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Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

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101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#101

I've wondered if my kids will literally kill me through sleep deprivation.

Having more than two people in the house who can act as parents is a game changer. Definitely one place where modern society has slipped up, though there's some change in that with families like mine.

I utterly despise nuclear families now. Not the families of course (I'm in one!) but the arrangement. It's horrible. For all involved.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#102

I've wondered if my kids will literally kill me through sleep deprivation.

You'll live, but the toll is harsh. Hire help if you can so that you can get some rest.

Hoping to move somewhere I can shove them out the door (nicely) and tell them to play in the neighbourhood.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#103
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have trouble breathing through your nose only? Other issue is people breathe through their mouth instead of nose. Get some nose strips and tape mouth shut and train yourself to breathe through your nose.

Did it ever occur to you that sometimes the structure of people's face makes it harder or easier to breathe through the nose exclusively? Unless you're a doctor, you should probably stop giving unsolicited medical advice on the internet.

no that is not why “millions” of people have undiagnosed sleep apnea

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#104
post #72
post #38

I really wanted there to be controllable habits listed in this article, but instead it was about sleep characteristics. Telling me that "having trouble falling asleep," or "having trouble staying asleep," or "not feeling alert upon waking" are working against me is useless to me. These aren't "habits." I'm not choosing to do them until they become routine. They just happen to me. Tell me how to FIX those things. Tell…

Drop caffeine after noon, quite alcohol/cig/weed/screens anywhere close to bed time, keep evening meals small and low in carbs/sugar to avoid an insulin spike, wait at least 3 hours before hitting bed after a meal, more is better. Go to bed at roughly the same time every day, make sure your room is as dark as can be, make sure it's not warmer than 20c, exercise so that you're physically tired at the end of the day, o…

> make sure it's not warmer than 20c

Do you have a reference for this? 20 C is freaking cold. I wake up because of cold below 23 C.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#105
post #38

I really wanted there to be controllable habits listed in this article, but instead it was about sleep characteristics. Telling me that "having trouble falling asleep," or "having trouble staying asleep," or "not feeling alert upon waking" are working against me is useless to me. These aren't "habits." I'm not choosing to do them until they become routine. They just happen to me. Tell me how to FIX those things. Tell…

To be fair, it's a press release about a scientific study, not a self-help blog post, but you raise a good point when you say that poor sleep patterns "just happen to me." I've always valued sleep, but often in my life, my sleep has been disrupted because of stress, anxiety, and depression. The article says the researchers controlled for "other factors that may have heightened the risk of dying, including lower socioeconomic status, smoking and alcohol consumption and other medical conditions," but did they control for stress?

The author quoted in the press release seems quite confident that we can eliminate these bad mortality outcomes by teaching people to sleep better, but another way to interpret the result is that any factor that increases stress will damage health and also disrupt sleep.

I also wonder where the author gets his confidence that "good sleep hygiene" can have such a great impact. How does he assume that "sleep hygiene" will overcome the factors causing poor sleep? Does he really believe that they've controlled for every other factor and isolated "sleep hygiene" as the root cause? My personal experience says that what he calls "sleep hygiene" helps a little bit, but it doesn't overcome the effects of stress or poor life management due to depression, and those factors have to be managed directly.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#106
post #86
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why treat “sleep apnea” and not the actual root cause? if you’re not fat and have sleep apnea, the other major cause is alcohol consumption/smoking. seems odd to treat the symptom eg sleep apnea and not try to cut out alcohol and smoking and then reevaluate.

Bit rude of you to assume that I'm apparently an alcoholic or a smoker. Nice illustration of my point that public awareness on sleep apnea is lacking. Good luck figuring out the root cause of sleep apnea. Years of research hasn't turned one up. There's a wide variety of contributing factors (including weight, alcohol, asthma/COPD). But there's also plenty of fat asthmatic drunks who don't have sleep apnea. It's obvio…

> Good luck figuring out the root cause of sleep apnea.

Inadequate jaw development. We're so used to people having recessed jaws that we're just used to considering several mm of recession as a normal, non-recessed face, and we don't even think about the fact that most kids have jaws so tiny that their teeth don't fit properly and they need braces.

This causes both narrow, collapse-prone airways, and tiny nasal cavities that have high airflow resistance and deviated septums.

Both age and obesity largely just convert people from waking up out of airway collapse to overt apneas.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#107
post #26

I'll keep saying it: sleep apnea is vastly underdiagnosed and undertreated. I had so many weird symptoms for so long, which all gradually started to disappear as I started to get my sleep apnea treated. Unless you're fat, doctors will rarely even consider the possibility. And once you do get a polysomnogram, the usualy course of action is to throw a CPAP machine at you and send you on your way, without much followup.…

isn't sleep apnea usually related to another problem, like diet (most of the time), or smoking/drinking, another is the position of your jaw (the teeth shouldn't touch)

...the teeth absolutely should touch, and besides, that's guided by tooth contact points and not habit/lifestyle factor. Sheesh.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors aren’t typically incentivized to treat things with lifestyle changes. For better or worse, that’s something you need to self advocate for.

That's because nobody listens, doctors have more or less given up. People want meds, they always want a quick fix not to exercise and eat better

that isn’t true. i’ve never received nutritional advice from a doctor, and if i did i doubt it would be much more than “eat fruits and veggies and exercise”

the “official” food pyramid put out by the government still tells people to eat mostly refined grains and carbs.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#109
post #38

I really wanted there to be controllable habits listed in this article, but instead it was about sleep characteristics. Telling me that "having trouble falling asleep," or "having trouble staying asleep," or "not feeling alert upon waking" are working against me is useless to me. These aren't "habits." I'm not choosing to do them until they become routine. They just happen to me. Tell me how to FIX those things. Tell…

Get a sleep study that scored UARS in addition to OSAS.

Re: Sleep habits may have long-term benefits

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having more than two people in the house who can act as parents is a game changer. Definitely one place where modern society has slipped up, though there's some change in that with families like mine.

Do you care to elaborate? I've been thinking about this a LOT over the years. I feel like children were meant to be able to roam around and find different adults to glom onto until they're too annoyed and then move on to the next, all the while learning different specialized skills and niches to find one they fit in with. I can't help but feel that more-than-2-adult households would have a huge advantage in this era.

"It takes a village to raise a child" [0] sums it up nicely.

Teenagers and adults also need a "third place" [1].

It's all about community. Current individualistic trends and cost of living undermine this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

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