Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.
During a very difficult time in my life recently, I found it impossible to sleep. I would have stress nightmares and even when i did fall asleep, I would soon wake myself up with specific scenarios my mind was trying to work out.
I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation.
I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep.
Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again.
This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists.
My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills.
I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds.
Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience.
I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping.
Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.
I am a little surprised that so many responses suggested optimization to your technique but not how to solve the problem at root.
I am neither a shrink nor your shrink but I think it's probably safe to say that whatever is affecting your sleep is probably affecting other parts of your life too, and while you mentioned a very difficult time - our bodies and brains don't by default react in most helpful says (eg - keeping you up with nightmares isn't helping anything)
In my experience what helps is a real way to "look within" to understand what's really going on. Ideally, this is done with the help of a real psychiatrist - someone willing to do real deep work of therapy and analysis, not just boredly write a prescription.
The other thing is developing self insight techniques yourself. For me, a diligent yoga practice and yoga study into the meditative aspects has been immensely helpful. But even on the purely physical practice level, learning to "look within" to understand why a pose is hard or painful teaches you the same process that I am talking about.
This all may sound wishy washy but if you are a software person you can relate to this - it's often easy to fix problems once you understand them. It's impossible to fix problems until you do, at best you can manage symptoms.
I had similar issues, and tried to solve them with a similar method. I fell asleep to an audiobook about the roman empire many nights. I finally realized that the reason I was having trouble falling to sleep, and trouble getting back to sleep after a noise, etc.
I turns out that the only time when I was not doing something that occupied my mind was when I was trying to sleep. Eg, I'm either working, consuming media such as Netflix or podcasts, talking with people, etc. I'd even listen to podcasts while taking walks. So when trying to sleep, I'd be stressing out over my problems, and trying to work through them.
For me the solution was to find a better time to remove distractions and think about my problems. Eg, taking walks without podcasts, driving without the radio on.
Putting on my armchair psychologist/anthropologist/whatever hat, I find the fact that you can sleep better with people speaking around you very interesting. I wonder if we are built to feel comfortable when we can hear people whom we trust (your background conversations in this case) speaking as we sleep? Means someone else we trust is awake and can be observant of dangers while we nod off.
For anyone who is suffering from this, or on some days finds it hard to sleep I recommend Science and Futurism With Isaac Arthur podcast.
It has "Narration Only" versions of all episodes and it is very interesting, so if you can't sleep you can listen to it but it will not have harsh noises.
Also Philosophize This has the same properties (very old episodes have some loud music).
Take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but I feel intentions(not to be confused with intentionality) help a lot here. They play a distinctive role in the etiology of attention(and the subsequent process of resilience building), one of the fundamental aspect of dealing with psychological issues. For eg, Whenever you become aware of these nightmares, try to observe the casual chain, eventually your mind will be inured to these episodes and will become much better at threat detection. Something like a mindfulness(Vipassana) retreat can help with this a lot.
My experience has been that most of the psychological issues can be resolved to a great extent by employing the "redundancy of potential command a.k.a Self-Organization"(See McCulloch). Meditation does this by asking you to bring back the wandering mind again and again. But you can also do this voluntarily by repeatedly observing the stress inducing conditions such as nightmare(in your case), which can help your brain better adjust and detect patterns.
In "The Body Keeps the Score", Bessel van der Kolk discusses the effects of psychological trauma and how important it is for people to process traumas via dreams which essentially remove the emotional component but leave the learning. When, say, veterans wake up from nightmarish dreams of a trauma, they don't complete processing it. Then they keep waking up from the same extreme nightmares stuck with that trauma unprocessed. He found a medication that helped veterans stay asleep through the entire nightmare, and within weeks the veterans moved past their traumatic dreams. There may also be non-medical interventions to help get past that trauma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score
Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...
"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).
I use a similar approach, but instead of TV, I use the build-in text to speech tool of Mac OS X (you can set up a keyboard shortcut[1] and then select any text and computer will read to you). I choose usually a longish-article, or sometimes a HN comments thread, and then a few minutes in I've dozed off.
It's a little tricky to choose the right length (i.e. not being awake enough to notice when it ends, but also not too long so it reads to me for hours).
I'm not sure if this is healthy... It works for me as a source of entertainment, but I can fall asleep without this too. I've heard that bringing a computer into the bedroom is definitely something not recommended for anyone seeking work-life balance.
That's interesting, I do 4-7-8 box breathing when I can't sleep due to anxiety. And its pretty much impossible for me to fall asleep when there is any kind of audio/visual stimulus in my environment. I need darkness and silence. Heck I can't even fall asleep if my S.O. or even my pet is touching me.
Listening to the right human speech creates an INCREDIBLE relaxation response for me. I have never felt so deeply relaxed as when listening to the right speech.
I have tried several sleep aids in heavy dosages, meditation, breathing exercises, visualization/journey exercises and pre-recorded journeys ... but none create such a powerful relaxation response.
Weird, I know! It took me a while to notice how deep and regular my breathing was without effort, and how a deep calm always settled over me when I fell asleep listening to audio such as from The West Wing. Eventually I bought a sleep mask with built-in wireless earbuds, and began experimenting with different kinds of human speech as background for sleep.
Just as @koheripbal discovered, I found the selection of just the right audio is important.
I had a critical acute stressor a few years ago, I wont describe the situation, but the symptoms were:
- panic attacks
- waking up into a panic attack; imagine sleeping, then waking hyperventilating, shivering, and for lack of a better word "freaking out"
- sleep disturbances
- periodic severe emotional disturbance
- inability to remove the stressors, and critically, I had to increase the stressors involved as it was time critical
I was able to take two weeks off from work, and I took escitalopram.
I didn't find escitalopram to be ... a game changer, but it did allow me to "decide" how I was going to feel, and if I felt I was going to have a panic attack, I could head that off through feedback and self aware thinking.
This very difficult time in your life you appear to have in common with your collegues if I’m reading you right. Can you elaborate a little bit on your work and maybe other novel coping strategies you and your collegues evaluated?
Sounds similar to why many watch these types of videos: [0]
I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1]
As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR
This is very interesting, this is the easiest way to fall asleep for me - reading a book or watching/listening to a comedy series. For some reason my brain prefers it to a dark & quiet room.
When I get to sleep with sound in the background it usually gets incorporated in my dreams. Recently fell asleep while listening to a podcast about file systems and in my dreams all my family members were talking about files systems and B-trees. Didn't feel well rested in the morning. But something like white-noise or different nature sounds could be much better. There are apps that play different droning sounds like train or plain noises, forest sounds, seaside waves etc.
My wife has tried very similar things for years: having an Alexa Echo (or similar) play rainstorm sounds all night seems to work fantastically for all here.
I've found a similar solution to my sleep problems.
I used to fall asleep listening to audio books. I eventually found audio books that are barely interesting, with certain narration styles to put me to sleep faster.
I now have a series of audio books, mostly gumshoe detective novels, that I use to sleep on nights when I'm dealing with stress. I set the sleep timer for 6 hours, and invariably get a good night of sleep.
I know several people who can’t sleep well without a tv playing, usually a playlist of old movies they have seen 10 times. It works for them. I’m up to 430am every night since about 8 months ago and it makes me wonder if I should try it.
I wonder if taking melatonin supplements for a week or two could resolve your issue. A very small dose (0.3 mg) of melatonin is usually sufficient to restore nighttime plasma melatonin levels to those characteristic of young people.
Two things that work great with me: smoking weed & wearing a sleeping mask (a bit of light can really fuck w/ my sleep and for some reasons no US apartments seems to have real blinds).
A possible explanation is that when you are “watching tv” you’re not obligated to do anything else, hence you loosen up and stop thinking about those other things. A safe space of sorts.
I have used a similar coping strategy in stressful times. Put a YouTube video on that’s “the right amount of boring” in my headphones and just let the auto play play me out.
Reminds of days when I could only sleep with the Air crash investigations show running in the background. It was something about the narrator’s voice that put me to sleep.
> revenge bedtime procrastination: a phenomenon in which people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.
For me, it started as more of a reverse-Christmas situation - if I go to sleep, the next thing I know I'll be having to got to work and I really don't want that!
Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.
I get a lot more done as a knowledge worker than I ever did in college, because in the real world nobody cares if something is a day or three later than the nominal deadline, and “this turned out to be harder than I anticipated” is a legitimate excuse. Consequently I never start the cycle of staying up to meet a deadline and then blowing the next deadline because I was trying to work on it sleep deprived.
This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.
I worked very closely with somebody when we were both about 10 years out of college. Unlike you and I, she still believed that “cramming” by staying up late to meet a deadline was a worthwhile strategy. I shared my reasoning with her, and nudged her over time, calling attention to the concrete detrimental impact of pursuing short term goals at the expense of intermediate term capacity and personal well-being, but she wouldn’t budge. This is a very smart person who ostensibly shared similar educational and professional experience to myself, that simply reached a very different conclusion. She ended up modifying her behavior only after going through a painful and damaging burnout.
How does a person go through university and not learn this lesson? Should we teach them the better way? How?
Edit: I remembered a potential clue- my coworker was able to transition from work to sleep rather easily, where I require a substantial wind-down period. Perhaps this shifted the equation.
In the real world, 2 or 3 days doesn't mean a failing grade most of the time. However, when you start to get 2 to 3 weeks behind the deadline in the real world there is no escape hatch.
Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work.
And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
The thing is, that when you have a high level of stress, you will find it hard to sleep well.
"Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep"
So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.
I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.
The other thing is that if you’re not an individual contributor, trust your people and let go of things.
I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory.
Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.
You're leaving out nutritional deficiencies. Specifically, magnesium, for which most are deficient.
When you increase your levels of magnesium, suddenly it's easier to be present, meditate, mental endurance increases, you can endure much more mental stress.
If you're deficient, it can lead to a bad, downward spiral.
Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited
"The idea of a bidirectional relationship between magnesium and stress was first introduced by Galland and Seelig, in the early 1990s [9,10] and then referred to as the vicious circle. This vicious circle implies that stress can increase magnesium loss, causing a deficiency; in turn, magnesium deficiency can enhance the body’s susceptibility to stress"
...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.
I had great success picking up a consistent meditation habit with the greasing the groove-approach[1].. in essence, every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session. It usually results to 3-5 sessions per day. It's such a great mental reset, and I haven't since experienced the kind of complete depletion that you get from pushing yourself hard through the day.
I bet some Zen master would reprimand me for this being the wrong approach, but I found it quite difficult to get into the habit of doing, say, a single 30-60 minute session per day. Now I can consistently drop into the meditation session with no urge for procrastination and have also successfully experimented with longer ones.
[1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
> … every time I would feel a bit foggy in the head, I would take a 3-15 minute meditation session.
Hey, that's what I do too! I've never read anything meditation-related and consequently do not know any of those approaches but I once realized that lying in bed/on the couch/on the floor for a few minutes while freeing my head of all thoughts really helps with mental fog (I have ADHD and fog tends to build up even with meds). I tend to jokingly refer to the process as 'clearing my cache'.
Highly doubt any Zen master would reprimand you.
Any habit you want to keep needs to be sustainable, if it doesn't fit the way your life works, you probably won't keep it.
They would however most likely encourage you to challenge yourself from time to time when possible to see if you can get comfortable doing a longer session once in a while.
> [1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
Happy to see this concept references here!! I've started thinking about a lot more things in my life in terms of greasing the groove, IE: how can I make the healthy things convenient and the unhealthy things inconvenient? I want to be lazy with my willpower when I can.
It's a very powerful concept, since it teaches you to become very comfortable with starting things.
I often employ it in work too, picking one of the most minor thing I have on the to-do while having morning coffee and three hours later realize I have been grinding away non-stop.
Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors. Heart rate variability at rest is one of the best indicators of stress and these devices are pretty good at estimating sleep duration and sleep cycles.
Regulators need to recognize that continuous tracking devices are a new tool for establishing a health baseline and they should not be expected to match the performance of single-test medical devices. Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit need to build standards to share this baseline data with medical professionals and offer analytics to determine when changes occur.
Questionnaire based medicine seems backwards given the digital tools available.
There's a DIY-ish service that can be self hosted (not sure if it's still maintained) that tracks all kinds of data in a way that you can share with a physician. It's called Fluxtream, and might take a few extra keywords to find. Written in Java+Spring. I haven't used it myself.
Putting more and more of our data, especially health data, in the hands of others is the wrong direction to be moving IMO.
I will say that learning about and monitoring my HRV after getting a smart watch has been useful to monitor stress and trends. Like with anything though, I've had to try and not self-induce more stress watching this number continuously ha.
> Many of us are wearing devices with continuous optical heart rate monitors.
I don't know how representative you folks are. I know a few people who invest time, money, and effort into tracking and measuring every aspect of their health. It looks like neuroticism to me. Especially when they look for explainations of every blip on every chart.
On the other hand, its incredibly useful to establish what is a healthy baseline for your own body, so that when you do get a disease it is easier to compare your results.
I wake up after about 4.5 hours of sleep "no matter what". Bedtime of 10pm or 2am, exercise or no, light exposure or no, late eating or no - always the same result. Then I'm awake for a few hours, then get my "second sleep" of 1 to 2 hours. I've been going like this for a decade without daytime sleepiness (a few oz of coffee and I'm charged up for the day), but these kinds of articles really worry me.
I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?
Dude, this is exactly me. Same age. 4.5 hours. Read for a while. 1-2 hours more.
Just this morning, I think I finally diagnosed my central sleep apnea. I was laying there and just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing. My diary has notes about this happening all the way back to last March. This happened to me after my first sleep.
To add to that, I've become hyper-sensitive to caffeine. It causes palpitations (started in late 2019).
I don't snore, but I have been using Breathe Right strips to make sure I have adequate air flow, and so I'm really sure I don't snore. Curiously, I haven't used them for a couple of weeks (long story).
EDIT: if you want to contact me, my info is in my profile
>just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing.
Uncanny. Me too. Also tried every airflow device I could find (breathe right, nose baffles, chin strap, and many more) to no avail.
CPAP was a total fail because if the pressure is turned up high enough to defeat my resistance, it just fills my stomach with air (called aerophagia, a common CPAP problem). I'm starting to think the only solution is one of those implanted breathing pacemakers but that freaks me out.
Btw, I also had palpitations! I'd wake up with them really bad, probably from not breathing. Going off caffeine doesn't help though. A beta-blocker (6 years now) works wonders. HOWEVER! I just saw a study yesterday that people can have insomnia from beta blockers, and that 2.5mg melatonin helps counteract it. Round and round!
If you're overweight at all, even by a little, losing that weight that greatly impact your sleep and health overall. Also if you eat any inflammatory foods - sugar, carbohydrates, dairy, etc - then that inflammation can cause issues with sleep, especially for brain related inflammation, sleep time when brain channels are meant to open up to clear waste; inflammation is linked to Alzheimer's now because of this process.
Skinny guy, no obvious source of airway obstruction. Maybe that's why the cpap doesn't work. I think I literally hold my breath (some variant of so-called "central" apnea?) and foil the cpap that way.
I'll consider the inflammation stuff. I've been trying to cut out down on sugar anyway.
It's literally at 3oz a day though, so "cutting" would effectively be zero. Maybe I could try decaf since I seem to need a bit of coffee for, ahem, regularity.
Thank you so much for sharing, this is a really insightful article!
By the way, a friend of mine is doing a Master's thesis in work psychology at the University of Turin on this subject.
I am a bit ignorant about this topic since I have a business background + work in tech-startups. But I am genuinely passionate about this kind of thing.
The gist of the thesis is that all these dynamic and interdependent aspects (e.g. lack of sleep, stress, social pressures, even for athletes before, after and during a race, even if we think about the influence on self-perception in relation to other people and related expectations on personal performance) can lead to somatization which can come in the form of concussion, but also to burnout or multiple injuries (as my friend is researching on the thesis) and as it happened to me too, in my life.
Practicing yoga or simply going for a walk daily, helped me a lot along that path... and helped many friends of mine as well. But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect".
All of these are very interesting talking points and the inherent dynamics behind vicious cycles (echoing @raghuveerdotnet's comment) is still not crystal clear and needs further research and experimentation.
> But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect".
What would a placebo effect even be when talking about lack of sleep, stress, etc.?
In medicine the size of the placebo effect seems to depend on the procedure. A placebo surgery is more effective than a placebo injection, which is more effective than a placebo pill. So if you want to test if an injection is better than a placebo you compare it to a placebo injection like saline water, something where there's no way it can have a medical effect beyond the psychological effect. But that would mean that to evaluate meditation you would have to compare it to some kind of fake meditation, maybe breathing exercises that have no viable way to be effective beyond the placebo effect. But we don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to come up with such a thing.
Sleep seems so essential to our lives and yet we understand very little. I had two car accidents due to lack of sleep the night before. Whenever I don't get my sleep I can't focus, my recollection is poor and I have trouble doing basic stuff. You can find texts online about people literally dying from chronic insomnia. I always wonder how some people can function well with little sleep and almost everybody seems to do better than me. And I'm convinced that lack of sleep accumulates because I can sleep till noon if I have no obligations that day.
For my schizophrenic sibling one of the most troubling aspects of his condition is bad irregular sleep. Sometimes he can't sleep all night and then he sleeps the whole next day. But it's never enough sleep, nothing but constant drowsiness and lack of energy. Psychosis sure does resemble dreaming while awake, you accept weird ideas, things just happen etc, same as in a dream. And once medication kicks in, seems like slowly waking up and dream fades out.
Somehow it's all connected and whoever figures out the puzzle of sleep will make the world a much happier place.
I remember reading the results of a study a few years ago that said people in poverty suffered something like a drop in cognitive ability. I wonder if the effect reported here is related.
Readit News
I was incapacitated by this, which exacerbated my situation.
I eventually noticed that I could fall asleep if I sat with my daughters while they watched TV. This evolved to me falling asleep with the TV on. ...but the light, noise, and discomfort of the couch made this poor quality sleep.
Which then evolved to me falling asleep in bed with earphones on just listening to old tv, not watching. But I noticed that as soon as the tv show stopped, I would have nightmares again.
This evolved into me selecting 8 hours of movies that, on low volume, keep me asleep all night and I've essentially solved my sleep problem - despite this stressful situation persists.
My colleagues has instead started taking prescription sleeping pills.
I have found that selection of audio is important. It cannot be interesting or novel. It cannot be sound only - there must be speech. It must be content you enjoy, but have seen multiple times before. ...and it must have peaceful audio without screaming, shooting, abrupt sounds.
Interestingly, I no longer dream at all. The audio has essentially supplanted dreaming. I know this because on the occasions that the audio fails, my dreams return and are a notable experience.
I have been doing this for over 6 months now. 8 solid hours of sleep per night on the same programming all night. No ill effects noted. It has been instrumental in coping.
Food for thought. It seems stress caused insomnia can be cured without drugs, and dreams are optional for humans.
I am neither a shrink nor your shrink but I think it's probably safe to say that whatever is affecting your sleep is probably affecting other parts of your life too, and while you mentioned a very difficult time - our bodies and brains don't by default react in most helpful says (eg - keeping you up with nightmares isn't helping anything)
In my experience what helps is a real way to "look within" to understand what's really going on. Ideally, this is done with the help of a real psychiatrist - someone willing to do real deep work of therapy and analysis, not just boredly write a prescription.
The other thing is developing self insight techniques yourself. For me, a diligent yoga practice and yoga study into the meditative aspects has been immensely helpful. But even on the purely physical practice level, learning to "look within" to understand why a pose is hard or painful teaches you the same process that I am talking about.
This all may sound wishy washy but if you are a software person you can relate to this - it's often easy to fix problems once you understand them. It's impossible to fix problems until you do, at best you can manage symptoms.
I turns out that the only time when I was not doing something that occupied my mind was when I was trying to sleep. Eg, I'm either working, consuming media such as Netflix or podcasts, talking with people, etc. I'd even listen to podcasts while taking walks. So when trying to sleep, I'd be stressing out over my problems, and trying to work through them.
For me the solution was to find a better time to remove distractions and think about my problems. Eg, taking walks without podcasts, driving without the radio on.
It has "Narration Only" versions of all episodes and it is very interesting, so if you can't sleep you can listen to it but it will not have harsh noises.
Also Philosophize This has the same properties (very old episodes have some loud music).
Let me know if you know similar podcasts.
My experience has been that most of the psychological issues can be resolved to a great extent by employing the "redundancy of potential command a.k.a Self-Organization"(See McCulloch). Meditation does this by asking you to bring back the wandering mind again and again. But you can also do this voluntarily by repeatedly observing the stress inducing conditions such as nightmare(in your case), which can help your brain better adjust and detect patterns.
Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...
"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).
It's a little tricky to choose the right length (i.e. not being awake enough to notice when it ends, but also not too long so it reads to me for hours).
I'm not sure if this is healthy... It works for me as a source of entertainment, but I can fall asleep without this too. I've heard that bringing a computer into the bedroom is definitely something not recommended for anyone seeking work-life balance.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...
I have tried several sleep aids in heavy dosages, meditation, breathing exercises, visualization/journey exercises and pre-recorded journeys ... but none create such a powerful relaxation response.
Weird, I know! It took me a while to notice how deep and regular my breathing was without effort, and how a deep calm always settled over me when I fell asleep listening to audio such as from The West Wing. Eventually I bought a sleep mask with built-in wireless earbuds, and began experimenting with different kinds of human speech as background for sleep.
Just as @koheripbal discovered, I found the selection of just the right audio is important.
- panic attacks
- waking up into a panic attack; imagine sleeping, then waking hyperventilating, shivering, and for lack of a better word "freaking out"
- sleep disturbances
- periodic severe emotional disturbance
- inability to remove the stressors, and critically, I had to increase the stressors involved as it was time critical
I was able to take two weeks off from work, and I took escitalopram.
I didn't find escitalopram to be ... a game changer, but it did allow me to "decide" how I was going to feel, and if I felt I was going to have a panic attack, I could head that off through feedback and self aware thinking.
I can attest to it being very effective at inducing sleepiness. Here's a representative type that seems to work very well at making me fall asleep: [1]
As a sibling comment mentions, the old Joy of Painting videos by Bob Ross were early forms of this. He's kind of the unofficial godfather of ASMR
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jomUOcwqchA
I used to fall asleep listening to audio books. I eventually found audio books that are barely interesting, with certain narration styles to put me to sleep faster.
I now have a series of audio books, mostly gumshoe detective novels, that I use to sleep on nights when I'm dealing with stress. I set the sleep timer for 6 hours, and invariably get a good night of sleep.
It can’t be a new one or else I’ll get too interested in it.
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Which sometimes lead to the strange situation of going to bed earlier on weekends.
This is easy to recognize from outside but at the time I did not really understand the problem, I thought it was just my capability/identity and the inherent difficulty of the work.
How does a person go through university and not learn this lesson? Should we teach them the better way? How?
Edit: I remembered a potential clue- my coworker was able to transition from work to sleep rather easily, where I require a substantial wind-down period. Perhaps this shifted the equation.
Worst case in college, you submit the later assignment, settle for a D, and vow to study hard for the final. In the real world, you manager calls you to his office, asks you why you're weeks behind, it's going down now in your evaluation. Maybe you're in a start up, you loose that crucial client, now you're wondering how to pay your expenses as well. You have a family, kids, the stress compounds, pretty soon you're a mess at home and at work.
And, I've got 12 years of higher education under my belt. When I made the final push for my PhD thesis corrections, I stayed up 4 days straight right before the deadline dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's. 6 years into the "real world", I often look back on that time as the good ole days.
"Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep"
So those are very connected. If you practice mindfulness and work out in a healthy way. And be conscious when and how you go to sleep ... things will improve.
I once made the mistake of absorbing lots of accountability for things under the misguided instinct of “protecting” people. My role changed quickly as a result of a crisis and the world seemed to change. The reality was that it was really a type of selfishness and pride. After a few weeks I got to a point where I thought I had a physical problem — I basically had no short term memory.
Took me a bit for my thick skull to grasp, but once it clicked it ended up being fairly easy to fix.
In Chinese, it's a single, uhm, guess you could call it a word: 報復性熬夜
See also:
https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/advice/living/article/31130...
When you increase your levels of magnesium, suddenly it's easier to be present, meditate, mental endurance increases, you can endure much more mental stress.
If you're deficient, it can lead to a bad, downward spiral.
Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3672/htm
"The idea of a bidirectional relationship between magnesium and stress was first introduced by Galland and Seelig, in the early 1990s [9,10] and then referred to as the vicious circle. This vicious circle implies that stress can increase magnesium loss, causing a deficiency; in turn, magnesium deficiency can enhance the body’s susceptibility to stress"
...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.
I bet some Zen master would reprimand me for this being the wrong approach, but I found it quite difficult to get into the habit of doing, say, a single 30-60 minute session per day. Now I can consistently drop into the meditation session with no urge for procrastination and have also successfully experimented with longer ones.
[1] refers to the method of increasing your pull-up capability by installing a pull-up bar in your office / bedroom doorway and doing a set every time you pass through the doorway
Hey, that's what I do too! I've never read anything meditation-related and consequently do not know any of those approaches but I once realized that lying in bed/on the couch/on the floor for a few minutes while freeing my head of all thoughts really helps with mental fog (I have ADHD and fog tends to build up even with meds). I tend to jokingly refer to the process as 'clearing my cache'.
Happy to see this concept references here!! I've started thinking about a lot more things in my life in terms of greasing the groove, IE: how can I make the healthy things convenient and the unhealthy things inconvenient? I want to be lazy with my willpower when I can.
I often employ it in work too, picking one of the most minor thing I have on the to-do while having morning coffee and three hours later realize I have been grinding away non-stop.
Regulators need to recognize that continuous tracking devices are a new tool for establishing a health baseline and they should not be expected to match the performance of single-test medical devices. Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit need to build standards to share this baseline data with medical professionals and offer analytics to determine when changes occur.
Questionnaire based medicine seems backwards given the digital tools available.
Putting more and more of our data, especially health data, in the hands of others is the wrong direction to be moving IMO.
Found it though: https://github.com/fluxtream
I don't know how representative you folks are. I know a few people who invest time, money, and effort into tracking and measuring every aspect of their health. It looks like neuroticism to me. Especially when they look for explainations of every blip on every chart.
I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?
Just this morning, I think I finally diagnosed my central sleep apnea. I was laying there and just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing. My diary has notes about this happening all the way back to last March. This happened to me after my first sleep.
To add to that, I've become hyper-sensitive to caffeine. It causes palpitations (started in late 2019).
I don't snore, but I have been using Breathe Right strips to make sure I have adequate air flow, and so I'm really sure I don't snore. Curiously, I haven't used them for a couple of weeks (long story).
EDIT: if you want to contact me, my info is in my profile
Uncanny. Me too. Also tried every airflow device I could find (breathe right, nose baffles, chin strap, and many more) to no avail.
CPAP was a total fail because if the pressure is turned up high enough to defeat my resistance, it just fills my stomach with air (called aerophagia, a common CPAP problem). I'm starting to think the only solution is one of those implanted breathing pacemakers but that freaks me out.
Btw, I also had palpitations! I'd wake up with them really bad, probably from not breathing. Going off caffeine doesn't help though. A beta-blocker (6 years now) works wonders. HOWEVER! I just saw a study yesterday that people can have insomnia from beta blockers, and that 2.5mg melatonin helps counteract it. Round and round!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-messy-facts-a...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/05/05/closer-look-anti-inflam...
I'll consider the inflammation stuff. I've been trying to cut out down on sugar anyway.
I’ve struggled for years, and I still do with waking up like you do. Some nights are perfect though. What has helped the most is:
- Sleep study. Awful but it landed a CPAP. Also awful but it works now that I’m used to it.
- Quality bedding
- No pets and no computers in the bedroom. Everything is off
- exercise. Until exhaustion if possible
By the way, a friend of mine is doing a Master's thesis in work psychology at the University of Turin on this subject.
I am a bit ignorant about this topic since I have a business background + work in tech-startups. But I am genuinely passionate about this kind of thing.
The gist of the thesis is that all these dynamic and interdependent aspects (e.g. lack of sleep, stress, social pressures, even for athletes before, after and during a race, even if we think about the influence on self-perception in relation to other people and related expectations on personal performance) can lead to somatization which can come in the form of concussion, but also to burnout or multiple injuries (as my friend is researching on the thesis) and as it happened to me too, in my life.
Practicing yoga or simply going for a walk daily, helped me a lot along that path... and helped many friends of mine as well. But some people can argue that it is the natural outcome of a "placebo effect".
All of these are very interesting talking points and the inherent dynamics behind vicious cycles (echoing @raghuveerdotnet's comment) is still not crystal clear and needs further research and experimentation.
What are your thoughts?
What would a placebo effect even be when talking about lack of sleep, stress, etc.?
In medicine the size of the placebo effect seems to depend on the procedure. A placebo surgery is more effective than a placebo injection, which is more effective than a placebo pill. So if you want to test if an injection is better than a placebo you compare it to a placebo injection like saline water, something where there's no way it can have a medical effect beyond the psychological effect. But that would mean that to evaluate meditation you would have to compare it to some kind of fake meditation, maybe breathing exercises that have no viable way to be effective beyond the placebo effect. But we don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to come up with such a thing.
For my schizophrenic sibling one of the most troubling aspects of his condition is bad irregular sleep. Sometimes he can't sleep all night and then he sleeps the whole next day. But it's never enough sleep, nothing but constant drowsiness and lack of energy. Psychosis sure does resemble dreaming while awake, you accept weird ideas, things just happen etc, same as in a dream. And once medication kicks in, seems like slowly waking up and dream fades out.
Somehow it's all connected and whoever figures out the puzzle of sleep will make the world a much happier place.
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