The generations in my family are full of people who had dementia/Alzheimer's/auto-immune disorders. They all had anxiety, and they all had sleep disorders - I'm certain there is a connection among it all.
I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(
From what I've found, being overweight negatively affects sleep. As far as I can tell, the extra weight simply makes it hard to breathe at night, leading to apnea. This can then cause depression and anxiety, depression because you wake up tired and feeling awful every single day and anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.
At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.
There are discords where users offer each other advice. That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them and if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.
> That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them
No, they don't. At least not on a Resmed machine. You just have to enter a special mode to change them. On my machine that's holding down 2 buttons for a couple of seconds.
> if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.
I'm glad you had a Dr that did this for you. It is not the universal experience, and it definitely wasn't mine.
Configuring the machine with anything other than the default settings
A new machine with the default settings is a nightmare. The apap algorithm will spike your pressure up to 16 (which is too high for most people) one minute and drop down to 4 (which is too low for most) the next. At the high end is aerophagia and leaks, at the low end, your apnea events will still happen.
When I called my doctor and explained the machine made my sleep worse, her office said “we gave you a machine. It’s out of our hands. Would you like us to refer you to a psychologist? The problem must be in your head.” This is almost verbatim.
The equipment supplier wasn’t much better. They offered to do a “mask fitting” but it was mid 2021 and the woman didn’t even want to be in the same room as me for fear of covid.
So what should they have done? I dunno. Eventually a friend recommended a mask that worked for me. I learned to analyze the data reported by the machine and changed the settings myself to something that worked for me. It took a year, the worst year of my life. Tired and constantly waking up. Thank god for YouTube and OSCAR. knowing what I know now, I can (and have) help someone else do this process in a week or two, but I had nobody to even ask.
I think it would be a good case for handing off from the prescribing doctor to some kind of home health aid / respiratory therapist who can make house calls and help make adjustments at the home.
It needs extensive calibration, if you don't want it to either be ineffective, or wake up in the morning, with your stomach pumped full of air, like a balloon.
> At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.
If one wants to rule out sleep apean (being not the best sleeper) but probably doesn't have it (but other causes like stress) but at least want to measure it somewhat, how could one test that oneself with at least some probability?
Lots of things that are called "at home test" seem to involve getting special equipment and sending stuff to a lab anyway, that still involves a physician, some visitations with them etc... anyway.
Is there anything at all that one can do on their own to have at least some idea of the chances of having sleep apnea or not that does not involve a professional? Even if to then consider a professional if there are some indications? E.g. from an all-night audio recording, any indication of sounds that are yes or not sleep apnea indicating? And heartbeat/oxygen etc... measured by a watch?
Or is sleep apnea such a subtle and hard-to-detect issue that it's really impossible to self diagnose, it's such a subtle thing that only specialized equipment and specialists can do it, and trying to measure anything yourself gives no more answer than a 50/50 random chance coin toss?
The tester they give is basically just a pulse oximeter that logs your heart rate and SpO2 all night. I'm not sure how they interpret it, but I'd imagine that if your heart rate goes crazy and your oxygen drops, that's probably bad.
Otherwise you can look at questionnaires that ask things like whether you wake up a lot at night or snore, etc.
That said... it's pretty easy to just get a device that they give you that you connect to your phone to log data for a night. And they know what they're doing when they interpret it. So I would recommend that, since it's really easy to just go to a place and get a device and do a test.
This isn't like it used to be where you'd have to sleep in some strange place.
The at home tests require a quick before and after video call to a physician, and equipment mailed to you and mailed back... It's really not a big deal.
> anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.
I have SA and a history of "mild" nightmares going back decades. Nothing terrifying, but very uncomfortable such as snakes hiding everywhere, and recently other animals such as tigers. I can't prove it, but I believe these are subconscious efforts by your brain to scare you into breathing.
I mean, panic attacks where you hyperventilate are basically the drowning reflex going off. So given that a lot of the dreams in our case were literally suffocating (drowning, etc.), I'm pretty sure that some part of the brain gets awakened enough to realize something, if not exactly what.
Same, except we also have digestive issues. I'm really hoping a paleo diet and good probiotics will save me. It's already helped me a lot. I'll let you know in 40 years if it prevents me from getting Alzheimer's.
[x] Highly stressed pretty much always due to work
I can only hope that whatever brand of dementia I end up with is something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride, or whatever. I'd be happy just to go out either laughing or well-rested.
If you’re supplementing probiotics, there is some research about inulin to talk through with your doctor. There’s a chance that inulin is carcinogenic even at lower doses. A lower dosage might be 4g and a typical probiotic is 200g.
Reasons to be wary of this research, including:
-The rodent-to-human study element
-causation v correlation
-sample size
Reasons to take this research seriously:
-Probiotic supplements are relatively new and long term effects aren’t understood.
-The “health as a business” realities that are very much at work here.
This is a strange comment, inulin is not a probiotic, it's a soluble dietary fiber. It's at best considered a prebiotic. Probiotics are microorganisms.
Culturelle contains inulin. That's the brand that takes up most of the space at my local CVS and Walgreens. Also the CVS-brand knockoff contains inulin.
...in miniscule amounts. Culturelle has 200mg inulin.
From the case study in the GP
>The only noted lifestyle change between colonoscopies was the initiation of 4 grams of agave inulin powder daily in his morning beverage for the last 2 years of that seven-year period.
Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It sounds like choking in your sleep. In my case, I was doing this more than 70 times an hour - often multiple times a minute! My blood oxygen was as low as 67% - a threshold that would have me on a ventilator, were it happening in a hospital.
Until I got my apnea treated, I never slept well. I had not had a really good night's sleep in years, and I hadn't had a great night's sleep as an adult probably ever. In school - decades ago - I fell asleep in class regularly and napped every day. Despite this, I have been successful, but I can't help but wonder who I'd be if I hadn't had that problem. What's worse, because you do not actually sleep, whatever happens during sleep that repairs your body doesn't really happen. Sleep apnea massively increases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and many other serious conditions.
Sleep apnea is treated with CPAP - continuous positive airway pressure - from a machine that sits on your bedside. You wear a mask like Bane and it forces air into your throat and opens it, making it easier to breathe. CPAP is not a cure, because it doesn't fix the underlying anatomical issue, but properly calibrated it results in complete remission. I now sleep normally. From a sleep perspective, I feel amazing, better than I have in years. For the first time in my life, I can rely on feeling good in the morning if I get enough hours of sleep in. Even four hours on the CPAP is better than eight or nine hours without it. (Also, over time, your brain becomes conditioned that CPAP = sleep, and you zonk out within minutes of putting it on.)
It is costly and time consuming, yes, and CPAP machines are a huge lifestyle adjustment. But good lord, is it worth it. I have never felt or slept better. In the years since my diagnosis I have not slept a single night without my CPAP and I don't think I ever will again, unless some magical cure comes out.
If you have struggled with insomnia, snoring, or feeling wakeful after sleep, I beg you to get a sleep study and look into whether apnea, or another similar condition, could be the cause.
Do you know if fitness trackers with integrated pulse oximeters can detect sleep apnea?
My Apple Watch has an oximeter (I bought it before that feature was pulled in the US), and there's a "sleep apnea notifications" section in the "Health" app, but I'm not sure if the absence of notifications implies an absence of a problem.
Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
I'm not a doctor, can't give medical advice. This is my understanding:
> Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
It would not always be visible, no, if your AHI was low enough. It is still damaging even if your blood oxygen is okay, because you are waking up to keep it that way. You're not getting enough sleep as a result.
You might try the recording trick I mentioned below to listen for sounds of it, but if you're unsure at all, I'd consider seeing a sleep doc.
Lower blood ox could just be you sleeping on your arm. Among other things.
If you're concerned with Sleep apnea testing is very easy these days. You goto a sleep specialist, they give you a little kit you take home, you put it on for one night, they look at the data. Done! It's not like even a decade or so ago where it's "goto sleep lab", most of it's done at home now for the initial investigation.
RingConn Gen 2 has built-in Apnea monitoring -- so far I am loving it. It provides a picture of my sleep apnea when I'm not using the CPAP (because the CPAP can be uncomfortable after a while).
FWIW I had moderate sleep apnea (nowhere near as bad as what you're describing) and I "cured" it by forcing myself to breathe through my nose at least 90% of the time, including when sleeping. Some people tape their mouth shut, but I can't do that - I have a beard. Breathing through the nose seems to have fixed the permanently runny nose as well, I don't know why. I know it's all individual and what worked for me might not work for everyone, but IMO it's worth a try. The downside is, until the corresponding musculature regains strength you will feel like you're out of air. It'll take 3-4 weeks to fully adjust. It'll pass, don't worry.
My hypopnea (pre-apnea) is getting resolved as I have lost a lot of weight by following a program using GLP-1 meds. I also no longer have knee discomfort when hiking or doing long climbs on my bike (used to wear a sleeve beforehand to do that). Not to mention, I just look and feel better.
CPAP is a life-saver for sure, but treating your underlying causes of apnea can often help as well.
That is simply not true. Anecdotally, three people in my family including myself have sleep apnea. I am the only overweight one. The others are a normal or even low BMI. Also, I had sleep apnea when I wasn't overweight.
Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers:
"Nasal breathing exercises" cannot overcome physiology and cannot help you if you are sleeping and have no conscious control over your muscles. Apnea is caused by physiology and while it can be made worse by weight, weight loss alone does not fix it. It may bring some people's apneas down to an acceptable level, but that is not the case for all or even most patients.
Your advice is roughly the same as telling people to skip their flu or COVID shots and hope their diet and exercise keeps them from getting sick. It's not that diet and exercise are bad for you, but they aren't the same as an exact treatment for the problem you have.
Medicine is wholly corrupt. If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known.
Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution.
You will learn more operating orthogonal to such a corrupt anti-inquiry, science-theatre. Just as a doctor-spouse (an unpaid friend-consultant) will always give you better advice than a paid doctor.
...Im saying if you are willing to read the research you are probably willing to run some n-of-1 quasi experiments.
For example dont use a computer, TV or phone for a month. Don't sit under LED or Fluroescent Lights for a month...I dont know, just try dumb things and you will learn faster than professionals "games".
This is because we operate in a low bar expectation brought on by arrogance of theory over experiment.
When crowd sourced n-of-1 combinatorial design apps drop for patients and scale to large enough, ... this point will make sense
All of your posts on this thread, honestly are some of the most bizarre I've ever seen on this site.
I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."
It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.
I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?
I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.
And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.
I know I was a bit over-the-top, but I stand by this logic that is far more general than "CPAP-as-an-answer" (but I do personally think it applies here but that is moreso speculation):
> "...If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known."
The reasoning is that there is a large capacity and infrastructure of trained professionals and insurance expectational-warp. If the medical visits and drug prescriptions were decimated the financial side of things would collapse. The reason they turn a blind eye to what we think of as truth-oriented science is that early career professionals have mortgages and debt and so are themselves locked-in to playing their cards in favor of institutional self-preservation. When this gets out of hand they begin to habitualize a rationalization-like thinking that is purely self-serving.
I am of the opinion that we are far past the point of corruption (it is unconscious in the professionals themselves), but it is mostly a question of debt thresholds and group psychology.
My reasons for saying you should yourself as a sleep apnea patient should just figure it out is that that is how pessimistic I am about such professional blindness. To be honest I'm leaving out the main problem with CPAP because by your response you just aren't ready to engage in creative thought (no offense that is almost all of humanity). Most of the intellectual and professional world sets a bar so damn low its like they are playing limbo. Meanwhile patients are like zombified robots programmed to trust the white lab coats like lambs to the slaughter.
Just like political debate is self-perpetuating such that a negatively defined identity is preserved and valued over mediation and understanding, most professionals use their brain power to self-sabotage away from institutional-skeptical inquiry as its too uncomfortable to self-sacrifice reputation, income and eventually their careers.
Do you think they even want to understand apnea? It seems to me there is a toxic incentive situation here. I'd bet money a full blown set of variable controls will be found to solve this problem and come from outside sleep medicine.
Its not magic, its that modern professionalized science is devoid of inquiry.
And how many out-of-box variables have they had patients control for? If it's less than 25 I think medicine has been hijacked by the consumer wanting to not participate in the medical-inquiry process.
I could solve the issue with perhaps 1000-5000 serious patient-subjects, a small amount of funding and a friggen smart phone app.
Also a non-corrupt government should seem to want to lower healthcare costs. But just because politicians say that doesn't mean much because the incentives of government too are poisoned. They don't in practice (and in sum) want to lower healthcare costs. Why would you think that?
It's self-sacrifice that is needed. Most medicine will collapse in my lifetime, and the professionals, politicians and lobbyists brought this upon themselves (and unfortunately us).
So, it's not all sunshine and flowers. It sounds like your calibration process was successful, but when its not, you end up with a range of problems, including the ever-fun one of 'my stomach has been pumped full of air overnight and I feel like a balloon ready to burst' - every single morning.
No and yes for wife or a video recording. Get a sleep study for 100%.
My suggestion is an elevated sleep position by increasing your head position with two stacked pillows or raising the head of the bed. It mechanically helps sleep apnea. It got me from a high Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) score to a very low one with the cpap.
The Apple Watch has not shown an ability to identify sleep disturbances or sleep apnea when it should according to my cpap AHI score and when napping/sleeping without a cpap.
Blood oxygen measurements are basically useless from my research unless you need oxygen because you are so sick you cannot walk short distances. Everyone seems to have a different % they function well at asleep or awake. I have also used a much more accurate and faster reading device than the Apple Watch.
No idea about Apple Watch, but wife, definitely. My wife noticed it. (She's also a doctor, but anyone can identify the sound of choking and gasping, which is what it sounds like.)
I can't give medical advice, but: Record yourself on your phone overnight and listen back. If you hear loud snoring with gaps or pauses in between, and especially any sort of choking, gasping, or coughing sound, and you don't remember doing it... definitely look into it further.
If you look carefully, what happens there is prions screwing up your brain, and insomnia seems like more of a consequence than a cause.
> The cause of death for people diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia is damage to the brain and nervous system. This damage, caused by prion proteins accumulating in the thalamus, creates symptoms of insomnia and mental deterioration.
Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time.
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Alternately, sleep is the optimal ultra-high-efficiency survival state and wakefulness only exists to give creatures enough time to get their affairs in order so that they can safely return to dormancy.
It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow part of a holistic system that's just doing its own survival and propagation thing.
Consider trees, mushrooms, cicadas, snakes, or cats. Chilling out in low power mode as much is possible is maybe not a error to be fixed so much as it is an outcome of efficient design.
The default and optimal state of a life form is waiting and efficiently using resources.
Moving around, socializing and reproducing,
killing and eating, are all energy expenditures or necessary to be able to prolong the sleep-life. Annoyances, from the POV of the sleep-being.
"Hurry up and idle" for CPU design ended up being great for power efficiency. Nature came to the same conclusion for biological organisms a long time ago.
Consider hibernation. Evolution went to great trouble there to maximize the duration that some animals can sleep for - and it's pretty clearly solely designed to save power.
Which doesn't mean that's the only thing sleep is good for, evolution doesn't believe in separating concerns, but it's definitely a thing it does.
I wonder if we looked at really basic life forms like bacteria, would we find things akin to sleep at that level? What about next up in sophistication?
Yeah. Nature is the ultimate form of science. At any moment, it's incorporating an infinite amount of science, most of which we likely haven't discovered yet, and may not discover for millions of years - if ever.
Nature developed over millions of years of trial and error.
Seems likely like the need for sleep then selects for many social/group behaviors. “Solo self-found” is not really an option unless you’re really good at hiding or have some other tricks
Running improved my sleep quality dramatically. Now the problem is, that if I take a day off running, my sleeping suffers. Curious if people that do weight lifting (which I'm considering) get great sleeps? Maybe I can alternate between cardio and weight lifting each day?
I tried weight lifting/strength training for about a year and never really noticed an improvement in sleep quality. However, it was still a net positive in the strength/overall daily energy department.
I used to bike a lot, stopped after a leg/back injury (not from biking), but I picked up an eBike about 3 years ago and absolutely love it. The pedal assist takes enough stress off my leg that I can keep it on the lowest setting and ride for hours, which feels really, really good and does actually help with sleep that night. This, of course, is weather/season dependent but I relish the times when I can just hop on after work and go somewhere.
I play hockey frequently and have the same issue. When we go on vacation, I sleep worse, need to sleep later and longer to feel better. I know that even moderate cardio regulates circadian rhythm and helps with body temperature regulation. Your body's temperature increases during exercise, when you stop and your body temp comes back down, neurologically it tells the body you're now ready for sleep. Exercise also helps regulate melatonin production which affects your sleeping cycles.
When I play in really hard, grueling sessions, taking CBD also helps reduce the inflammation in my body and helps me sleep deeper. I also stretch for at least 30-40 mins when I get done which also helps.
So it makes sense, once you stop or change your body's cycle, it can affect a lot of other areas of your day-to-day schedule.
Walking. Walk 3 miles a day. It gives you a drastically different set of benefits from running, and you can walk all day without worry of overtraining.
Running is great too. But be careful of doing it too much. Overtraining can break down your immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.
I wonder if it only works for a dedicated walking time (e.g. walk for 3 miles nonstop) or also for bursts of short walking during the day. I consistently get 3-5 miles of walking per day due to chasing kids around, taking short breaks during work, and doing chores, but rarely actually have a 30+ min sustained walk.
A sustained walk maximizes digestion and subconscious problem-solving benefits. Short bursts, especially w/ kids involved, maximizes spiritual fulfillment.
(Even before that, I didn't sleep particularly well. Yes, when I visit a friend in the countryside, where it's really dark and quiet, I sleep better. Perhaps I should look into blackout shades!)
I bodybuild, and when I'm lifting hard -- especially peaking volume at the end of a mesocycle -- my body CRAVES sleep. I'll fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and sleep 8 to 9 hours basically straight through.
yes, I alternate and it works fine. in my experience running/heavy cardio sleep > yoga sleep > weight lifting sleep >> no exercise sleep. if that makes sense
My wife needs 8-9 hours, whereas I can get by just fine with 5-6. She is a very light sleeper who will wake up 3-4 times every night; I can sleep through almost any noise, and never get up in the middle of the night. My son takes after me -- he seems to need significantly less sleep than other kids his age, but he's an extraordinarily deep sleeper.
Anecdotal, but I think that sleep depth might have something to do with it.
I have spent months at a time getting 7-8 (amid years of 5-6). I never notice any difference and am actually surprised my body can do 7-8 to no purpose.
Anecdotal also but I sometimes sleep alone in my office (have a futon) where it is very quiet. I usually feel fully rested after 6 hours in there versus 8 hours in bed with wife, dog and the cat occasionally coming through.
I wish culturally it was standard for houses to have something like `sleep` rooms that are optimized for that purpose.
Is that actually the case? do we have long term data on these people? or are we just going off of "I feel fine on 5 hours of sleep" stories? Or are you only referring to day to day health effects?
There's been research on it, although not as much as I wish. I'm one of those people who simply needs more sleep than the average, as does my dad... meanwhile, my mother chugs away just fine on 5 hours or so, and is in better health than either of we men are.
People who accomplish a great deal are often one of these "short sleepers" who can subsist on 5 or even 4 hours of sleep a night; think top-of-their-field salesmen, CEOs, and so on. They simply have more time to get things done, and don't have the problem longer sleepers do that getting 4-5 hours on a regular basis would start to affect their performance in every area of life, not to mention their health.
> There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome
Presumably they mean there's no evidence of this syndrome causing health issues (presumably the "known" part is redundant). Trying to position a causal hypothesis as a matter-of-fact-finding is crazy.
EDIT: that article is insanely poorly written and even worse cited. How are these websites giving super-sketchy medical advice even legal. There's no author to hold accountable, no way to remediate the quality of the article, no sources cited, and it's making statements that wouldn't hold up in a court of law.
I don't understand what you are objecting to. What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"? It's just an ordinary claim that if the syndrome is harmful, it's not as immediately apparent as something like sniffing glue. It's saying "this is harmless" can't be ruled out.
> There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome
This is a causal hypothesis framed as a statement. The rhetorics indicate an authoritative statement of fact regarding what the syndrome does cause, which is fundamentally an impossible conclusion to draw empirically.
The only hedge in the sentence is "known", which is tautological.
Of course, it's impossible to eliminate all variables, making authoritative claims about lack of causal relation impossible. But at least they could make the effort to frame this uncertainty in reasonable terms.
> What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"?
EDIT: but c'mon, just read the article. It's extremely bold in its claims with no evidence. "If you have short sleeper syndrome, you don’t need as much sleep as others. You can expect this to continue throughout your life." "Natural short sleepers don’t experience the same health risks as people who don’t get enough sleep." etc.
I don't see any semantic difference between this and "this syndrome causes no known diseases". (or "SSS doesn’t pose any known health risks." as the actual quotation states.)
Yes, I'm one of the people that needs a solid 7-8 of sleep or else I easily become agitated, and anxiety and OCD kick in quickly ... Would love for this to not be the case, if there was a way for me to need less sleep I would be very interested
Really? I thought I was the only one. Everyone around me seem to do fine with a good 3-5 hours of sleep. Before I lost weight, even if I had a good 7 hours of sleep, I'd still fall asleep at work. Now, even if I do get sleepy, a little moving around fixes things.
One thing to note, I have ADHD and have similar issues getting sleepy when understimulated no matter how much sleep I get at night. Getting up and moving around for stimulation helps.
I haven't used an alarm clock in 20 years and wake up within the same 5-10 minute window almost every day.
I have a friend that will just sleep through multiple alarms. But he can also just fall asleep in 10 minutes on an airplane and I can't sleep at all on a plane. He also takes lots of naps and I never take a nap unless I'm sick.
The worst feeling to me is waking up from some external noise. I just feel so groggy afterword. My body will feel better after 5 hours of sleep and I just wake up naturally compared to 5 hours, go back to sleep for 2 hours, and get woken up during the wrong time (middle of REM cycle?) and then I feel tired for the whole day even though I got more sleep.
Wasn't there supposed to be a smart watch out there you could set a window of time you wanted to wake up like "between 6:30 and 7:00" where it would use the sleep tracking to pick the optimal time to wake you up like at the end of a REM cycle? I feel like I must have hallucinated this because I'm wearing a smart watch (fitbit) now and no such feature exists.
There's an Android app called "Sleep" that does this without the watch. You put your phone on the corner of your bed and it figures out how awake you are with the accelerometer.
>while the new Inspire 2 gives insights into sleep stages, the Smart Wake feature is absent. We’re not sure why this is. Hopefully it will come via a software update.
I sleep 5-6 hours a night. I also seem to be bi-phasic...on the weekends if I wake up after 5 hours, hang around for an hour and successfully go back to sleep, the second cycle is the sleep of the dead. Like, I don't move. Wake up with limbs fallen asleep, a deep divot in the memory foam...and a lot more rested.
> iirc, biphasic sleep is the “usual way” people sleep without the advent of electricity, yes? “the waking hour”, and all that.
I honestly believe that this is not "natural", but rather an adaptation to the absurdly long European winter nights. Note that we didn't evolve there, so it seems unlikely that bi-phasic sleep is the most primal way.
Some of us have partially evolved for that environment. My ancestors eyes turned blue to see in the dim light and their hair and skin changed from Ethiopian Black to pale and blonde af.
Seems reasonable to expect some degree of genetic drift in sleep regulation as well, but I know of no data on this.
A bigger pupil would work better for dim light vision. Light through the iris would sacrifice daylight vision. The light skin on the other hand does have an obvious benefit in that climate for Vitamin D.
Everything is an adaptation to something. The one 8 hours sleep a night is also an adaptation for the life style we adapted for in the last 100+ plus years.
A CPAP had a severe negative effect on my sleep even after two years of getting used to it. I had severe apnea measured in a sleep study, but even so I've done better without it.
I am incapable of sleeping more than about 5.5 hours (unless I'm severely sleep deprived). So to me it seems likely that FNSS (familial natural short sleep) is a thing, but more research is needed I guess.
my dad typically gets 3-4 hours sleep a night. when he was a kid he fractured his skull riding his bike and has a hard time getting comfortable laying on a pillow for very long. despite that he's been able to maintain a high performance lifestyle for most of his life. i've also been very interested to know how he's been able to do it.
"In a 2023 study, researchers in Brazil found that fruit flies that were sleep deprived showed overexpression mostly of genes that affected metabolism, glucose, triglyceride and levels of the hormone dopamine"
"After just one day of restricting sleep in mice, Rogulja could see fats in the animals’ intestines that weren’t entering circulation. After five days, their guts were filled with fat although their bodies were starved of nutrients."
This is interesting. People with Autism and ADHD often have gut issues and problems with dopamine etc. Maybe these deceases are caused by constant sleep deprivation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
It seems that given the options of 1) staying awake and active as normal during the night and 2) using the night period to run various maintenance task but without awareness the second option apparently turned out to be the winner as far as evolution is concerned.
What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.
I think part of the answer is that our world is just very conducive to hidey-holes. There isn't that much surface area you need to cover in a three-dimensional space to get protection from the elements and other predation, and there's an awful lot of stuff out there (trees, dirt, etc) you could comfortably use to do it.
Depends how you look at it, but fatal things should have a clear explanation for why they kill you. We can survive longer without food and that one is easy to explain.
So you can concentrate your energy on maintenance tasks, like memory consolidation and physical restoration, during the down time during which it is cold and dark -- when you can't effectively hunt and stay warm. If you did not do that, you would have to constantly allocate some energy towards these tasks, at the expense of more urgent ones. And the higher up you are in the food chain, the less risky it is to rest.
Which maintenance tasks, why does it require us to be unconscious, why can't we apply constant energy towards them? Lots of interesting questions to answer
Like memory consolidation and physical restoration. My lay understanding is that we are unconscious because we turn our sensors off during deep sleep, and direct energy away from the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning and consciousness reside, to the limbic system, which processes memories and feelings, so that learning can take place.
We work in the neurotech/sleeptech space, specifically with the stimulation which was VERY poorly described in this article where they discuss "pink noise".
They point to one small study in 7 participants, but slow-wave enhancement (increasing slow-wave delta power) has over a decade of research, including 4 recent papers in older adults looking at Alzheimer's both as a preventative measure and as management of symptoms (we can't say treatment yet, that's still many studies away).
We provide our technology to researchers, and are preparing our consumer product.
You can find more on our website, as well as links to a few of the more relevant studies at https://affectablesleep.com
How I describe the technology is that slow-wave activity is the synchronous firing of neurons, the hallmark and defining feature of deep sleep. We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase the electrical activity, increase the synchronous firing of neurons, which is like giving the glymphatic system an extra boost of power. This enhances the restorative function of the brain, without altering sleep time.
I should be completing our whitepaper which provides a more in depth look at the technology, the state of sleep, and a large chronological list of how the research has progressed over the last decade.
The periods of my life I was the most productive and learned the most were when those when I managed to sleep >=8 hours every single night, in a dark, silent environment. I still manage to sleep >=7 hours most nights, but I feel like it's getting harder to keep a baseline of 8 hours for every night. Don't know if my sleep needs changed over time due to aging, or if it's just a consequence of having more responsibilities.
I saw this post where Andrej Karpathy asks if hyperbaric oxygen therapy might work like exercise by boosting oxygen to tissues, I wonder if sleep has any correlation.
Likely it also because your other body parts needs repairing, not just the brain and the brain tells you by being sleepy. Evolutionarily, why we don’t go on for 24hrs maybe because we have night time.
The generations in my family are full of people who had dementia/Alzheimer's/auto-immune disorders. They all had anxiety, and they all had sleep disorders - I'm certain there is a connection among it all.
I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(
From what I've found, being overweight negatively affects sleep. As far as I can tell, the extra weight simply makes it hard to breathe at night, leading to apnea. This can then cause depression and anxiety, depression because you wake up tired and feeling awful every single day and anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.
At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.
Easy to get, hard to get used to for many. It’s common for doctors to offer little to no support after prescribing the machine.
There are discords where users offer each other advice. That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them and if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.
> That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them
No, they don't. At least not on a Resmed machine. You just have to enter a special mode to change them. On my machine that's holding down 2 buttons for a couple of seconds.
> if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.
I'm glad you had a Dr that did this for you. It is not the universal experience, and it definitely wasn't mine.
Which two buttons?
How would support look like in this situation? Honest question I simply don't know
In my case:
Showing me how to use the machine
Showing me how to wear the mask
Configuring the machine with anything other than the default settings
A new machine with the default settings is a nightmare. The apap algorithm will spike your pressure up to 16 (which is too high for most people) one minute and drop down to 4 (which is too low for most) the next. At the high end is aerophagia and leaks, at the low end, your apnea events will still happen.
When I called my doctor and explained the machine made my sleep worse, her office said “we gave you a machine. It’s out of our hands. Would you like us to refer you to a psychologist? The problem must be in your head.” This is almost verbatim.
The equipment supplier wasn’t much better. They offered to do a “mask fitting” but it was mid 2021 and the woman didn’t even want to be in the same room as me for fear of covid.
So what should they have done? I dunno. Eventually a friend recommended a mask that worked for me. I learned to analyze the data reported by the machine and changed the settings myself to something that worked for me. It took a year, the worst year of my life. Tired and constantly waking up. Thank god for YouTube and OSCAR. knowing what I know now, I can (and have) help someone else do this process in a week or two, but I had nobody to even ask.
That's a bad doctor, IMHO. Ours at least could be talked to and would adjust the pressure, etc.
At the extreme end of concierge medicine I could see the doctor getting into bed with you.
Date the doctor? :D
I think it would be a good case for handing off from the prescribing doctor to some kind of home health aid / respiratory therapist who can make house calls and help make adjustments at the home.
It needs extensive calibration, if you don't want it to either be ineffective, or wake up in the morning, with your stomach pumped full of air, like a balloon.
The latter is quite painful.
Not to mention finding out which masks suit you the best.
> At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.
If one wants to rule out sleep apean (being not the best sleeper) but probably doesn't have it (but other causes like stress) but at least want to measure it somewhat, how could one test that oneself with at least some probability?
Lots of things that are called "at home test" seem to involve getting special equipment and sending stuff to a lab anyway, that still involves a physician, some visitations with them etc... anyway.
Is there anything at all that one can do on their own to have at least some idea of the chances of having sleep apnea or not that does not involve a professional? Even if to then consider a professional if there are some indications? E.g. from an all-night audio recording, any indication of sounds that are yes or not sleep apnea indicating? And heartbeat/oxygen etc... measured by a watch?
Or is sleep apnea such a subtle and hard-to-detect issue that it's really impossible to self diagnose, it's such a subtle thing that only specialized equipment and specialists can do it, and trying to measure anything yourself gives no more answer than a 50/50 random chance coin toss?
The tester they give is basically just a pulse oximeter that logs your heart rate and SpO2 all night. I'm not sure how they interpret it, but I'd imagine that if your heart rate goes crazy and your oxygen drops, that's probably bad.
Otherwise you can look at questionnaires that ask things like whether you wake up a lot at night or snore, etc.
That said... it's pretty easy to just get a device that they give you that you connect to your phone to log data for a night. And they know what they're doing when they interpret it. So I would recommend that, since it's really easy to just go to a place and get a device and do a test.
This isn't like it used to be where you'd have to sleep in some strange place.
The at home tests require a quick before and after video call to a physician, and equipment mailed to you and mailed back... It's really not a big deal.
> anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.
I have SA and a history of "mild" nightmares going back decades. Nothing terrifying, but very uncomfortable such as snakes hiding everywhere, and recently other animals such as tigers. I can't prove it, but I believe these are subconscious efforts by your brain to scare you into breathing.
I mean, panic attacks where you hyperventilate are basically the drowning reflex going off. So given that a lot of the dreams in our case were literally suffocating (drowning, etc.), I'm pretty sure that some part of the brain gets awakened enough to realize something, if not exactly what.
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Same, except we also have digestive issues. I'm really hoping a paleo diet and good probiotics will save me. It's already helped me a lot. I'll let you know in 40 years if it prevents me from getting Alzheimer's.
[x] Anxiety
[x] Sleep apnea
[x] Digestive issues
[x] Former psychonaut
[x] Highly stressed pretty much always due to work
I can only hope that whatever brand of dementia I end up with is something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride, or whatever. I'd be happy just to go out either laughing or well-rested.
> something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride
You know the plot of that ride, right?
Yep.
For those who don't know, you end up in jail for a DUI, get out, drive your car into a train, and arrive in hell.
If you remember to do so.
If you’re supplementing probiotics, there is some research about inulin to talk through with your doctor. There’s a chance that inulin is carcinogenic even at lower doses. A lower dosage might be 4g and a typical probiotic is 200g.
Reasons to be wary of this research, including:
-The rodent-to-human study element
-causation v correlation
-sample size
Reasons to take this research seriously:
-Probiotic supplements are relatively new and long term effects aren’t understood.
-The “health as a business” realities that are very much at work here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277257232...
https://news.gsu.edu/2018/10/18/adding-refined-fiber-to-proc...
Probiotics usually refers to bacteria, inulin and other indigestible starches are usually referred to as prebiotics.
This is a strange comment, inulin is not a probiotic, it's a soluble dietary fiber. It's at best considered a prebiotic. Probiotics are microorganisms.
Strange or not, it's correct.
Culturelle contains inulin. That's the brand that takes up most of the space at my local CVS and Walgreens. Also the CVS-brand knockoff contains inulin.
...in miniscule amounts. Culturelle has 200mg inulin.
From the case study in the GP
>The only noted lifestyle change between colonoscopies was the initiation of 4 grams of agave inulin powder daily in his morning beverage for the last 2 years of that seven-year period.
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Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It sounds like choking in your sleep. In my case, I was doing this more than 70 times an hour - often multiple times a minute! My blood oxygen was as low as 67% - a threshold that would have me on a ventilator, were it happening in a hospital.
Until I got my apnea treated, I never slept well. I had not had a really good night's sleep in years, and I hadn't had a great night's sleep as an adult probably ever. In school - decades ago - I fell asleep in class regularly and napped every day. Despite this, I have been successful, but I can't help but wonder who I'd be if I hadn't had that problem. What's worse, because you do not actually sleep, whatever happens during sleep that repairs your body doesn't really happen. Sleep apnea massively increases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and many other serious conditions.
Sleep apnea is treated with CPAP - continuous positive airway pressure - from a machine that sits on your bedside. You wear a mask like Bane and it forces air into your throat and opens it, making it easier to breathe. CPAP is not a cure, because it doesn't fix the underlying anatomical issue, but properly calibrated it results in complete remission. I now sleep normally. From a sleep perspective, I feel amazing, better than I have in years. For the first time in my life, I can rely on feeling good in the morning if I get enough hours of sleep in. Even four hours on the CPAP is better than eight or nine hours without it. (Also, over time, your brain becomes conditioned that CPAP = sleep, and you zonk out within minutes of putting it on.)
It is costly and time consuming, yes, and CPAP machines are a huge lifestyle adjustment. But good lord, is it worth it. I have never felt or slept better. In the years since my diagnosis I have not slept a single night without my CPAP and I don't think I ever will again, unless some magical cure comes out.
If you have struggled with insomnia, snoring, or feeling wakeful after sleep, I beg you to get a sleep study and look into whether apnea, or another similar condition, could be the cause.
Do you know if fitness trackers with integrated pulse oximeters can detect sleep apnea?
My Apple Watch has an oximeter (I bought it before that feature was pulled in the US), and there's a "sleep apnea notifications" section in the "Health" app, but I'm not sure if the absence of notifications implies an absence of a problem.
Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
While the Oura ring won't alert the user to sleep apnea, one person with an Oura ring looked at the accumulated data from their Oura ring and could see the signs of sleep apnea - https://www.tomsguide.com/features/my-oura-ring-helped-me-di...
Ringconn, similar to Oura without the compulsory subscription, claims to be able to detect sleep apnea with 90.7% accuracy. see https://ringconn.com/blogs/news/understanding-sleep-apnea-an...
I'm not a doctor, can't give medical advice. This is my understanding:
> Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
It would not always be visible, no, if your AHI was low enough. It is still damaging even if your blood oxygen is okay, because you are waking up to keep it that way. You're not getting enough sleep as a result.
You might try the recording trick I mentioned below to listen for sounds of it, but if you're unsure at all, I'd consider seeing a sleep doc.
Lower blood ox could just be you sleeping on your arm. Among other things.
If you're concerned with Sleep apnea testing is very easy these days. You goto a sleep specialist, they give you a little kit you take home, you put it on for one night, they look at the data. Done! It's not like even a decade or so ago where it's "goto sleep lab", most of it's done at home now for the initial investigation.
Newer Apple Watches are able to detect signs consistent with sleep apnea (which is legally distinct from actually diagnosing it).
RingConn Gen 2 has built-in Apnea monitoring -- so far I am loving it. It provides a picture of my sleep apnea when I'm not using the CPAP (because the CPAP can be uncomfortable after a while).
FWIW I had moderate sleep apnea (nowhere near as bad as what you're describing) and I "cured" it by forcing myself to breathe through my nose at least 90% of the time, including when sleeping. Some people tape their mouth shut, but I can't do that - I have a beard. Breathing through the nose seems to have fixed the permanently runny nose as well, I don't know why. I know it's all individual and what worked for me might not work for everyone, but IMO it's worth a try. The downside is, until the corresponding musculature regains strength you will feel like you're out of air. It'll take 3-4 weeks to fully adjust. It'll pass, don't worry.
My hypopnea (pre-apnea) is getting resolved as I have lost a lot of weight by following a program using GLP-1 meds. I also no longer have knee discomfort when hiking or doing long climbs on my bike (used to wear a sleeve beforehand to do that). Not to mention, I just look and feel better.
CPAP is a life-saver for sure, but treating your underlying causes of apnea can often help as well.
CPAP is a very American solution, pay money and treat the symptom with minimal effort but not the underlying cause.
The vast majority of cases of sleep apnea can be cured with weight loss, exercise, nasal breathing exercises..
That is simply not true. Anecdotally, three people in my family including myself have sleep apnea. I am the only overweight one. The others are a normal or even low BMI. Also, I had sleep apnea when I wasn't overweight.
Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers:
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5181619/
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-024-01669-9
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9130173/#:~:text=Ap...
4. https://ejo.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43163-024-006...
5. https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/respiratory-care/68...
"Nasal breathing exercises" cannot overcome physiology and cannot help you if you are sleeping and have no conscious control over your muscles. Apnea is caused by physiology and while it can be made worse by weight, weight loss alone does not fix it. It may bring some people's apneas down to an acceptable level, but that is not the case for all or even most patients.
Your advice is roughly the same as telling people to skip their flu or COVID shots and hope their diet and exercise keeps them from getting sick. It's not that diet and exercise are bad for you, but they aren't the same as an exact treatment for the problem you have.
Medicine is wholly corrupt. If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known.
Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution.
You will learn more operating orthogonal to such a corrupt anti-inquiry, science-theatre. Just as a doctor-spouse (an unpaid friend-consultant) will always give you better advice than a paid doctor.
...Im saying if you are willing to read the research you are probably willing to run some n-of-1 quasi experiments.
For example dont use a computer, TV or phone for a month. Don't sit under LED or Fluroescent Lights for a month...I dont know, just try dumb things and you will learn faster than professionals "games".
This is because we operate in a low bar expectation brought on by arrogance of theory over experiment.
When crowd sourced n-of-1 combinatorial design apps drop for patients and scale to large enough, ... this point will make sense
All of your posts on this thread, honestly are some of the most bizarre I've ever seen on this site.
I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."
It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.
I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?
I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.
And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.
I know I was a bit over-the-top, but I stand by this logic that is far more general than "CPAP-as-an-answer" (but I do personally think it applies here but that is moreso speculation):
> "...If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known."
The reasoning is that there is a large capacity and infrastructure of trained professionals and insurance expectational-warp. If the medical visits and drug prescriptions were decimated the financial side of things would collapse. The reason they turn a blind eye to what we think of as truth-oriented science is that early career professionals have mortgages and debt and so are themselves locked-in to playing their cards in favor of institutional self-preservation. When this gets out of hand they begin to habitualize a rationalization-like thinking that is purely self-serving.
I am of the opinion that we are far past the point of corruption (it is unconscious in the professionals themselves), but it is mostly a question of debt thresholds and group psychology.
My reasons for saying you should yourself as a sleep apnea patient should just figure it out is that that is how pessimistic I am about such professional blindness. To be honest I'm leaving out the main problem with CPAP because by your response you just aren't ready to engage in creative thought (no offense that is almost all of humanity). Most of the intellectual and professional world sets a bar so damn low its like they are playing limbo. Meanwhile patients are like zombified robots programmed to trust the white lab coats like lambs to the slaughter.
Just like political debate is self-perpetuating such that a negatively defined identity is preserved and valued over mediation and understanding, most professionals use their brain power to self-sabotage away from institutional-skeptical inquiry as its too uncomfortable to self-sacrifice reputation, income and eventually their careers.
100% and it's rather sad people cant see through it as medical rent seeking.
Do you think they even want to understand apnea? It seems to me there is a toxic incentive situation here. I'd bet money a full blown set of variable controls will be found to solve this problem and come from outside sleep medicine.
Its not magic, its that modern professionalized science is devoid of inquiry.
In countries with subsidised health care there's still an incentive to solve these problems, since the solution will lower healthcare costs.
And how many out-of-box variables have they had patients control for? If it's less than 25 I think medicine has been hijacked by the consumer wanting to not participate in the medical-inquiry process.
I could solve the issue with perhaps 1000-5000 serious patient-subjects, a small amount of funding and a friggen smart phone app.
Also a non-corrupt government should seem to want to lower healthcare costs. But just because politicians say that doesn't mean much because the incentives of government too are poisoned. They don't in practice (and in sum) want to lower healthcare costs. Why would you think that?
It's self-sacrifice that is needed. Most medicine will collapse in my lifetime, and the professionals, politicians and lobbyists brought this upon themselves (and unfortunately us).
So, it's not all sunshine and flowers. It sounds like your calibration process was successful, but when its not, you end up with a range of problems, including the ever-fun one of 'my stomach has been pumped full of air overnight and I feel like a balloon ready to burst' - every single morning.
Is there any chance that Apple Watch or wife would not notice a severe apnea condition?
No and yes for wife or a video recording. Get a sleep study for 100%.
My suggestion is an elevated sleep position by increasing your head position with two stacked pillows or raising the head of the bed. It mechanically helps sleep apnea. It got me from a high Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) score to a very low one with the cpap.
The Apple Watch has not shown an ability to identify sleep disturbances or sleep apnea when it should according to my cpap AHI score and when napping/sleeping without a cpap.
Blood oxygen measurements are basically useless from my research unless you need oxygen because you are so sick you cannot walk short distances. Everyone seems to have a different % they function well at asleep or awake. I have also used a much more accurate and faster reading device than the Apple Watch.
No idea about Apple Watch, but wife, definitely. My wife noticed it. (She's also a doctor, but anyone can identify the sound of choking and gasping, which is what it sounds like.)
I can't give medical advice, but: Record yourself on your phone overnight and listen back. If you hear loud snoring with gaps or pauses in between, and especially any sort of choking, gasping, or coughing sound, and you don't remember doing it... definitely look into it further.
A severe condition is very noticeable. The sleeping person stops breathing for up to a minute or two, and then does a sudden gasp for air.
And this repeats all night long.
Relevant to this, people with a genetic mutation that adversely affects sleep end up developing dementia and dying early:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25001-fatal-f...
If you look carefully, what happens there is prions screwing up your brain, and insomnia seems like more of a consequence than a cause.
> The cause of death for people diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia is damage to the brain and nervous system. This damage, caused by prion proteins accumulating in the thalamus, creates symptoms of insomnia and mental deterioration.
I've wondered if anyone's ever looked at inducing long periods of sleep as an early dementia mitigation.
I hereby volunteer for this study
I already do that, I need 8 hours of sleep a day..and 10 at night.
Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time.
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Alternately, sleep is the optimal ultra-high-efficiency survival state and wakefulness only exists to give creatures enough time to get their affairs in order so that they can safely return to dormancy.
It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow part of a holistic system that's just doing its own survival and propagation thing.
Consider trees, mushrooms, cicadas, snakes, or cats. Chilling out in low power mode as much is possible is maybe not a error to be fixed so much as it is an outcome of efficient design.
I enjoy this flipped perspective.
The default and optimal state of a life form is waiting and efficiently using resources.
Moving around, socializing and reproducing, killing and eating, are all energy expenditures or necessary to be able to prolong the sleep-life. Annoyances, from the POV of the sleep-being.
"Hurry up and idle" for CPU design ended up being great for power efficiency. Nature came to the same conclusion for biological organisms a long time ago.
I think one of our goals is to reduce entropy in the Universe, and being awake lets us do 100x more of that than if we were in low power mode
What kind of sleep are you having that is more entropic than your waking?
Entropy increases in the universe by default, so sleeping allows that to happen more than in the waking state
Consider hibernation. Evolution went to great trouble there to maximize the duration that some animals can sleep for - and it's pretty clearly solely designed to save power.
Which doesn't mean that's the only thing sleep is good for, evolution doesn't believe in separating concerns, but it's definitely a thing it does.
I wonder if we looked at really basic life forms like bacteria, would we find things akin to sleep at that level? What about next up in sophistication?
> if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Cats sleep during the day without any issues. So the amount of light seems to not matter.
By the way I wonder do their ear sleep or not because they still wake up easily if there is some suspicious sound.
Yeah. Nature is the ultimate form of science. At any moment, it's incorporating an infinite amount of science, most of which we likely haven't discovered yet, and may not discover for millions of years - if ever.
Nature developed over millions of years of trial and error.
That is like saying God is the ultimate form of religion
Seems likely like the need for sleep then selects for many social/group behaviors. “Solo self-found” is not really an option unless you’re really good at hiding or have some other tricks
Most animals sleep alone, that's simple reality.
Recent work suggests that "Animals that live in groups do not sleep in isolation":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953472...
So now we just need to know what percent of animals live in groups.
While older studies suggest that most mammals live alone, new field data show that only 22% of mammals are solitary: https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Keep in mind that my claim doesn't require them all sleeping together - any protective any social behavior would suffice (e.g. Having look-outs, etc.)
Since it's such simple reality, surely you can support your claim?
Maybe you were talking about non-mammals?
Sleep is vulnerable, but it also keeps you curled up and hidden somewhere rather than out in the open walking around and taking risks.
Running improved my sleep quality dramatically. Now the problem is, that if I take a day off running, my sleeping suffers. Curious if people that do weight lifting (which I'm considering) get great sleeps? Maybe I can alternate between cardio and weight lifting each day?
I tried weight lifting/strength training for about a year and never really noticed an improvement in sleep quality. However, it was still a net positive in the strength/overall daily energy department.
I used to bike a lot, stopped after a leg/back injury (not from biking), but I picked up an eBike about 3 years ago and absolutely love it. The pedal assist takes enough stress off my leg that I can keep it on the lowest setting and ride for hours, which feels really, really good and does actually help with sleep that night. This, of course, is weather/season dependent but I relish the times when I can just hop on after work and go somewhere.
I play hockey frequently and have the same issue. When we go on vacation, I sleep worse, need to sleep later and longer to feel better. I know that even moderate cardio regulates circadian rhythm and helps with body temperature regulation. Your body's temperature increases during exercise, when you stop and your body temp comes back down, neurologically it tells the body you're now ready for sleep. Exercise also helps regulate melatonin production which affects your sleeping cycles.
When I play in really hard, grueling sessions, taking CBD also helps reduce the inflammation in my body and helps me sleep deeper. I also stretch for at least 30-40 mins when I get done which also helps.
So it makes sense, once you stop or change your body's cycle, it can affect a lot of other areas of your day-to-day schedule.
I will add creatine as a supplement to improve sleep in the face of hard exercise.
Walking. Walk 3 miles a day. It gives you a drastically different set of benefits from running, and you can walk all day without worry of overtraining.
Running is great too. But be careful of doing it too much. Overtraining can break down your immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.
I wonder if it only works for a dedicated walking time (e.g. walk for 3 miles nonstop) or also for bursts of short walking during the day. I consistently get 3-5 miles of walking per day due to chasing kids around, taking short breaks during work, and doing chores, but rarely actually have a 30+ min sustained walk.
Benefits to both I think.
A sustained walk maximizes digestion and subconscious problem-solving benefits. Short bursts, especially w/ kids involved, maximizes spiritual fulfillment.
Both are probably great for metabolic health.
I walk over six kilometres (almost) every day and don't sleep well.
How's your sleeping environment? Do you have black out shades? Keep your room cool?
I have a toddler kicking me in the head.
(Even before that, I didn't sleep particularly well. Yes, when I visit a friend in the countryside, where it's really dark and quiet, I sleep better. Perhaps I should look into blackout shades!)
Any physically tiring activity makes me sleep better. From lifting to running to walking long distances.
You should alternate cardio and weight lifting for general health, not just for sleep. The weight training helps with muscle/bone loss as you age
I used to run long distance. I'd have to go for 15+km in a single session to get any noticeable impact on sleep and it wasn't huge.
Weightlifting on the other hand... a solid hour of going heavy will put me out like a baby every time.
I'm very curious why. Am I just built for long distance running and NOT for building muscle?
Definitely - anything that physically tires me out enough helps a lot. I would say weight lifting actually might help more for personal insomnia.
I mostly do distance running though - shorter interval training or sprints kills me and probably also is better for sleep. Or I'm just less used to it
I bodybuild, and when I'm lifting hard -- especially peaking volume at the end of a mesocycle -- my body CRAVES sleep. I'll fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and sleep 8 to 9 hours basically straight through.
For me it really depends on when - if i go run after 8PM i definitely sleep worse.
yes, I alternate and it works fine. in my experience running/heavy cardio sleep > yoga sleep > weight lifting sleep >> no exercise sleep. if that makes sense
Anecdotally, I get dramatically better sleep after good cardio. Weightlifting doesn’t seem to have much of an effect.
Some people seem to need a lot less sleep than others with no deleterious health effects. It would be very interesting to find out why.
My wife needs 8-9 hours, whereas I can get by just fine with 5-6. She is a very light sleeper who will wake up 3-4 times every night; I can sleep through almost any noise, and never get up in the middle of the night. My son takes after me -- he seems to need significantly less sleep than other kids his age, but he's an extraordinarily deep sleeper.
Anecdotal, but I think that sleep depth might have something to do with it.
I used to get by fine with 5-6 hours, too, until I started getting 7-8 and realized how much better I feel.
I think this is pretty common! More sleep makes everything better -- attention, immune system (getting colds less often), mood, etc.
I feel like a different person sometimes. And going to bed even 1hr earlier makes it generally much higher quality.
I have spent months at a time getting 7-8 (amid years of 5-6). I never notice any difference and am actually surprised my body can do 7-8 to no purpose.
From the perspective of evolution there's a purpose... burn fewer calories in the dark when there's nothing else to do.
The question is whether it still matters in the modern era.
Anecdotal also but I sometimes sleep alone in my office (have a futon) where it is very quiet. I usually feel fully rested after 6 hours in there versus 8 hours in bed with wife, dog and the cat occasionally coming through.
I wish culturally it was standard for houses to have something like `sleep` rooms that are optimized for that purpose.
I stopped sleeping with my wife in the same bedroom some years ago and it was great for our sleep quality.
It's very funny how people conflate that with other aspects of couples relationships.
They're called a bedroom.
Obviously he means a room for one person to sleep. It’s called a bedroom too but he knows that and so do you.
That's called a divorce
Obviously he wants sleeping in different rooms normalized without a divorce. But you knew that.
> with no deleterious health effects
Is that actually the case? do we have long term data on these people? or are we just going off of "I feel fine on 5 hours of sleep" stories? Or are you only referring to day to day health effects?
There's been research on it, although not as much as I wish. I'm one of those people who simply needs more sleep than the average, as does my dad... meanwhile, my mother chugs away just fine on 5 hours or so, and is in better health than either of we men are.
People who accomplish a great deal are often one of these "short sleepers" who can subsist on 5 or even 4 hours of sleep a night; think top-of-their-field salesmen, CEOs, and so on. They simply have more time to get things done, and don't have the problem longer sleepers do that getting 4-5 hours on a regular basis would start to affect their performance in every area of life, not to mention their health.
It's a fairly well studied phenomenon known as short sleeper syndrome.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...
There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome, according to a Cleveland Clinic overview page: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/short-sleeper...
> There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome
Presumably they mean there's no evidence of this syndrome causing health issues (presumably the "known" part is redundant). Trying to position a causal hypothesis as a matter-of-fact-finding is crazy.
EDIT: that article is insanely poorly written and even worse cited. How are these websites giving super-sketchy medical advice even legal. There's no author to hold accountable, no way to remediate the quality of the article, no sources cited, and it's making statements that wouldn't hold up in a court of law.
I don't understand what you are objecting to. What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"? It's just an ordinary claim that if the syndrome is harmful, it's not as immediately apparent as something like sniffing glue. It's saying "this is harmless" can't be ruled out.
> There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome
This is a causal hypothesis framed as a statement. The rhetorics indicate an authoritative statement of fact regarding what the syndrome does cause, which is fundamentally an impossible conclusion to draw empirically.
The only hedge in the sentence is "known", which is tautological.
Of course, it's impossible to eliminate all variables, making authoritative claims about lack of causal relation impossible. But at least they could make the effort to frame this uncertainty in reasonable terms.
> What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"?
EDIT: but c'mon, just read the article. It's extremely bold in its claims with no evidence. "If you have short sleeper syndrome, you don’t need as much sleep as others. You can expect this to continue throughout your life." "Natural short sleepers don’t experience the same health risks as people who don’t get enough sleep." etc. I don't see any semantic difference between this and "this syndrome causes no known diseases". (or "SSS doesn’t pose any known health risks." as the actual quotation states.)
Yes, I'm one of the people that needs a solid 7-8 of sleep or else I easily become agitated, and anxiety and OCD kick in quickly ... Would love for this to not be the case, if there was a way for me to need less sleep I would be very interested
Really? I thought I was the only one. Everyone around me seem to do fine with a good 3-5 hours of sleep. Before I lost weight, even if I had a good 7 hours of sleep, I'd still fall asleep at work. Now, even if I do get sleepy, a little moving around fixes things.
One thing to note, I have ADHD and have similar issues getting sleepy when understimulated no matter how much sleep I get at night. Getting up and moving around for stimulation helps.
3-5 hours a night??
I haven't used an alarm clock in 20 years and wake up within the same 5-10 minute window almost every day.
I have a friend that will just sleep through multiple alarms. But he can also just fall asleep in 10 minutes on an airplane and I can't sleep at all on a plane. He also takes lots of naps and I never take a nap unless I'm sick.
The worst feeling to me is waking up from some external noise. I just feel so groggy afterword. My body will feel better after 5 hours of sleep and I just wake up naturally compared to 5 hours, go back to sleep for 2 hours, and get woken up during the wrong time (middle of REM cycle?) and then I feel tired for the whole day even though I got more sleep.
Wasn't there supposed to be a smart watch out there you could set a window of time you wanted to wake up like "between 6:30 and 7:00" where it would use the sleep tracking to pick the optimal time to wake you up like at the end of a REM cycle? I feel like I must have hallucinated this because I'm wearing a smart watch (fitbit) now and no such feature exists.
There's an Android app called "Sleep" that does this without the watch. You put your phone on the corner of your bed and it figures out how awake you are with the accelerometer.
Quick edit, I guess the name changed slightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
I'm wearing a fitbit (charge 6) now, and I still have this feature. It's called "Smart wake" https://gadgetsandwearables.com/2021/07/09/fitbit-smart-wake...
A-ha that answers my question
>while the new Inspire 2 gives insights into sleep stages, the Smart Wake feature is absent. We’re not sure why this is. Hopefully it will come via a software update.
It's an app that uses data from your watch, the name is something like sleep cycle.
Apple Watch does this.
Not ootb-separate app needed?
Your friend could benefit from a sleep study. I'm not saying they have sleep apnea or UARS, but people with those disorders often have those symptoms.
I sleep 5-6 hours a night. I also seem to be bi-phasic...on the weekends if I wake up after 5 hours, hang around for an hour and successfully go back to sleep, the second cycle is the sleep of the dead. Like, I don't move. Wake up with limbs fallen asleep, a deep divot in the memory foam...and a lot more rested.
(as an aside: have CPAP, apnea is not a factor.)
iirc, biphasic sleep is the “usual way” people sleep without the advent of electricity, yes? “the waking hour”, and all that.
I wonder if there was an increase in dementia-related disorders once lightbulbs kept people up longer.
> iirc, biphasic sleep is the “usual way” people sleep without the advent of electricity, yes? “the waking hour”, and all that.
I honestly believe that this is not "natural", but rather an adaptation to the absurdly long European winter nights. Note that we didn't evolve there, so it seems unlikely that bi-phasic sleep is the most primal way.
Some of us have partially evolved for that environment. My ancestors eyes turned blue to see in the dim light and their hair and skin changed from Ethiopian Black to pale and blonde af.
Seems reasonable to expect some degree of genetic drift in sleep regulation as well, but I know of no data on this.
A bigger pupil would work better for dim light vision. Light through the iris would sacrifice daylight vision. The light skin on the other hand does have an obvious benefit in that climate for Vitamin D.
Everything is an adaptation to something. The one 8 hours sleep a night is also an adaptation for the life style we adapted for in the last 100+ plus years.
A CPAP had a severe negative effect on my sleep even after two years of getting used to it. I had severe apnea measured in a sleep study, but even so I've done better without it.
It helps for me...of course if I dropped 40 lbs, it probably wouldn't be needed...but then there's the whole GLP-1/Weight thing.
There are a very small minority that seem to have a genetic component requiring less sleep for them (4-6hr).
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover...
A subsequent study has not found any link between the ADRB1/DEC2/other gene mutations and various sleep conditions:
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9499244/
I am incapable of sleeping more than about 5.5 hours (unless I'm severely sleep deprived). So to me it seems likely that FNSS (familial natural short sleep) is a thing, but more research is needed I guess.
my dad typically gets 3-4 hours sleep a night. when he was a kid he fractured his skull riding his bike and has a hard time getting comfortable laying on a pillow for very long. despite that he's been able to maintain a high performance lifestyle for most of his life. i've also been very interested to know how he's been able to do it.
"In a 2023 study, researchers in Brazil found that fruit flies that were sleep deprived showed overexpression mostly of genes that affected metabolism, glucose, triglyceride and levels of the hormone dopamine"
"After just one day of restricting sleep in mice, Rogulja could see fats in the animals’ intestines that weren’t entering circulation. After five days, their guts were filled with fat although their bodies were starved of nutrients."
This is interesting. People with Autism and ADHD often have gut issues and problems with dopamine etc. Maybe these deceases are caused by constant sleep deprivation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
It seems that given the options of 1) staying awake and active as normal during the night and 2) using the night period to run various maintenance task but without awareness the second option apparently turned out to be the winner as far as evolution is concerned.
What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.
I think part of the answer is that our world is just very conducive to hidey-holes. There isn't that much surface area you need to cover in a three-dimensional space to get protection from the elements and other predation, and there's an awful lot of stuff out there (trees, dirt, etc) you could comfortably use to do it.
3) Some animals can sleep with only half their brain at a time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
Plenty of animals are nocturnal, diurnal, or sleep in non-24h windows. Evolution does whatever works.
Isn’t that the crux of the question? Figuring out what all the maintenance stuff our bodies need to do every night and how it works seems useful
And whether we can recreate it without sleep.
The way dolphins sleep with half of their brain asleep is fascinating to me.
https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-do-dolphins-sleep/
Also some birds, even while flying.
Actually makes sense - like CPU that deactivates extra cores to let them cool down.
Depends how you look at it, but fatal things should have a clear explanation for why they kill you. We can survive longer without food and that one is easy to explain.
I have just read this book and found it very interesting and helpful:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-...
I've seen this book talked about a lot. However, I also have heard that there is some big holes in the research. Take a look online.
The citation is "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors": https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
fwiw, I found the 'the sleep fix' much more helpful
So you can concentrate your energy on maintenance tasks, like memory consolidation and physical restoration, during the down time during which it is cold and dark -- when you can't effectively hunt and stay warm. If you did not do that, you would have to constantly allocate some energy towards these tasks, at the expense of more urgent ones. And the higher up you are in the food chain, the less risky it is to rest.
Which maintenance tasks, why does it require us to be unconscious, why can't we apply constant energy towards them? Lots of interesting questions to answer
Like memory consolidation and physical restoration. My lay understanding is that we are unconscious because we turn our sensors off during deep sleep, and direct energy away from the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning and consciousness reside, to the limbic system, which processes memories and feelings, so that learning can take place.
Mental and physical body process refactoring is my guess
Cant run inference on the model while it’s in a new training run.
Quiet, so as not to attract predators.
We work in the neurotech/sleeptech space, specifically with the stimulation which was VERY poorly described in this article where they discuss "pink noise".
They point to one small study in 7 participants, but slow-wave enhancement (increasing slow-wave delta power) has over a decade of research, including 4 recent papers in older adults looking at Alzheimer's both as a preventative measure and as management of symptoms (we can't say treatment yet, that's still many studies away).
We provide our technology to researchers, and are preparing our consumer product.
You can find more on our website, as well as links to a few of the more relevant studies at https://affectablesleep.com
How I describe the technology is that slow-wave activity is the synchronous firing of neurons, the hallmark and defining feature of deep sleep. We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase the electrical activity, increase the synchronous firing of neurons, which is like giving the glymphatic system an extra boost of power. This enhances the restorative function of the brain, without altering sleep time.
I should be completing our whitepaper which provides a more in depth look at the technology, the state of sleep, and a large chronological list of how the research has progressed over the last decade.
The periods of my life I was the most productive and learned the most were when those when I managed to sleep >=8 hours every single night, in a dark, silent environment. I still manage to sleep >=7 hours most nights, but I feel like it's getting harder to keep a baseline of 8 hours for every night. Don't know if my sleep needs changed over time due to aging, or if it's just a consequence of having more responsibilities.
There’s this one guy in Vietnam who literally doesn’t sleep ever.
https://www.news18.com/amp/buzz/meet-80-year-old-vietnamese-...
Google it. There’s a lot about him. It’s like the one thing that makes zero sense in all this research about sleep.
He might have some mutation that means all this housekeeping happens all the time I guess.
I saw this post where Andrej Karpathy asks if hyperbaric oxygen therapy might work like exercise by boosting oxygen to tissues, I wonder if sleep has any correlation.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1903586665832321271?s=46
When I take a supplement with sulforaphane, I feel like I need less sleep.
I feel refreshed in the morning. Strange.
Likely it also because your other body parts needs repairing, not just the brain and the brain tells you by being sleepy. Evolutionarily, why we don’t go on for 24hrs maybe because we have night time.
Because it defragments and cleans the brain.
We have no understanding of medicine.
Yeah, if you think about it in the grand scheme of things, this is true.
Our science is fairly reductionist. Nature is incorporating vast amounts of science, most of which we probably don't even know about yet.
[dead]
Extreme Sleep deprived people did hallucinate.
Nature may give us some hints to improve "AI" reliability.
It was a mistake to use the term “hallucinate” in AI. It’s a decent metaphor but it’s best to avoid terms prone to anthropomorphism.
It’s less “hallucination” and more “confabulation”
It's less "confabulation" than "pattern-based statistical prediction"
It's "hallucination" because we got image generation before text generation, but yes this is a better term.
I've suggested Runge Spiking as an alternative, non-anthropomorphic metaphor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517
It was also a mistake calling it "AI".
Should’ve just gone with calling it Al. Seems friendly and you’ll mistake it for actual AI until you look closer
You can call it Betty.
Maybe only if you're their long last pal though.
> best to avoid terms prone to anthropomorphism
Like "understanding" and "thinking"?
Or "will change everything"?