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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1873 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:

  • 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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@ 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.

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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