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Recepies For A Good Night's Sleep?
pavelc asks: "I was wondering recently if there are any ways to improve the efficiency of sleeping and awakening. You have all probably noticed that sometimes it is significantly easier to wake up after partying the whole night and a 3-hour-long sleep for work than it is to wake up after being in the bed for 12+ hours. It also makes a lot of difference how you wake/get up - do you use the XMMS Alarm plugin or a conventional alarm clock? What do you do after that? A long shower works for me much better than caffeine for example. Any suggestions on how to improve the quality of sleep, and just as importantly, how you start the day."
I like the old "hair of the dog" remedy for a hangover. The problem is that I have Boston Terriers and they don't shed enough to provide a really effective cure.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
This falls into the "duh" category. If you're overstressed, take steps to change your environment by whatever means necessary. Chronic stress will do things far worse than messing up your sleep patterns.
If I have one too many blankets, it takes me a long time to fall asleep. This is something that's difficult to notice. If you find yourself tossing and turning, chuck a blanket and see if that helps.
I have asthma. I rarely have full-blown attacks, but breathing will often become more difficult than usual. This is another thing that's difficult to notice, that will keep me tossing and turning for hours. Make sure you can breathe freely. Install air filters if you're having trouble - they'll save you a lot of grief during the day, too. If you have serious trouble breathing, fairly often, see a doctor. You may have asthma or another breathing disorder (or be allergic to a solvent in your carpet, or what-have-you).
This is another "duh" point, but if you have to go to the bathroom, you're going to be waking up every couple of hours until you drag yourself out of bed and go. That'll wreck your night's sleep pretty effectively.
YMMV.
Not everyone has a natural cycle however. People who have problems sleeping might just be living in such a way that conflicts with their sleeping and waking cycle, or it might be that they are predisposed to not forming sleeping/waking cycles. Melatonin can do wonders in such a case. Melatonin is produced by your brian when its dark and destroyed when you see bright sunlight. People will really bad eye-sight sometimes don't distinguish between daylight and night with the same contrast that well-sighted people do. A little Melatonin can help out a lot in such cases.
Light regulates sleeping and waking cycles. People who have trouble sleeping or waking up are often more strongly affected by light than others. Don't sleep in the basement. Make sure you've got a room with lots of windows, or a big window, or a window that gets sunlight as soon as the sun rises (or all three!). Go to bed when it gets dark, wake up when it gets light out.
If you have problems sleeping, you may have to abandon any hopes of sleeping less. If you don't sleep well now, and your asking to be able to fall asleep instantly and wake up refreshed, and only get 4 or 6 hours sleep, your probably won't get what you want. If you've got bad sleeping habits the best thing you can do is establish good ones.
Between the ages of 9 and 25 I had horrible sleeping habits. It really affected my life. It took me 2 hours to fall asleep every night and I woke up every 45 minutes (no it was apnia). I woke up in a very foul mood and usually stayed in bed for an hour or so before getting up. My life suffered greatly. Then moved into a place where my bedroom was facing the sunlight in the morning. WOW! Things were very different. I woke up early and felt great.
Also try Melatonin. It's a substance produced by your brain when there is no light and induces sleeping behavior. The brain destroys melatonin when you see bright sunlight. It really has a profound effect on regulating sleeping and waking cycles. I've used it on and off for years now and when my sleeping habits begin to slide it really helps to get back on track. Or when I NEED a full nights sleep without interuption it helps too.
Simple. Just fly West at least two time zones every day. Does absolute wonders. Of course you end up on some very odd Pacific islands now and then, but the natives are generally friendly.
Actually, I've been doing a fair bit of flying from North America to Europe and back, and it's wonderful for about a week. I get to Europe at about 3pm local/9am EST, having slept a few hours on the plane, muck around for a little while, and crash about 10pm local/4pm EST. Wake up great in the morning, perfectly rested, and stay that way through the week. By the time I'm getting to sleep around midnight and getting up around 8am, it's usually time to go home. The flight home makes the day about 30 hours long, so when I get home I go to bed around 9pm local/3am not-so-local, and once again I'm fine for about a week.
My problem is that my sleep schedule isn't suited well to 24 hour days. When left to myself (vacations and such), my schedule rotates forward by about 2 hours every day. I figured out a schedule that I think would have worked well, replacing 7 24 hour days with 6 28 hour days per week. Unfortunately, my wife did not approve, and I suspect that if I had tried it out I would have gotten no sleep whatsoever. Similarly, I've figured out what I think would work well for waking me up - have one loud annoying buzzer-based alarm clock that I hit the snooze button on, one softer alarm radio that I leave on - I've found it helps a lot to give me some sense of time passing, something for my brain to lock onto to pull me into consciousness, and have my bedroom lights on a timer to brighten up the room in the morning. But, once again, the wife intervenes, and I'm left just oversleeping. If I could just get it so that she goes to work before me, all would be much better. Oh well.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
- Get TiVo so you don't try to justify staying up until midnight or later just so you can see South Park or Battlebots or whatever. Now, go to bed 2 hours earlier.
- If you're the type whose brain doesn't shut down just because his body is lying in bed, get one of those nature noise generators from Sharper Image or wherever. I find that having something other than complete silence helps distract me enough to get to sleep. Total silence and I keep writing code in my head. Remember to get one with a shutoff timer so it doesn't play all night. Also, don't go leaving the tv on, it'll inevitably keep you from getting into a really deep sleep.
- When you get out of bed, if you are so inclined, turn around and make the bed. For some reason this always makes me feel more awake in the morning. It's like starting the day by actually doing something instead of shuffling into the kitchen for coffee and a newspaper. On a similar note, do the things you "have to" do first (such as shower, make lunch, make bed...) and the lounging arond stuff (reading slashdot) second.
- Pay attention to your breathing. I've found it to be really neat that as I pay attention to my breathing I can actually feel myself falling asleep. Not the actual moment of losing consciousness, of course, but definitely feeling some signs that translate into "Hey, neat, I'll be asleep in about a minute."
- DON'T STRESS. I know that almost all of my sleepless nights (and by that I mean waking up every ten minutes) are caused because of some important event the next morning. If you can get passed the stress of something like that, you'll sleep alot better.
- When it is time to get up, get out of the bed. My worst habit was always staying in bed and telling myself I'd get up in 5 minutes.
- An interesting thing I found is that late at night, with just the television for light, I will feel extremely sleepy and can't keep my eyes open. But when I turn off the tv and go into the bedroom, I'm not as sleepy. I suspect that it has something to do with the light from the tv causing my eyes to strain and thus want to be closed.
That's my list.www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I've found that one key in all of the above is consistency. Our bodies are designed to do everything in cycles. Breaking the cycle or just having erratic behavior to begin with is very hard on your body. But once you get into a regular routine of eating, exercising and sleeping, you'll be amazed at the difference in how you feel. You won't need caffeine because you'll have plenty of energy to go all day.
This is, of course, based solely on my own observations on how my body has reacted to various behavior patterns over the years. I assume it applies more or less to other people but YMMV! ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
all natural, herbal, Valerian Root tablets work good, usually..
can't take it if you have any alcohol in you, though..
While I was in college, I tried staggered 2-hour naps throughout the day instead of one 8 hour sleep cycle at night. I'd sleep from noon til 2pm, 6pm to 8pm and 2am to 4am, or something like that. Thus I ended up with 6 hours of sleep a day, but feeling much better overall than the standard sleep cycle. It also amazing how much studying you can get done from 4 to 7 in the morning :)
Unfortunately, you get tired pretty quickly if you miss your scheduled naps, and its hard to have much a social life when you sleep in the early evening. Maybe if your lifestyle allows this kind of flexibility, you might want to try it out.
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---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
we listen to a looping mp3 of waves crashing on the beach or a river flowing over rocks while we sleep every night.
the waves are really the best thing, since research has shown that it sounds much like everything sounded when we were inside the womb....
the river sounds have a similar effect, and are a nice change after listening to the waves for a couple of months.
when we lived in oregon for a year, we actually had a tin roof, and of course it rained all the time, so we didn't need the extra sounds.... but now, we're back to the mp3s again.
we have an x10 remotemouse that we use to launch the thing, so that when we are laying in bed watching TV and decide it's time to drift off, we can just hit a button on the remote and it launches the playlist.
Drink lots. It will help with the hangover :>
indeed, in the UK, melatonin is covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act. It's a Class C controlled substance (the same class as benzodiazepines and whatever). Illegal enough to lose you plenty of sleep, anyhow.
TomV
Yes, melatonin is natural, but please be careful with it. Lot's of people seem to be blindly jumping on the melatonin bandwagon. Be aware that it can be inappropriate, especially for younger people. Use of melatonin can actually depress your natural production.
The same thing applies to over-the-counter sleeping tablets, which usually use dipenhydramine. If you can't fall asleep any other way, dipenhydramine works wonders (I occasionally use it myself). But you want to be real careful when doing this, because despite the claims on most boxes that "these are not habit-forming," it is relatively easy to fsck up your sleeping cycle. Neurochemistry is a sensitive thing, and the less you mess with it without a doctor's supervision, the better.
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Am I the only Slashdotter who is sick and tired of losing 9000 karma points every time they moderate?
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Hence, if you need three hour cycles, 3,6,9 or 12 hours will leave you refreshed but 8 won't - hence the curious effect of 3 hours seeming better than 8.
In the same way, if you need four hour cycles, 4, 8 or 12 hours works but say six or ten turn out to be next to useless.
As I said, it's just a theory but it does explain why differing lengths of sleep work differently.
It's funny you should ask that question. If you haven't noticed, in the past few months, there has been a push among sleep researchers to alert the public to the importance of sleep.
The bottom line is, Americans need more sleep. The whole "less sleep is better" or "rise and shine" attitude seems to be an antiquated leftover from the 19th century when we didn't have electricity and getting up with dawn conserved time.
Anyway, from what I've been able to read:
(1) Figure out when you naturally would go to bed and naturally would wake up. "Naturally" means on vacation when you're not up 'til 4:30 at a LAN party or whatever.
(2) Try to aim for going to bed and waking up with your natural schedule. Consistency helps; getting few hours one night will throw off your sleep the next few days.
(3) Watch how much you sleep. If it's substantially different from 7-9 hours of sleep, there might be a problem, whether it be physical, psychological, or both. I've now learned, for example, that when I sleep much more than 8 hours, It's a pretty reliable sign I'm getting sick.
(4) Don't take substances close to before when you go to sleep (alcohol, caffeine, etc.). The key is to not mess up REM sleep. Dreams are your way for your brain to learn and assimilate what's happened during the day. When it can't do that, you have problems.
(5) After you get little sleep, there is sometimes a feeling that you have extra energy or some such thing. This is somewhat of an illusion: attention and cognitive performance actually inevitably degrade with lack of sleep, the feeling of extra energy is fleeting anyway.
Sweet dreams!
Gentoo Sucks
As for sleep problems, as a couple of other people posted, light has a lot to do with it. If you work in your well lit office, go home, sit down in your well lit den and type away on the computer you may be setting yourself up for difficulty sleeping.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Most people forget that that every 90 minutes(generally) of sleep a person starts a new period of rem sleep. If you go to sleep at 12:00 pm, it's better to wake up at 6:00am then 7:00am(the middle of the 5th rem sleep period). Now you need to figure out the duration of your specific rem cycle(because it CAN vary from 30 to 90 min), by going to bed at the same time and waking up at different times and recording the results. Groggyness felt in the morning is do to the fact that your motor skills have been shut down during rem and they need to be rebooted. Get up and start walking around instead of lying around and snoozing in bed. This will activate your motor skill program and alliviate that groggy feeling. If you just remember that fact then waking up's like CS 101. BTW, apples in the morning work better then caffine.
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...