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Sleep Is the New Status Symbol (nytimes.com)
The New York Times has a good story on how sleep is increasingly becoming a big business -- and the tech industry is rushing in to tweak our natural rhythms. From the article: At M.I.T.'s Media Lab, the digital futurist playground, David Rose is investigating swaddling, bedtime stories and hammocks, as well as lavender oil and cocoons. [...] Meanwhile, at the University of California, Berkeley, Matthew P. Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory there, is working on direct current stimulation as a cure for sleeplessness in the aging brain. [...] In Paris, Hugo Mercier, a computer science engineer, has invested in sound waves. He has raised over $10 million to create a headband that uses them to induce sleep. [...] Ben Olsen, an Australian entrepreneur, hopes to introduce Thim, a gadget you wear on your finger that uses sound to startle you awake every three minutes for an hour, just before you go to sleep. [...] Sleep entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond have poured into the sleep space, as branders like to say -- a $32 billion market in 2012 -- formerly inhabited by old-style mattress and pharmaceutical companies.
Find something everyone needs, or they will die, figure out a way to sell it back to them, profit.
If only there was a way to transfer sleep - it would many of the world's problems. Poor people could just sleep and get paid, rich people could produce even more wealth; maybe parents could get a little more personal time away from their children?
A couple years at most, then the next big thing will be the new "status symbol".
Granted, I'm a morning person, but if you want good sleep, go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time as much as possible. No sleeping in on days off.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
. . . . I do my best to spend weekends and days off, sleeping in. Because, between the job, the commute, and everything else I'm committed to, I'm currently booked at 25+ hours on a GOOD day.
8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is pretty much a luxury to me. . .
Sleep is the new status symbol
My teenagers have unbelievably high status, then.
What helped me sleep better at night is a heating pad on low setting underneath my left side.
Whiskey. Works every time!
--
Carpe noctem!
Hey, ladies! I'm well rested... every... day. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Not having to sleep would be a huge competitive advantage. I know my coworkers are lazy and start to drag after about eighty hours. Many of them complain about not being able to sleep when they can. If they worked harder, then they would be more tired so they would be able to sleep. That or exercise which would be better for them, but not as good for the team.
It's quite common for me to wake up sexually aroused too.
If I wanted to get more sleep, I'd ask you to tell me more about yourself.
... when you say you "slept" with that hot girl from biology class, you actually mean you slept with her? And that's a status symbol?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Granted, I'm a morning person,
Oh, go take a long walk on a short pier!
*grumbles and goes for more coffee*
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I thought we did away with kids having coworkers with modern employment law...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Snake Oil is the new Snake Oil.
Sleep restriction. Take your total sleep time, set your bedtime by rolling back from your desired rise time. When your sleep efficiency over a week reaches 90% or more, move bed time back by 15 minutes. If it falls below 80%, move it forward.
I'm an insomniac with a prior ADHD diagnosis. I got Modafinil from a psychiatrist after my attention issues became asinine; it was fucking awesome for 2 weeks, then I got hit with sudden suicide-grade depression. Modafinil doesn't interrupt my sleep; and since I was sleeping 2 hours a night for over a year anyway, the consequences of abusing Modafinil to stay up for weeks on end suddenly became clear to me--which is actually great, because I wasn't able to find that in the literature. I also got a sample of suicidal impulse, but not much; the experience of that kind of extreme depression was too-new and carried too much risk, so I shut those thoughts down as they formed. I'm too hardened now for that to happen again, so I won't get a second chance to examine how the actual desire to kill yourself forms in a safe environment. Oh well. I get why people bitch about depression so much now; I learned to make it go away, but it was never that bad, holy shit.
That lead to a huge run of psychiatric experimentation. Amphetamine for the anhedonia? Makes me depressed (yes, it does the opposite of what makes people want to smoke meth). Melatonin? No dice. Wanted to avoid a GABA drug, so my psychiatrist gave me Belsomra (Suvorexant), which worked amazingly: instead of 2-3 hour sleep latency and lots of being awake for hours at a time in between, I got to sleep in 20 minutes, despite not actually feeling any sleep urge--I needed like 20mg of Melatonin to actually sleep, though, even with the Suvorexant. $300/month so insurance wanted me to try GABA drugs, so I tried Eszopiclone; it made me really fucking high for a couple weeks, then I stopped taking it because I nearly drove into another car 20 hours after the last dose; the withdrawal was hilariously bad, but lasts only a day.
I'm on Atomoxetine now. The drug hit me like a hammer, and 80mg/day was making me manic, driving my heart rate up by like 30 points, and causing ludicrously-high blood pressure. 60mg still hits me with fatigue, so I want to split the dose and cut it back more. Since I started taking Atomoxetine, I can control my insomnia with little more than sleep restriction, although 2mg of 8-hour continuous-release melatonin helps, and an overdose on B6 helps immensely (B-100 supplements have a toxic level of B6; B6 toxicity only shows up in literature after a minimum of 1.9 years of supplementation, mean 2.6 years, and can cause permanent psychiatric damage. Most "dietary supplement" sleep drugs--unregulated in the United States--contain high doses of B6, e.g. any Melatonin pill will contain 5x the RDI, and ZMA contains a lot of B6. ZMA is also essentially a GABA drug like Valium, since Magnesium binds to the Benzodiapezine site on the GABA[a] receptor and induces a similar anxiolytic effect).
So yeah, it's Atomoxetine and sleep restriction, at a minimum, for me. It's fantastic. Meanwhile I see idiots on Dimaxion and Everyman thinking they're performing better because they have less sleep, and I'm like... I remember I didn't realize the sleep deprivation was actually causing me a problem, even though I knew it was miserable. My brain started shutting down major facilities to compensate near the end.
I've considered that Ramelteon might make my life a bit easier, but I don't want to introduce a new dependency into my life right now. I'm curious, because it hasn't been directly-compared to Melatonin in literature yet. (Ramelteon has a 1-2.6 hour half-life; I get no sleep urge. Sometimes, I'd just like to feel like sleeping when it's time to sleep, instead of feeling like I'm dying of sleep deprivation but still not feeling tired and having sleep be just a damnable chore. Imagine if you only had to eat because you'd become dizzy and weak eventually, and food wasn't really that palatable; eating would be terrible, but necessary.)
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No need for market research, just note the television ads. So many for pillows, mattresses, pharmaceutical sleep aids, etc. Now I can start my pyramid scheme of having people sleep under pyramid tents that focus the "somnorific rays."
How is waking you up every three minutes supposed to help you sleep?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Like many other recent "tech fixes", this one attempts to paper over fissures in society that have quite different causes. More and more people are "badly off", however you measure it. They have less money, they are deeper in debt, even while they spend less; and increasingly, they have to work longer hours and have several earners per household. One of the obvious consequences is that people have less time for sleep, and more worries to distract them from it.
If you are doing something you find enjoyable or satisfying, you have enough spare time to express yourself as a person, you have the support you need from family and friends, and you are eating and exercising right, then sleep should open up under you like a black velvet crevasse you just can't help sliding into. You sleep for about 7-8 hours and awake refreshed. There are a few tips that most people nowadays have heard: avoid bright artificial lights, strenuous exercise, worrying thoughts, exciting entertainment and too much food and drink before sleep. Some others are less obvious, such as blackout curtains and other ways of making your bedroom as pitch-dark as possible - even a luminous clock dial can be a problem for some.
But if you are having to work too hard for too long, perhaps at several different jobs; if you can never work hard or fast enough; if your boss and co-workers are always giving you a hard time; if you are always worried about money and security; if you eat and drink the wrong things (for whatever reason), and don't get enough plain physical exercise, you will have trouble sleeping. And it's unlikely that any artificial aid will make up for serious lifestyle deficiencies.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Science fiction author Larry Niven came up with a way to solve this problem, which this article reminded me of: 'Russian sleep sets' would induce a current in your brain, causing you to sleep. It was super-efficient, and only a couple hours under it's influence would leave you as refreshed and ready to go as a full 8 hours' normal sleep. I can't imagine we'd get anything so great as that, but to be able to put on a headset of some sort, set a timer, be instantly asleep, sleep deeply, and wake up completely refreshed every time? That'd be a game-changer.
I (40 year old single male) recently griped at work that I only got 6 hours of sleep, and my coworkers who are parents got a good laugh out of that one, saying if they are able to get 6 hours of sleep it's a luxury.
Look, you can't "create trends".
This is not a trend.
Hashtag that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Imagine if you only had to eat because you'd become dizzy and weak eventually, and food wasn't really that palatable; eating would be terrible, but necessary.)
That's me about half the time. Eating & food is such a huge pain in the neck. Huge waste of time & money. And yet I get the shakes and fuzzy headed if I don't keep the calories coming in on a regular schedule.
Because it's a social thing, you can't just find a nerd replacement like Soylent or some other "get it out of the way" solution - the wife & kids need & want food too.
The human body is just an awful thing to have to maintain.
" Ben Olsen, an Australian entrepreneur, hopes to introduce Thim, a gadget you wear on your finger that uses sound to startle you awake every three minutes for an hour, just before you go to sleep. "
Got one - it's called a cat, though generally she wakes me for three minutes every hour, either by walking on my head, or sticking a paw in my mouth.
Being proud of your lack of sleep is like being proud of the monthly balance that you've been carrying on your high interest credit card for the past decade. You're not more successful due to your lack of sleep - you're successful despite it.
Sleep more and see how the speed and quality of your work improves, thus making more time for the very sleep that enabled such work (not to mention the overall quality of life improvements).
The irony of all being that Silicon Valley innovations, making phones and tablets just that much more addictive, are one of the big drivers in the poor quality of sleep these days.
If you really want good sleep, find work where you can set your own hours and then sleep whenever you like. I never had any luck trying to force sleep, but being able to choose when to sleep works great.
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This problem already has a solution, it's called: LESS STRESS
But no because America is a culture of burnout referring to other countries as slackers, we have to innovate to sell you more crap to solve a problem that was the invention of that very same society!
We'll make great pets
I honestly don't understand how people manage on such little sleep, even 8-hours seems marginal. It seems to me that I need 80 hours total per week (average 10 per day). If I skimp on that by sleeping "only" 8 (or fewer) hours a day, I just end up sleeping in even more on the weekend to make it up.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and putting me on a CPAP eliminated my snoring but did nothing for the duration of sleep I seem to desire. I typically wake 2-3 times in the early morning (that I am aware of) but I desperately want to get back into whatever I was dreaming about (hate leaving whatever I was urgently doing unfinished) and in the absence of interruptions I usually fall right back to sleep.
I the morning (after 10 or so hours) I don't feel refreshed at all, more bleary-eyed and hyper-sensitive to light and sound (no, I don't drink alcohol) with heavy, lethargic limbs that don't want to move. I also desperately want to get back into the last dream and finish whatever it was I was doing, which is extra-frustrating when the memory of what I was doing quickly fades leaving me with the vague sense that I was doing something really important but now I've forgotten what it even was.
The only thing that seems to help is a late wake-up time. It seems like if I can sleep in all the way until 7:00-7:30-ish I wake up much easier and it almost doesn't matter how late I go to bed. But of course that's incompatible with job-having.
Given that you're going to stay with it for the rest of your life, you might want to learn to enjoy it, like the rest of us. Cooking and eating is a ceremony here in Europe, akin to a ritual.
Experimenting with flavours and cooking techniques may be a wonderful hobby, whether you cook yourself or pay someone to do it, although I recognize that it may be quite expensive in that dysfunctional food culture you have over there in the States, where poision is subsidized and quality raw ingredients are more expensive than processed food.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
When I was on amphetamine, I started using soylent because I could only get 1200kcal/day. The original dose (20mg MAS ER) was so powerful I couldn't eat at all: food had a terrible taste and texture, and swallowing felt like an invasion. It was hard to get down. I eventually settled on 15mg MAS ER; 10mg gave me anxiety, and 15mg only made me mildly-depressed. I break over at 20mg like an avalanche effect, complete with a mix of mild and moderate-severe overdose symptoms. The pharmacological window for amphetamine is supposed to be huge, like 8:1, so a large dose usually makes you kind of high and causes insomnia (any dose causes insomnia; it takes 26 hours to be capable of sleep after taking amphetamine), while very large doses do slow damage and get you really, really high (consequence: you're going to feel shitty later and, eventually, you'll reach a point where you're never going to feel good again).
By contrast, alcohol doesn't seem to work too well on me. Benzodiapezine-likes (Eszopiclone, a non-benzodiapezine) seem to not do much at normal doses. Enough alcohol will get me drunk, but it won't muck about with my reasoning abilities; the whole experience is terrible, involves a mixed manic episode, and leaves me incapable of sleep as if I'm on a stimulant--even at 0.34. One of the annoying things about the emotional clusterfuck is the emotional clusterfuck, which I'm stuck observing because of course I am; you'd think I'd just go along with the ride, but no, emotions are an external factor and not a driving part of my experience of self, and I'm prone to point out where emotions are eroding my judgment and overrule them (largely because I'm not comfortable with the emotional decision--figure that out). Eszopiclone puts me in a daze, during which I notice I feel really fucking high 24/7, and that my memory is iffy; it doesn't help me sleep and it does nothing until several hours after I've taken the pill.
Drugs suck. Somebody get me some better tools. In your case, you need... something. MSG in your food, or a good dose of Welbutrin (...no thanks) or Phenylpiracetam (I like this stuff; it's relatively-safe). PPR makes my reward system work correctly and allows me to experience feelings of emotional pleasure, but I generally don't use it, and I remove it from my schedule whenever I have actual doctors making drug adjustments so I've got a better baseline during treatment. Even when I do use it, I take a lowered dose to essentially activate wanting without activating the emotional side of liking, because feelings of pleasure still register to my senses as being really, really high and I'm not entirely comfortable with the impact on my judgment (which is stupid: lack of reinforcement behavior has destroyed my judgment, and my primary goal is to avoid any and all discomfort, so I'm not really bothered by failure but don't pursue achievement if it means expending effort; I need good emotional feelings, it's a requirement for proper function, even if it's scary and kind of embarrassing to take drugs to make me feel good).
Ask your psychiatrist to fix that shit. Trust me, being broken like that sucks. The alternative requires just as much discipline, and draws less sympathy--people will criticize you more for getting fat than starving yourself to death--and it's still a lot better to have to push yourself into eating less than you burn and maybe monitoring your intake and caloric consumption instead of just stuffing your face on the couch. When your body isn't telling you food is good, life becomes difficult and miserable.
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I've already started my happy hour, so can someone please explain to me how having a gizmo on your finger that startles you awake every three minutes is going to help with sleeplessness?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Good luck finding that. I believe that not forcing them to get up everyday at the same time is a necessary condition for happy and creative employees.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Actually, the REAL reason for the rise in sleep interest are the possibilities of brainwashing citizens on a larger scale, and via a more easily manageable (tool).
Wait a minute! Where was I yesterday?!
Didn't I used to hate that politician?!
Why does scientific fact no longer matter?!
And I digress from there.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
A couple years at most, then the next big thing will be the new "status symbol".
Granted, I'm a morning person, but if you want good sleep, go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time as much as possible. No sleeping in on days off.
that is an over simplification sadly and not true for many who have problem just because it is for you. There are a lot of causes of sleep problems and insomnia is more of a catchall generic term. I have disruptive sleep phase disorder myself and my "natural" peak and trough alertness times (associated with sleep ease) linked to circadian rhythm changes as it doesn't map neatly to the normal 24 hour ; in environmental queues present every day environments, I mean I know it goes longer for the typical folks when queues removed. It isn't mental thing either as can be monitored as core tmep changes and lot of physiological as well as mental changes. Mine is delayed as I'm late compared to norm BUT it has a habit of drifting forward to the point I need resetting because it goes waaay out over time.
My doc is VERY clinically competent and up to date on research and knows my background but since a kid for 30odd years I'd found a lot of none specialised doctors simply don't have the theory and don't understand it as well as they should and have a very basic understanding of the biochem and neuro side of things as well as specific sleep disorders in general, more a trouble sleeping = stress or routine which is not always true as is proven (objectively I mean not just uncontrolled self observation or self diagnosis).
There are a LOT of factors, cortisol and adrenaline levels get mentioned linked to stress, as does melatonin and inhibition with blue light (and close UV perhaps) often gets blamed in other cases. There are whole host of neurotransmitters invloved though and inblalances can throw stuff out. On top of it disorders like my own make people naturally different due to different neurological wiring so the issue is NOT fixed by routine and relaxation sadly. Even the try it longer shutdown since doing that for 30odd years and still exact same problem but treating it on case by case basis properly fixes the issues mostly or gets around them. .
If you really want good sleep, find work where you can set your own hours and then sleep whenever you like. I never had any luck trying to force sleep, but being able to choose when to sleep works great.
that works in delayed or advanced sleep phase disorders really well if people can manage it. Delayed sleep phase disorders is surprisingly common and advanced not far behind so shifts or odd hour work can be perfect when matched to those. Some things like my own are more disruptive because they are out of sync at the reset point and move. Basically I start at delayed and move through over time to point it hits advanced phase point. Then I stop sleeping completely, even at times where I had weeks I could sleep whenever I couldn't because of SLIGHT light and sound in daylight hours. I'm over sensitive to some light and noise due to unrelated conditions so can't just zone it out like neurotypical "normal" would. Then the lack of sleep screws me to the point I have lot of other problems, eventually got to work hours that suit my reset point and got doc that was clinically brilliant compared to the norm and helped work something out rather so intervention is not needed daily now like living on modafinil,zopiclone/zolpidem etc etc which never actually fixed things because they created other problems or changed the existing one rather than remove it. Sadly the only cure I can think of in my case is get a new brain which is not yet possible and I like some of the side effect quirks of being oddly wired I guess.