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Rethinking Sleep

nytimes.com

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Re: Rethinking Sleep

#31

Post by gnosis »

dreamr wrote: post #22

Strange (and boring... you've been warned) little anecdote. Yesterday (like so many days, ha) I spent too much time typing out silly posts for HN. Last night, I couldn't sleep well because of some noise outside and I had this dream. One of those dreams where it is so vivid and the story line is so clear, and there are "scenes" almost like a film where the "camera" zooms in on some aspect, that you wake up remembering…

"An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter."

Dreams often have many layers of meaning. You might want to try keeping a long-term, detailed record of your dreams, and spending some time each day trying to make sense of them and relating them to your life and to other dreams. You might be surprised to find just how rich they are with meaning.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#32

Post by adlwalrus »

dfc wrote: post #25
peterjmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you first posted about sleepyti.me here on HN, I was enduring a long phase where I was having a particularly hard time falling asleep at night. I would often lie in bed for two or three hours before I finally drifted off. Compounding the issue was my tendency to constantly measure and analyze how long I'd been trying and how much sleep I would (not) get if I fell asleep "now", always comparing those figures with…

I'd love to try out f.lux but I am a little wary of installing a binary that messes with my xwindow settings. I wish the source was available...

There are in fact a number of free solutions...

IIRC redshift was the most developed of them when I looked into it a while back.

http://alternativeto.net/software/f46lux/?license=opensource

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#33

Post by jmilloy »

david_shaw wrote: post #3

Disclaimer: I'm going to reference a product I built. The science of sleep is a strange thing. Sleep is ubiquitous (after all, everyone needs to sleep), and almost everyone I know complains of being tired, or constantly groggy, or stressed due to the limited amount of sleep that they get every night. I know this particularly well, because I suffer from mild insomnia that keeps me awake far later than I should be. I t…

For me, it has everything to do with consistency. Then my brain adapts and is not in deep sleep when my alarm goes off.

Consistency can be the number of hours asleep or the time I get up, and takes about three days to set in. It gets even better if I break up my sleep into, say, 3 hour chunks; instead of just sleeping for multiples of three hours, I inform my body when it's time to start and stop sleep cycles by waking up for 20 minutes. It is supposedly more efficient because your brain on its own spends longer than necessary in between sleep cycles, which is a waste of time.

Just a few more ideas!

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#34

Post by dfc »

adlwalrus wrote: post #32
dfc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to try out f.lux but I am a little wary of installing a binary that messes with my xwindow settings. I wish the source was available...

There are in fact a number of free solutions... IIRC redshift was the most developed of them when I looked into it a while back. http://alternativeto.net/software/f46lux/?license=opensource

Nice! Thanks for the tip:

  dfc@ronin:~$ apt-cache search redshift 
  gtk-redshift - Adjusts the color temperature of your screen with GTK+ integration
  redshift - Adjusts the color temperature of your screen

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#35

Post by vidarh »

janezhu wrote: post #30
vidarh wrote: post #24

I've adopted a biphasic sleep pattern of sorts by chance. It started by occasionally falling asleep when putting my son to sleep, and when I'd wake up I'd compensate by staying up longer. After a while I realized it works very well for me to got to sleep for a couple of hours around 8 when he goes to sleep, and then stay up for a few hours before going back to sleep - I usually feel very mellow and relaxed when wakin…

I did this for the first two years of college-- I'd often sleep for about 3-4 hours each night before class, and then sleep another chunk of time in the afternoon. However, it had the opposite effect on me as it became more and more difficult to go "back" to sleep in the afternoon unless I waited until the evening. What ended up happening the last year or so is that I started sleeping 5-6 hours per night without a na…

> . However, it had the opposite effect on me as it became more and more difficult to go "back" to sleep in the afternoon unless I waited until the evening.

8 here for me is 8pm. So I'll sleep 8pm until somewhere between 10 and 11.30pm depending on how rough the day was, and then get up and stay up anywhere until around 1.30am to 3.30am and go to bed and sleep until 6am.

I don't think I could deal with sleeping in the afternoon - it has to be when it's reasonably dark out, and it definitively helps to have a rough enough schedule and short enough total amount of sleep to be properly tired by the time I go down for the first round.

I rarely sleep more than 6 hour total during the evening/night, but will often catch up with a nap during the day on weekends.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#36

Post by donaldc »

durandal1 wrote: post #20
peterjmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you first posted about sleepyti.me here on HN, I was enduring a long phase where I was having a particularly hard time falling asleep at night. I would often lie in bed for two or three hours before I finally drifted off. Compounding the issue was my tendency to constantly measure and analyze how long I'd been trying and how much sleep I would (not) get if I fell asleep "now", always comparing those figures with…

One thing I want to emphasize here is f.lux. It works. In fact it works brilliantly – it has had a profound effect on my sleep quality of the last year.

I personally have found that f.lux is insufficient. It does significantly tone down the amount of blue that my laptop screen puts out, but even when set to the most red-shifted setting possible, my laptop screen still puts out enough blue light to keep me from getting sleepy.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#37

Post by philwelch »

gnosis wrote: post #31
dreamr wrote: post #22

Strange (and boring... you've been warned) little anecdote. Yesterday (like so many days, ha) I spent too much time typing out silly posts for HN. Last night, I couldn't sleep well because of some noise outside and I had this dream. One of those dreams where it is so vivid and the story line is so clear, and there are "scenes" almost like a film where the "camera" zooms in on some aspect, that you wake up remembering…

"An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter." Dreams often have many layers of meaning. You might want to try keeping a long-term, detailed record of your dreams, and spending some time each day trying to make sense of them and relating them to your life and to other dreams. You might be surprised to find just how rich they are with meaning.

You can read meaning into anything. For the most part though, dreams are just synapses firing randomly. I wouldn't read too much into them, or at least not take the interpretations too seriously.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#38

Post by zrail »

durandal1 wrote: post #20
peterjmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you first posted about sleepyti.me here on HN, I was enduring a long phase where I was having a particularly hard time falling asleep at night. I would often lie in bed for two or three hours before I finally drifted off. Compounding the issue was my tendency to constantly measure and analyze how long I'd been trying and how much sleep I would (not) get if I fell asleep "now", always comparing those figures with…

One thing I want to emphasize here is f.lux. It works. In fact it works brilliantly – it has had a profound effect on my sleep quality of the last year.

It has had a huge effect on my sleep as well. In fact, I jail broke my phone specifically to install f.lux and that's been even better.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#39

Post by svasan »

dfc wrote: post #25
peterjmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you first posted about sleepyti.me here on HN, I was enduring a long phase where I was having a particularly hard time falling asleep at night. I would often lie in bed for two or three hours before I finally drifted off. Compounding the issue was my tendency to constantly measure and analyze how long I'd been trying and how much sleep I would (not) get if I fell asleep "now", always comparing those figures with…

I'd love to try out f.lux but I am a little wary of installing a binary that messes with my xwindow settings. I wish the source was available...

Side note about f.lux. I installed f.lux on my windows XP laptop and it kind of messed up the settings. The funny thing is even after uninstalling f.lux, my laptop retained the brightness settings that were set by f.lux. (Thankfully, it is fixed now.) It also crashed a few times due to its memory consumption.

Issues highlighted in the FAQ page here. http://stereopsis.com/flux/faq.html

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#40

Post by nazgulnarsil »

I'm extremely pissed I went the first 27 years of my life without knowing this. It completely changed my life.

When you wake up you are dehydrated. Immediately have a sip of pickle brine and a cup of water. The electrolytes (salt and potassium) help you absorb the water quickly. You will feel MUCH better. Coconut juice is another possibility if you find pickles gross.

This is also helpful for hangovers.

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