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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   922 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 17, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Figured out how to "reduce stress" on Oura ring readings. Basically need to make sure I take computer breaks throughout the day. Post lunch time walk, computer-free lab meeting, etc. have added a lot of restorative time to my days. This seems to be correlated with how I'm feeling as well.

Still waking up every single day at 4am. Usually manage to go back to sleep with a low dose melatonin, but is still annoying. My leading hypothesis is something to do with blood sugar, am trying to eat more fat and protein. Any tips/thoughts appreciated.

Have you had sleep issues before? What's your relationship to sleep and to wakefulness (how do you feel and think about them, is there anxiety involved etc)? Is it only a waking up problem or a getting to sleep problem as well?

I had insomnia in college that I resolved with CBT. That was a falling asleep problem. I no longer have that problem at all (except when I don’t follow obvious sleep hygiene tips about stimulation before bed).

I pretty religiously track sleep, but I don’t feel that I’m anxious about it. There maybe is a feeling of frustration/annoyance when I wake up at 3/4 for the 1,000th time, but I don’t fall asleep fearing that, if that makes sense.

Why don't you stop tracking your sleep altogether? And what about wakefulness? Do you like being awake? If not, your brain will try to confront you with that "problem" and solve it. You should welcome wakefulness when you wake up, instead of trying to get away from it again. Sleepiness will return after a while, if more sleep is needed in the early morning hours.

Anyway, I recommend the book This is Natto.

The problem is when I wake up in the middle of the night, I usually am not sufficiently rested. I know I need more sleep.

I track sleep because it is a leading metric on other things: recovery from training above all. I really don't understand the skepticism towards biometrics on this forum.

You're still dodging the question of your relationship to wakefulness.

"Needing" sleep, worrying about sleep, tracking sleep and its markers... this will just problematize it further.

You should worry about increasing your internal understanding of your mind. It's the mind which produces the sleep drive and the brakes on that drive.

Read the book I recommended. It's short.

You might balk at this, but consider going a week without taking any biometrics or monitoring at all. I'd actually suggest a month or longer. From my wild and woolly point of view the currently popular idea of "optimizing" one's physical health is more like micromanaging when maybe just grooving for a bit would be more helpful. I suspect however that this suggestion does not interest you.

It's a tough line to walk, especially because as you get closer to the optimal frontier, the quality of evidence for what is "best" declines significantly, so many folks find themselves swimming in all sorts of claims about minute details, which, even if real, may only have an extremely small effect size. E.g., people nitpicking about exact timing of protein intake and its exact composition at those times. Like, sure, if you're an elite athlete and your pay may depend on whether you can eek out an extra percent here and there, maybe it's worth trying to figure it out, but it's just not for most people. It's definitely not worth the psychological hassle of trying to wade through the various claims or attempting to micromanage a signal which may not even be high-quality enough to ever capture the phenomenon you're looking for.

On the other side, there are basic things that many people just don't grok until you collect their specific data from them and show it to them. For a couple examples, I've met people who simply did not truly comprehend that calories correspond noisily but directly to body weight or that alcohol messed up their sleep until it was shown to them with their own data.

Of course, it's always difficult to know which category you're in, because, well, you don't know what you don't know.

I will definitely do this November/December this year when I am not training hard. It is helpful when training to have stuff tell me when to chill out and when I can put in work.

Yeah agreed. I think biometrics do more harm than good personally.

How's your magnesium intake?

I've noticed that I have restless sleep when I get deficient.

On a related note, how do you know whether you're magnesium deficient?

How often does your leg go to sleep?

If this is a personal question and not an hypothetical question meant to answer my own question, the answer is: Pretty much never. Paresthesia is the word, by the way. (edit: douchebag aside struck through.) The last time I felt it I think I had slept on my arm too long one night.

As far as I know self-diagnosing magnesium deficiency is very, very difficult, as the symptoms (twitchiness, cramps, tremors, jaw clenching) are part of a differential diagnosis for many other conditions. But empirically, if someone noticed these symptoms and either adjusted his/her diet (spinach, quinoa, dark chocolate, whatever) to increase dietary magnesium or went on supplements like magnesium glycinate and then noticed an absence of the symptoms, then okay. I'm wondering though how anyone would know this, though there may be places online where upping one's magnesium is considered common knowledge. My concern would be kidney issues.

What's the connection here?

It's one of the symptoms of magnesium deficiency, IIRC.

For me, I can tell because I can't sleep right.

Maybe it's a placebo effect?

The red flag for being really magnesium deficient in my case was tightness or discomfort around my jaw. I noticed this when using drugs that depleted magnesium, and it was always immediately fixed by taking magnesium.

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