I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.
The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.
The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
I found gwern's take on Melatonin interesting: https://gwern.net/melatonin
A small excerpt:
> One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone.
> Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as ‘Nature intends’ and as humans have usually slept through history, but rather in a single 7–9 hour long block.
> [...]
> Finally, there are multiple lines of research suggesting chronic sleep deprivation is prevalent among young adults (including historical comparisons). It is striking that unemployed adults sleep a full hour longer than the employed , and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.
> There are few to no side-effects to melatonin use in adults (there is uncertainty about the risks & benefits in children & adolescents28), and it is not addictive or habit-forming like caffeine is. The usual dose for a night is 0.5-3 mg and I take 1.5mg [29]; my dose is highly likely to be too high. High doses may well be responsible for why some people try melatonin and report that it does nothing or hurts them, since in one study, the best dose for old people was 10x smaller (0.1mg or 0.3mg) and for one blind person, 0.5mg [30 31 32] . Zhdanova et al 1996 found 0.3mg & 1.0mg to affect sleep onset similarly. A study of delayed-release melatonin found with their high dose of 4mg (but not 0.4mg) elevated melatonin levels 10 hours after bedtime ( Gooneratne et al 2011) - potentially interfering with waking time.
It is difficult to find doses as small as 1mg sublingual (dissolve under the tongue) in my area. Everyone is trying to sell you 5-30mg chewables. And, I expect everyone is buying them under the assumption that more is better. But, here it explicitly is not.
The way melatonin works well for me is to wait until I'm already settled into bed and should be asleep, but I'm not. Do a couple body scans to relax for real. Try to think about something mindless. Then if I'm still awake, pop 1mg under my tongue. I'll usually wake in the morning with half of it drooled on my pillow :P
It usually takes 15-30 minutes before I get noticeably drowsy, but I feel no more groggy the next day than if I slept sober.
I've always had insomnia since I was a kid and I just chalked it up to "being a night owl." As a teenager, I mostly solved this by living in a permanent fog during the week and "catching up" by sleeping in on the weekend. As an adult, I was suffering greatly from chronic sleep deprivation because adults (mostly) don't have much control over when they can wake up to start the day.
Around 10 years ago, I started taking 5mg melatonin. It's going to sound like I'm overselling it, but it changed my life. It _very reliably_ makes me sleepy 1-2 hours after I take it. If I forget to take it, I am fully awake until the wee hours of the morning. Is it important to note that (for me), after I take it, I have to engage in some passive activity like (calm, non-shouty) YouTube repair videos or reading. Also, the "window of sleepiness" is at most about 30 minutes and if I decide to power through it, I will come out the other side fully awake again. Melatonin does not "force" me to sleep, only highly encourages it.
I was skeptical of melatonin for the longest time. Generally, I rarely see much if any positive effect from supplements. But (for me!) this stuff really works. If anyone reading this is on the fence, I highly recommend giving it a try. (With the acknowledgement that it takes about a week to get into a solid sleep schedule if yours is currently disorganized.)
Also, I don't take melatonin often, only when I seem to need to reset my sleep cycle, and I only take about 200-300 micrograms.
Why do you take so much? 5mg is a lot, according to the studies.
I started with 5mg arbitrarily because that seemed to be the most common dosage sold at the time. I think about lowering the dosage sometimes but at the end of the day, I know 5mg works well for me. I don't notice any side effects, and it's not any cheaper.
I also started with the special "slow release" formulas but couldn't tell any difference from the normal generic stuff.
- a long uninterrupted night cycle and a short (20-60 mins) afternoon nap. Around 2pm. - a night cycle split into two halves. With a 1-2h break (maybe up to 3h) starting around midnight to 2am.
The former is still very common, and imho stretching the definition of multiple cycles. The latter is more historical (more common when there are long winter nights and no electricity).
Also making it a “Western” problem is kinda weird? There are other cultures where single cycle sleep has existed. Even hunter-gatherer groups with little to no contact with the west. And alternatively afternoon naps are still quite common is some western areas. I guess the main thing that prevent it would be the classic work day schedule.
As someone who has never been a regular coffee consumer, I really didn't want to end up with the dual dependence of melatonin at night and then caffeine in the morning.
This thread is stimulating me to want to get my magnesium checked, but barring that I've found the most effective sleep interventions are the basic ones: get some exercise earlier in the day, and don't do screens for the last few hours before bed.
The usual suggestions from doctors for first line treatment are more mild medications that have drowsiness as a side effect, prescribed at low dose. I would actually prefer many of these low dose options over some of the high dose melatonin supplements. Melatonin is a hormone and taking it can throw off natural production
The reason diphenhydramine Is associated with a slight increase in dementia risk is the anticholinergic properties. This risk increase is from correlational studies on other medications with anticholinergic medicines being taken for many years by elderly people, so the risk of taking Benadryl occasionally is low to none.
The prescription alternatives like doxepin have the same antihistamine properties without the anticholinergic properties when used at the prescribed dose.
This is an example where people can get themselves into the wrong outcome by assuming anything their doctor prescribes is a last resort quick fix, but anything they can source by themself is safer and superior.
It’s not a good idea to take Benadryl for many years, but occasional use or even for months while going through a difficult period isn’t going to cause dementia.
Tramadol is routinely prescribed long term where I live. I know someone with a massive bottle good for something like 6 to 12 months of daily use. (I don't know if that's a good thing but it is certainly a thing.)
It has opioid effects and can cause drowsiness but would never be prescribed for sleep.
It’s also typically a controlled substance. I don’t know where you live but I’d be surprised if anyone was handed a 12 month supply in a bottle.
for people getting 7 hours of sleep you're good. Improve your sleep hygiene, ok, but artificial interventions to get 8 may not be worth it for you.
But I don't think it does anyone any favors to oversell the idea that it has "few" or "no" side effects -- it has mild side effects, most commonly reported in the literature are daytime fatigue, headaches and GI symptoms, and also nightmares. Mild doesn't mean it isn't a nonstarter for some people.
It's also important to remember that there are major gaps in what we know about melatonin; notably the effects of chronic supplementation are not well-studied, but earlier final awakening has been documented and this is quite commonly reported in anecdata -- I can contribute a datapoint there, as can most people in my circles who have used it.
To be clear, melatonin is great and useful, but as someone with a rare lifelong chronic sleep disorder who is intimately familiar with this substance, I think it's most useful when we're clear on what we know, what we don't know, and what actually are the limitations on a substance.
Just because downing a bottle of it probably won't cause systemic organ failure or otherwise any kind of medical emergency in most people doesn't mean there aren't tradeoffs to consider when using it, especially if you are sleep-challenged
I can easily sleep 8+ hours. Today slept 10.5.
I'm either not convinced screens are an issue, or they simply are not an issue for me personally, but if thats true -- WHY?
Man, were these the worst nights of my life! I’d get 2-3 hours of shut-eye and then be FULLY awake. Ready to go, couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. I was dead tired by day 7 and gave up.
Tried 0.3mg. Tried 5mg. Nope. There’s some evidence that melatonin can mess you up if you’re sensitive to cortisol/have too much of it. I’m not touching it again. No side effects? Sure.
N=1, but if it’s not working for you, don’t push it. My doctor instead prescribed a bit of therapy (CBT-i) and my sleep went back to normal after a couple of sessions.
I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.
I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.
Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.
I also find sauna before bed is good. I have a bed chiller so I can crank up the sauna before bed and not sweat a lot. Generally if I sauna and take the aforementioned supplements I sleep well. Exercise also seems to help me out a lot. If I exercise during the day, and a 4-5 times that week in general, I tend to sleep well.
Funny how it's basically do all the things you're supposed to do - exercise, diet, stress management - then sleep is then easier.
I dont have problems normally, just cant sleep in high altitude, 3000m is already showing mild effects. Guess what, I do/did quite a bit of mountaineering, its easy to get above 5000m in himalayas, highest I've been in tent attempting to sleep before summit push was 6000m on Aconcagua. Tried both Mg and melatonin up there over multiple nights, 0 improvements. I had highest O2 blood level measured in 5500m by doctor (mandatory there) from whole group.
Physical effort makes better sleep for literally everybody, thats age old knowledge and I havent met a single exception yet.
> I dont have problems normally
A lot of things don't have effects on people that don't have the problems the thing is trying to solve.
I'm skeptical that avoidance of "relying on the quick fixes" generalizes to software developers as a whole :)
Which type, if you don't mind my asking? And how long did it take before you felt the benefits? I took it for a month once (forget which type) an hour before bed and nothing changed.
I've not noticed any significant difference between the other two.
Much more deep sleep with Glycinate, some folks don’t like it because they feel too groggy after waking.
Oddly, it has the opposite effect as sleeping pills on me, it doesn't make me sleep more but I'm more rested when I wake up. It even happened a few times that I only slept 5 hours but still could focus well at work and bike intensively for an hour in the evening, without glycine that was impossible.
At 20 euro/kg I think I'll take it for the rest of my life, and it probably will add a few years to my life.
The study that made this claim was performed by the person who patented magnesium L-threonate and sells it at a high price. They go after any company that tries to sell cheap generic versions. The study was in mice and only showed small increases.
Magnesium L-threonate doesn’t get absorbed into your body and go into your brain as a lot of the supplement podcasts and social media posts have been implying. Magnesium supplements like this dissociate into their components in your digestive tract. Magnesium and threonate get absorbed separately. So if magnesium L-threonate has some special properties, it would be because threonate does something to improve absorption or maybe has other effects in the body, but that’s a big if. Remember that the person claiming it works better has been making a lot of money off of that one study.
If you have the cash and don’t mind paying the price then there’s no reason to switch. Many people find that magnesium glycinate, which is cheap, works just as well if not better. Glycine supplementation has been found independently to improve sleep, so taking a magnesium supplement that dissociates into magnesium and glycinate might be helpful in its own way.
Magnesium builds up in the body. Some people are deficient and get strong effects from initially correcting the deficiency. Take high doses for too long and you can start accumulating enough to get into excessive magnesium range, which brings problems. That was previously a rare observation but it’s occurring more as people get into magnesium supplements from podcasts that encourage constant high dose protocols and repeat claims that everyone is severely deficient. Keep the dose moderate.
> And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
“Sleeping pills” could mean a lot of things. Few doctors will put a patient on long-term hypnotics with high dependence liability like Ambien in the 2020s. Most doctors are hesitant to prescribe them at all in the current environment, and when they do it’s short term. I would be very surprised if you went to multiple doctors who offered to prescribe you something like that as a new patient without a complicated history. Even the people with significant long term insomnia complain about how hard it is to get doctors to prescribe those.
What they usually recommend is weaker medications with somnolence as a side effect, but the effect is weaker and doesn’t target pathways prone to addiction. Trazodone, doxepin, and a few others are common. These are not in the same category as what people think of as “sleeping pills” like Ambien that have higher dependence and addiction liability. They should not be dismissed together as one big category of drugs that are all bad for you.
There were some generic versions available but the Magtein people go after them. They have to in order to protect their cash cow until the patent expires.
There are some horrifying case studies where people took like too much zinc, or copper, or some other thing for years and got really really messed up.
I think this is just what happens if you read a lot of supplement forums and listen to the supplement podcasts a lot: You start developing elevated beliefs about the supplements, disdainful beliefs about doctors, and think you’re making superior choices having done your own research. That last point is some times critical for the supplements working, because if you believe you’re taking something special after having cracked the mystery by listening to 50 hours of Huberman or Rhonda Patrick (as examples) then the placebo effect will supercharge the result. Having belief that you’ve solved the problem makes the effects much stronger, especially for cases like this where the underlying problem was already pointed out as being stress related.
Hmmmmmmm
People sharing their experience doesnt immediately mean AI-generated advert
"Health" and more specifically the supplement industry is just a revolving door of fads. There's also survivorship bias, those who are obvious get banned quickly.
I did it recently and found out basically all my b vitamins were in the toilet along with my vitamin D level. I started taking a b complex vitamin and D3 supplement and found immediate improvements to brain fog and exhaustion.
The Magnesium RBC Test measures magnesium inside red blood cells, providing a more accurate assessment of magnesium status than serum tests.
When a serum Mg test comes out low, the patient already has severe deficiency and visible symptoms, so isn’t very useful unless you’re investigating a systemic issue.
As explained by my endocrinologist.
Or is there a "maximum low level deficit" which you will never leave with just eating the right stuff?
(Like VitamineD deficit - it can get so low, that you cant fix it by "just going more into the sun")
Doing a quick search for magnesium-rich foods, it seems like it would take either an unsustainable focus on eating these foods to see results on a similar timeline or an extremely prolonged timeline to see similar results.
That said, I am not a doctor or nutritionist. But my instinct is that you can get so far in the hole with a lifetime of magnesium deficiency that supplementation is by far the most time- and lifestyle-efficient to digging yourself out. Whether or not switching to magnesium-rich foods can sustain you being at correct levels will end up depending on what the size of the deficit was in the first place, but is probably worth a try.
Same as with VitD, seems like - at some point, your level is just that low that you cant restore it by "just eating right", you need more firepower
Most magnesium doesn't cross the blood brain barrier, such as the one you tried.
Try magnesium threonate, which does.
For me, avoiding high histamine foods as well as histamine liberators had helped tremendously.
The theory:
Anti-histamines like Benadryl make you sleepy by blocking histamine.
Well, instead of blocking the histamine, get rid of it in the first place by avoiding histamine foods (for example aged or preserved meats).
The brain histamine in your neurons is primarily synthesized from an amino acid. The histamine levels in neurons are different than the levels in mast cells.
There are a lot of degrees of hand waving in your theory that don’t work.
Bro Science, HN Edition in one sentence. Nice.
As a software developer, I am a much better doctor than actual trained doctors, and am definitely immune to any placebo effects.
I don’t know what people think you learn in medical school that makes you an infallible source of health knowledge.
The problem is not with evidence-based medicine itself, but with how the evidence is generated. The gold standard of medical evidence--a large, randomized, double-blind clinical trial--is extraordinarily expensive. In practice, much of this research is funded by private industry, which must have a reasonable expectation of earning a return on its investment. That naturally directs research toward treatments that can be patented, commercialized, and sold at a profit.
This creates a structural blind spot. Many naturally occurring compounds cannot be patented in their natural form, making it difficult to justify the enormous cost of conducting the kind of trials that modern medicine demands. As a result, potentially useful natural therapies often remain under-studied, not because they have been proven ineffective, but because the economic incentives to investigate them are weak.
This is the reason your doctor is much more likely prescribe Ambien CR than to suggest trying magnesium supplements.
Do you know they’re wrong? Please don’t invoke Dunning Kruger like this, it’s cliché and also wrong to do. There’s no indicator for whatever it is Dunning & Kruger showed, you cannot know if it applies to a single person. Their main plot showed a positive correlation between confidence and competence. Their paper has problems, their methodology has been rightly questioned, and some attempts to reproduce have failed. Plus keep in mind that, ironically, for people who are intimately familiar with the debate over DK, using it to essentially name-call someone backfires and has the opposite of the intended effect, it makes the name caller look confidently ignorant.
I don't know what the hell I was taking too much of, but I didn't have a good way to test it. I wish the body had some indicators.
Not helping the 'AI ad' claims lol
They do factor in shift work as a categorical variable, and employment status as a categorical variable not taking into account occupation. But probably occupation (not a variable here) interacts with sleep status. Any job that involves a lot of flying (pilot, crew, people travelling for business) get more cosmic radiation exposure, for example, and potentially more sleep disruption. Certain operations and manufacturing jobs correlated with exposure to carcinogens also likely correlate with less regular sleep, possibly in a way that isn't corrected for by the limited shift work categories.
In the past few years I went from having relaxed 11AM daily meetings to rigid 8AM meetings, and my sleep has suffered immensely. But nothing else in my life has changed, so it wouldn't show up in my socioeconomic data.
this one selected about 100k people from a dataset of around 500k. All from one country/region (UK)
furthermore they dont measure sleep but they estimate if someone was maybe asleep based data from an accelerometer. so they cannot measure what sleep state someone acheived or if they were actually really sleep or just u know staring at the ceiling in an existential crisis....
These two goals are kind of at odds with one another. We can only get insight into depth of sleep achieved if we bring you into a sleep clinic, but we can't do that for a significant sample size...
If others in the house prefer to sleep from 10-6 and you prefer to sleep from 12-6, but others start making noise a 6, your sleep quality in the last two hours is destroyed. Then over time, it just results in poor sleep regularity, as you cycle between exhaustion and trying to sleep according to your internal clock.
The study authors aren't even purporting to show a casual relationship (i.e. that improving sleep would necessarily reduce mortality), just that irregular sleep predicts mortality.
Regular sleeping hours as a marker for a less stressful life?
Also ran across this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/
I doubt it's the actual reading. Maybe having a calmer life where you take the time to relax with a book.
You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.
Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.
Keyword: "associated"
EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.
On the other hand racing stripes have zero impact, but do correlate to the speed of the car.
I have always assumed that, being in a larger vehicle that is bright red, people would be more likely to spot the vehicle from further away, notice it out of the corner of their eye, or that I would generally be MORE visible to other drivers.
I'm sure the correlation insurance companies are looking at is that the driver's of red vehicles are the cause of the higher accident rate.
nextCarSpeed(currentSpeed, wheelPower, dragForce, mass, deltaTime) =
currentSpeed + ((wheelPower / currentSpeed - dragForce) / mass) * deltaTime
Not that I entirely agree with his account but just some food for thought.
I calculate around a 3% drop in speed (from 60mpg) for holding an average sized book out of the window. That's surprising to me.
It's not quite right to use hazard ratios to calculate life expectancy. But if we force it, it looks like being in the top 20% of "regular" sleepers compared to the bottom 20% confers 3-4.5 years of extra life (from birth, assuming everything else equal, assuming USA, etc.). That's 3.8%-5.7% more life (79 year life expectancy at birth in the USA as of 2025). So the numbers are actually close.
I made a bad analogy :)
But you get my point!
They are both causes to speed.
In fact you don't even need flow to infer speed. You can just use pressure calculations and temperature, which is how airplanes measure their speed.
Controlling drag is a major component of the inputs to speed when flying an aircraft.
Only if we know of an intervention that will likely slow the car down and the risks+cost of that intervention justify the benefit.
Otherwise, we worry without purpose.
EDIT: I will say that there is a philosophical question here related to "basic research" / "pure science" / "fundamental science." Usually just "knowing new things" eventually proves valuable, especially in a long timeline. So in that sense, TFA could be important.
Technically the book would add drag and the car would slow down but likely imperceptibly to a mere mortal
But what they are saying is, it would be valuable if it was causative wiggles eyebrows
Last sentence of the abstract:
> Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.
But why would it NOT be? Seems stupid for us to have evolved into beings that need our sleep to be irregular.
...yes it does?
Presumably, the example missed the part where they stated the book was being held in front by an outside agent, because that is the only way it would make sense.
Nobody goes to bed and wants to wake up 2 hours later.
Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
I would imagine that someone with a very regimented life tends to stick to a lot of healthy habits. They aren’t going out to the bar every night, then waking up at 6am for their morning routine.
I have a very consistent sleep schedule now and it is a real pleasure. I my sleep schedule has 2 or 3 3-4 hour stretches of solid sleep. I make my own schedule now so sleep is usually available when I'm ready.
Sometimes changing the correlated item, also affects the cause, through a link of causual changes.
E.g.: "Night visits to the fridge linked to high cholesterol".
Now, that's just correlation: it's not the visiting of the fridge, it's the snacking.
But if you read that and stop visiting the fridge, you likely reduce your snacking too as a side effect, and thus lower your cholesterol, without consciously trying to address the primary cause.
Maybe it's because I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge, or maybe its because I don't see why people wouldn't just eat more before heading to bed.
It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
In some cases it might be hard (e.g. insomnia), in others it might be as easy as e.g. changing your schedule, or stopping binge-watching/gaming/doomscrolling late, or some such change.
>It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
It is more opaque.
But the point is not that it's necessarily easy. It's rather than even if X -> Y is mere correlation, by forcing yourself to fix X (even if hard), the resulting changes might also help with Y.
And technically "bad sleep" here isn't necessarily a symptom either. It can be a co-effect of the same symptom.
But I guess what might be slightly triggering is claiming that it's a "simple" target. Don't I wish I could sleep on command and better?
So a clear question is - why do people choose to sleep or why do they naturally sleep irregularly?
Because for that there must be a logical cause in the first place. They say they control for mental health and all that, but is it then that ultimately it comes down to preference in their mind? I'd think most people want to sleep in healthy way.
Basically - if they were able to control for all possible confounding variables, what exactly was the cause of irregular sleep?
Anecdotally I can say that I sleep more irregularly the more stress there is, and stress could easily affect health, but if they controlled for stress, what then?
I guess ultimately they are saying it's a desirable target to measure, so it's fine in that sense. They are not really saying that choosing to sleep irregularly is what is causing the issues.
To be clear, I apply an equal deep skepticism to most fields that aren't math (in the sense of a priority) or physics (in the sense that you aren't trying to study the entire world, but a specific set of phenomena that you can reliably control enough + repeat to run intervention on), whether the results agree with me or not. Maybe a bit of intellectual closed-mindedness. But then that means that me, personally, I can't in good faith use the criticism as a proper 'debunk' argument - at best it's a heuristic to avoid spending cycles to evaluate it (which is 'rational' behavior, as much as I hate that word, IMO).
The way I see these is "these persons invested a lot of time putting this together and all I have to counter it are personal vibes", so unless my LLM of choice can find plenty of conflicting papers, I tend to assume it's reasonably valid work.
E.g. considering some common causes like work stress - if they did the causation and compared people who did the same type of work, and they controlled for stress levels then why did one group of people have sleeping regularity issues more than compared to others?
Like there has to be some other driver then that they didn't control for, as in personality, environmental or physical difference?
Most people do want to have healthy sleep, the ones who don't usually have something causing those issues.
There is a whole paragraph on "Statistical analysis" that even provides five supplementary methods (S1.5, S2.2 and S2.4-6) if you want detailed information.
At least they aren’t shift workers
Or irregular sleep corresponds to bad habits like drinking and using drugs and they are the cause of mortality?
Or, could it be that problems with sleep are caused by using alarm clocks, i.e. not waking up naturally but forcefully at unnatural time? Waking up at the same time every day benefits people whose inner clock has 24h period and disadvantage people with clock tuned to 23h or 25h day.
Or I am wrong?
If you want to make sure, get a sleep study done.
Why do you think you are avoiding the bed as if you were afraid of dying in there. Exactly! You literally are.
- two pieces of fruit per day
- two portions of vegetables per day
- half an hour of outside sunshine per day
- twice per week exercise until you sweat
- no sleep during the day
- get out of bed every morning around the same time
- no processed food!
What I did :
- LSD (microdosing + a semi dose one year ago) did absolute wonders on my anxiety (which was what kept me energetic). I would then describe myself as having a general anxiety disorder and I now describe myself as chill af. It's amazing. I'm still stressed out by things but that's normal and not my default mode anymore.
- Prolonged-release melatonin keeps me asleep for the whole night
- Took the habit of reading in the bed. I'm so tired that most evenings, I have a really hard time to read 5-10 pages, I must fight to keep my eyes open.
Going for a walk can also rewire your brain, but doing so on LSD will probably rewire it more quickly. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you do a good job with the rewiring. It comes down to how well you trust yourself.
Think of it like jet lag. If you travel to the other side of the world, you rapidly shift schedule in accordance with your habits (the timing of your meals, light exposure, activity, socializing etc), whether that be night or day. These inputs more than ever influence morning-ness or evening-ness qua chronotype, with the advent of limitless evening light and entertainment.
I have struggled with on-and-off sleep issues for a while, and I'll admit I don't always follow perfect sleep hygiene. But there is something about dumping my thoughts out loud that completely shuts down the repetitive, circular thinking that usually keeps me awake.
Bryan Johnson says you should base your life around your sleep. He’s totally right
… but he won’t get young men to sleep in at 8pm
New sleep meds are creating a new lever here and serve a real empowering function in a way that culture hasn’t caught up to yet
When we think of traditional sleep meds we think of sedatives and it has an identity connotation to it. The new meds coming out, not just in sleep either, are changing a lot of things. I’m talking about designer drugs, new pathways, multiple agonists etc etc.
By total accident a month ago, I was prescribed a medication for sleep, lemborexant (not into trade names for drugs, more power to generics)
I didn’t plan on ever getting a sleep med. I don’t see myself as a sleep med guy lol. I didn’t walk into a clinic thinking I’d ever want one either. But to me this feels like a peptide or an athletic recovery supplement. And I think there’s even better and newer out there
Having this lever has personally helped me a lot. Why? Because it’s very easy to let sleep quality slip over time. Here are a few questions I wished someone had asked me a year or two ago:
-Have you been dreaming? When’s the last time you had a vivid dream? If you can’t even recall that, it’s a big red flag. If you haven’t been dreaming, your sleep quality could be junk
-Erections during sleep? Just something to take note of
-Waking up tired or ready for the day?
-How long does it take you to fall asleep? There’s a key distinction there between how long you’re in bed vs. how long you’re actually sleeping. Check your apple health data. It’s so easy to mess this up, in this modern age especially, it’s why I’m hooked. There are far too many variables that could affect a key function of your life, especially for young guys. An afterparty, a hookup, a stressful period in business, a productive all-nighter, or just overthinking instead of sleeping
People notice when you don’t sleep well
At low doses though it works by mimicking GABA in the brain, so it actually increases REM sleep time. A lot of sedatives will get you to sleep but give you worse sleep because it's working in a very unnatural way. It totally eliminates the issue of taking a long time to fall asleep.
Now you still have to be able to get yourself to bed in the first place, but that's half the battle already won. My life is so much better using it as I've always had a hard time falling asleep. Hopefully we'll have similar medication available to everyone soon as I really think it can solve a lot of suffering people experience
i've never had a problem with staying or even falling asleep, instead my issue is *wanting* to go to bed and getting myself there. adhd, executive dysfunctoning/akrasia, screens, chores i procrastinated all evening, etc, all give me too many things to do at night instead of tucking myself into bed. i basically don't feel tired at all until i lay down. i don't notice i'm mentally wiped until i start bottomfragging in a video game at 2 am.
i've taken melatonin (and magnesium) for a long time, but only in the past few months i started taking it like 3 hours before bed, after reading scott alexander's psychiatry website, instead of right beforehand.
i also happen to have been recently RXd a drug called guanfacine which dampens sympathetic activity (think fight-or-flight) and when i take it with the above pills, i finally *feel* tired at 10 pm. my body is heavy and slow and my brain starts craving being turned off. it's remarkable. there's something about *feeling* tired that is humbling and makes me feel human. weird!
BJ et all aren't joking when they say the biggest performance enhancer is sleep and especially regularity. i would rather sleep 6 hours and wake up at my normal time, than slide my schedule around and hit 8 and sleep in. but when i hit 8 on my usual schedule it's like i have superpowers. i don't make gains at the gym unless i sleep well. and it's such a funny thing to say out loud, but i don't need coffee when i'm rested. when i'm rested and take a coffee, it feels like i just drank 3 coffees and i'm ODing on top of my natural alertness.
Melatonin gummies help for sure, I have zero complaints. I embed the lex into the gummy
Same with adhd btw
You should def try this. My prescriber just somehow knew, likely bc of vyvanse. I spoke to him again the following day, and I was telling him dude this is great, I want a permanent supply of this lol. Maybe it’s a common issue amongst us ADHD people
I’m really looking forward to Centanafadine, looks like it’s going through approvals this month?
I’m thinking of trying guanfacine, wonder if it’s actually worth it. It apparently widens your pfc veins or something? A very veiny brain sounds awesome
Cheers!
But i suspect if you hop over the second part there will be more funding in telling poor people to sleep there way to longevity.
Do you think our ancestors slept exactly 8 hours a night from 10pm to 6am? No they slept when they wanted.
Yeah I pretty much do expect that (but more like 6 or 7). They were awake a few hours after sunset by fire light, then get up fairly early. I certainly don't imagine them napping during the day, when they could be working together to get food, unless it's a climate where it's too hot to do anything in the middle of the day.
Studies of modern hunter gatherers seem to back this up e.g. [1]
It's widely known that Victorians would have two sleeps over night, with a productive period in the middle, but this seems to be a misconception based on a passing remark in one court case. Even if true, this is a post-industrial society with unhealthily long working hours and I don't think we should be copying their sleep patterns.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
But to answer your question-- for me, washing my face helps a lot. I don't know why. Not that I nap all that often.
I follow the same schedule as you do, and also work remotely, and usually take a single 1-2h nap somewhere between 12pm - 3pm. It makes me have two moments of “morning productivity”, which works very well for me.
In the end, listen to your body.
Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.
This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.
This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.
Believable is important because you have to internally 100% without a doubt believe that what you're doing is the right thing to be doing now.
As soon as the "what ifs" starts to creep in for the big picture items or goals, that can destroy everything. I'm not talking about running into technical implementation problems along the way (those can be fun), it's more like "did I pick the right language for this?" level of questions that sit in the back of your mind.
Personally when I find something to work on that I like and will have what I think is a favorable outcome, it's easy to put in 8-10 real 100% laser focused hours into a task every day, even if it spans weeks or months. I'd like to think most people can do this too, the hard part (for me at least) is having these things to work on.
I try to turn what-ifs into actions. Instead of a what if rumination it is a small task, or a small trial of something, or a move in general forward rather than not. Not even remotely close to doing this well all the time, but I notice an overall boost in mood and productivity when I reorient my mint to progress rather searching in the uncertainty space.
> https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
That's because he was the one burning people out while he was there living out his hobbies.
https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/42284/vibrat...
https://www.bolonhome.com/news/bed-frame-vibration-control-d...
I remember a Youtube video about a story of a skyscrapper that added something to damp vibrations so that it would be more comfortable due to high winds or something like that. If it's feasible to damp vibrations on a whole building, you can do it on a smaller scale as well
I think this kind of behavior by the groups causing this impact on you is irresponsible and harmful, even if it's not known. If they know I think they are being unethical - I think its fair if they suffer harm and damage as a result such as in court or you similarly start to coordinate a group of people that can make their jobs harder as well through legal means of course.
Maybe ya'll stand outside their work and speak with megaphones for as long as possible, or just stream a speaker blasting audio towards them as they work.
1. The Sleep With Me podcast, especially if you struggle with racing thoughts (if you have a partner who can't stand hearing this, the Ozlo Sleepbuds are a good if imperfect solution)
2. Stellar Sleep, an app that delivers CBT-I, evidence-backed cognitive therapy for insomnia; this reset my sleep clock in about two months, which is now maintained by the other items on this list
3. Eight Sleep mattress pad to keep temperature low during sleep, especially on warmer nights
4. Manta Sleep Mask to get full light blackout
Also I've definitely just doxxed myself. But worth it to help some fellow insomniacs!
[0]: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/keep-your-night-vision-sh...
It is only natural that it takes months to years to fix a problem if you had the problem for years.
The common levers I know and that worked at least a bit for me:
- start by having a fixed waking time, and get sunlight or bright light quickly after waking up. Normally relatively fixed sleep time is supposed to follow. For me waking up is the easy part, transforming that into getting up and going outside is harder. Another option here is a strong (like, really strong) lamp on a timer, or letting the morning light in your bedroom (this one is usually not recommended I think, most people seem to be blackout curtains style, but for me it gave me a nice 6am waking time with good sleep last summer).
- melatonin. Two main ways: using it as a kind of hypnotic, so ~30 minutes before sleep, experimenting with 0.3mg to ~2mg doses ; then using it as a circadian regulator, this is a good resource https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/, search for "TO TREAT" in the page.
- app timers, for me it was mostly no twitter and no youtube, or a very low time for each.
- light, ie reduc light before sleeping. Not just blue light and not just screens, if I'm on my phone in bed I'll reduce the luminosity a lot, same with computer, same with e-reader. I also try to avoid using too much the lights in my room. More light tend to make me feel more "wired" and less ready to sleep.
- "meditation" to cut rumination, by which I mean "lay down in my bed, gently try to find sensations in the body and to stay focused on them, by gently I mean it's a very low stakes game where the goal is to find sensations in the body and give them attention, but losing focus for a while is not a big deal".
- shower in the evening, as I don't like feeling dirty when I am in my bed, but also not just before bed as sometimes I don't really want to go take a shower and this delays my bedtime
- clean bedsheets, bedroom, stuff in/on your bed
- AC in the summer, I wouldn't be able to sleep properly without it
- sleeping mask. It helps going to sleep, but it falls of my head every night so it doesn't prevent waking up with light too.
- making getting good sleep the priority of the evening. This is easy/possible for me due to my circumstances (ie low responsibilities in the evening). The way I do it is that unless something is actually important, what I'm trying to accomplish in the evening is prepare myself for sleep and get good sleep. This can look like not starting a movie at 11pm, not booting up games, not eating a super heavy meal, not drinking too much water after 6pm to avoid waking up to pee, if I have things I want to do try to do them early so they're done earlier, move some stuff I want to do every day like spaced repetition in the morning.
Part of what I wanted to say is, there is conventional wisdom, then there is how you actually put that wisdom in practice in a way you stick with. I've struggled a lot with the implementation, but sometimes by throwing lots of stuff at the wall I find something that brings me halfway there. It's not the "golden way" but it leaves me in a better place than before, with a bit better sleep, a bit more self knowledge, and a small victory.
If you dont have enough time get to the point when you can do HIIT safely, its literally 15-20 min max. If you have time, add long walks on rest days for example, or whatever is available to you nearby (ie swimming/surf if usable water body nearby).
Had she died at 65, I wouldn’t have even known her. Instead she was around for my entire childhood and well into adulthood.
To me burning the midnight oil is my way of life.
In a past life, two decades plus ago, I used to write books: I'd write at night, when all is quiet. I'd go buy two or three warm "croissant" at 6:30am when the shop would open, then I'd go to bed.
And I love the hours later at night that then becomes early in the morning to get work done.
Because I'm such a night owl (not to party nor drink at all), I've got a different view on, for example, city life. Or rural area life. Things are different in the middle of the night.
Last night I had something that needed solving: went to bed at 8am.
My wife shall never ever take an appointment for me in the morning.
If it's of any comfort to you, I'm still fit and made it to 53 y/o so far and my doctor laughs at me when I go see him, saying I'm totally fine.
Anyhow seeing the old wreck my fater is at 78 y/o, I kinda came to peace with the notion that it's okay'ish if I don't make it that far.
Those with fucked up sleep schedules: you're not alone.
P.S: if I wasn't such a night owl, I'd never have met my wife... Long story but the butterfly effect: 25 years ago, coming back from my editor (who was also a night own) at something like 3am I decided to stop at a club knew but to which I'd never been, for there was some forms of life still awake too. There I met a girl, which became my girlfriend for a while. I kept in touch with her and through her I met a friend: a crazy dude. And through that crazy dude I met my wife. So had I not decided to stop at 3am at that club, I'd never have met my wife. So there's that.
Basically my doctor's biggest concern right now is making sure I don't die in my sleep because of something the device records that I and my wife never even know happened. Its a point of debate right now how much to disrupt my life with side-effects to do that.
This has been game changing and keeps me on a regular sleep routine.
He said that as long as people are mostly regular in their sleep hours, the actual timings don't matter much. However, extended periods of irregular sleep schedules are actually (his words) "classified as a type of carcinogen."
I briefly looked into the evidence at the time but did not find it very concerning. TFA does make a more compelling case by linking it to all-cause mortality.
[1] I believe it was The Sleep Solution by M. Chris Winter, though I may be wrong. I can only remember it had a blue cover, but turns out pretty much ALL books about sleep have a blue cover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get the study design is not causal and all, but this R^2 looks very underfit for a study that claims a stronger predictor?
Last year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.
My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.
It sounds unbelievable but you’d have to experience it to understand. But the end result is it “fixed” the delayed sleep issue.
I’d give just about anything to be able to just sleep and keep sleeping, but on the up side now I’m an early bird with extreme regularity and quite like it.
It's it really? What if you go to bed at 6am? Will you really still wake up 30 mins later?
I discovered that it helps when I actually put in effort to fix my sleep schedule. Like getting off screen 1 hour before I sleep. Boxing bedtime to 23:00-08:00. And similar things.
It is just really difficult to fix for me but it doesn't feel impossible. I have made progress in last 6 months but trying different methods and only some portion of that progress stays permanent.
Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.
What finally worked for me were red light glasses. I wear the True Dark Twilights Classics (though I’m sure there are other brands on the market) for 2-3 hours before bed time and I’m actually sleepy. Way more effective than taking melatonin tablets ever was in my experience. And I haven’t even had to substantially change my screen usage either (though the glasses do make everything come out monochrome, which makes it difficult to use anything that’s not in color blind mode).
Might have to try that myself. Do you still use your phone/tablet/etc or does it also encourage you to use them less?
I do still use my phone, and more importantly for me my computer, basically right up until bedtime. I have probably decreased my usage some but it’s not a huge factor.
> Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.
Should I mention that "neurodivergence" and different sleep pattern genes have a large co-morbidity? E.g. many people with anxiety / ADHD / dyslexia / depression / etc have a very high likelihood of having delayed sleep or other genes.
Disclaimer: I made the app.
The first couple days or week will feel pretty bad, but if you give yourself enough time then you'll shift your sleep schedule around. Now I get tired at 8:30pm and fall asleep at 9ish like clockwork. grad school me would have considered that insane considering I'm doing less work on average during the day. My day is just shifted now so that I do more stuff in the mornings and really relax in the afternoons, which is the opposite of before.
A key is actually giving yourself enough time to fall asleep. Most people think they can hop into bed and just get 8hrs, when you actually need to hop into bed around 30mins beforehand and really relax with a book or something.
I also think it's important to not stress about sleep a lot. Unless you're literally feeling miserable or have apnea, I think it's better to just let yourself relax if you wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'll snap awake at 2am and just read for 2hrs, then get 2 more hours of sleep and generally feel fine.
Recalling from college neuroscience classes and subsequent reading of research, the studies show the ordinary human sleep cycle when unrestrained adds about a half hour per day, so 24.5 hours is 'natural'. Long-term studies with all time cues carefully removed ended up with subjects on a ~50 hour sleep schedule, as in awake 36-38 hours and sleeping 12-14hrs.
This is also why it is easier to travel across time zones to the west than to the east.
[0] https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339110740_Living_Wi...
The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.
I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022151
like "garbage collection"
And why would someone need to have a scientific background to read about sleep regularity and how it affects mortality?
ADHD, for example, is correlated with both sleep cycle issues and worse outcomes in life (including higher rates of crime and participation in risky activities).