity fell precipitously almost immediately. That was the last straw, so even though I thought I had the discipline to handle it, my body thought otherwise and I started crashing (falling asleep at my desk, having so much brain fog that I struggled with basic chores, etc). I miss that job often, but the writing was on the wall at least a year before that when I noticed that nobody listened to my expertise, they just wanted output. That's the surest route to burnout that I know of so far.
I did have a lot of concussions in elementary school, but all I remember is the nausea and laying in bed for days. Severe burnout/depression feels similar in that one loses their executive function. To me, burnout felt like what I imagine having a stroke might feel like. My problem-solving faculties shut down, so it was like my mental muscle memory of everything I had learned was no longer there so I was consciously aware of every single step I had to perform (which left me frequently overwhelmed). It also felt like maybe the left and right sides of my brain weren't talking. When I thought about doing any task at all, no matter how minor, I felt low grade pain over my entire body like the feeling you get as you walk slowly into a cold body of water. Where there used to be excitement at the anticipation of doing things I enjoyed, there was now only a void of apprehension and dread. Everything felt like work, even recreation.
I had to start from the beginning and relearn how to write todo lists, journal about what I wanted out of life, address all of the physical issues I could, etc etc etc. The self-help stuff is all true. The only part they are missing is that IMHO as much as 80% of our mood is derived from physical sources. The science of vegetarianism isn't quite there yet. So for example, I was eating more beans (legumes) and nightshades each day than most people probably eat all week. The anti-nutrients had lowered my absorption of iron, zinc and I'm pretty sure iodine, not to mention that I wasn't taking enough of the basics like B vitamins. Each time I reintroduced traditional foods like bacon, I received outsized returns because of things like tryptophan turning into serotonin. Nutrition is huge.
Anyway, when it's all said and done, the best treatment for me was to slow down and emphasize things like how priceless consciousness is (dignity), and deemphasize artificial human constructs like worth/productivity (materialism). Also I learned that habits take about 2 weeks to form, so it was helpful to list 1 or 2 things I was struggling with, then perform them manually and dispassionately until the habit stuck. Negative self-talk is huge too. I adopted a continuous mindfulness as a set of rules so that whenever my inner monologue is critical, I note it and file it away without engaging. Over time, the positive thoughts grew as my inner child learned that positive reinforcement works.
I'll stop there since I could talk about this literally forever, but I highly recommend talking to someone and seeing a doctor or nutritionist and trying some integrative and holistic approaches. Don't lose years like I did.
