I'll keep saying it: sleep apnea is vastly underdiagnosed and undertreated. I had so many weird symptoms for so long, which all gradually started to disappear as I started to get my sleep apnea treated.
Unless you're fat, doctors will rarely even consider the possibility. And once you do get a polysomnogram, the usualy course of action is to throw a CPAP machine at you and send you on your way, without much followup. This, predictably, leads to abysmal compliance and the perception that PAP-therapy is awful or innefective.
And while I'm on my soap box, I really wish the PAP-manufacturers would dislodge their collective head from their collective arse. Trying to lock down machines and preventing patients from accessing their data (and settings) is plain evil. And maybe put some money into R&D for better machines? There's literally hundreds of millions of people with sleep apnea, there's bound to be a market for better devices ...
I'm not so sure, my experience tells me differently..
I am a thin guy with very low body fat. As soon as I told my doctor that I had woken up 2-3 times with my soft pallet dry & semi-collapsed, also that I would wake up regularly with a dry mouth, he immediately sent me for a sleep test. I went and did the test and the results were that I had mild sleep apnea. The sleep doctor told me that they were ordering a CPAP machine for me. I asked why I needed it for mild apnea and also told them I wouldn't use it. They ordered it anyway and told me to take the issue up with my doctor.
While all this was going on I was in the process of reducing the amount of meds I took (bad accident in 2010). I also started reading up on & studying sleep apnea. One of the first things I learned, and that worked, was keeping my mouth shut during sleep (many ways to accomplish that). The other thing I learned is that Big Pharma/FDA does a horrible job of listing medication side effects. I say that because "causes sleep apnea" was not on the list of side effects for carbamazeine (used for my peripheral neuropathy). As soon as I stopped the carbamazepine the apnea symptoms vanished. I have no need for a CPAP, it was ordered and I've received many calls about it, but there it sits at the sleep doctor's office..
> The other thing I learned is that Big Pharma/FDA does a horrible job of listing medication side effects. I say that because "causes sleep apnea" was not on the list of side effects for carbamazeine
Having designed and run clinical trials, I think your assertion based on a single experience is unreasonable.
Companies are very interested in unexpected events, particularly bad ones (called “adverse events” in the jargon). Viagra was “discovered” because of an unanticipated side effect of a drug being tested for a heart disorder.
That long list of side effect warnings? The companies love that list because it reduces legal risk (and marketing risk: doctors will tell patients what to look for and/or will avoid giving it to patients at risk of effect X).
While it seems plausible to me that sleep apnea could be a side effect of a drug like carbamazepine (though it’s not a benzo) it was not reported to any statistically significant extent.
since you have to report all AEs, the FDA will, in some cases, zero in on one that was reported at a minor level for additional study, because someone in the review panel thought worthy of investigation due to some scientific issue in their specialty. Drug companies hate that of course, but that’s one reason why there’s a review panel rather than a single reviewer.
Sleep study was a complete joke - I slept in a creepy hotel like room in a clinic for maybe 3h total. Uncomfortable and totally different sleep then at home.
AHI of 5, given CPAP with no follow up. It really felt like this sleep Doctor got paid to hand out machines.
Hacked the settings, used it for 8months then quit cold turkey as a test. Felt the same.
My sleep improved more from:
Drastically reducing alcohol, smoking, weed. Septum correction and tonsil removal. Sleep alone in bed in complete darkness in a cool room.
I followed your route. Got the machine, hated it, didn't accept it.
I ended up getting a "boil-and-bite" mouthguard thing that kept my lower jaw from slipping backwards when I sleep.
That helped for about 6 months, but eventually I would wake up throwing up in my mouth. What happens is that you fall asleep, your throat collapses, you go to take a breath and since you can't bring in air through your mouth, instead you try to bring the stomach acid from your stomach up into your lungs.
eventually went through the hassle of getting a machine, found the nasal pillows mask was *much* better than the default mask, and have been good.
Two relatives in my family who are highly symptomatic were turned down by their primary care when they asked for a sleep study. One for being too skinny and the other for being "too cheerful".
If you want to criticize the pap manufacturers, there's a lot more than just that too. There's a shortage of machines because of the negligence of the Philips company. Documents have shown that they knew their machines were causing problems for years before finally doing a recall.
This is a huge problem! If they are in the US most insurers allow you to go straight to a specialist. Unsure if that helps them but for anyone reading this, if you can, go straight to a sleep specialist. My treatment was delayed for 3 years because I didn’t snore (another common reason for rejection of a sleep study).
I recently did a sleep test because i was really sleepy and tired during the say an my apple watch is telling me i have too many wake ups. My AHI score is 33 which is quite bad. I immediately got A CPAP (auto) and after a week of using my AHI is now 1.3. And my brain has become so clear and alert. I can't imagine how I lived before once i got the taste of normal brain.
I would call it the no booze hangover. Sometimes the symptoms would be like a mild hangover. You wake up with a headache, still tired, and a little bit of a “what happened last night?” vibe.
Except that “what happened last night” was drink plenty of water and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
A wide variety of non-specific things. The most frightening of which was palpitations and skipped beats. Then panic attacks. Occasional ice pick headaches. Brain fog. Strangely, daytime sleepiness was not a symptom for me.
How did you get it treated? I've heard of the machines for this, but its not a very appealing option. I've also heard of exercises for neck/throat/jaw region, but do they work?
With a CPAP machine, a lot of patience, OSCAR [1], and the help of the kind people over at Apnea Board [2].
I was given the machine, which was titrated to the wrong pressure settings, with the cheapest mask that was too small for my big nostrils. If it hadn't been for the fact that I had a friend whose life was greatly improved by CPAP, I probably would have thrown in the towel on the first night. But I stuck with it, asked for help on Apnea Board, tried to learn as much about apnea and PAP-therapy as I could, and eventually got to a point where I'm pretty happy with it.
In regards to your last question, Yes, the exercises can/do work with helping to strengthen your throat area. Tying your jaw shut at night with a scarf, or taping your mouth shut, works as well. Another thing I learned, through a comment found here on HN, is how to force your sinuses to open up. Even if you are congested, close your mouth and try to breath through your nose. Eventually (usually not long) your body's need for oxygen will take over and open up your sinuses. Hope this helps but remember that I am not a doctor.
isn't sleep apnea usually related to another problem, like diet (most of the time), or smoking/drinking, another is the position of your jaw (the teeth shouldn't touch)
It's a blanket term that describes a condition where your airway collapses while you sleep, but there are lots of causes. Smoking, drinking and other substances can cause your muscles to relax and bring on apnea, as can being overweight. Lots of body builders suffer from it as their necks become developed.
The biggest "cause" once you remove factors like alcohol is heredity. You get the shape of your face from your parents, why not the anatomy of your airway as well?
Bit rude of you to assume that I'm apparently an alcoholic or a smoker.
Nice illustration of my point that public awareness on sleep apnea is lacking.
Good luck figuring out the root cause of sleep apnea. Years of research hasn't turned one up. There's a wide variety of contributing factors (including weight, alcohol, asthma/COPD). But there's also plenty of fat asthmatic drunks who don't have sleep apnea. It's obviously not as simple as you're making it out to be.
I really wanted there to be controllable habits listed in this article, but instead it was about sleep characteristics.
Telling me that "having trouble falling asleep," or "having trouble staying asleep," or "not feeling alert upon waking" are working against me is useless to me. These aren't "habits." I'm not choosing to do them until they become routine. They just happen to me.
Tell me how to FIX those things. Tell me what habits would help me fall asleep, stay asleep, and feel rested.
As-is, this isn't actionable. It's just, "Hey, people who don't sleep well don't live as long."
Convincing people that sleep is a problem worth caring about is half the battle.
There are many resources available that get into the practical/tactical aspect of improving sleep. But if you don't believe sleep is a problem yet, you won't seek those out.
The Huberman Lab has put out a number of good resources for this [0] including a podcast episode speaking with Matt Walker, PhD, sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep [1] (also a good read).
I've been a night owl for most of my life, and only more recently did I fully realize how connected this behavior was to traumatic situations growing up. When I started going down the rabbit hole on how to improve sleep, it was encouraging to find the emergence of a ton of practical non-pharmaceutical resources (I did try sleep aids for awhile, but couldn't deal with the side effects).
The hard part is that it does require willingness to implement real changes. They're not pleasant at first, but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
I started this journey by setting a goal for myself to see/photograph a sunrise. I now regularly take pre-dawn walks and have seen more sunrises in the past few weeks than I had during the prior 30+ years of my life.
> but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
You also seem to sleep an hour more, so some changes you experienced might be due to that.
This is probably a clear metric for our annoying friends who complain that they don’t get high enough quality sleep, but go to bed at 2 and have an alarm set for 7 every day. Sure you may have worked best on 5 hours sleep in college (though probably not), but if you aren’t "feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week", you might try more sleep.
Some people need this advice, and a clear metric to hit. I’ve known them, and although I failed to make a dent, eventually something did. Maybe it was an article like this.
Research and summaries of research will rarely hand out advice. In recent years, there has been an explosion of content that provides practical advice on getting better sleep. Most of this advice involves habit changes, and many of these habit changes are hard (e.g. avoiding screen time for ~2 hours before bed is tough if you always watch Netflix in the evenings).
I added links as a response to the sibling comment with some practical resources, and I think it's important to recognize that work focusing on the impact of sleep or the lack thereof is not necessarily in the same category as work that seeks to provide remedies / improve sleep.
Thankfully, as we continue to learn just how important sleep is, we also continue to learn about ways to improve it.
Drop caffeine after noon, quite alcohol/cig/weed/screens anywhere close to bed time, keep evening meals small and low in carbs/sugar to avoid an insulin spike, wait at least 3 hours before hitting bed after a meal, more is better. Go to bed at roughly the same time every day, make sure your room is as dark as can be, make sure it's not warmer than 20c, exercise so that you're physically tired at the end of the day, only use your bedroom for sleep
Yes, I've been following similar recipes and my sleep improved noticeably (after initial ~2 weeks or misery, when my body was getting accustomed to the new sleep schedule)
To be fair, it's a press release about a scientific study, not a self-help blog post, but you raise a good point when you say that poor sleep patterns "just happen to me." I've always valued sleep, but often in my life, my sleep has been disrupted because of stress, anxiety, and depression. The article says the researchers controlled for "other factors that may have heightened the risk of dying, including lower socioeconomic status, smoking and alcohol consumption and other medical conditions," but did they control for stress?
The author quoted in the press release seems quite confident that we can eliminate these bad mortality outcomes by teaching people to sleep better, but another way to interpret the result is that any factor that increases stress will damage health and also disrupt sleep.
I also wonder where the author gets his confidence that "good sleep hygiene" can have such a great impact. How does he assume that "sleep hygiene" will overcome the factors causing poor sleep? Does he really believe that they've controlled for every other factor and isolated "sleep hygiene" as the root cause? My personal experience says that what he calls "sleep hygiene" helps a little bit, but it doesn't overcome the effects of stress or poor life management due to depression, and those factors have to be managed directly.
Even a lot of the more specific habits that do sometimes get recommended ("sleep hygiene") are:
1) Potentially expensive/disruptive (control of the sleep environment may imply moving house or installing soundproofing materials, air conditioning, etc.)
2) Contradictory (get out of bed if you don't fall asleep in 15 minutes, but also don't look at the clock)
3) Not individually tested or validated
4) Based more on old-school behaviorism than on anything specific to the processes of sleep.
EDIT: forgot an important one
5) Only addressed at difficulty falling asleep initially, not staying asleep or improving sleep architecture.
As a tangent, I got a new bed couple of weeks ago. My old one had been around for ages and was well past it's expiration date.
It cost a small fortune but Jesus Herbert Christ on a tandem bicycle has it made a difference on how I feel during the day. I fall a sleep faster, wake up more well rested.
First few mornings I was just sort of confused by the feeling of waking up profoundly physically relaxed. Felt very weird and unusual. I don't think I've been that relaxed for years.
How did you chose your new mattress? I've had a hard time knowing from the short impressions in a mattress store if that mattress is really what I want or just feels nice for 5 minutes in a store
We've had good luck buying basic spring mattresses with almost no extra features and then experimenting with toppers. You can throw 2 or 3 inches of latex or memory foam on it and it gives you that instant comfort.
Cheap spring mattresses seem to be getting harder to find online. I believe the margins are much higher on memory foam products.
Went to several stores and tried a whole bunch of mattresses. Tried several dozen beds and got input from a bunch of different salespeople. Was like a 2-3 week vetting process before I found something great.
Not OP but I’ve had a very good experience just buying thick foam toppers for super cheap. Can’t link but you can buy 12’ foam pads straight from the factory in mattress size for a few hundred dollars. It’s essentially like buying a foam mattress.
I recently had a similar experience with a new pillow. For as long as I could remember, I couldn't find a comfortable pillow. It got to the point where I just ditched them and slept without one. The closest to something suitable had been foam knee pillows, or sometimes a blanket rolled up in a weird position. A couple of months ago I saw a sale on Tempur pillows and walked into the store on a whim. Decided to give one of them a try and got one. Luckily, this one seemed to do the trick! I was surprised at how big a difference it made both with falling asleep and staying asleep better throughout the night.
I’m always baffled that so many people don’t make new or comfortable beds, sheets, pillows, etc. a critical priority. Generally speaking, a third of your life will be spent there, invest in the best you can afford.
I'd be willing to buy a nice one, but it's probably one of the most annoying things to shop for. I don't know what I want, and mattress vendors all seem like crooks. The rise of the internet foam mattress startup has made it worse.
Nothing special. Like it's modern mattress technology and all, which has apparently improved quite a lot sine back when I bought my old bed.
But overall it's just much better suited to my body. I'm pretty tall so I need a relatively firm mattress to avoid sinking into it and sleeping all banana-shaped, but with this bed the core is firm but the top layer is soft. Hard to explain, but it's amazing.
I've been going through another episode of sleeplessness lately. Just like it had before, it has serious detrimental effects on my overall wellbeing. I'm less trusting of others, more inclined to shirk social situations, more sensitive to antisocial behaviors in others. I struggle with telling cause from effect, because these things literally stress me out even more, exacerbating the sleep problem. I just _feel_ the sleep deprivation eating away at my general health.
I'm getting the best possible treatment (standard of care) which is cognitive behavioral therapy, but man, is it a slow process to recovery.
Sleep deprivation prevents memories from forming, that's my theory on why people have more than one kid. They actually don't form memories for most of the first year or so. The only memories they have are the pictures they took of the happy moments.
Nobody takes a video of their kid screaming their lungs out at 3am with snot running from every orifice because their favourite toy fell off the bed or the pillow is the wrong colour.
I only have one kid. Having to wake up and calm her down (or, "fuck it, no sense falling asleep since she's gonna wake me up AGAIN in 30 minutes") is probably the one thing I remember very distinctly in the last three years. COVID-19 kinda smooshed everything else together and made it bleak. My sleep deprivation stands out.
Having more than two people in the house who can act as parents is a game changer. Definitely one place where modern society has slipped up, though there's some change in that with families like mine.
I've been thinking about this a LOT over the years. I feel like children were meant to be able to roam around and find different adults to glom onto until they're too annoyed and then move on to the next, all the while learning different specialized skills and niches to find one they fit in with.
I can't help but feel that more-than-2-adult households would have a huge advantage in this era.
If you sleep for 20 extra minutes every day, that's a full extra year sleeping over a 72 year span. (If you exclude 1/3 of the time as sleep, that's a year and a half of extra awake time.)
If you gain 1.5 years of extra time awake but lose 0.5 years of life, did you win or lose time?
Yes it’s like “Was the chicken or the egg born first?” anyway if you sleep bad maybe you don’t know your issue, and if you just sleep bad you will have more chance to die prematurely. This research just want to say this i think.
But you might just work retail, do shiftwork at a factory, or work in any number of places that require weird hours. Healthcare, plowing snow, train conductor, and anywhere that you wind up on-call just to name a few.
I've seen enough mental issues in people (depression, schizophrenia, etc...) that seem to have a high correlation to poor sleep and/or lack of sleep to make sure I stay on top of getting enough sleep.
Depriving your body of food, water, oxygen or sleep is no joke.
I’m bipolar and my sleep problems are because of my mental issues. For example, when I’m depressed, I can’t sleep. The part of my brain that makes sleep happen doesn’t work.
Lack of good sleep hygiene is unlikely to give you a highly genetic mental disorder.
Readit News
Unless you're fat, doctors will rarely even consider the possibility. And once you do get a polysomnogram, the usualy course of action is to throw a CPAP machine at you and send you on your way, without much followup. This, predictably, leads to abysmal compliance and the perception that PAP-therapy is awful or innefective.
And while I'm on my soap box, I really wish the PAP-manufacturers would dislodge their collective head from their collective arse. Trying to lock down machines and preventing patients from accessing their data (and settings) is plain evil. And maybe put some money into R&D for better machines? There's literally hundreds of millions of people with sleep apnea, there's bound to be a market for better devices ...
I am a thin guy with very low body fat. As soon as I told my doctor that I had woken up 2-3 times with my soft pallet dry & semi-collapsed, also that I would wake up regularly with a dry mouth, he immediately sent me for a sleep test. I went and did the test and the results were that I had mild sleep apnea. The sleep doctor told me that they were ordering a CPAP machine for me. I asked why I needed it for mild apnea and also told them I wouldn't use it. They ordered it anyway and told me to take the issue up with my doctor.
While all this was going on I was in the process of reducing the amount of meds I took (bad accident in 2010). I also started reading up on & studying sleep apnea. One of the first things I learned, and that worked, was keeping my mouth shut during sleep (many ways to accomplish that). The other thing I learned is that Big Pharma/FDA does a horrible job of listing medication side effects. I say that because "causes sleep apnea" was not on the list of side effects for carbamazeine (used for my peripheral neuropathy). As soon as I stopped the carbamazepine the apnea symptoms vanished. I have no need for a CPAP, it was ordered and I've received many calls about it, but there it sits at the sleep doctor's office..
Having designed and run clinical trials, I think your assertion based on a single experience is unreasonable.
Companies are very interested in unexpected events, particularly bad ones (called “adverse events” in the jargon). Viagra was “discovered” because of an unanticipated side effect of a drug being tested for a heart disorder.
That long list of side effect warnings? The companies love that list because it reduces legal risk (and marketing risk: doctors will tell patients what to look for and/or will avoid giving it to patients at risk of effect X).
While it seems plausible to me that sleep apnea could be a side effect of a drug like carbamazepine (though it’s not a benzo) it was not reported to any statistically significant extent.
since you have to report all AEs, the FDA will, in some cases, zero in on one that was reported at a minor level for additional study, because someone in the review panel thought worthy of investigation due to some scientific issue in their specialty. Drug companies hate that of course, but that’s one reason why there’s a review panel rather than a single reviewer.
Sleep study was a complete joke - I slept in a creepy hotel like room in a clinic for maybe 3h total. Uncomfortable and totally different sleep then at home.
AHI of 5, given CPAP with no follow up. It really felt like this sleep Doctor got paid to hand out machines.
Hacked the settings, used it for 8months then quit cold turkey as a test. Felt the same.
My sleep improved more from:
Drastically reducing alcohol, smoking, weed. Septum correction and tonsil removal. Sleep alone in bed in complete darkness in a cool room.
In that they diagnose you with apnea, throw a CPAP machine at you, and then do no follow up.
I’m curious what part of this you are saying is not aligning with OP?
Deleted Comment
I ended up getting a "boil-and-bite" mouthguard thing that kept my lower jaw from slipping backwards when I sleep.
That helped for about 6 months, but eventually I would wake up throwing up in my mouth. What happens is that you fall asleep, your throat collapses, you go to take a breath and since you can't bring in air through your mouth, instead you try to bring the stomach acid from your stomach up into your lungs.
eventually went through the hassle of getting a machine, found the nasal pillows mask was *much* better than the default mask, and have been good.
If you want to criticize the pap manufacturers, there's a lot more than just that too. There's a shortage of machines because of the negligence of the Philips company. Documents have shown that they knew their machines were causing problems for years before finally doing a recall.
I would call it the no booze hangover. Sometimes the symptoms would be like a mild hangover. You wake up with a headache, still tired, and a little bit of a “what happened last night?” vibe.
Except that “what happened last night” was drink plenty of water and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Which means it's profitable and they will double down on it
I was given the machine, which was titrated to the wrong pressure settings, with the cheapest mask that was too small for my big nostrils. If it hadn't been for the fact that I had a friend whose life was greatly improved by CPAP, I probably would have thrown in the towel on the first night. But I stuck with it, asked for help on Apnea Board, tried to learn as much about apnea and PAP-therapy as I could, and eventually got to a point where I'm pretty happy with it.
[1] https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/ [2] http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/
The biggest "cause" once you remove factors like alcohol is heredity. You get the shape of your face from your parents, why not the anatomy of your airway as well?
if you’re not fat and have sleep apnea, the other major cause is alcohol consumption/smoking.
seems odd to treat the symptom eg sleep apnea and not try to cut out alcohol and smoking and then reevaluate.
Nice illustration of my point that public awareness on sleep apnea is lacking.
Good luck figuring out the root cause of sleep apnea. Years of research hasn't turned one up. There's a wide variety of contributing factors (including weight, alcohol, asthma/COPD). But there's also plenty of fat asthmatic drunks who don't have sleep apnea. It's obviously not as simple as you're making it out to be.
Telling me that "having trouble falling asleep," or "having trouble staying asleep," or "not feeling alert upon waking" are working against me is useless to me. These aren't "habits." I'm not choosing to do them until they become routine. They just happen to me.
Tell me how to FIX those things. Tell me what habits would help me fall asleep, stay asleep, and feel rested.
As-is, this isn't actionable. It's just, "Hey, people who don't sleep well don't live as long."
There are many resources available that get into the practical/tactical aspect of improving sleep. But if you don't believe sleep is a problem yet, you won't seek those out.
The Huberman Lab has put out a number of good resources for this [0] including a podcast episode speaking with Matt Walker, PhD, sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep [1] (also a good read).
I've been a night owl for most of my life, and only more recently did I fully realize how connected this behavior was to traumatic situations growing up. When I started going down the rabbit hole on how to improve sleep, it was encouraging to find the emergence of a ton of practical non-pharmaceutical resources (I did try sleep aids for awhile, but couldn't deal with the side effects).
The hard part is that it does require willingness to implement real changes. They're not pleasant at first, but I went from an average 3AM-10AM sleep cycle to 10PM-6AM, and I've realized that all the things I told myself over the years about needing to be up all night were simply untrue.
I started this journey by setting a goal for myself to see/photograph a sunrise. I now regularly take pre-dawn walks and have seen more sunrises in the past few weeks than I had during the prior 30+ years of my life.
It's worth the effort.
- [0] https://hubermanlab.com/toolkit-for-sleep/
- [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
You also seem to sleep an hour more, so some changes you experienced might be due to that.
Point 5: "feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week"
But of course! I'll fix my sleep by ensuring I wake up well rested.
Some people need this advice, and a clear metric to hit. I’ve known them, and although I failed to make a dent, eventually something did. Maybe it was an article like this.
I added links as a response to the sibling comment with some practical resources, and I think it's important to recognize that work focusing on the impact of sleep or the lack thereof is not necessarily in the same category as work that seeks to provide remedies / improve sleep.
Thankfully, as we continue to learn just how important sleep is, we also continue to learn about ways to improve it.
Do you have a reference for this? 20 C is freaking cold. I wake up because of cold below 23 C.
The author quoted in the press release seems quite confident that we can eliminate these bad mortality outcomes by teaching people to sleep better, but another way to interpret the result is that any factor that increases stress will damage health and also disrupt sleep.
I also wonder where the author gets his confidence that "good sleep hygiene" can have such a great impact. How does he assume that "sleep hygiene" will overcome the factors causing poor sleep? Does he really believe that they've controlled for every other factor and isolated "sleep hygiene" as the root cause? My personal experience says that what he calls "sleep hygiene" helps a little bit, but it doesn't overcome the effects of stress or poor life management due to depression, and those factors have to be managed directly.
1) Potentially expensive/disruptive (control of the sleep environment may imply moving house or installing soundproofing materials, air conditioning, etc.)
2) Contradictory (get out of bed if you don't fall asleep in 15 minutes, but also don't look at the clock)
3) Not individually tested or validated
4) Based more on old-school behaviorism than on anything specific to the processes of sleep.
EDIT: forgot an important one
5) Only addressed at difficulty falling asleep initially, not staying asleep or improving sleep architecture.
It cost a small fortune but Jesus Herbert Christ on a tandem bicycle has it made a difference on how I feel during the day. I fall a sleep faster, wake up more well rested.
First few mornings I was just sort of confused by the feeling of waking up profoundly physically relaxed. Felt very weird and unusual. I don't think I've been that relaxed for years.
Cheap spring mattresses seem to be getting harder to find online. I believe the margins are much higher on memory foam products.
A bit of a hassle, but well worth it though.
But overall it's just much better suited to my body. I'm pretty tall so I need a relatively firm mattress to avoid sinking into it and sleeping all banana-shaped, but with this bed the core is firm but the top layer is soft. Hard to explain, but it's amazing.
If the bed is too soft, it might be comfy for a few nights but then my back and neck start hurting.
I'm getting the best possible treatment (standard of care) which is cognitive behavioral therapy, but man, is it a slow process to recovery.
I had a serious episode of ptsd after a natural catastrophe and I couldn't shut both eyes for months. Meds became a life saver.
Sleep. It's underrated.
Nobody takes a video of their kid screaming their lungs out at 3am with snot running from every orifice because their favourite toy fell off the bed or the pillow is the wrong colour.
I want to forget, but can't.
I've been thinking about this a LOT over the years. I feel like children were meant to be able to roam around and find different adults to glom onto until they're too annoyed and then move on to the next, all the while learning different specialized skills and niches to find one they fit in with.
I can't help but feel that more-than-2-adult households would have a huge advantage in this era.
If you gain 1.5 years of extra time awake but lose 0.5 years of life, did you win or lose time?
Deleted Comment
But you might just work retail, do shiftwork at a factory, or work in any number of places that require weird hours. Healthcare, plowing snow, train conductor, and anywhere that you wind up on-call just to name a few.
1. Dim house lights 1-2 hours before going to bed.
2. Earplugs + blackout curtains.
3. Doing some sort of physical activity during the day.
Depriving your body of food, water, oxygen or sleep is no joke.
Caffeine is an absolute killer that we don't talk about nearly enough when it comes to sleep.
Lack of good sleep hygiene is unlikely to give you a highly genetic mental disorder.
Though fasting is a thing, and when well performed has health benefits (self reporting here).
And I've -- probably for good reasons -- never heard of oxygen of sleep fasting :)