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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
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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.
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