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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1870 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 12, 2023

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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@ fellow sleepyheads

  1. "I have a healthy sleep cycle. I sleep for 8 hours each night, at the end of which my body wakes me up naturally in the morning. I get up and do not feel tired through the day."

  2. "To feel no tiredness upon waking up in the morning, regardless of whether I am woken up naturally, by an alarm, by someone else (etc.), I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night."

Both of these claims can be true at the same time. They're both true for me. But online advice about sleep cycles has zero real advice for this issue. I don't really care about whether I'm getting the correct amount of sleep. OK, I do, but it's secondary.

My problem is that I don't want to feel tired in the morning for my first 10 minutes of awake-ness. I want to get up after 8 hours and feel awake, not groggy, not sleepy, not 'I want to go back to bed'. To get this feeling, I must sleep at least 10-11 hours a night. There are all kinds of guides on 'how to feel more awake' once you're already awake, taking cold showers, going for a jog, going outside, opening the curtains immediately etc etc.. But by the time I'm doing this, I'm already awake; I may as well just have a coffee.

Is there any way I can change this? I want to eliminate the 10 minutes of morning misery after I wake up after 'only' 8 hours of sleep.

Coffee might be the problem, at least in my experience if you cut out caffeine completely getting out of bed goes much more smoothly.

To hazard a guess I'd say it's because 8 hours (or longer since you're not going to have a coffee right before bed) is long enough to cause mild withdrawals, but really I'm just going off experience here.

opening the curtains immediately

I've also noticed (much milder) benefits from just leaving the curtains open at night. Sunlight causes a much less abrupt awakening than an alarm, though depending on where you live there are issues with privacy, bright streetlights and very early sunrises that make this less practical. Some type of timer that opens the curtains say 20 minutes before your waking time would be ideal here.

I've also greatly improved waking by buying a couple of color changing LED bulbs for my bedroom lamps, which Alexa is programmed to gradually color shift people to my wakeup time, starting with deep blue and getting increasingly white over about 45 minutes. As a bonus, I can make the light brown in the evening before bed.

Not practical at all but sleeping outdoors has that kind of invigorating effect. I'd guess it's the combination of cold night temperatures, unlimited fresh air and natural levels of daylight. Probably the closest you could get at home is some kind of techno fix that draws your curtains and opens your windows wide.

I'm a male so YMMV.

IME, petting the one-eyed snake any few hours before sleeping is guaranteed to result in a bad wake-up. If I don't beat my meat for a few days, I wake up naturally without any grogginess in 6-7 hours. If I let the genie out of the bottle >2-3 times a day, I'll have to sleep 9 hours to wake up without grogginess.

Not sure if my experience is even close to a subset of universal, let alone replicable for a woman. But something something dopamine receptors? Try avoiding pre-sleep screen time as a proxy and see how that works.

Conversely, I sleep way better after having proper sex.

Sex and jerking off are not the same things at all.

Yeah, my experience is that both your point and his are true.

When I was in high school, I found I could do this by jumping out of bed immediately upon waking up either naturally or via alarm clock and moving, suppressing any reflection on how I felt or temptation to look at a clock. I stopped doing this after leaving college and felt groggy on waking up no matter what for the next decade or so. I have recently resumed something like this, as I have tried to shift myself into an early riser, and it has worked well.

For me, the 10+ minute loop of grogginess is somewhat re-enforced by a cycle of thoughtful awareness about how I feel, and my body trying to react by going back to sleep. If within 30 seconds of waking up, I am in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and within 2 minutes I am already beginning my day with activity, I don't have time to feel groggy (assuming I am overall well rested). The negative is I now get much tired-er at night right after dinner, but this could be a function of having small kids.

You could delay caffeine 1-2 hours so that it's not the first thing you do when you wake up. I'm not sure of the efficacy here, I've heard that this helps restore your natural cortisol response in the morning.

Maybe also keep a window cracked and your bedroom doors open while sleeping. Anecdata, but my air quality monitor reports fairly significant CO2 spikes at night if we don't do this.

I usually wake up extremely energetic, and I mostly attribute that to years of practicing free-running sleep (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Formula_for_good_sleep:_free_running_sleep). I haven't woken up to an alarm in years, thanks to lifestyle changes from COVID, and I almost exclusively wake up around 7-7:30 am every day naturally. I'd argue that any unnatural wake-up like an alarm will often leave you groggy no matter what other changes you make.

Other ideas: you could try "artificial zeitgebers" like Nobiletin for a month, which will help normalize your circadian rhythm. In fact, the more zeitgebers (social activity, movement, sunshine, exercise, water) you can incorporate into your morning routine the better, as they'll potentially make an alarm-less or light lifestyle viable.

This probably has to do with sleep quality, the 4 main things that I've noticed make a noticeable difference for me are

  1. stopping caffeine

  2. magnesium supplements before sleep

  3. Some form of bed cooling system (I use the bedjet 3). If you're hot or sweating or cold while you sleep, this will make a massive difference

  4. A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)

Are the haptics of the Apollo pulsing in a particular way? Could I just buy a weak haptic device and recreate it by having it on constantly?

Yeah the pulsing patterns seem very specific, and are probably the entire technical moat of the company. The way it works is that there are a variety of "programs" on the app, so you have a "stress program" that lasts 15 min, which starts with short, intense pulses that get quicker and quicker, then you have a "calm program", a "sleep program", etc. The device modulates both the intensity and the frequency of the haptics over time depending on the program you chose.

I'm actually very curious about the Apollo device, I'm convinced that 'sending signals to our nervous system' or whatever is very powerful, due to my experience with chronic pain. Not sure I can stomach the price though. I hope these things go down in price soon.

This quote from the website slaps:

As a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Dr. Dave has always been fascinated by consciousness and our inherent ability to heal ourselves from illness and injury. After dedicating his career to understanding the impact of chronic stress on our well-being over 15 years ago, he observed a core challenge that confronts every single one of us - healthy behavior changes will benefit us in the long term, but making those changes when we’re under chronic stress is really, really hard.

The reason? Chronic stress itself. Our nervous system is there to keep us safe. When we face stress, our brains tell our bodies the equivalent of “Hey, there’s a lion over there! Get out of danger!” That’s why we have trouble sleeping, low energy, and a hard time focusing - it’s like the nervous system is saying “run” or “fight” when we’re just trying to get through our day. We developed Apollo Neuro to restore balance to the nervous system, calming the body to clear the mind, and leaving us feeling safe and in control of how we feel.

A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)

No way this works, right?

Surprisingly, it kind of does! It felt to me like it helped me not think of work or other things while I'm going to sleep, the vibrations on your skin have a way of capturing attention very effectively. I tried it out for a few weeks after seeing it recommended here, but I'm now returning it, the difference just isn't that big for me, nowhere near the magnitude that the bedjet is making.

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