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Rethinking Sleep

nytimes.com

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#51

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…

This sounds like a gross oversimplification. For one thing - even if 90 minutes is the average length of a sleep cycle, this surely varies between humans. My sleep cycle might easily be 80 minutes or 100 minutes long, rather than 90. If I were to use sleepyti.me, it might recommend that I go to bed at 11:00pm to get up at 6:30am. But if my sleep cycle is only 80 minutes long, it will be 40 minutes out in its recommen…

300,912 people apparently disagree. Sometimes even gross oversimplifications are better than nothing at all.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#52
post #47

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…

Two words: Wake light. Simplest and single greatest natural cure for sleep inertia. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...

And also a cool hacker project: http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/09/16/sunrise-lamp-alarm-clo...

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#53

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…

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…

Don't go to bed on an empty stomach. I can't fall asleep if I'm hungry.

This is hugely bad advice. Consistently going to bed with anything other than an empty stomach can lead to acid reflux (GERD). This is especially so after having chocolate before bed time, since chocolate loosens the muscle between your stomach and esophagus and allows acid to enter the tender areas of your esophagus, causing scaring and pain.

I have severe issues with this because of years of laying down after eating dinner. The muscle referred to above, in my case, is permanently damaged, such that it won't close all the way. I have to be very careful what I do after eating. It will be this way for the rest of my life and it's a complete pain in the ass.

Not everyone experiences this, but many will. I strongly recommend people do not follow the parent comment's advice.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification. For one thing - even if 90 minutes is the average length of a sleep cycle, this surely varies between humans. My sleep cycle might easily be 80 minutes or 100 minutes long, rather than 90. If I were to use sleepyti.me, it might recommend that I go to bed at 11:00pm to get up at 6:30am. But if my sleep cycle is only 80 minutes long, it will be 40 minutes out in its recommen…

300,912 people apparently disagree. Sometimes even gross oversimplifications are better than nothing at all.

No, in this case it's actually not. Mathematically. See your parent for proof. And please do not bring the "a billion flies can't be wrong" argument into this.

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#55
post #30
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…

> I also referenced a product I built. The app is called SleepBot and it's a very simple mechanism to help people track sleep and get an idea of their sleep "debt" over short periods of time.

Hey, nice to meet you :). I'm using SleepBot on my phone for over a year now, it's great!

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#56
post #53

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…

Don't go to bed on an empty stomach. I can't fall asleep if I'm hungry. This is hugely bad advice. Consistently going to bed with anything other than an empty stomach can lead to acid reflux (GERD). This is especially so after having chocolate before bed time, since chocolate loosens the muscle between your stomach and esophagus and allows acid to enter the tender areas of your esophagus, causing scaring and pain. I…

Thanks for the warning, but isn't consistently going to bed with a full stomach different from going to bed with a light snack every once in a while to make sure your stomach is not growling?

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#57
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind the question: what kind of activity do you need to have in a site to generate that kind of revenue from it? ($ 1500 - $ 2000). Is it something in the order of, say, 10k ad views per month, 100k, or something bigger like 1 million, or is any other interesting factor that needs to be considered?

I'm not the OP, but I've been running ad-supported sites since before the dotcom crash of 2000, so hopefully I have some useful insight on this. As an extremely rough benchmark, assuming $1 - $2 per 1000 page views on most sites is a reasonable baseline. Not all sites will be able to get to this, and some will get to far more, based on monetisation methods, ad placement (VERY important and frequently undervalued), nu…

Thanks! very insightful

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#58
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification. For one thing - even if 90 minutes is the average length of a sleep cycle, this surely varies between humans. My sleep cycle might easily be 80 minutes or 100 minutes long, rather than 90. If I were to use sleepyti.me, it might recommend that I go to bed at 11:00pm to get up at 6:30am. But if my sleep cycle is only 80 minutes long, it will be 40 minutes out in its recommen…

300,912 people apparently disagree. Sometimes even gross oversimplifications are better than nothing at all.

That doesn't mean anything. You need a real study (placebo works great you know). crntaylor is right. The sleep stages differs a lot between individuals. You need to analyze brain waves in order to be more precise (you could also try to detect movements like the "Sleep as android" app on android. But that's far from perfect.)

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#59
post #19
post #12

So if you're used to sleeping for eight hours at a time...should you set your alarm for four hours, wake up, do something sedate for a while, and then go back to bed? Should it be more like 4.5 so that (in theory) it happens at the end of a 1.5-hour sleep cycle?

I don't think you should set an alarm ever if you can help it. If the theory is that bi-phasic sleep is ideal and natural for us, you should fall into that pattern naturally. All you need to do is go to sleep around the time that the sun goes down. It's just that "easy".

>All you need to do is go to sleep around the time that the sun goes down. It's just that "easy".

What about in December when the sun sets around 16:30? Surely people aren't getting in bed then?

Re: Rethinking Sleep

#60
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

not entirely randomly, but processing stuff that's been "on your mind" and not packed away in long-term memory.

I imagine it (non-scientifically) as the brain's trash compactor, finishing up all the half-completed thoughts of your day, not necessary in any sort of logical way, like mashing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together regardless of how well they fit, to get something that just barely fits together at a glance.

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