A Clue About How To Sleep Better

Seth Roberts

A few nights ago I slept surprisingly well: I woke up feeling more rested than usual. Each morning I judge how rested I feel on a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 = as if I hadn’t slept and 100 = completely drained of tiredness. I got scores of 100 after standing 9 or 10 hours during the day. That showed what was possible but that much standing was unsustainable. Without extreme standing, 99 has seemed to be the maximum.

A few nights ago, I did better. The ratings for that night and the preceding four nights were: 98.9, 98.8, 99, 98.8, 99.2. Doesn’t look like much, but actually the improvement was so clearly unusual I didn’t need records to notice it. If I gave the scores for the preceding 100 nights you’d see it was rare to score above 99. Moreover, I was keeping the amount of animal fat I ate constant, unlike previous nights with scores above 99. The difference between 98.8 and 99.2 is easy to notice. Think of the difference between 12 and 8.

What had improved my sleep? I could think of four unusual things about the preceding day:

1. Several cloves of garlic in the pork-belly soup I ate for lunch. I’d never before added any garlic.

2. I began using f.lux, which reduced the color temperature of my computer screen after sunsight.

3. I’d played Dance Dance Revolution (on the Wii) for 10 minutes at 8 pm. Usually I do it in the morning (much longer, 30-50 minutes).

4. More bike riding than usual (including two long stretches that added up to 66 minutes).

All four seemed unlikely. 1. Who’d heard of garlic improving sleep? Not me. 2. Laptop screens are quite dim compared to sunlight. 3. The amount of exercise was small. I’d played Wii Tennis for longer periods in the evening without noticing any change. DDR in the morning hadn’t made an obvious difference. 4. I’d ridden my bike for 50-odd minutes at a stretch without noticing better sleep. This was only slightly more.

Now I am testing these possibilities. If you have any idea which it is — perhaps it is none of them — please comment.

15 thoughts on “A Clue About How To Sleep Better”

  1. My sleep gets much, much worse when using any kind of computer at night. Seems unlikely it’s’ just the difference in color temperature, but who knows?
    Some speculations.
    * Monitors can certainly blow your night vision, which is something that haven’t been possible for human ancestors prior to being able to make fires. So having night vision activated, and not interrupted, for a time might be a pre-requisite for sound sleep.
    * Monitors usually show vivid colors that are impossible to perceive at night time. Maybe colors are enough to trigger wakefullness. Vivid colors are also semi-universal signals of danger, so there might even be an evolutionary reason for staying alert in the presence of strong colors.
    There’s seems to be a bunch of studies on the effect of different lighting by the US Navy, so there’s probably data available to suggest one way or the other.
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  3. Sleep researchers have found that it’s specifically blue light, from wavelengths 465-480 nm, which activates wakefulness and interferes with sleep. It’s probably because we evolved to respond to the blue sky as a sign it was time to be alert. Both fluorescent lights and computer screens give off a fair amount of blue light. Sleep centers have started making specific blue blocker clip-ons to block out light in the 465-480 wavelength range.
    About two hours before bed I clip on some cheap amber lenses to my glasses to help block out the offending light. It makes a noticeable difference, and I imagine I’d get even better results if I tracked down a prescription pair of blue blockers.
    Seth, does your 1-100 scale feel more logarithmic or incremental to you at the high end? I personally tend to think in a bell curve that is incremental in the middle and logarithmic at the tails when I rate stuff for myself, but most people don’t think like this.
    To most scientists, trying to draw inferences from incremental differences of a few thousandths on highly subjective measurement is going to be considered skeptically. Not saying there’s nothing to your data, just trying to get a clearer idea what your numbers mean to you.
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  4. I agree with the above commentators. It’s probably the (reduction in) blue light from the computer screen. If I use a computer after 8pm, I get insomnia. It has a much stronger effect than the fluorescent light bulbs around my house.
    Garlic and onions contain compounds that cause drowsiness in some people, but I haven’t found that either improves my sleep.
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  5. I had a similar reaction as Caleb to your scale. To say that you can have an accurate subjective judgement on a 1-10 scale is one thing, staying accurate with 1-100 precision seems to already be pushing the boundaries of a reliable measurement and going to an effective 1-1000 scale as you are with your tenths of a unit scale seems like a lot of noise.
    How would you describe the difference between sleep quality of 98.9, 98.8, 99, 98.8, 99.2?
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  6. Mr. Pla Cebo might have something to do with it? My problem is waking up in the middle of the night due to little kids sneaking into our beds late at night. I can be up for hours and some days I’m up at 3 or 4am for good.
    Getting by on 3-4hrs of sleep for several days is awful and terrible for our immune systems.
    I thought it was related to caffeine and cut back my coffee intake to zero.
    Problem went away and then came back. I eat a high fat diet, low in carbs (especially refined ones) and high in protein. I also supplement with vitamin E, D etc. I drink some bacteria rich yogurt but probably nothing as good as the stuff you’re growing :-).
    Rather than tweaking my diet I tried breathing slowly in and out and just focusing on my breath and nothing else. Somewhat like meditation and I go back to sleep very easily ever since.
    And this is regardless of how I’m eating that night.
    So in my case – it was simply finding a better technique to go to sleep with.
    I think one of the gotchas with self-experimentation is the placebo effect. Making a change (switching from tea to coffee) can certainly plant the belief that something has changed – and that could be all that’s really needed.
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  7. I would not rule out the garlic, whatever else may be going on. I seem to have had a very relaxed feeling of bodily “earthy bliss” that is hard to describe as a result of eating several cloves of garlic. People in Berkeley in the 70s ate a lot of garlic because it seemed to mellow them out… I doubt that this was mere placebo or wishful thinking…
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  9. “Sleep researchers have found that it’s specifically blue light, from wavelengths 465-480 nm, which activates wakefulness and interferes with sleep. It’s probably because we evolved to respond to the blue sky as a sign it was time to be alert. Both fluorescent lights and computer screens give off a fair amount of blue light. Sleep centers have started making specific blue blocker clip-ons to block out light in the 465-480 wavelength range.”
    Last year, my psychiatrist, who is one of the best in the state, suggested I keep an open window in my room and replace my alarm with a natural-spectrum light that would go off at the appropriate time. His reasoning? Folks with ADD (which I have) have circadian clocks that are out-of-whack and need to be reset more often than the average person. We’re generally pretty horrible at waking up. Natural light, taken in the morning, essentially resets your circadian clock. When your eyes take it in, it sends a signal to your brain to wake up, probably for the reasons you stated. My morning wakefulness improved substantially.
    According to him, however, this can only happen between the hours of 6 and 9am. Past that time and you’re out of luck. Perhaps it’s anecdotal, but his reasoning suggests the blue light spectrum doesn’t have much to do with Seth staying up at night.
    I don’t sleep well when I use the computer late at night, either, but I think it has more to do with what I’m doing, which is generally pretty active. I’m also staring at a light source 3 feet from my face as opposed to one across the room. I can sleep well after reading or even watching TV (which also has a lot of blue light), but it’s more difficult when the computer is involved.
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  10. Vikram said “one of the gotchas with self-experimentation is the placebo effect”
    Right, and if it works, then it isn’t ‘just’ a placebo effect, as some researchers are wont to say. Rather, the placebo effect is effective. No need to discount it or control for it, except in so far as to identify it.
    Reply
  11. 1. Evening exercise may increase sleep length if the problem is waking up earlier.
    2. I don’t think you can rate accurately on a scale from 1 to 1000, as your scale effectively is with 3 sig figs, but I will trust your subjective impression.
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  12. too much garlic wrecks my sleep — i think the reason is that i think it increases circulation to limbs and peripheral stuff. but ymmv.
    perhaps you were fighting something off?
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  13. Its obvious you have no problem sleeping or any sort of sleep disorder. Stop whining and get on with your life.
    The ability to be able to rate sleep between 98 and 99 with 0.1 “accuracy” is a dream (no pun) for many of us.
    For those of you who do, keep a dream journal and rate the pleasure of the dream. Then also compare that to the quality (enjoyment) of sleep you had. You may get a surprise.
    Even if you wake up to go take a pee, quickly jot your dream down.
    As for the few of us who dont sleep reguarly, and i mean 2 or 3hours at a time if im lucky, and who dont dream, (ever cat-napped during the day, think only 10mins have passed but its really been 3 or 4 hours ? I do that every time, i dont dream anymore), do whatever you can to experiment.
    Try random beds, places, catch up on the books you want to (re)read, etc.
    ALso watch the movie “cash-back”. An extra 8 hours per day can be some what liberating.
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  14. insomniac, you wrote: “It’s obvious you have no problem sleeping or any sort of sleep disorder. ” Not exactly. I’ve been studying my sleep for 30 years. I started studying it because I woke up too early in the morning (which is a sleep disorder — early awakening, a form of insomnia). Eventually I found four ways to improve my sleep so now I sleep fine. But it all started because I had trouble sleeping.
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  15. The idea behind your experiment is exactly what we hope to automate and uniformly quantify at WakeMate. If you use our app, we automatically upload a sleep quality score for that night based on how restful you sleep was. We us a a clinically proven science called Actigraphy. You can tag anything you want and then compare your sleep score across the different metrics you are tracking! Check outhttps://www.WakeMate.comfor more!
    Reply

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