Dealing with Insomnia • Hacker News Board

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#141

Post by rajlego » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:36 AM UTC

wuwuno wrote: post #139

lbayes wrote: post #117

I've struggled with brutal insomnia (getting to sleep and staying asleep) my entire life (45 years old now). Over the years, I've gotten pretty good at forcing myself to get to work early and just made due with 4-6 hours on most nights and trying to make it up on the weekends. Early this year I discovered medical marijuana. It's completely game changing. A few puffs from a vaporizer (with flower, not the terrible oil…

I was born not to sleep. Newborns typically sleep 22-23 hours a day. I was sleeping for 1-2 hours. I almost destroyed my family. If you have children imagine your child only sleeping 1-2 hours day. From birth until I was about 12 I lived on 1-3 hours sleep a day, but I slept every day. When I hit puberty I started having days and days of no sleep, my record is 11 days without sleeping I was 15. From 14 until my mid 5…

Wow, that's insane.

There's a program called SuperMemo which has a feature called sleepchart. In sleepchart, you plot sleep episodes which gives you some neat data that can help figure out things like subjective night [1].

But since SuperMemo is a spaced repetition system, sleepchart can also do some very unique analysis. The main graph it can make with repetition data + sleep data is alertness over time: how grades change the longer you've been awake. I would be very curious if you were to try it to see how your alertness/grades reported for repetitions change the longer you're awake.

[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Subjective_night

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#142

Post by manmal » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

mike_h wrote: post #91

manmal wrote: post #77

For some people, improving (reducing) CO2 levels in the bedroom might be low hanging fruit. Ever since moving to a new place with a controlled ventilation system, I had no dream recall, and often suffered from incredible fatigue and tiredness. I suspect that I was low on REM phases, but never got a sleep study done. Finally, I started opening the sleeping room window ever so slightly, by turning the window handle a b…

If you’re curious about CO2, there are a number of home CO2 monitors available these days. It was really enlightening to me to see the levels rise well above optimal within just a few hours of sleeping with the room sealed.

Thanks for the hint! CO2 is so often overlooked as the problem. There’s even CO2 toxicity, and it happens faster than one would believe.

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#143

Post by frankzinger » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

Brushfire wrote: post #14

I’ve struggled with insomnia my whole adult life and I can tell you the three factors that have helped the most are, in order: - removing caffeine completely - getting enough direct sunlight (hours per day) - losing weight Everything else (melatonin, blue light, exercise, sleepy tea, other drugs, etc) never helped or made my quality of life worse.

For those who cannot or would not give up caffeine, consider that the reason you wake up prematurely is because you're going through withdrawals. When I started having my last cup in the late afternoon I started waking up too early less often.

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#144

Post by inimino » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

I hesitate to speculate as much as I'm about to on the basis of a blog post alone, but here goes...

Everything about this post screams to me that the real problem may be chronic stress. Rather than seeing the trouble sleeping as a symptom of stress, and addressing that, the author is just treating sleep as one more thing to be aggressively managed and thereby adding even more stress to the mix ("the time has come to put a stop to this" -- yikes! sleep is meant to come naturally, it's not another checkbox on a to-do list!).

I haven't read the book and don't know the author's life circumstances, so maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's just how the post reads to me.

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#145

Post by biolurker1 » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

olingern wrote: post #138

Also an insomniac. I’ve ran into “sleep anxiety” over the past few years which, for me, means becoming anxious when I think I’m supposed to go to bed. Things that have helped: - Minimum of 10K steps per day - Weightlifting and HIIT - 0 light in my room (windowless room) What has helped most: - Letting go of a rigid schedule and just letting tiredness dictate when I go to bed. My lifestyle is a luxury I can afford bec…

Same struggle. I found weight liftibg to make it worse maybe due to cortisol but cardio and tennis to make it better. I do lift weights some times but always followed by cardio

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#146

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

acituan wrote: post #126

DenisM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing with a lot of thins I did not say.

You've equivocated anxiety with anxiety disorders and dismissed the suggestions on improving environmental factors. I posited even if a person presents with anxiety, fixing environmental factors should be the first thing to consider. Sure I went ahead and criticized pill pushing as a first option which you didn't openly suggest, but you made a vague suggestion of "treating anxiety without changing environmental facto…

[deleted]

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#147

Post by biolurker1 » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

Stressed out from covid quarantine I started having insomnia which spiraled me down to self reinforcing insomnia and Anxiety cycle.

The most terryfying thing was that I was worried that if I don't sleep I am damaging my hippocampus forever and slowly getting Cognitive decline. That obviously made me unable to sleep. At some point after some months I upped my physical exercise and started melatonin and valerian and they seem to work for now.

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#148

Post by 7demons » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

olingern wrote: post #138

Also an insomniac. I’ve ran into “sleep anxiety” over the past few years which, for me, means becoming anxious when I think I’m supposed to go to bed. Things that have helped: - Minimum of 10K steps per day - Weightlifting and HIIT - 0 light in my room (windowless room) What has helped most: - Letting go of a rigid schedule and just letting tiredness dictate when I go to bed. My lifestyle is a luxury I can afford bec…

Become parent and your insomnia would be gone in a few weeks. You would be exhausted mentally and physically. Drained out. I remember my child when she was 1 - 2 years old. Jesus Christ... I slept wherever I could. In car, even in toilet at work.

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#149

Post by petemir » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 7:41 AM UTC

chimen wrote: post #49

I'm using NC headphones for years. Highly recommend Sony MX3 or even MX2. The issue for me is that I'm now worried of the constant Bluetooth waves that go into my brain since I wear these headsets pretty much the entire time I spend at the computer (quite a lot). I actually gave up wearing them due to this concern. I tried finding a headphone that does noise canceling and produces audio without bluetooth. There's not…

I recently bought the Taotronics Soundsurge 90 (TT-BH090). They have ANC (although I suppose not a very good one compared with Sony/Bose/Sennheiser), which can be used with the headphones plugged in with the standard audio jack. There's another version with USB-C (TT-BH085).

Re: Dealing with Insomnia

#150

Post by drpancake » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

wakkaflokka wrote: post #35

drpancake wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBT-i more or less fixed me too. It should be noted that sleep restriction (the practice you're describing here) is only part of CBT-i but it seems to be the most important. I also gave up coffee and I stop looking at screens 30-60 mins before my bed time. Before the therapy ~30% of my nights were sleepless. This article helped a lot: http://ilya.sukhar.com/blog/an-algorithmic-solution-to-insom...

Really good point - there was a bunch of other restrictions/lifestyle changes that probably helped contribute. I think the main one was going from two cups of coffee (morning, and then afternoon) to one cup (morning) really helped me. Also the recommendation that if I couldn’t fall asleep within 15-ish minutes, to get out of bed and do something until I’m tired again instead of lay there and “try” to sleep.

Yes the 15-20 min rule helps a lot! I tried a morning coffee again recently (I miss it) but it messed up my sleep that night. But that could be due to my mind playing its tricks on me rather than the caffeine remaining in my system.