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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.
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?
Sleep is the new status symbol
My teenagers have unbelievably high status, then.
Whiskey. Works every time!
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Carpe noctem!
Hey, ladies! I'm well rested... every... day. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Student 1: I don't mean to brag, but I took part in an orgy the other day ...
Student 2: No, you didn't. You just fell asleep in biology class.
Student 1: Totally counts!
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Carpe noctem!
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.
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.
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.
What's been proven is that 8 hours in one block is far too much. The natural sleep cycle is 7 hours, with about 1.5 hours spent awake just past the halfway point. It's also seasonal, requiring a bit more sleep in winter than summer. Your data is out of date.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
It is STAYING asleep that is the tough thing for me....
And if I've been drinking at all, you can almost set a timer to it...4 hours exactly I wake up and often can't go back to sleep.
But even if no alcohol is involved, I find it more and more difficult to stay asleep, you get up to pee 1-2 times a night and can't fall back asleep.
And I really do better on 8 hours of sleep..as I get older it seems more difficult to hit near that mark, 6 hours is often the best I can seem to get.
I just wish I knew how to stay or fall back asleep, it isn't the initial part of sleep I have a problem with, hence, no pills out there to help or anything I've found yet.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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).
I've read somewhere that having some wake-up time in the middle of the night is a natural cycle, and that's how people slept back in the African savannah, in two separate stretches. So maybe you should try to find some other four hours of sleep during the day, which are not right behind the first four hours?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
I used to have the same problem. My wife noticed that I have sleep apnea and that I sometimes woke up because of it. You don't realize that you woke up because you stopped breathing, but you do notice that you have to pee.
Before doing a sleep study, I decided to try one of the mandibular device solutions and it worked great! No snoring and I can sleep through the night, without waking up multiple times to "pee". If it didn't work I was going to give in and do the "sleep study" and possibly go with a cpap solution.
My doctor said that getting sleep between 10pm and 2am was critical to a long healthy life and preventing deteriotating vision in old age. I'm not sure if that's simply because of getting sleep in dark hours, or there's something physics related about having the Sun behind the core of the Earth.
Norway has no night-time in the Summer months, so it's just permanent sunset/sunrise for three months, so bedrooms have blackout curtains while people are out walking around at 4am in the morning, painting their houses, taking pets for walks.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
As somebody who resisted a sleep study for a long time because, "I sleep fine, what are you talking about, I snore?", I can't urge people strongly enough to go get a sleep study done if you're told you snore, or you think you're not sleeping very well.
First, get yourself a fitbit (or similar - something that'll help track your movements during sleep) - use it for a week or two, and notice that you've probably got a very restless sleep pattern, meaning you're moving a lot during the night.
Second, get yourself a sleep study. It's a pain in the ass, but it's worth doing. My sleep study determined I was having apnea episodes approximately 50 times an hour (an average of nearly one every minute).
Third, if the doctor recommends one for you, get and use the CPAP machine.
The first night I tried mine, it was uncomfortable and weird, and I slept badly. The second night, I slept for 10 hours uninterrupted, and woke up feeling like I was 20, had fucked my brains out the night before with a hot co-ed after a college party, and then slept in until 2 pm on a Sunday, woke up with no hangover, and with the same co-ed giving me wake-up head. I literally can't recall having slept so well in years. I'm still using it, and have noticed that:
1) My snoring is largely gone; My wife appreciates it, that's for sure;
2) I sleep with less restlessness, as shown by a movement tracker;
3) My 2 pm "drowsy hour" is completely *gone* - I'm more productive and focused at work;
4) I have way more energy when exercising in the morning and playing with the kids at night;
I was resistant to it initially, but I'm an enthusiastic convert. It's really been a godsend. If you're hearing complaints about your snoring, or you have a lot of afternoon drowsiness, or your movement tracker shows you're tossing and turning constantly - give it a try.